Customer Reviews

The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses: Tips, Techniques and Tools to Improve your Marketing

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As a marketing consultant and author of several books for entrepreneurs and professionals, I expected this volume to be similar to many other marketing books. It's not. Not only is it focused on existing rather than new businesses, it concentrates on planning and strategy, which receive little attention in other books. Full of checklists, charts and truly helpful explanations, it will aid you in creating and tweaking a reasonable, effective and comprehensive marketing program that grows your business.

The Marketing Toolkit For Growing Business: Tips, Techniques And Tools To Improve Your Marketing by Jay B. Lipe (President of Emerge Marketing) is a step-by-step guided tour through the basic essentials of developing a successful marketing process regardless of the product or service being offered in local, regional, national, or international marketplace of commerce. Readers will learn what marketing is and is not; the most common marketing mistakes made by growing business and how to avoid them; how to quickly develop an effective marketing plan; how to efficiently implement a marketing plan; how to write promotional copy; how to measure the results of marketing efforts; as well as how to brand a company so that it will stand out and apart from any competitor. Enhanced with an extensive glossary of more than two hundred marketing terms, The Marketing Toolkit For Growing Business is ideal for the novice entrepreneur, and has much of value to offer even the more experienced businessman or businesswoman.

Jay Lipe's book is just what I needed to help me sort out the confusion I was feeling in putting together some new business campaigns. It is common sense marketing put into a very useful format. Looking at the book, I have marked 17 different pages for immediate action. For me, Chapter 14, "The Keys To Branding Your Company," was the most powerful. A must read for any business wanting to get their marketing house in order.

The first thing that came to my mind as I read this book was that it is one of the most practical, down-to-earth, hands-on approaches to marketing that I have come across. Jay Lipe manages to distill some vary advanced marketing concepts into small easy to understand and easy to apply pieces that anyone can follow. Some of the areas he covers include common mistakes and how to correct them (or avoid them entirely), how to use active language to get people to act, how to use metrics to determine what works and what does not in your marketing plan, search engine positioning, budgeting, and even how to market during a recession.

Mr. Lipe asks some very directed questions at strategic points in the book. These questions are designed to make you think and help clearly define your goals as well as how you will be able to achieve them. In addition he includes lots of forms that can be used to clearly define your target market, how you will get your marketing plan to them, exactly what your marketing plan should, and should not include, and exactly how to go about implementing the plan. This is a complete marketing plan that can be used for any business no matter what type of services or products they provide. If you want a marketing education that concentrates on the practical side of marketing without a lot of discussion of theory then this is a book that you will want to consider. I've taken college level marketing courses that did not provide as much practical knowledge as this book. "The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Business" is a very highly recommended purchase if you plan to take charge of your own marketing or want to know what your marketing firm should be doing.

Pretend that you have walked into Lipe's Executive Hardware Store. He greets you warmly at the door and offers to give you a complete tour, during which he identifies all manner of "tools" and carefully explains how to use each. He realizes that you don't need all of them, at least not NOW, but correctly observes that you should be fully aware of all the "tools" that are available. There are 17 different departments in his store. After you complete your tour, you select (with his assistance) those "tools" which are most appropriate to your organization's current needs.

This book is your toolkit. Just as you would become thoroughly familiar with what Lipe's Executive Hardware Store offers, you should become thoroughly familiar with all of this book's contents which are carefully organized within 17 chapters. Some executives will read a book and then attempt to apply immediately everything they have learned from it. Other executives make an equally bad mistake: Because all they have is a "hammer," they see every task as a "nail." Hence the importance of having a variety of different tools, knowing not only how but when to use each of them effectively. As needs change, so must the resources which are allocated to meet those needs.

Here is Lipe's definition of marketing: "...a process where everyone [underlined] in the company pursues actions, at designated points, to increase sales, grow profits and deepen relationships." My own is much simpler: Marketing is the process by which to create or increase demand for whatever one offers. I could not agree more, however, with his assertion that everyone (literally everyone) in any organization must be involved in marketing because people do business with other people, not with companies, and "doing business" includes every (literally every) person with whom there is contact each day, both within and beyond the organization. Lipe quotes Drucker's assertion that "Marketing is not a function. It is the whole business as seen from the customer's point of view." This is precisely what Warren Buffett had in mind when asserting that "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." Customers' perceptions of value are in fact the ultimate realities of the marketing process.

Although Lipe's book does indeed provide "tips, techniques and tools" to improve current marketing efforts, it can also provide an essential source of information and guidance when formulating a marketing plan for the first time. His book can also be of substantial benefit to those now preparing for a career in business even if they do not plan to specialize (if that's the word) in marketing. They must realize that, as noted earlier, everyone (literally everyone) in a given organization is directly or at least indirectly involved with marketing. Once you have read this book, you are urged to check out Lipe's "Recommended Resources" and "Websites for Marketers" sections (pages 241-244), both of which would be even more helpful had Lipe also provided brief comments on resources identified. There is one significant omission: Theodore Levitt's The Marketing Imagination, based on his earlier article "Marketing Myopia" which appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

" And Jay Lipe knows how to guide both emerging and established businesses.... As a self employed graphic designer/ and exhibiting artists, I especially appreciate the hands-on practical approach, easy to read with step-by-step directions. In particular, I enjoyed the text in chapters 14, 15 and 16 which discussed "The Keys to Branding Your Company", "12 Tips to Help You Write Better Copy", and "Secrets to Search Engine Positioning'. A great book... which I will refer to my colleagues!!!"

This is neat approach, started businesses that have plateaued or not grown at the desired rate. For them, there is a whole array of marketing tools, here delineated and explained by Lipe.

As a former mkt. exec I find this whole approach very right on and well presented in a way that the non-marketing types can grasp and use. Especially salient here is his checklist of "common list mistakes". This is really an area that the non-mkt types miss golden opportunities to understand their biz and how it can move ahead to serve mkts better and grow.

There is great suggestive stuff here, e.g. cheap, good research, and how to integrate all of the mkt. plan once it's developed. Continuing monitoring of this plan and its modification is critical to mkt. share movement, and Lipe's ideas will deliver a solid approach to reigning in one's mkt. to make it do what it can do: build mkts.

If you're looking for an easy to understand (and, hence, easy to implement) marketing book from a proven Fortune-500 marketing exec, this is the book for you. I found the Internet marketing information particularly helpful for my business.

From all the books about marketing , finally a book which explain step by step all what you need to know for small and big business,
Big thanks for Mr Jay B Lipe who wrote a great book about marketing .

Shortcut to years of practical marketing ideas in a easy to read presentation. Big ideas are shown broken down into simple steps. While this book is aimed at the small business owner, the ideas work equally well anywhere people need to market their idea, their service or their department/organization.