PROPEL – Five Ways to Amp Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Business By Whitney Keyes
“She draws on her years of experience with big-time brands and game-changing startups to provide a cutting-edge manifesto for marketers–and a manual to make things happen. This book will propel your business forward.”
–William C. Taylor, cofounder, Fast Company, author of Practically Radical
What does a Fortune 500 company like Starbucks have in common with a small meat vendor in Malaysia? Surprisingly, a lot. When it comes to marketing, size doesn’t matter. Success for every organization boils down to these five things: strategy, story, strength, simplicity, and speed.
Yet day after day Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike make costly blunders that waste time, churn through budgets and damage their brands around the world. How can you use marketing tools in the most effective ways to reach your goals? After spending over 20 years in the trenches as a senior manager at Microsoft, strategic advisor for American Express, and consultant to thousands of businesses around the world, author Whitney Keyes has uncovered what it takes to help organizations of every size and across every industry. In her new book, PROPEL: Five Ways to Amp Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Business, Keyes shares a core set of five principles that blend traditional marketing techniques with the hottest social media tools. Corporations and startups alike learn how to uncover opportunities at their fingertips and use them to build market share, boost brand loyalty, and generate more revenue—fast.
A professor, and fellow at the Center for Strategic Communications at Seattle University and U.S. State Department speaker, Keyes did extensive research and packed the book with real world examples of what works in today’s trying economic times. PROPEL includes exclusive, behind-the-scenes interviews from executives at companies such as American Express and Microsoft, as well as never-before told stories from heads of arts organizations, entrepreneurs, and Main Street mavericks .
“With her latest book, Whitney offers a savvy, up-to-the-minute perspective on how marketing and its various disciplines can jump-start a company’s strategy and enhance its brand cachet. She offers straightforward ideas on strategy, storytelling, strength of message, simplicity of approach, and speed to market. A must-read for anyone whose job (or dream vocation) revolves around customers and the positioning and selling of a brand or service.” Said Corey duBrowa, senior vice president of global communications and international public affairs, Starbucks
In PROPEL, Keyes lays out five essential steps to help all organizations be more successful and move:
- Strategy: Set your course for success. Marketing can be incredibly fun and creative, but at the end of the day, it needs to be smart and well-directed.
- Story: Build your brand story and share it with your market. According to Keyes, success is all about telling the right story at the right time, in the right way, to the right people.
- Strength: Boost your efforts by extending your reach. Collaboration is the name of the game so team up to create powerful alliances.
- Simplicity: Keep the plan and process straightforward. One of the biggest marketing mistakes Keyes sees again and again is people turning a great idea into a complex plan. The key is to make marketing as effortless and uncomplicated as possible.
- Speed: Accelerate and move forward. There are a lot of things you can do in the short-term—in fact, right this minute—to start making a positive impact on your bottom line.
Through these five principles, Keyes shows readers how to remove challenges holding a business back, identify new marketing opportunities, and turn ideas into action by creating a customized plan. Anyone can do marketing, but true success lies in how to do marketing.
About the Author: For over 20 years, Whitney Keyes has helped organizations and individuals become more successful. As a senior manager for Microsoft, Whitney managed global marketing campaigns, including the launch of Office 2000, an $8 billion business, and helped create the company’s primary philanthropy program, Unlimited Potential. Prior to that, she worked for the City of Tacoma helping over 500 small businesses stay in business and started her career managing her family’s retail store. Whitney has worked as a strategic advisor for American Express and a marketing consultant to thousands of businesses around the world through the U.S. Department of State’s programs to empower women entrepreneurs in Malaysia, Kenya and Namibia. Today, Whitney serves as a fellow for the Center for Strategic Communications and a professor of Global Reputation Management at Seattle University. She also delivers keynotes and facilitates workshops for national organizations including Small Business Administration. Whitney writes for business publications including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Biz Bite Blog (http://blog.seattlepi.com/thebizbite/) and lives in Seattle, Washington. She can be reached through her website: WhitneyKeyes.com.
PROPEL
Five Ways to Amp Up Your Marketing and Accelerate Business
By Whitney Keyes
$15.99 paperback
ISBN
August, 2012