Marketing, like every other business discipline, doesn’t have a silver bullet. If you are reading this you have probably tried searching for how to market your business online and didn’t find an article materially different from the article before it. In most instances, you can’t. Marketing is a business process that requires a framework for decision making, not a checklist you can just follow.
Just about every major keyword people search for on the subject of marketing has the same information. Each post is a top ten list rewritten with the same set of approaches and tactics and to-dos. The information provided is suspiciously ( or conveniently for the author ) light on specifics.
Marketing doesn’t work by tricking people, but it seems that the broader digital marketing landscape has fooled search engines by producing a sea of similar posts sharing the same noninformation.
Before some real advice, lets clear the air and state that marketing your business online is going to be tough to get started. You will waste money to start and costs are rising. The advantages of marketing online are also going away quickly. Think about the digital landscape in economic terms.
Once every business is online, the competition will increase for the top spots in search results. Only the top results gain views and clicks. There are a finite number of spots at the top for any given query and results won’t change quickly. Demand-side factors are still a reality, but the supply of information is virtually unlimited and nearly costless to distribute. Companies can provide consumers complete information about their product and service more easily and cheaply than ever before.
Like a calculus equation, businesses are able to provide information to potential clients in a way that approaches theoretical limits. The primary economic factors in digital marketing that come into play include:
- Perfect information – All consumers and producers know virtually all prices of products and the utility from owning each product.
- Rational buyers – more available information makes all exchanges increase in their economic utility resulting in fewer trades that do not increase their utility.
- Homogeneous products – products are more easily understood to be perfect substitutes for each other.
- Costless distribution – near-zero marginal costs of distribution for information.
It is getting harder to differentiate and specialize in marketing efforts on the internet and the distribution systems for information is equal. The internet is making marketing brutally efficient. I predict the long term effect of the internet is that all companies in aggregate will be less profitable in the long run, consumers will be better off.
Apply this logic when thinking about the problem of marketing your business and despair. Oh, and I forgot to mention that if you produce an effective marketing campaign it is likely to be copied, reproduced, and improved by your competition faster than you can evaluate what you did successfully. Welcome to the internet, isn’t it wonderful?
And, herein lies the problem for many business owners. Most don’t know where to start and look for an overly simplistic checklist of items to follow. Instead of following a dogmatic approach to marketing, business owners should be looking to learn about the marketing process generally. Then once understood, build a framework for thinking and taking action. Just like the pre-internet, thinking about a business relative to competition, microeconomics, and customers’ preferences is a good place to start thinking about marketing your business.
When getting your business online specialize early. As will be discussed below, there are many ways to skin the proverbial marketing cat. Taking a framework approach to developing mastery of a marketing tactic then layering successive approaches will generally result in more favorable results. This is especially applicable for small businesses with limited budgets.
A framework for action in contrast to a prescribed to-do list of efforts avoids the mistake of not taking in new information. Competition for share of wallet means marketing is a problem that must be solved for over and over again.
Now here is something you didn’t expect to hear in this discussion. I don’t have a framework that is going to work for your business. This is something you are going to have to solve. To understand how to market your business we will start by teaching you to build a process to market your business.
Any marketer who says they have ‘the answer’ for you is selling. The ultimate solution for your business is likely going to be composed of multiple interwoven marketing components and should contain multiple campaigns to reduce the risk of a single channel not working any longer. Video killed the radio star. No marketing effort works forever.
Marketing Process
The future changes and marketing in a given channel works until it doesn’t. Competition for marketing channels will ruin the effectiveness of those marketing channels over time. Process is what will rule the day for successful marketing efforts.
The process of marketing your business could not be more simple and should follow something like this:
- Determine how much capital can be spent to market your business each month
- Split your marketing efforts across at least 4-5 different channels
- Review ROI per channel monthly
- Automate and hire against things that will work long term while always working reduce cost and free up more spend for items that attract more potential customers
- Use some percentage of your budget towards testing new channels and processes as old ones are certain to lose effectiveness over time
Eventually, your marketing efforts should consist of dozens if not hundreds of smaller processes or tasks that re-occur indefinitely until eliminated or changed. Your objective over time is to figure out and perpetually execute on every type of marketing that produces a return for your business. You want to do as much of it with extreme quality at the lowest cost possible.
For active campaigns the process I follow monthly is just as simple:
- Check each line item in my marketing budget against the performance of every other item
- Do more of what works every month and less of what doesn’t
- Always allocate a percent of spend to testing new channels
Think of every time you try something new as a unique campaign. Make sure to track spend and time for execution of a specific campaign from the list. Personally, I favor the weighted list approach to determining what should be added and eliminated from our marketing efforts.
One final note on process should be re-stressed. Every marketing effort should be based on return on investment. If you can get more customer spend from a single source of marketing spend you should double down on what works. But never be fully dependent on a single marketing channel. The worst kind of watering hole is a dry well.
And that’s it as far as process – create a spreadsheet and just track each and channel performance month over month. Don’t make things more complicated than it needs to be. The next section deals with the real challenge of building a working framework for knowing what to test and how to evaluate a potential marketing channel.
Building a marketing framework
How to market is the process. What to market should follow a framework. Compare the types of marketing available, not how to market generally. There are hundreds of types of marketing, in reality, you will need to try substantially all of them in some cases in multiple different ways.
Research the types of marketing as individual components that should be combined in your marketing process. Here are a few external links to get you started: Example (1) (2). Similar research should be sought from books and well-regarded marketing experts. Avoid ‘guru’s’ and focus instead on academics and the preeminent business minds.
Frameworks establish correct patterns of thinking and help remove natural biases that everyone has.
I have shared a broad framework for thinking about marketing in two of my businesses below. For my companies, successive layers of requirements for ongoing marketing spend have helped us ferret out what works and what doesn’t. Every subsequent component needs to be satisfied or it isn’t worth pursuing. Run every single process through your framework monthly.
Layer I: Simple Tests
- Do I understand the effort well enough to be able to do it well?
- Do I have the bandwidth to support the effort?
- Can I easily put in a dollar today and get more than a dollar back in return?
Layer II: Learning and Expertise
- Is there an expert in the field I can learn from first and save time and money?
- Is there an expert in this field it would make sense to leverage vs doing this in house?
Layer II: Execution
- What no-brainer parts of my marketing strategy can I knock out first?
- Is there an expert
- What parts cost me nothing to maintain?
- What I need to maintain perpetually?
- Can I track the data from this effort well enough that I can make a decision as to its effectiveness
Layer IV: Evaluation
- At the end of every month – how has that individual effort performed?
- How much longer does an experiment need to run?
- Is the opportunity cost of facilitating this effort a waste of resources?
- Can I cut cost out of the process and get the same result?
Finalizing items:
- What is the range of likely future outcomes?
- Which outcome do I think will occur?
- What is the probability that I’m right?
- What is the prevailing consensus?
- How does my expectation differ from the data?
Add criteria in your marketing framework that is specific to each business.
Having personally stood up two full, revenue-producing marketing teams I’ve found the processes to be generally the same. The most successful and long-lasting marketing efforts are built brick by brick. One-off efforts can have great ROI but the ability to sustain their effectiveness over the long term is what matters.
To market your business is to have a process and a framework for evaluating your efforts, past present, and future. Hanging your hat on a single strategy is dangerous and a surefire way to fail. Each business will require a slightly different framework befitting its unique characteristics.
The objective is to build out multiple automatic processes for each component of your marketing efforts. The answer is not one or the other in most situations but yes to all items that work, some more than others, and eliminating what no longer works.
