The Non-Obvious Guide to Small Business Marketing

by Rohit Bhargava

ALL-NEW SECOND EDITION COMING APRIL 2021! This book is like having coffee with an award winning marketing expert. Most business guidebooks treat you like a dummy or an idiot. Not this one. This is a short and easy-to-read guidebook filled with useful, no bullshit, only-what-you-need-to-know, immediately actionable advice for marketing your business or startup. The book focuses on the most common small business marketing challenges, Why is setting a budget the worst way to start a marketing plan? How can you create unstoppable word-of-mouth for your business? Why is it a mistake to try and be on every social media platform? Within these pages you’ll get the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about how to promote your business like these. Along the way, you'll learn how to fit your entire marketing strategy on a single page, what it takes to create a tagline that people remember, how to buy advertising at a fraction of the "sticker price," why some customers remain loyal while others leave as soon as they get a better deal, and the #1 most important thing about branding that most small businesses forget. Inspired by real life conversations and experiences with hundreds of small business owners and entrepreneurs, this is the rare guide that will skip all the useless definitions, avoid the fluff and cut right to the point to give you the real-life advice you need to hear with an irreverent "non-obvious" perspective you deserve. From downloadable one page guides to real life stories and examples, this guide will give you the inspiration and tools to put together a winning marketing strategy to grow your business - no matter how much you know about marketing already.

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2019

About the author

Rohit Bhargava is a leading authority on marketing, trends and innovation. He is the founder of the Non-Obvious Company and is widely considered one of the most entertaining and original keynote speakers on marketing disruption and innovation in the world. He is the #1 WSJ and USA TODAY bestselling author of eight books on topics as wide ranging as the future of business, building a human brand with personality, and how to create a more diverse and inclusive world. Rohit is an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and writes a monthly column for GQ Brazil. He is married and lives with his wife and two boys in the Washington DC area, loves the Olympics and actively hates cauliflower.

Reviews

[Debbie Orazi · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best small business marketing books I have read. The author gives actionable easy to understand advice and provides a plethora of guides and reference materials to assist. Subjects covered include: understanding how your customers think, creating a memorable & persuasive tagline, using your personality to engage customers and build loyalty, strategically using social media and email, and inspiring your employees to promote your business. Highly recommend.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear and Actionable

This book has a few bad reviews and I think it from people looking for a silver bullet
The author is concise and gives you actions to take on the basics and that is where we should all,start from
Do the basics well then get “fancy like”
Remember you need a great cake to put the icing on

[Jordan Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Non-Obvious Guide to Marketing & Branding without a Big Budget is a must-read book for any entrepreneur wanting to educate themselves on the critical role of marketing for business success. I loved how Rohit Bhargava uses real stories and plain language to cover the breadth and depth of all manners of marketing – from brand and avatar selection, to ad spend, content creation and social media. You will appreciate the writing style of award-winning Rohit Bhargava, who speaks directly and respectfully, contrasting other beginner and how-to books for dummies. The book focuses on storytelling, which we can all relate to. It helps you to tell a better story, connect with your authenticity, build trust with your customers and avoid spending advertising budgets when start-up cash is tight. The Non-Obvious Guide to Marketing & Branding is ideal as it covers both strategy in part one, and action (execution in part two). Readers will learn everything from writing a tagline to choosing the right metrics to track their plan is actually delivering.
If you have ever worried about how-to approach marketing, fear not, as The Non-Obvious Guide to Marketing & Branding holds your hand every step of the way. Filled with downloadable templates, further reading, videos and chapter summaries that guide you, your every marketing need is met step-by-step. Your guide and author Rohit Bhargava, is a marketing expert with an impressive pedigree. He’s worked in the industry for over fifteen years with some of the biggest brands in the world, yet he also knows what it’s like to start small. He’s used his guide with thousands of clients and also in his own successful start-up businesses. You'll feel at ease as he shares snippets of real-life stories that make his advice easier to digest. The simplicity of Bhargava’s advice includes things like: the value of being honest, why different and desired is better than having a better product/service, and why you should never start marketing by setting a budget amount. Do yourself and your business a favour: don’t spend another minute on marketing, or another dollar on advertising until you have read The Non-Obvious Guide to Marketing & Branding. With Rohit Bhargava by your side, you can be confident every marketing choice you make is intentional and each action is leading to your business success.

[Madison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked that this book is called the non-obvious guide to branding and marketing and that is actually what is delivers. So many books and articles I’ve read on branding and marketing cover the same ground. Helpful and effective, but very similar. This book looks at things from a different angle and included things I hadn’t read about in other branding books. For example, this book not only tells you why you should create customer personas and how to write them, but how to better meet your customers’ needs and use this information to guide your outreach and get customers to actually start marketing and advocating for you. Similarly, instead of just demonstrating what a tagline is or why you need one, it breaks down the steps on how to create one in a way that actually seems achievable, even for me.

The two parts and 18 chapters cover a wide range of topics, from marketing strategy and understanding your customer, to helping to spread word of mouth, creating a marketing plan, using social media and websites and using data to measure impact.

Each chapter uses examples and clear instructions on how to take action. Included are also a range of links to a repository of further reading, templates, videos and downloads.

I think my favourite moment was reading the customer persona they had created for the book, being able to identify myself within that persona and feeling that this book had been written with me in mind, and that’s exactly how it feels reading the book.

I’ll be putting this book to regular use as I continue to work on my professional branding journeys and recommend it as a practical and helpful resource for those just starting to learn about branding and marketing and for those who want a resource that covers more and dives deeper than other books you might find.

The publishers provided an advanced readers copy of this book for reviewing purposes. All opinions are my own.

Find more reviews, reading age guides, content advisory, and recommendations on my blog Madison's Library

[Juan Manuel Vera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, great advices

I really enjoyed this book. All of it is useful, practical and executable. I think is a very good guide for small business. Is a complete guide to improve our performance and be prepared in a internet era.

[Too Blue Scientist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short and rich information. I don’t know anything about marketing so the book is good enough for me since it contains realistic examples and hơ-to guides.

[Phương Tô · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somehow it's about communication and branding rather than organization. But it has a lot of useful information.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Easy to read. There were a lot of good points made but I struggled to connect the examples and points to marketing my own business.

[Best Indie Book Award · Rating 5 out of 5]

🏆 2022 BIBA® Non-Fiction: Marketing Winner!

[Tsepo Roessing · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good clear message, very helpful.

[Jamie Bee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not So Non-Obvious

The words in the title “non-obvious guide” certainly catch the eye, making you think you'll find out also to cool secrets that, well, aren't obvious. Perhaps I've just read too many marketing books, but I think this book is full of more obvious things about small business marketing than non-obvious ideas, though I've rarely seen them all combined together into one book. Admittedly, too, the author has a friendly and approachable writing style that feels conversational—something I always like to see in a nonfiction book. The author certainly organizes this book well and shares excellent tips and techniques. I like that he's divided the book so you think strategy before you think about specific tactics. I've seen people far too often jump right into tactics before truly thinking out their strategy. This book has a lot of freebies that you can access that will help you better plan both. The author offers templates, tutorials, and videos on his website to help you along the way. There were a few issues with this book, though. It doesn't have any sort of table of contents. I really like and actually need my non-fiction to have a table of contents. That way, after I read a book, I can easily go back to sections I would like or need to review. Also, reading on my Kindle app on my laptop, some columns ran off the edge of the Kindle page. Other than these issues, though, I thought this was a decent collection of sometimes obvious (and sometimes not) ideas about small-business marketing.

I received a free copy of this book, but that did not affect my review.

My book blog: https://www.readingfanaticreviews.com

[Amanda Creger · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great compendium for a novice marketer. Loaded with tools & tips to accompany each overview section. As a more experienced marketer, I didn’t find too many net-new learnings but did walk away with a couple nuggets.