Digital Marketing; A Misnomer. Things you should understand before hiring an agency.

With prospering businesses, mushrooming start-ups and advent of the high-speed accessible Internet in India; an industry, which experienced exponential growth, is Digital Marketing. Admit it; if you are an entrepreneur or a manager, you have been to a digital marketing agency at least once in your lifetime and also that you have heard of complex jargons like growth hacking, ROI models, marketing funnel, lead generation, Barter, remarketing, organic, retention marketing and what not. The chances are that you are overwhelmed, you are confused, and you are tired.

Halt! First of all, lets clear the clutter off our minds, understand and appreciate the magnificence called “MARKETING”.

Marketing is not a process, marketing is not calculations, and marketing can never be inorganic.

“Marketing is all about understanding your audience, creating/ improving your product accordingly and captivating your audience with entertainment.”

The first two things advance over with time, you can never understand your audience entirely and your product will never be perfect, but “entertainment” is what should be done right from the first day.

And entertainment is not expensive; you don’t need big setups, expensive cameras, and maestros from the industry, you need a few creative brains.

The best example is the app TIKTOK; millions of subscribers are glued to the app to view a person next door, performing anything interesting. Trust me, the most liked and viewed videos on that app were shot on an inexpensive phone by people with no relevant experience but a hint of creativity.

So, build a team of amazing storytellers, beautiful illustrators, enchanting crooners, engrossing filmmakers and amiable people who will dissolve their essence into your brand, because only creativity can entertain people, rest everything is documentary.

And that is the sole reason why some brands evolve, grow and others diminish and that is how a company/ business becomes a BRAND with time.

But what actually happened?

With the dot com revolution, the population of marketing professionals bloomed. Professional courses for Marketing became a rage, and now everyone who knows how to boost a post on Facebook is a digital marketer.

To start with, please stop calling “Digital Advertising” as “Digital Marketing”. They are different, they are subsequent, not simultaneous. Advertising comes after Marketing, in fact, there is one more step that falls between them and that is production. You plan a campaign in marketing, you produce it and then you accentuate. And ideally, there should be nothing called “Digital Marketing” in fact it should be “Marketing”. You can’t make two different marketing plans for digital and offline, marketing is according to your product and not according to platforms. And if you have separate plans for digital and offline, then there can never be coherence and continuity in your communication, and the first step to building a brand is creating continuity in branding across any given platform.

You might argue that you can call it anything, it’s a nomenclature, it’s a noun. But again, it’s a proper noun, there has to be a logic while naming and it won’t hurt calling it what it should be called. Call it anything, my only purpose is to clear the concept behind it, to declutter (Unclutter) your minds and tell you something that might be helpful in the future.

I have taken over 100 interviews till date and the saddest part was dealing with people who had a degree with major in marketing. 90% of them were unclear about how marketing, branding, and advertising were different. The only thing they knew well were case studies of how big brands survived and thrived, how they made millions and what marketing tactics they used. I would like to put up a question, “which two giants have you seen using exactly the same marketing strategy?” Every company is different and of course, the marketing strategy should be custom made, taking inspiration is all right but you can’t copy blindly and succeed.

So, when marketing professionals started failing in delivering value for the brand, and because of these failures, businessmen started losing trust, new terms were coined. Simple things were complicated on purpose. One agency is digital marketing agency, the other one will name themselves as ROI based agency, the next one will call themselves as Growth Hacking agency.

Basically, professionals started marketing “marketing” and using new terms which would appear powerful and effective and you would be forced to use them, for fear of missing out and not because you believe in them. These terms imbibe fear in the mind of entrepreneurs and sway them away from the actual art of marketing.

Always remember, effective marketing is not possible until and unless there is passion and a desire to create something beautiful and that is why it is always suggested that owner/ founder should be a part of brainstorming.

Marketing is a lovely amalgamation of analysis and creativity; carefully analyze your product/ service, sit down with your marketing agency, brainstorm, knit beautiful stories, get them produced in the form of written as well as multimedia content and then advertise through whatever media/ platform you wish.

Post it on facebook, promote it on Instagram, use google adwords, put it on hoardings or make jingles for radio and that is where you will need Digital Advertising agency, Outdoor Agency, ATL/BTL agency and all other growth partners.