Let us get this straight.

Marketing for a business DOES NOT mean throwing out a bunch of advertisements on 10 different platforms. 

It is basically to ensure that a business gets a positive ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). 

That is to say that when a business invests ‘X’ amount on marketing, it should generate ‘X + Y’ amount of revenue from that. In this way, whatever money is spent on marketing is not only recovered back but more.

Fundamentally, this is one of the core aims of every marketer for the business they are working with.

What this allows the business to do is to then grow exponentially. Because the more it spends, the more it makes while expanding its customer base and brand identity. Of course, this is a simplistic and idealistic approach. 

There are many factors deciding the fate of a campaign and companies and businesses spend a lot of resources iterating to get it right. Even if you are not getting a positive ROAS, as long as the marketing campaigns run, we are at least helping in brand building. And usually if the product, offer & market is in alignment, a well-designed campaign will succeed in boosting the business tremendously!

If marketing was just about running ads, business owners could do it on their own. These days, it’s not very hard for business owners to start running a paid campaign offline or online with little support. For instance, Facebook has the ‘Boost Post’ option very vividly pointed out for all the page admins and there are many who do not shy away from trying it out. The point is this:

Just because it’s easy to start a campaign, it does not mean it is going to be effective. And just because you didn’t get good results, it does not mean that the platform does not work.

Most business owners are great at the craft of running a business. They have spent enough time perfecting the tricks of the trade. But not many would be good at crafting impactful marketing campaigns. They are not even expected to, that is the role of a marketer. But when you are hiring a marketer for your business, it is important to know if that is just a person who knows how to run ads or it is someone who understands marketing. If the campaign is not run the right way, your marketing spend will not be an investment, it will just remain an expense without any proper returns. You could burn a lot of cash without getting the desired results. 

I am originally from an Engineering background, but since this field’s potential has intrigued me so much I have always been curious to learn and share new insights in this field.  

I have come across some big and successful marketing companies who claim to get you the highest share of the market by getting the  

• Maximum Brand Awareness
• Highest Conversions  
• Biggest Profit Margins 
• Sustained Results  
• Increased Market dominance

I would agree, the wordings above feel like a cliche collection of superlatives. In fact, I myself would not really trust them. But well, it looks like such results can be achieved.

What makes me say so? Actual empirical data and experience of people who have worked for thousands of businesses from many countries.

DigitalMarketer.com is a company that handles digital marketing for a brand of its own and helps many other businesses grow using digital marketing. In my quest for understanding the best strategies a business can deploy for great results, I ended up picking up a bunch of training and certification courses from them. 

As I started consuming the content, I have come to respect the science and logic behind the decisions a marketer takes when running campaigns. I now have reasons to believe that such promises can be achieved and I feel ecstatic knowing that I am learning those concepts.

I have decided to share my learnings along the way. This would be a series of blog posts that deal with the best approach to have when building a marketing strategy for a business.

If you are a business owner, I hope these insights help you get good ideas for similar implementation in your business. If you are a marketer, I hope you find them intriguing and use them in your marketing efforts.

I would be more than eager to get any feedback from you on your thoughts and comments on these ideas. Do you agree or disagree? Do you find them easy or hard to replicate in your own business? It would be an interesting exchange of ideas and I am sure we would both learn from each other in doing so. So do give me a shout whenever you feel like 🙂 

But before we dive, since this is so much of work, let us cover any skeptics out there. People who are still not sure about the need of marketing for their business.

Why should you consider marketing?

Unfortunately, we live in a world where it is not practical to assume that if you have a good product/service, people will come to it. You may have the best product/service in the market, but if you are unable to convince the prospect of what your business can do for them and how it will help them – you do not get a sale. 

Conversely, if your competitor has a slightly inferior product or service, but is smarter in the way he positions his business in the market, has a better funnel structure or garners wider brand recall by aggressive branding and marketing – there is a very high probability that they will pick up a big chunk of customer-base. As much as you’d want the best product/service to win, that is not the case usually.

Yes, agreed that organic growth exists and we have many such cases of people never having to spend much on marketing. But if you talk about the larger picture, how many businesses can be so innovative or disruptive? And even those businesses take a long time to gather big numbers if they only wait for word-of-mouth. If they wish to scale, even they would eventually need to market themselves.

These days people are busy and unwilling to try new things. People do not trust others easily, they are sick of everybody calling themselves, best, cheapest, most valuable, etc.,

If a brand articulates their position as a problem solver in an impactful way and convinces the prospect about how they can solve the prospect’s problem – an instant connection is developed.

So, to grow your business – you need to spend resources on making customers believe how you are good for them. In fact, Dan S. Kennedy, a famous author, consultant, and business coach has gone on record saying: 

“Ultimately, the business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins.”

Dan S. Kennedy

That is to drive home the point that when you have so much competition, the business that is capable and willing to spend the most to acquire a customer will eventually win. Ideally, this spending should be profitable. But even if, for a short while, this goes in the negative – that is NOT BAD.

It would take some courage and proper evaluations, but if you look at the number of companies that have employed this formula, you will soon realize how simple their formula for success has been all this while!

With all that said, let’s look at what are we going to do next!

• We will visualize a business that is about to start its digital growth journey.
• We will run through the process of devising a complete digital marketing strategy from scratch. 
• In the end, we will pick up an example business and implement this strategy on it.
• We will learn, we will experiment, we will bounce off ideas, but more importantly, we will have fun growing businesses. 

Next Up > How can marketers boost a business from scratch – the right way!