Duct Tape Marketing - John Jantsch

This is the first book that marks my entry into the subject of marketing. Decided to choose this book after seeing the numerous good reviews. But more importantly, I have been subscribing to the Duct Tape Marketing blog for some time, and I thought that it was quite a good resource.

The contents in the book are extremely practical and easy to understand. The main audience that the book targets is small business owners - people who need marketing strategies that are simple yet effective. The overarching theme to the book is that marketing is "getting people, who have a specific need or problem, to know, like and trust you". I like this definition, which is straightforward but has much impact on many of the points that were highlighted later in the book.

Some ideas that I've picked up along the way:

• Alot of marketing is commonsense but such simple stuff often gets lost when one aims for the glitz that is associated with marketing that can be seen.
• Segmentation of the client development process to into: suspects, prospects, clients, repeat clients and champions, with different strategies for each group. Never really thought abt such a differentiation strategy before, but it makes perfect sense.
• Another simple fact, but very useful to keep in mind - there are two ways to increase sales: getting more new customers and selling more to yr current ones. As with the segmentation strategy above, these require rather different strategies.
• If you market well, sales is redundant.
  
• Several methods to generate referrals, which is a key in expanding yr customer base.
• Using stories to target yr PR / media channel as a marketing tool - how to use news releases, pitch letter and PR kits to engage the PR industry.
  
• How to do a two-step direct response ad - the first step aims to get the customer motivated enough to respond to yr ad, which signals a permission for the marketer to step in - the second is a more in-depth marketing process.

All in all, this was a good primer to the world of marketing which I had (up to this point) very little clue about. Having such knowledge is important if I want to run my own start-up in the future.