What is Marketing? Good marketing.

Marketing is scaling up through your customer’s network. 

Many marketing approaches struggle because they ignore this part grossly. The journey becomes uphill and demands many fancy approaches to continuously acquiring new customers.

On the other side, many businesses marketing approaches don't come under a lot of limelight because they are visible to the right audience without noise and are working with their existing customer's network calmly. They keep growing, continuously.

Marketing is grabbing attention. This single sentence had created havoc and made people think that marketing is visible to as many people as possible in a push of a button or so. NO.

Good marketing is visible to the right set of audience.

And this cannot happen all of a sudden.

Why scale up through your customer's network? Because it keeps your CAC lower. Simple, plain and straightforward. 

Author and investor Andrew Chen mentions this effect in his book "The cold start problem"

Though the book and the author's profile is more about the SaaS industry, I find any other product or service that would function in the same way.

This leads to thinking about good marketing

Where?

What?

How?

Where do they present?

What are their preferences?

How do you reach them?

When is barely necessary for today’s marketing. Because when is them who decide, in today's connected world. It is not from you anymore.

Let’s get back to the definition. The definition looks good except for one word “customer”. How do you acquire your first set of customers?

Everything you going to do in terms of marketing when scaling up doesn’t apply to the first set of customers. Let them be a very few or few hundred even. 

Acquiring the first set of customers are the most difficult and is super important in learning about your customer. This exercise helps a lot in future scaling up. 

Meet them, knock on their doors, use your network, your friend’s network, deliver free samples, offer free trial usage, cold call them, send snail mail, send cold emails. Try many things to acquire the first set of the customer(s). No amount of standardised marketing approaches may work here. Generally, what you cannot scale, works here, very well. 

Once you have the first set of customers in place, you can easily(relatively) draw a characteristic set of them and replicate it in acquisition. This exercise helps you in finding a similar audience - how to reach out to them, what are their pain points and answering their questions. 

Why your customer’s network?

It is important to leverage your first customer networks(so on and so forth) whether you going to leverage the network or not, the network is going to communicate with each other. You only have the great opportunity of emphasising it positively.

If you have a problem here, ie., your first set of customers is not happy or worst even, hates you, they will not talk about you and have a much larger problem to address and is completely worth addressing it at first.

If there is a problem here, and if you are deliberately not willing to address it, then it is not coming under the purview of marketing. 

A good marketing job is to sell a product/service that comes with the guarantee of customer satisfaction.

A good Marketing job is NOT to sell a problematic product, ill service or any Ponzi scheme. 

Where, What and How?

“Where” is the important question to be answered because you can’t talk at a place where your customer isn’t present. In online marketing, your audience will generally be spread out on multiple platforms. But it is a trap, “Focusing at once on all the platforms, where they present”

Focus on one platform where your maximum number of audience is present. And, master that platform.

A certain percentage of your existing customer should also be present on this platform. Because some of your first set of customers may not be present here and that is fine because you have acquired them in a non-scalable approach.

How to master that platform?

That led to our “What” part

What are their preferences? What is that they expect from you? 

Your customer is expecting only one thing from you and that is “What is in it for them”? Not what is in it for you, it is for them. Nobody does charity.  So no sales pitch, here. 

Cater their likings. In today’s online world it happens to be information. Information that helps them live happier. You don’t even have to mention your product, explicitly. Just help them with the information where they connect your product with that information. Just educate them. They will remember you at the right time.

The “How” part

That transfer of information happens through a piece of content. An E-book, a video, a blog post, Audible content, a set of graphic design, Slide decks, Infographics and likewise.

You may ask, there are already a ton of information available, what can I do here? 

It is not about the tons of information available in the online world. It is about the information from your brand and for your customer, only. 

The other side is, I cannot create content, my nature of business doesn’t support creating a lot of content - this is not an acceptable argument, as any business on this planet can create tons of content for their audience.

Two things

1. The when part mattered earlier in the Industrial age marketing, today the when part is less important. If you do the foundation right you only have to do a simple amplification of your marketing activities, especially if you are looking forward to a sales hike during a festival or stock clearance or any other occasion-based sales.
2. Cant’ I do all these through online ads? I have written many times about online ads, so I'm going to leave you with the 2 lines below,

The era of shouting(ads) at people is over and the era of talking to your audience has begun.

If my above writing resonated with you, let me know in the comments. I'll see you next week with another piece about Marketing the next Monday.

- Navanee Viswa.

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Talk to us to adapt to a sustainable, compounding marketing approach, that fuels business growth.

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"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.