To stay on top of the marketing game, it’s important to study, learn about new trends, and try, try, try. Often that third one – “try, try, try” is put off and in our opinion, because of a lack of confidence and a fear of failure. Marketing however often involves experiments and figuring out what works best. But it can be tricky sometimes to know what to try first especially when your confidence levels are down.
One way to bring them up is to study and learn. And while there are all sorts of “free” resources out on the web, we can get lost in them. We might even find a great article on line, and then our concentration and focus suddenly changes, we open a new tab in our browsers, and end up forgetting that we wanted to study that new technique we were reading about.
Recently, I was talking with a psychologist and he honestly believes that both adults and kids today are suffering with too much online information. He had two recommendations:
- Get back to reading real books
- Commit to spending time outdoors with no electronic devices for half an hour a day
I never really gave up reading real printed books and in fact, I find I learn more, take in more, and just like back in high school in the “old” days, making notes on real paper with a real pen. There is something about taking notes with pen and paper that seems to reinforce ideas and learning in the brain that typing notes just is not as efficient.
So, with that in mind, you might find it helpful to know some of the books we’re either reading or that are on our reading list! Let’s dive in:
How Brands Grow – What Marketers Don’t Know
By Byron Sharp
Author Byron Sharp has an impressive resume in the field of marketing. He is a Professor of Maketing Science and the Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia. But he’s much more than an academic. His resume includes real experience in marketing via working with 50+ scientists at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Along with Byron, they study human behavior and have discovered law-like patterns that motivate customers to buy. His institute is sponsored by some pretty big names including Coca-Cola, CBS, P&G, Mars, Red Bull, and Unilever.
In How Brands Grow, you’ll learn what most marketers don’t know! But they should know, and if you’re trying to market your own products and services, you’ll get an edge by reading this book. From the Preface:
Marketers, even senior marketing academics like to say that there can be no laws concerned with marketing. These people argue that consumers are far too individual and unpredictable. Research has shown this is utter nonsense.
Intrigued? You should be as the author goes on to introduce us to 11 Laws of Marketing and with the results of research, supports them with thorough explanations, data, charts, and explanations.
This book should be in the hands of everyone that wants to grow their business! Understand these marketing laws, take action based on them and now you’ve given you and your business a greater chance to succeed!
Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation
By David J. Bland & Alexander Osterwalder
This book is on our “to read” list and looking forward to it! It’s been highly recommended by others (check out the reviews), and both authors have a great reputation. The book is built on the premise that 7 out of 10 new products fail. That’s generally a lot of money, time, and effort (and for many, even heartbreak) and the authors of this book want to help us improve this statistic.
From the description:
Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to:
- Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas
- Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation
- Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas
A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.
Learn Copy Writing
There’s a lot of great resources out there on how to improve your copy writing, but one of the best is a course by Mike Giannulis – an internet marketing genius who quit copy writing for the same reasons you probably get frustrated: What to do with a blank page? But then Mike came up with a super system and returned to the copy writing and realized he was onto something. He writes terrific copy that sells – and based on a system that has 3 simple rules:
- Never start with a blank page
- Write With “Lego Blocks” NOT An Etch-A-Sketch
- Make Sure You Never Lose An Idea, Note, Or Thought Again
His course covers:
- How To Ethically Steal All The Copy & Ads You Could Ever Want!
- The New Paradigm Of Copywriting
- Copywriting As A Research Factory
- My Favorite Spots For Knowledge & Information Gathering
- The magical tech stack
- The Infinite Folder System
- Copywriting In The Copywriter Brain System
- Putting It All Together
The price of Mike’s course is impressively affordable (but there are upsells – but also very much worth the money if you are committed to learning and becoming a better copy writer). If you own your own business, are engaged in marketing, or writing content – The Copy Brain (the name of the course) is for you.
We all need to keep learning, improving our skills, and hopefully at least one of the above resources will be something you’ll get excited about.
Build A List
Okay – so now that you’re committed to learning more about the laws of marketing, or how to develop a business idea faster and be able to test more quickly, or learn actual copy writing skills, you should be thinking of an email list!
We’re really impressed with Klaviyo – especially made with E-commerce site owners in mind!
Klaviyo integrates with many e-commerce platforms including WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and many more – helping you to track what your customers are doing, how they progress through your website, what their historical purchases have been, and of course, email newsletter management.
It has the ability to segment lists (for example, you want to be able to send to just a small segment of the list instead of the entire list), track open and click-through rates, and so much more! If you use it, you’re probably going to increase your online sales!
You can set up auto-responders including for abandoned carts, thank you emails after a first order, coupons, and quite a few fantastic marketing series of emails. It takes a bit to learn all the functionality, but the company has provided excellent resources to help you get started.
They offer a free introductory plan to help you get started – but as your email subscription list grows and the more emails you send, there are different levels of paid subscription services. But as you grow, it’s likely you’re going to be earning what you’re spending back, multiplied.
Sign Up For Klaviyo Now – and get started on your list!
Wishing you a successful season (and more to come) of increasing your marketing skills and knowledge!