Online will remain clumsy but you alone can make a choice.
Navanee Viswa
Marketing professional | Principal at Peregrene - Full-stack marketing solutions | Speaks at Events about Marketing
In marketing, you have choices to make that align with your business aspirations. In a world of too many approaches and counter approaches to choose from, choosing one that suits you is no easy task.
Over and above there are Outliers who will make you believe all that you have put on your table is wrong. Welcome to (digital)marketing.
If we give it a shape and make all the approaches to simple frameworks there are only a handful.
PART-01
PAID
“Buy visibility through paid media” and get your offer out. By far a well-known approach and many businesses depend on this model solely.
You pay, get the eyeballs - end of the story.
The only downside of this model is, it increasingly brings negligible results.
In spite of the data, businesses jump on paid media because their business affords it or it’s how things have been happening from their end.
CONTENT
Build your content repository(Blog, Video channel, E-books etc.,) Nurture audience, earn trust through content, get purchase ready queries.
The opposite of the PAID model. The downside people claim is, it is slow.
It is about adding 1+1+2 customers and so on and so forth. A solid approach that beautifully syncs with the comprehensive growth of an organization(Ex; capacity building)
All that you spend on creating content is an investment that can be put to work for nurturing your customer repeatedly and almost perpetually. All successful brands have invested in their content at some point in time.
HYBRID
If a business is getting transitioned from traditional and adopting digital, a blend of both should work.
In fact many businesses especially those who are 100% reliant on ads should consider blending both.
The successful model being used even(1) by D2C and digital products have been, using online paid ads to take a potential customer to their content repository. It is definitely a smart approach.
Asking to buy doesn’t work, relying on content is slow, so it’s no wonder using both to its maximum potential - something that I get convinced.
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PART-02
The easiest choice
With new businesses getting started, the fastest approach is being chosen and it is paid ads, regardless of the CAC and regardless of the other factors which play in making the ad campaigns a successful one.
Every new business has so many things to address, the marketing part goes for a toss and no wonder the easiest is being chosen.
The online
In a country like India where internet penetration is about 60%, there will be new businesses that add noise to the online space.
The existing businesses which are adopting digital that initially jump on to paid ads will also be adding up a lot of noise. They usually take some time to realise that they need to build their content repository to make their paid campaigns bring performance.
Summary
It is of no significance when you choose to go ahead with paid ads plainly. In today’s world, no good marketing efforts can rely upon paid ads alone. (2)
Even if everything is favouring you to do all the easy online ads Hungama, you should start building your content repository to make those ads work.
We live in a world full of content. The sooner you have your brand content in place, the rest of your marketing activities start to perform.
The more media you want to buy, proportionately investing in brand content will bring a nice performance, together.
1- When I say even, it means being a D2C how ahead they are in the marketing game. If you have a niche audience, the reasons to create content is much higher.
2 - E-commerce based consumer goods, digital products, online courses and other low-risk, low-ticket products can use paid ads successfully.
See you next Monday in another article. - Navanee Viswa.
"Marketing is Engineering" is a book that I’m currently writing. The tagline of the book is "Get out of the paid ads rabbit hole and do solid marketing using content to scale up in the connected world". This story or a portion of it may get a part of the book. Stay tuned, I’ll share more about the developments of the book here.
💌Fuelling life with Anyo mobile app🫂 Creative Wellbeing Experiences Curator 🧬 Cocoon Artist 👩🎨 National Youth Awardee 2010 by Govt of India
3yAnother piece of reassurance, that put a lot of my questions to rest. The initial lines spoke my mind on how some campaigns or marketing activities would make us think that we are doing it all wrong. In reality, they are only doing what suits their marketing objectives. It should never become a competitive game. Also, another point I would like to add is, the marketer in an organization has to help the rest of the team understand that this is a clumsy world, and we have to pick our approach based on our priority goals. We can't be doing everything.