THE DIGITAL MARKETING REVOLUTION?
It’s no secret that the business world has gone crazy over social media. Currently one-third of the world is on social media, and 94% of buying decisions are influenced by social media (Socialnomics) so it’s obvious to scale up your business all you just need to do is pour more money into marketing, its so simple right? Well this blog is designed to give you a really quick insight into marketing and social media from my prospective – especially if you’re thinking about increasing your ad spend! My aim from this blog is to get you to re-look your business structure and brand, and to hopefully prevent you from burning your money on marketing.
My names is Yusef and during 2018 I worked with a rehabilitation charity and assisted in setting up a successful social enterprise and project managed the enterprise with a £40,000 budget. The project was so successful that it almost broke even in year 1, it was planned out in terms of operations and systems so well, that a franchise is already on the way. Also as a hobby, I was working and creating a marketing plan with an independent music artist that went viral and assisted him in achieved 1million + streams in his first year, all off organic marketing – resulting in myself starting up a innovative marketing company. Now I currently work for an amazing entrepreneur and author called Daniel Priestley who gave me the opportunity to work inside his company and learn from the ground up. Daniel develops entrepreneurs to stand up and scale out and has worked directly with 3,500+ businesses with his business accelerator company called Dent, helping them to scale their business exponentially.
Here’s a few questions I want you to think about – Has social media and digital marketing suddenly become the most important thing to ensure your business is successful? Are your competitors running the industry and spending large amounts on marketing and sweeping up all your potential customer? Is this forcing you to spend money on marketing above your means when you truly don’t know what you’re even doing? Marketing is the future right? well, actually its the past.
The truth is marketing isn’t a new phenomenon, it has actually been around since the dawn of businesses. Marketing really took off the same day that the first logo was created – let me take you all the way back to an era where there was no social media, and no, i’m not talking about 10 years ago. Lets vision a time when the first logo’s were created in the form of a flag. We’re going to go back to the first ‘war flags’ and one of the most powerful war flags I want to talk about was the ‘rising sun flag’ (旭日旗 Kyokujitsu-ki) which was originally used by feudal warlords in Japan as early as 1603, but really originates way back in the 7th century!
Now, they didn’t continuously allocate loads of their wealth into ‘marketing’ to create massive banners that can be seen from a mile away, along with branding all their horses and soldiers armour with the ‘Rising Sun Flag’ logo to increase revenue and get more leads. It was really more to do with the whole ethos and meaning behind the flag, what was associated with it, what ‘feeling’ would a enemy have when they saw that iconic flag approaching, what ‘key people of influence’ sat at the top of the command that people would associate the flag with, do you see where i’m going with this?
Well, lets break it down from a 2019 prospective. They wouldn’t have been able to create such a massive ‘brand’ that supported tremendous growth without having the behind the scenes business operations, strategies and finances in place first. Behind the Rising Sun Flag was a whole profitable business that supported everything from from cities, cooks, mercenaries, leaders, war lords, trainers, cleaners and many more. In other words they had the Key Person of Influence at the top, the Operations Manager, Marketing Expert, Salesman, Admin Manager and maybe an apprentice or two. We know for a fact they had to of had all the best and efficient strategies in place to deal with the growth of the army along with being able to deal with the benefits of conquering a city.
The enemies, or even other countries looking on from a distance knew that flag meant a solid army was approaching and they would have known exactly what that flag stood for and the history behind the flag in terms of war victories/atrocities – due to what? social… media? Well not quite, actually it was word of mouth and authors publishing them in their high sought after material, and mainly because of the massive results that came with that brand. So I can almost guarantee that the ‘Rising Sun Flag’ used all sorts of modern day marketing tactics from guerrilla marketing, to public speaking, social influencers and maybe even… Google Ads Words. The ‘Rising Sun Flag’ grew so much as a brand that it was adopted as the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army, and on October 7, 1889, it was adopted as the naval ensign of the Imperial Japanese Navy. It was so effective that it is still used in Japan as a symbol of tradition and good fortune, and is incorporated into commercial products and advertisements up to this day!
Now, lets look at a modern day brand, Coca-Cola. We all know this brand right and where they are today? Well it was created by a pharmacist named John Pemberton and he started of tiny, selling only 9 glasses a day in the first year. So quick question, do you think John decided to put all his money into marketing to grow his business, he must of right?
Well not quite, Atlanta businessman Griggs Candler bought the right to Coca-Cola off Pemberton for a whopping total of £1,500. Straight away Griggs Candler started working on the structure of the business from operations, sales, marketing and company ethos. My point is, Coco-Cola without the ‘business brains and backbone’ behind it probably wouldn’t have gone very far. Coco-Cola is now worth $71.3 Billion and they spend $4 Billion a year on Marketing. Why? Because they know they can support the growth, they own the whole distribution chain and can get their Coco-Cola drinks to the most remote of towns. So, if they spend $4 Billion a year to reach new customers, guess what, they know they can deal with the influx of leads and can convert them to sales as easily as the customer walking into their local shop in one of the world’s poorest towns and buying the Coca-Cola drink for the first time.
So my moral of the story is don’t run before you can walk. Social media and marketing isn’t going anywhere – make sure you get the business structure and brand ethos right first to ensure you can support the growth of the business that the marketing budget will ultimately provide. I want you to think of your brand like the ‘Rising Sun Flag’ or even Coca-Cola. First thing is sort out the product or service you provide and make it your mission to ensure your product or service it soo fantastic that people will organically spread the news of your brand through word of mouth, and so that authors will find an incentive to write about it in their highly sort after material.
If you have no-one raving about your product or service yet then you’re not ready to put a penny into marketing. If you have everything in place and people are raving about your brand organically then it makes the marketers job easy, they can keep the message and ethos of your brand consistent and they are confident that you have a sales process and strategy in place to deal with the influx of leads. Think about it, where do your most ‘warm leads’ come from? I can guarantee it’s either through word of mouth, or they saw a review or blog by a respected author that they trust.
Good Luck,
Yusef.
Yusef's Insight 