I’m writing a book about small business marketing. It would be called ‘The Small Business Marketing Bible’, except this guy already took that title. There are already quite a few books on the subject, hell, there’s even a dummies version, but no-one seems to have written a great book from an Australian perspective with an up-to-date and truly insightful section on online marketing as far as I can tell. Sure, there’s plenty of chatter on the Interwebs and lots of blogs about the subject, but I can’t find anything in print that acts as a complete, effective guide full of case studies, professional ‘theory’, practical advice, interviews and, gasp, research on ALL aspects of small business marketing.

Having run a number of my own successful small businesses over the last decade, and with an entire family all doing the same (my brother runs a cafe, my parents have built and sold about 5 vastly different successful small businesses in their time and virtually all of my other friends and relatives either own, or work in small businesses) I’ve got a wealth of practical experience to draw on, not to mention the knowledge I’ve gained from studying marketing at uni and working with and consulting for the marketing departments of some of the largest companies and organisations in Australia.

I’m still very much at the research stage but I think my table of contents is almost complete. I haven’t included the topics in each chapter, but a basic overview would be:

1. Overview
2. Initial Research
3. Location
4. Defining Your Brand
5. Writing a Marketing Plan
6. Your Marketing Budget
7. Your Website
8. Advertising and Promotion Opportunities
9. Word of Mouth Marketing
10. Public Relations
11. Networking
12. Knowing and Growing Your Customer Base
13. Marketing is Everyone’s Department
14. Distribution Channels
15. Creating Partnerships
16. Franchising
17. Marketing vs. Sales
18. Measuring
19. Case Studies and Marketing Tips
20. Tips for Specific Businesses
21. Finding Inspiration
22. Further Reading
23. Example Documents, Forms and Letters

If you have any ideas or initial feedback I’d love to hear it!

Tags: Small Business Marketing

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 7:37 pm and is filed under Small Business Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.