Previously in 7 Marketing Books to Read in 2019 I mentioned that reading is everything. If you do not read marketing, sales, branding, and other inspiring business books, then you lose a lot of new ideas that you can generate while reading. I personally try to generate as many as possible new marketing techniques, new marketing ideas to use it in my company or for other projects when reading a new book.
There are a lot of new books being published monthly and you just cannot keep up with all of them. I’m not saying that you should since many of them are not as good as they say. However, you should always set yourself ambitious goals. And reading as many business books (lets’ say 5 per month) as possible could be one of them.
I’m sure that your colleagues are fond of reading, at least some of them. So you can try to organize something like a reading club in your company like I did in mine. So, here is how everything started.
As a marketing leader in our company, I always try to learn something new every spare minute I have: on the go, on the train, in the subway, on a plane etc. And the more I read and learn the more I want. My wishlist of marketing books is growing daily and it seems almost impossible to read all of them. And to tell the truth I’m not a big fan of quick reading or reading short versions of business books. Reading a short version of any marketing book, and even some regular fiction book is like looking into the mirror with your eyes closed.
So I surely needed some company to help me out on this reading journey. This is how I came up with the idea of marketing Readmiring club I established in our company. First, it consisted of my colleagues from the marketing department who loved reading and learning as I did. There were just three of us.
I worked out a system that each of us had to read at least 6 books that year connected with our functions in the marketing department. So together we planned to read at least 18 marketing books during the year. I prepared the list of 4 mandatory books for every marketer and two additional they could choose by themselves, but it had to be connected with marketing or close to marketing.
And we had not just to read all those books but learn and share the ideas what we can use and implement in our company to help our sales department, to increase our conversion rate, to perform better ROMI etc.
Every three weeks one of us had to prepare a presentation and share it with the others. We used to meet every third Thursday and share what we learned from the book we read, how helpful it could be for our company. Together we run something like a brainstorm to generate as many new ideas as possible and then chose the best ones to try to use them in action.
As a result, after we had about 7-8 presentations I started to see that this kind of informal meetings made a great impact on my colleagues. They became even more active in terms of looking for some new solutions in marketing. Half a year after I launched the marketing Readmiring club I’ve noticed another thing.
We started to generate more incoming traffic to our website, and not just some random people who wanted to learn about power electronics, but new leads, quality leads. Our conversion rate reached 8% compared to 3% six months earlier. That was an extraordinary result. And that was the result of the new ideas and tools we created thanks to marketing Readmiring club.
And when my colleagues from sales learned about our great performance and what was behind that story, I started to receive requests from them to let them join our club. By the end of that year, the number of Readmirers grew a lot. What started with just me and a couple of the marketers became a marketing Readmiring club with over 20 members. That was an amazing result.
And this year I plan to welcome more people into my club. And now I want to add new sources of marketing, sales and other business related information like marketing magazines, sales presentation from various trade shows and conferences etc. We are still just at the beginning of this wonderful marketing Readmiring club journey.
Wish you all to try the system I described. I guarantee that you will see positive results very soon if you stick to your plan.
Marketing reading to all!
