Marketing Monday 8 Days A Week (Book Review)

“Marketing Monday 8 Days A Week”
By Natalie Armstrong

In Marketing Monday 8 Days A Week Ms. Armstrong manages to capture her keen sighted advise over the past 3 years. The book consists of an organized compilation of the best of her weekly columns about how to market an ADR practice. Like the newsletter, the book is whimsically wonderful. With short and concise descriptions, Natalie explains the most crucial guts of marketing an ADR practice to a group, who is mostly non-savvy in the practice of marketing. In addition, her brand of marketing is surely for money, that is, she does teach readers how to make money, but with compassion. This is because Natalie sees what most marketing authors, professors and pundits see, and perhaps a little more about marketing an ADR practice, or perhaps any product. One must first gain competence. Then one should develop a plan. Then one should get a lot of well paying customers, and take care of them well. Because clients do business for the most part, with people they know and/or like.

This above formula would seem to be a simple one. Yet I know that this is a prime subject for most ADR practitioners, because, like any sole practitioner, one is only as good as one’s last job. While that is a bit of an overstatement in the Mediation industry, what is not an overstatement is that if one does not think about tomorrow, eventually one runs out of paying jobs, no matter how good you are. Most of us never had any concept of the fact that to be a “self-supporting” mediator really does mean spending about 50% of your time marketing. And, that many choices and pathways should be chosen for their ‘marketability utility return’ to the performer of the services. That is, Ms. Armstrong would advise never to “give away” your services. By this statement, she does not at all mean don’t do any pro-bono work. That would be foolish. She says, one should understand the specific self-benefit of any pro-bono work one does, and it should be part of the general business and marketing plan for your practice.

Interestingly, Ms. Armstrong would advise you to do pro-bono work, as it is the key to success in this business. But use your pro-bono time as a “Magic Bullet.” The magic bullet that Ms. Armstrong describes she simply puts like this:

“You must Serve before you Sell.”

Natalie is the biggest advocate of pro-bono work one could find. But with a caveat, offer your services with a purpose.

This advice, as with all the advice in this book is of course correct. And with a very comfortable writing style and perfect advice, what could be wrong with a book like this? Well, the answer is truly nothing. In fact, to really understand the brilliance of the book, one must realize that the whole book is itself the ultimate use of marketing. What is the book after all? It really is a compilation of a very highly honed long term strategy. It worked more or less like this:

1) Start a Newsletter which you are very careful about, to put perfect advice into and are sending very regularly.
2) Build a database of these people who subscribe to the newsletter.
3) Encourage more people to join by asking your subscribers to send this to your friends.
4) Thus creating a need, an appetite, even a hunger for this column, so much so, that people on the East Coast are upset when they wake up Monday morning and it is not up yet, because of the 3 hour time difference.
5) Then after a critical mass is created of readers and material, compile the best of the advice into a book.

What happens? You sell a lot of advice. It is truly comforting, to realize, that what you are reading in your hand, is in itself, a perfect example of proper execution of a marketing plan. The more copies Ms. Armstrong sells, the better was her foresight.

Along with Natalie’s perfect advice (Ed. Note: “perfect” is defined here in the sense, that it cannot be rationally argued with; there may be reasons why something that Ms. Armstrong says might not be right for any particular individual, this is fine, but it cannot be reasonably argued that her advice will not work.) she keeps the reader more interested by sprinkling rather witty and apropos quotes throughout the book.

Finally, the organized fashion of presentation gives Natalie’s weekly advice, additional meaning and accessibility. Through the use of the index, one can hone in on the general subject area of desired advice, and then go right to it and read as much or as little advice as they are prepared to take in at that moment, and then go back to it later. That is a uniqueness of the book. It has no plot, it has no real tight structure, so it is flexible. It will meet your needs as a reader. The book is highly recommended for its fine kernels of advice and information on how to boost your ADR practice. Some of the author’s comments are truly essential to success in this business.

                       

Jon Linden

Jon Linden is a Mediator, Trainer and Business Consultant. He holds an BS in biology and an MBA, both from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. Jon spent 20 years in the Food Service Distribution business, where he was the COO and Sr. V-P of a Distribution Center of a major… MORE >