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Digital Marketing

Decoding the Digital Marketing Enigma: Before You Get Started

Decoding the digital marketing puzzle

Every day there is a new word added to the digital marketing world lexicon. This article is a beginner’s guide to the world of digital marketing for entrepreneurs. The key routes for driving growth are also discussed. They are virality, performance marketing, content and sales.  

A few months ago, I happened to hear in passing from my 11-year old’s room “Let’s go to another server…this one’s irritating!”. I was curious enough to walk into her room and asked her about the server she was talking about. Without looking up, she said “Discord”. All I could see on her screen was a Minecraft game.

Over the last couple of years, I have learnt that one must maintain some semblance of coolness quotient with the child. So, I walked away and hurriedly googled the word. Some previous instances of almost losing my “cool mom” image were: do you know what the last two letters (I & A) stand for in “LGBTQIA” or “do you think I should start using neopronouns” or “why does Olympics recognize 206 countries while the UN recognizes only 193?”. All this from a child who does not watch TV or read the newspapers.

She is a potential future consumer for many categories. As a marketer, I wondered how on earth is someone going to reach her, let alone convince her to buy something. By the way, we only go by unboxing videos and YouTube experts who decide the fate of a product.

I realized that I had to understand this new consumer and the potential world they are going to be living in. I had to go to my Bletchley Park and crack the Enigma. Else very soon I would not understand a word of what she was saying!

I have a feeling a lot of marketers are in the same boat as me. Every day there is a new word/ acronym added to the digital marketing world lexicon. While some are simple to understand – PPC (pay per click), some can stump you totally – like backlinks!

But on a serious note, lexicon notwithstanding, there are so many parts of the digital marketing elephant that most marketers are trying to figure out on their own (entrepreneurs/ small businesses) or simply handing over this whole shebang to a digital agency (large corporates).

I am going to attempt a beginner’s guide to the world of digital marketing for entrepreneurs like me.

It’s still the same

One would think from the headlines that digital marketing has appeared from another planet and its rules are only decipherable to a select few, necessarily below drinking age. The good news is marketing is still about identifying your target audience and then creating awareness, interest, desire and action. I realise this ever day as I interact with our first set of customers. Much to my relief, I must add.

Clarity before you leap into digital marketing

Jumping with arms outstretched

Even in these early days at Your Marketing List, we are spending a lot of time helping prospects hone their product’s promise, who they are targeting, and what is their next six months’ goals. Imagine you have an idea, let’s call it Unboxx, based on your learnings during your psychology major. Unboxx helps children develop skills to become a global citizen. Now, you want to test this idea. You could do one of the following: 

  1. Draw up a list of IB schools (thesis is they will be more amenable to the idea) in your city, use your contacts (in this very WhatsApp group, perhaps) and find a way in. Now, you have a list of 15 schools, and you call each and cajole the principal to listen to your pitch.
  2. You design an open program (children across schools can sign up), set up a simple website that sharply communicates the benefits to parents and set forth.

It’s apparent how different your marketing needs are for the two options. The target audience, school principals vs parents, changes the whole marketing mix. The final consumer is still the same in both cases.

Lanes of growth

Formula 1 racing cars on the race track

Our prospects at Your Marketing List have usually self-diagnosed their marketing needs and are coming to us with a prescription to fulfill. The thing is that is exactly what Your Marketing List was set up for. Fill the doctor’s prescription. You want a content writer? Here you go. Unfortunately, we are doctors ourselves and we can see that seven out of the ten diagnosis are wrong.

It’s useful once you have our product offering and target audience sorted, to think of the various ways to grow. Most people get surprised when we tell them that actually there are very few routes to growth:

  • Virality: This works when your product
    • has natural word-of-mouth. People like posting pictures, so categories like travel, food, fashion should try and encourage sharing of experiences. In fact, AirBnb benefitted a lot from this. People loved talking about ‘this great place I stayed in London and guess what it was half the price of a hotel room, with double the space.’
    • Gets better when friends, colleagues use it. This is what drove growth for the likes of Facebook, Snapchat.
  • Performance marketing: Use this when
    • You derive revenues directly from new users and you can spend the income to acquire more users profitably. Directly is key here, aggregating users at high cost and then hoping to make money by selling advertising or other services to them can be tough. Not a single digital media business that built their audience on cat pictures/videos have made profits. While the New York Times is having the best time of its life, surfing the subscription wave.
    • You are a new brand in an active category and folks are not looking for you naturally. For example, a new D2C offering.

Performance marketing is where most marketing dollars are spent. And largely at the end of the marketing funnel (fancy way of saying where the final sale happens).

When folks are already looking for what you offer, disciplined spending on various platforms make sense. If parents are already searching for classes in robotics, it makes sense to spend on Google ads. It’s not difficult to use free tools to determine search volumes of relevant keywords in your category. Unfortunately, this route tends to be used blindly. You may have a great consumer idea that solves a genuine problem. But if the category is nascent and needs education, you may want to consider the next route.

  • Content: This is not a short-term route. Takes time to build but if relevant to your category and market situation, can be powerful with high return on investment. These factors indicate fit for this route:
    • Your specific target segment lacks knowledge of the category but feels the need. For example, at Your Marketing List our thesis is small, medium businesses and start-ups have high awareness of digital marketing (accelerated by the pandemic) but do not have the depth of understanding to truly leverage it. For us, exploring a content led approach may make sense.
    • Your users naturally generate content via reviews or by answering questions (this is fancifully called UGC-user generated content). This content used well can make your digital presence show up during search. Proceed to your site and hey, buy your product. This is referred to organic acquisition. Inorganic is whatever you pay to acquire.
    • Your business generates lots of data that can be converted into content pages, again to spur better search performance. Zomato has details and menus of thousands of restaurants. Individual pages of each become a powerful search booster.
  • Sales: Then there is selling directly. We notice that the ‘new shiny object’ phenomenon makes founders ignore direct sales. Let’s go back to our Unboxx example at the start of the article. If you pick the first option of approaching IB schools directly, you just decided to make sales your main route to growth.

Besides these four routes to growth there are a few others that you could think of as mini boosters: PR is perhaps the most common in this category. Useful to create bursts of awareness when there is something genuinely newsworthy to share. It’s not that successful companies stick to one route all their lives, most mature companies will end up using most of these routes. However, when you are in the early phase of growth or starting up, it makes sense to pick one as the focus.

You can read here for a glossary of digital marketing terms.

If you are interested in other digital marketing topics, please refer to our Blog.

If you have reached this far, we hope this has given you food for thought. We genuinely believe that if we devote some quality time thinking through the above, what needs to be done next becomes far easier and infinitely more effective. Of course, each of the marketing tools through the customer journey has their rules and nuances. If you liked reading this, you might find the following article useful: Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane — A Customer Acquisition Playbook for Consumer Startups

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