REAL Digital Marketing Vs. Chasing Virality In Business: Crawl Before You Ball
Part 1: Maximizing Your Marketing Investment
Are you tired of wasting your hard-earned marketing dollars on guesting games and imitating your competitors?
At Inner Circle, we understand the struggles faced by business owners who have lost substantial amounts of money on marketing experiments, which can feel more like gambling than strategic investments.
When you step back to look at your marketing, can you truly say you’re investing, or are you just rolling the dice?
This two-part series will prevent you from vaporizing your precious marketing dollars in gambling, guessing, and emulating your “competitors.”
Marketing can be a slow and steady process, but more often than not, that’s where the real profitability lies.
What data are you tracking?
In my experience, knowing what numbers to track is half the battle when it comes to successful marketing.
Avoid getting caught up in vanity metrics like social media followings, and instead, concentrate on meaningful engagement and data collection.
Remember, a measured approach with reliable data is far more effective in utilizing your marketing budget than hasty, impulsive actions.
Now, while it may sound obvious, you might be wondering why many leaders end up squandering a significant amount of their budget on failed marketing experiments. The answer is simple: Most leaders are experts in their respective fields but lack expertise in digital advertising.
As a result, they often resort to hiring overpriced and inexperienced marketing agencies or, even worse, making attempts themselves.
We must applaud the CEOs who embark on a podcast journey to promote their businesses while meeting their sales quotas. However, it’s essential to realize that such a CEO resides on an iceberg of deep-running factors, including a validated offer and a mature delivery team who can make profitable good on the virality generated.
While it may be a common aspiration and a sign of the times for CEOs to hit the “campaign trail” by appearing on various podcasts, all that attention and virality won’t amount to much for your company’s bottom line if your marketing foundation isn’t set up properly.
Building things in the right order is crucial
Did you know there are only three effective marketing strategies in the world today?
The strategy that is right for you depends on the type of business you run and which stage your company is at in terms of growth and profitability.
Let’s Break It Down:
1. B2B Appointments & Qualified Lead Generation
This strategy aims to ensure that your digital assets consistently generate qualified appointments with potential customers who genuinely need your products or services. It works exceptionally well for complex offerings that require education and customization before an informed purchase. Naturally, the higher the value of the service or product, the better.
While it may not be rocket science, it is undeniably a science. Instead of relying on guesswork, Inner Circle members receive customized strategies from our marketing team and discounted technical support to execute them effectively.
2. B2C “No Touch” E-commerce
For many entrepreneurs, the holy grail of marketing is an e-commerce store that essentially sells itself. However, achieving this requires an abundance of skills and talents across various areas, including software, advertisements, product scaling, substantial financial resources and a willingness to endure months or even years of experimentation and negative cash flow.
The challenge intensifies when the average order value falls below $50. Leaders often miss out on significant sales opportunities by not having customer service representatives who can engage with customers directly. Having phone-facing representatives can boost average order values, reduce return rates and substantially increase brand loyalty and repeat sales.
3. Local Business Marketing
If your business relies on attracting walk-in traffic, the approach to generating online traffic and guiding customers “to your door” and “through your cash register” requires a slightly different strategy. It’s safe to say that marketing for local businesses follows a relatively consistent process, and it’s worth noting that search engines hold a special fondness for local establishments.
Now that you have identified your strategy or strategies, it’s time to consider a campaign that you can fully commit to during the experimentation phase while data accumulates.
As Jeff Bezos says, “Data is the new oil.” So, let’s start there.
In part two of this article, we will identify what goals and metrics you should be tracking if you want to execute a sober and highly effective marketing campaign. Stay tuned for valuable insights that will empower your business to thrive.
Is Inner Circle Right For You?
Kyle Dammann
Kyle Dammann is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, team builder, and automation expert. After a family member fell into a life-threatening addiction to prescription medication and his own experiences with plant medicine, he decided to dedicate his time and skills to legitimizing and accelerating the birth of the plant medicine industry. Kyle believes that access to nature’s pharmacy is a fundamental human right and that all adults should have safe, reliable access to these proven and safe compounds.
