Customer Reviews

The Ultimate Small Business Marketing Toolkit: All the Tips, Forms, and Strategies You'll Ever Need!

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book "Small Business Marketing Toolkit" by Goldstein is one of those rare books that has essentially distilled all of the key point of marketing and related business into an easy to read and easy to absorb package. I am an entrepreneur and also teach entrepreneurship, and I have begun to refer to the content and approach of this book in both my work and academic lives. It cuts through all of the usual academic chatter and presents the most important points and insights in a clear and unencumbered way. I would highly recommend it to someone looking for these attributes in a book on this topic.

I really like this work. I believe it's:

1) Practical, and one can apply/use the information immediately
2) Has real-life stories of entrepreneurs
3) Great interviews with experts in the field
4) A strong focus on sales and marketing and how they need to work together
5) An important focus on developing customer surveys...everything you need to know in order to develop your own and make sure the information is valuable and can help you make decisions
6) A CD-Rom is so well designed it makes it really easy to use the information in the book and apply it to your own business...whether it's still a concept or a business you've been running for years
7) A down to earth, easy to read format

However, I believe that more worksheets or even more real life stories would add value. I would also love to see more information on sales, even if this is a marketing book.

But, overall it's terrific!

Beth Goldstein has taken her years of real world experience put it into a easy to read format. The conversational style mixed with simple frameworks and practical tips make this a must read for any small business owner. Many books for small business owners simply reuse tools for large company marketing- but this book presents examples, market research methods and customer analytics in a language and scale most appropriate for small firm owners. The market plan implementation is definitely a winner. All small business owners should own this practical and useful book.

As a professional consultant (strategy, operations and growth) I have seen many young businesses longing for the real-world perspective Beth gives with her exercises and directions. This book provides the small business owner or "owner in startup mode" with a practical, hands-on `how-to-guide' to get their sales and marketing program (the engine for growth) off the ground and running fast. The pragmatic tools in the book and on the CD are an invaluable resource for beginners or those struggling to take their marketing efforts to the next level.

I hope that future editions of this book add even more of the `real-life' perspective that takes the expert's advice and shows it in action to the reader hungry for examples of how it's done.

As a small business owner, I don't have time or patience for lofty marketing theory. I want tips and tools that work, that I can implement without a lot of fuss. Although this author has the formal credentials and obviously knows her way around academia, I was struck by how practical and "accessible" this book is--written in a easy to read conversational style, almost as though you're sitting at the kitchen table with the author. The stories she shares (of her own business experience as well as clients')offer great examples of general principles and keep us engaged. And the book really is a "toolkit," offering all sorts of practical templates that you can put to use right away, especially if you take advantage of the CD ROM included with the book--a nice bonus feature. There is no shortage of books on the subject of marketing, but if you're looking for one that really "cuts to the chase," and will be a good reference for years to come, this is the one I'd recommend.

As a Director of Marketing for a small high tech start up firm, I'm always on the prowl for more practical and proven ideas on how to grow our business. I don't have alot of time to research new ideas but I found this book has done the research for me and I can implement some of these programs very quickly.

I found the section on quantifying the "lifetime value" of your customer particular helpful. The author takes you step by step (worksheet provided) on how to calculate the financial value of your current customer(s) and then through the process of calculating what happens if you increase the average value of the sale or frequency of the sale, and it s financial impact on your business. Things you think about but never really analyze on paper.

I also found the chapter on Surveys extremely helpful. The author provides you with everything you need to know about creating a survey (samples and worksheets included) and what to do with the data once you've collected your survey responses. Another reason to stay close to your customer.

This is a terrific book that presents many, many practical and useful ideas in one spot. And I always learn something from many of the stories in the book. The nice thing about this book is that I can implement many of the marketing programs one at a time and not feel like I have to do everything all at once. This has become my "marketing how-to" book and my reference guide.

I would have liked the author to have included more information on selling, telesales or telemarketing but maybe in her next book!

I needed to write a marketing plan and I liked that this book came with a CD with lots of forms to fill in, etc. However, my disappointment comes in that, although the authors include a marketing plan outline, many of the items on said outline are not specifically covered in the book. Examples of what they want you to include in your marketing plan that they don't cover are: demand analysis, collateral development (huh?), breakeven analysis, etc. I wanted a book that would walk me through the process of creating a complete marketing campaign and this book ain't it.

To be fair, there are some good checklists in here that really make you consider many factors of your business and solid, albeit basic, marketing ideas. I guess for pure small business marketing ideas, you still cannot beat the Guerilla Marketing books by Jay Conrad Levinson, et al.