Book Review: Navigating the Marketing Maze by Andy Fracica

In this modern technology-driven world, things change so rapidly that not only will what worked to market your business for your grandparents not work any longer, but what worked last year might not even work today. Business owners can easily feel lost amid all these changes, wondering which way to turn, which marketing strategy to use, and how to get their potential customers’ attention or even where to find those customers.

Andy Fracica, the Marketing Success Coach, lowers the marketing maze’s walls so you can see over them to view the bigger picture. In Navigating the Marketing Maze, Andy offers practical advice and personal experience on how to market any size business, reach customers, and get your product or service known and appreciated. He sifts through all the marketing possibilities to reveal what works, what doesn’t work, and what used to work and why it works no longer. From discussions about using the Yellow Pages to the latest updates on marketing with social media, Andy helps readers determine how to avoid dead-ends and continue through the marketing maze on the path to success.

Navigating the Marketing Maze is divided into five strategic sections for growing your business without breaking your budget: Foundational, Success, Management, Awareness, and Growth. Each section is divided into individual chapters that walk the reader step-by-step through the process from writing a business plan and a strategic marketing plan to identifying one’s customer, creating a buzz, handling changes internally, determining your unique value proposition, creating a digital footprint so customers can find you more easily, using social media, achieving multiple income streams for your business, and many more marketing secrets a business owner must know to bring to his business the attention it needs.

From the book’s first pages when Andy describes how he successfully marketed his lemonade stand at age eight, he had me hooked. His career has also included marketing for several Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning distributors and manufacturers, going back to school to earn his MBA, successfully starting his own business selling hobby items, and now being a marketing success coach. Throughout Navigating the Marketing Maze, Andy sprinkles in his personal stories as examples of successful marketing and offers advice on how these strategies might be applied to any business.

Andy knows from personal experience how to market a business on a small budget and how it feels to be a “do-it-yourselfer,” not always able to hire someone else to help. As a marketing coach, he offers his years of wisdom packaged into this inexpensive book, and you can always later hire him or someone else to aid you in your marketing efforts if you want additional help. Andy knows how frightening marketing can be for some people, so it only makes sense to learn from someone who actually enjoys marketing, and Andy is more than excited about it:

“I really enjoy marketing. I find it fascinating, and I love getting the win through marketing, whether by increasing sales or generating activity on a website, or by collecting leads from an ad or a tradeshow that blossom into sales. All of us are competitive in some way….I compete with marketing. I love taking on a challenge and then devising a strategy, formulating a plan, then activating that plan, and evaluating the results of my labors. You figure out what works and correct what doesn’t work the way you planned. That’s one of the secrets to navigating the marketing maze.”

Navigating the Marketing Maze is a practical, easy-to-read and easy-to-follow book, complete with exercises—in fact, Andy encourages you to write in the book. Not only does Andy present ideas and information, but he offers practical applications for them. If you’ve been in business for years, this book can help you backtrack to where you need to begin again, creating a stronger foundation for your marketing efforts, and if you’re just beginning a business, Andy can help you start on the right path through the maze so you emerge knowledgeable and successful in your marketing efforts.

For more information, visit www.TheMarketingSuccessCoach.com.