Laura Benjamin

Seth Godin summarizes several of his systems from previous books (including nods to Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, The Dip, and Tribes) into a an overall vision for what great marketing looks like. He sees marketing as an aspirational exercise, and this book is a great primer for how to understand the its role and implementation in your business.

Be authentic. Be in service. Embrace your customer and build strategies around them. This is Godin’s message in This is Marketing, and serves as a summative overview of many of Seth’s core systems and theses.

If you’ve been doing your homework on your sales funnel and ascension pyramid, you know there’s a lot of ways to plan and build out a system for your business. Allan Dib’s The 1-Page Marketing Plan is a great overview and workbook to help you start planning out that process.

One of my favorite takeaways from Dib’s book is that he helps you understand the business you’re actually in. You’re not selling what you think you are:

• People don’t want drill bits. They want to make holes.
• But actually… people don’t want holes either. They want…
• The shelf put up on the wall.
• The satisfaction of having gotten something off their to do list.
• The pride and status of the cool thing they built.
• and on and on…

These, and other big takeaways, will help you take your marketing from just passable to great.