A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu
Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small
By Nick Westergaard
Copyright 2016 Amacom Books
Price: $21.95: 226 pages with index
Traditional marketing meets digital marketing
The key to digital marketing is of course engaging the customer; it is providing content so valuable that you will position yourself and your company as experts in your field. The key words here are “engagement”, “content” and “value” and these are what this book is all about. Throughout his book the author, an experienced strategist guides us through the right steps to becoming a successful social media marketing company. From the first steps of mapping your marketing to involving your audience by asking them the right questions and creating a “Question engine” to measuring your progress, this book contains everything you need to develop, implement and grow you digital marketing initiative.
A great example of how this book works is in the chapter on simplification when the author brings everything together and talks about a number of short cuts you can take to have the most effective bang for your buck.
From the book talking about the various ways to create content that works:
- Relentlessly repurpose content: The next time you create a piece of content, brainstorm how many other things you can create from it.
- Utilize historic content: Dig into your files. Go into that old storage unit. Are there old photos you can digitize into relevant throwback content?
- Curate content: Where is great content already being created that you can share with your online community? Can you make this a regular part of your content strategy?
- Encourage user-generated content: Ask for it! Your customers will only know what you need if you ask them.
Pretty basic stuff right, but invaluable when you are in the middles of putting together your social media mapping. In other words you have to be there to really understand just how valuable this book is.
And frankly you have to be there when to all aspects of digital marketing if you want to be a player in your industry going forward. So whether you have been involved in digital marketing for a while or are just getting started as so many of us are today. Do not take another step on that journey until you read this book.
