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Book Review: Guerrilla Marketing:
Secrets for Making Big Profits
from Your Small Business
by Jay Conrad Levinson

Guerilla Marketing, by Jay Conrad Levinson, has been around since 1983 but it's so useful for small businesses that I felt I had to share it with you. It has sold over 400,000 copies since it was first published but it's fresh today due to a great update in 1998.

Guerilla Marketing has one simple core idea. Businesses have got to bring the customers in and close the sale and they don't have money or time to waste. Every dollar must count. Every dollar must be more effective than the dollars spent by their competitors.

Levinson comes from a big advertising agency background and then went freelance as a copywriter before writing this book, so he's seen both sides of the street and can help you find out how to do amazing things for far, far less than you might ever have expected.

Does this mean hunkering down and going for the least expensive advertising you can buy or to do no advertising at all? No. At its simplest and most basic, guerilla marketing has you consider all of the types of marketing that might be effective for your business and then test them. It demonstrates how to listen to your customers and get the same valuable information from them that could cost you thousands (or more) if you used a market research firm. It gives you the inside scoop on how to save money when you're purchasing advertising. That's valuable. Not only does he tell you that more than 50% of all advertising done in 1997 involved barter but then he tells you how to actually work trades so that you can cash in on it.

He covers the effectiveness of media and gives you practical information on where to spend lavishly and where to economize and why it makes sense. For example, only a few newspapers, radio stations or TV stations can actually do creative work that will make your business look good and stand out from the rest. So using them to script and produce your ads often doesn't make sense. Because they'll be less effective, your cost per order with them can be much higher than if you write the ads yourself (if you're truly good at it) or hire a great creative team to do it for you. However, once you've gotten them written, he says go ahead and use the production facilities at the TV studio or radio station. He tells you how to get twice as much done for your money by shooting two commercials or even three on the same day. And he says that, although the average TV commercial costs $210,000 to make, you can have a good and effective one for $1,000.

This book is loaded with information on how to buy media, make sure you get the right media, and deliver it effectively. I consider it a must read for the small business owners. Do yourself a favor, though, and go beyond reading it. Put it into practice. Most of the people who have read those 400,000 copies in print have come up with a half dozen really good ideas that they've put into practice and they're profiting from it. Most of them are not profiting from it as much as they could, though, because they're focusing only on those half dozen good ideas. Guerilla Marketing is an effective marketing system. If you really want to make the big bucks on a Guerilla budget, you've got to consider it as a system that enables you to constantly test and measure the effectiveness of your marketing program. The payoff? An effective marketing campaign that really gets the customer's interest and helps you keep them coming back for more. Your payoff? It could be a much more successful business and more of the good things that you'll deserve.

$$$$$ (Yep, our highest rating!)

-C. N-J.

ABC's book rating system: $ - A few useful items; $$ - Some good content; $$$ - Well balanced and worthwhile; $$$$ - Recommend highly; $$$$$ - Excellent! Buy it now