Author: Dan Norris.
Rating: 3/5
This book, written by Dan Norris is pretty simple and straight forward to understand.
The good thing about his writing is he writes from his own experience rather than cold theories.
This book covers the importance of compound marketing that comes in these four forms
- Brand
- Story
- Community
- Content
I like him as an entrepreneur as he doesn’t just provide advice from a theoretical perspective.
He writes base on his own experience and learnings and the achievements that other companies have made.
Brand
He talks about why entrepreneurs cannot delegate the responsibilities of branding to the other parties as they should own it. He also emphasises how companies think about branding as changing and the importance of story and design in branding.
Conclusively, he advises entrepreneurs to put in the work and heart to make a good brand out of it.
Story
Creating a good story is something he thinks one brand should focus on. In his book, he said one should not make up the story but share an authentic and relevant story with the public.
Story-telling is challenging as business and story can be very hard to bring together. We’re living in a capitalism world.
Many stories have become irrelevant as human-created a society that’s colder then it should be.
Look at how many companies spent billions on building stories for themselves that never work. Airlines, banks are a good example. We can look at story-ads that flying around during festive seasons.
Community
He shares about the importance of building a community and also the impact of one strong community.
However, he suggests building a small and exclusive community than a big one. The bigger the group, the less-exclusive it becomes, eventually losing its meaning and becoming meaningless to its audience.
It is also essential to keep providing value to the community and do not expect anything back from them.
Content
This book shares the importance of content and all the different channels we can use to create content. The author also discusses the differences between creating ROI-driven content vs engaging content.
I like the one concept he highlighted is creating content without expectation of immediate reward. I work with many clients expecting the return to come the next day, and it is unrealistic.
For example, we can’t expect posting an Instagram picture will generate sales the next day. All these activities have to be compounded to see the effect.
The fight between paid or organic channels
Overall, he focuses more on organic marketing than paid marketing.
In my opinion, I don’t think one channel is better than the other. It depends on what kind of business one is running.
Combining paid and organic could generate a much more significant impact than just siding with one channel.
I don’t think any business owner should pick aside.
For example, if you run a small digital agency business, you should take advantage of both channels – SEO + Google Ads to maximise your visibility on Google.
If you’re running an eCommerce business, you should also do all you can, from SEO, Google Ads, Facebook/Instagram Ads to gaining Facebook followers. As Facebook ads change their terms every month, by doing this, you won’t risk losing your mainstream traffic.
Summary
I will recommend this book if you are looking to learn more about building a relevant brand, story, community and content as the book is easy to be understood.
