Getting the latest marketing trends and ideas is now easy

Marketing plays such an enormous role in business today and one of the biggest problems that comes with it is that a lot of non-marketers - CEOs, FDs and other senior executives along with small business operators and entrepreneurs, find it hard to keep up with all the buzzwords and separate the hype and lofty promises from reality.

Others, along with marketers themselves, need marketing intelligence, information, case histories, trends and analysis, but simply don't have the time or often the inclination to read the books, search the websites or get involved with networking groups. And even if they do, they often find that none of these sources gives them the information they need regarding their specific product or service.

Two of my clients approached me last year to provide them with regular marketing bulletins specific to their industries, products and services.

They use these for their own edification but more often than not circulate the information to senior staff.

What I did was to delve in to my own marketing archives that go back more than a decade and source information from the web, books and magazines as well as overseas marketing associations, which I do in any event just to keep myself up to date. Further resources come from workshops I conduct which always turn up from delegates, interesting and fascinating case histories and ideas.

So, what I have started doing is offering a custom designed bulletin, weekly, monthly, fortnightly or however frequently clients require it and specifically designed for a particularly industry, product or service category.

And having to practice what I always seem to be preaching about - customer service, bulletins also include an interactive facility by which clients can pose question or request specific information from me.

The most important factor in compiling these bulletins is to ensure that information is always relevant and not just information for the sake of information.

Because the problem with the amount of information that is accessible these days is quite simply that there is far too much of it and the trick is to try and extract only that which has value.

The need for an understand of marketing and reliable marketing information is growing among non-marketers particularly from the point of view of them wanting to get more involved with marketing efforts and to be able to better judge requests for increased marketing budgets and activity.

And of course, get to where the ROI is in all that marketingspeak.