Foundations of Marketing for Business Owners (Read this before you spend a single marketing rupee)
To all the founders out there.
Also the founding team members
And a handful of committed marketing team members
In short, for all business people tired of doing everything all time.
I have bad news
Marketing is magic doesn’t exist.
And Digital Marketing is magic doesn’t exist.
But I want the magic
Yeah, who doesn’t?
The only real magic is in the hard work.
Learn the basics of your market, learn the message, channel and creatives that work best
or
If you have money, spend it on the person you’re asking to do this work
That’s the only magic.
Build the foundations of your marketing.
&
If you don’t fail to get this right,
there’s really not much use spending time, energy and money in the wrong direction.
Are you ready to work for it?
I advise all my clients to do their own research first.
Recently, at an Entrepreneur Masterclass, I asked the attendees.
“Are you ready to put to understand your market?”
Only if the answer is yes, there’s any reason to talk more.
About Digital Strategy and Execution.
Else, there’s no point.
Don’t get me wrong,
You can (and should) take the help of experts, people in the marketing industry, communities, online resources etc., but you are the one who has to figure out the space you are operating in.
Some of the non-negotiable things you have to learn:
You can only build a repeatable scalable marketing and distribution channel when your marketing foundation is strong.
Work on building that.
An employee or an agency can only help you reach your market if you’ve done the groundwork and set them up for success.
Learn your marketing
I and my agency is a strong advocate of getting founders to learn about marketing.
Don’t panic.
You don’t have to be an expert,
Remember when you started, you didn’t know much about anything?
But you learned, right?
Similarly, you’ll learn the foundations of marketing your own business.
Some of the points that you’ll have to research are:
And once you have done your homework,
you can give out the execution to someone one.
Remember, no one will experiment and learn the way you do.
As an marketing agency head, I request founding team to do this work.
It obviously works better for me if you give this work to me….
But I am okay to let that money go.
Why?
Because I have seen too many business and startup owners make the mistake of giving way too little importance to marketing
And once they have launched their business, and they’re not getting any customers,
they start to panic…
And make mistakes.
Falling victims to scams, inexperienced marketers and unscrupulous agencies whose only motive is to make you spend money so that they end up earning more:
Marketing works but it’s not a magic bullet.
It is an art and science much like any other business function.
You make assumptions, benchmark with industry standards, research your market, experiment.
All the time.
And hopefully you learn 🙂
Contact us if you have any questions about how to get your foundations of marketing right.
We are happy to help!
The full slideshow that I used for a recent event is here:
