Here are some nice freebies for you: my former colleague Andrew Leon Walker has written three genuinely useful guides which are available by email.
The Marketing Troubleshooters Guide To Planning For Growth introduces itself by saying that it’s important to take a step back to ensure your traditional and digital marketing activities are working together and delivering your messages in a consistent manner, and ensuring that those messages are relevant to those people who may be interested in buying your products and services – helping to protect your core business and supporting sales targets, It advocates the best way to do this is to create a written marketing strategy. The purpose of the strategy is to define how you will achieve your goals and objectives and guide your decisions.The guide then covers:
1. The objectives stage. Where do we want to get to (and when)?
2. The audit stage. Where are we now?
3. The planning stage. How will we get there?
4. The delivery stage. How do we make this happen?
5. The measurement stage. How will we know when we’ve arrived?
The Marketing Troubleshooters Guide To Preparing For Growth is part two of the trilogy and sets out the reasons why you may need to change your marketing approach and highlights many of the areas worth investing some time in to ensure your platforms, processes and procedures are fit for purpose and relevant to your audience and your objectives. Its contents are:
1. Why You Need To Think Differently
2. Understand The Role Of Your Website
3. Help The Search Engines Find Your Business
4. Take Advantage Of Google’s Free Tools
5. Understand Your Paid Advertising Options
6. Get Heavily Involved In Content Marketing
7. Social Media Marketing Can Amplify Your Voice
8. Get More From Your Lead Gen Activities
The Marketing Troubleshooter’s Guide To Driving Sustainable Growth moves on to actually “implementing the activities that will focus on delivering the results your business wants.” Its chapters are:
1. Make sure you’re looking at the big picture
2. Set your campaign goals and objectives
3. Building the content engine
4. The campaign landing page
5. The campaign promotion
6. Get your online and offline marketing working together
7. Manage those leads to closure
8. Measure success
You can download all of the guides at andrewleonwalker.co.uk.