Fundamentals of Marketing | How to achieve a high ROAS

Ever wondered why your campaigns are not performing? Why are you not able to get high conversion and ROAS.

This is for you guys. This article covers Marketing Fundamentals I learned recently.

If you were to go on to Google and YouTube search and put down a query about what is digital marketing, spend just 10 min surfing through YouTube videos and different websites who talk in this niche, basically let google know that you are interested in this new field.

Now you will be automatically thrown into the biggest scam out there online. Next time whenever you’ll see a new video or a display advert, typically there will be one guy showing you his income reports and telling you that he’ll show you the exact way how he scaled his business to 6–7 figure in a free webinar, amusing enough? and once you click on the link and there, you are thrown into their funnel. Now they will keep on re-targeting until they make some kind of money from you.

And you might as well think that it’s a free webinar, what’s the big deal for me to attend and know the secrets. And this is why they have made this webinar for. Mostly these webinars are pre-recorded and a very important part of their advertising plan. They have got you into a 1–2 hour session where they can elaborate their course/product and make you dream of that lifestyle and in the end, they ask you to enroll in the course which could be costing anywhere between 50$-500$ or even sometimes more.

The biggest problem/scam in these course cultures is that they are never about really teaching you Marketing they’re just promoting one single strategy, one single way of thinking in which they got success for a specific kind of a market. These online Gurus also tell you how they have tried tons of ways and how their course contains the best strategies among those. But trust me that is complete bullshit. Because again they are selling a single strategy, what about the Marketing fundamentals? Nobody talks about this, Every other person is like “How to scale your Facebook Ads Business”, “Learn Google PPC Ads in just 14days”.

Newbies in the industry tend to forget that the sole ingredient in learning and practicing ‘Digital Marketing’ is the know-hows of Marketing. Always try to believe in the critical thinking approach when it comes to sharing information or spending money and especially in this case people also tend to oversee the bigger problem which is that you are not just spending money but also wasting your 3–4 months there and once you get out of that school (some people also run their course and call it a university) you start claiming yourself as “Professionally Trained Digital Marketer in search of Projects” but you only know how to sell a product in a very specific niche and to a very specific market, and even your strategies are not unique now. It is a very obvious thing that to be a good Digital Marketing Practitioner you got to have the skills in Marketing first. As once you get out you will have to work with a lot of different businesses in varied niches. Digital Marketing for me is nothing but, applying every Marketing skill you have on the internet. And there is no way you’re going to get these fundamental skills from these kinda courses.

Another very dirty thing I came across this online course selling business model is that now people have started selling this idea itself, they are teaching you how to make an online course, I mean ‘Where has the value gone from your product?’ People on the internet are just behind making money, life values are gradually taking off from their plan so it is very important now more than ever for any beginner to invest their time in the very right place. Digital Marketing is and always will be a slow process of application and iteration, it’s never a path for overnight success.

Marketing Fundamentals for beginners.

Let us try to learn about the basics of Marketing. What do you understand by Marketing?

Introduction of the internet in marketing has changed the whole advertising industry and that is true as with help of Facebook and Google Ads you can have an insane targeting and segmentation of your target audience which was never there before. The important thing to note here is that even these platforms are getting crowded by a lot of your competitors because everybody knows how to target and segment the audience in these online ads platform, so then how do you stand out from them. And this is the place where the basics of marketing come into the picture. These fundamentals are never going to die out, there are certain triggers to which human reacts be it on paper or online.

Let us learn about 5 Marketing essentials for beginners.

1. Market & Prospect Awareness Audit

For whatever idea or narrative you are selling/marketing, it is very important for you to know about the market first, to know about where your market is and how informed your market is about the narrative(including both the problem and solution) because your whole marketing strategy kinda depends on that. Say if you are bringing a brand new solution to a brand new problem which is something is coming for the first time in the market then your plans are gonna be very simpler as you would just go out and give the product in the market with a description of the problem and how your narrative is going to solve that, not much of strategies to be made here. Subsequently, if you are bringing a new solution to a pre-existing problem then you have to formulate a plan with a unique mechanism, even with some intensifiers because you have a lot of competitors and your prospects are somewhat saturated from the multiple solutions already present in the market. There are also intermediate stages between these two discussed here, long story short, Marketer needs to analyze how sophisticated his/her market is to the narrative brought and then act accordingly to deal with the different stages of the market state.

Next comes up is the Prospect awareness audit, which is basically how much your prospect is aware of the problem and how far he has tried to solve that. This is explained by a pyramid structure where the volume of the pyramid is proportional to the volume of prospects, the lowermost section is those who are completely unaware of the problem and its solution, then on top of that comes prospects who are aware of the problem but don’t know about the solution, then comes those who know about the solution and different agencies which are providing the solution and the topmost are those who already know about you and your product and are paying customer of yours. Higher the section in the pyramid, lower is the effort required to convert them. It’s also advisable that not to target the lower section of the pyramid for obvious reasons.

2. Building Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

After knowing about the state of the Market and Prospects next thing to do here is to build a customer profile, which would contain such data about your prospect which impacts or triggers their buying decision making. Once you do this, 75% of the job is done as now you know the nature of your potential customer. You know what is their triggers, how they react at a certain kind of offers and intensifiers. Because hereafter all you need to do is pick the best triggers from these data and put it into your messaging and simply those people will react to it. And ironically this is the only step that most of the marketers skip incorporating and start assuming about the nature of the prospects which results in higher ads spent and lower ROAS. Remember while building an ICP- “The Information you discover about your prospect is only as valuable as the response it triggers”

There is a misguiding thought which is out there in the market about building ICP which is people mix it with building customer persona. ICP is not about what is the name of the customer, how old he/she is, where does he live and what background are they coming from so on and so forth. According to the quote written above this information about our prospect is not valuable/relevant as these things do not trigger there buying decision. With all this information we no way understand how prospects react to a certain problem hence not worth collecting. A good marketer requires onfield experience about what people are talking about the narrative and how they react to certain kinds of triggers. So now how to build an ICP, it is by understanding human behavior, about their desires, belief system, emotions strictly about the problem statement, because this is going to be the holy book of information in your marketing journey for that particular product.

3. Message Scripting

Instead of writing your message, steal it directly from your prospects. We are here talking about such situations where you are not able to have a direct conversation with your prospects, your client is not allowing you to interview your prospects, so what you do is try to make your datasheet by researching in the online forums, blogs, communities about what review are people asking about, what complains are they posting about your competitor and you try to script your message from there. If you have a competitor doing pretty well then even you can go and check what Ads are they running on Facebook Ads Library.

4. Formulating a Unique Mechanism

Bringing a new category to the market or as we call it Formulating a Unique mechanism is the most important task for any marketer as “It’s the RADICAL way to differentiate yourself in the competition”. It is the time when you ask your market to adopt a new perspective, you have to formulate a whole new way of thinking approach so that for them you stand out unique with your product. You have to strategically position yourself so that you stand out new and unique because we know that our market in such a stage where there is a lot of competition and prospects are kinda saturated with generic promises.

How to pull it off?

You need to uncover a new opportunity in your market. Create and make people realize a very new perspective that they haven’t heard of before. Then educate the market to think about the problem and then this gives you the best scenario to present your new opportunity as the solution. This is not a very new model, people have been using this for over 150 years. Also for those kinds of prospects for whom none of the generic solutions worked, they are highly likely to get converted when exposed towards a very new category.

How do you know that you will pass?

Certainly, there is no tool for you to check the market’s reaction to your unique mechanism. The only way to test is to go and try it out. But there is something which could help you to know whether you’re on the right track or not. You should be able to answer:

“Can you make your audience believe that ___[#1-Your Unique Mechanism]____ is the key to _____[#2-Statement of Need]_____ And is only attainable through ______[#3-Only your offer]_____ ?”

5. Irresistible Offering

People misunderstand what an offer is. It’s not the product or the discount you give or the incentives to give along. Offer in the simplest words is terms of the deal between you and your prospect. The narrative which you are selling and the entity you are getting in return, this trade deal is your offer. As in the barter system example, you offer some clothes which are going to solve a particular issue in place of coins.

“Make an offer (deal) so great that only a Lunatic would refuse to buy”.

Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising(1942)

About Irresistible offer, it is simply a strategic structuring of your idea(product/service), where the value-to-cost ratio is very high. The perceived value of your offer FAR exceeds the cost to access the value. It is to be noted that we’re talking about perceived value, not the exact value which would turn out in lower ROI. The only reason someone will associate or not associate with your narrative is because of how it affects their perceived status. Good marketing always acts as a vehicle to take/transform your prospects from a ‘before’ stage to ‘after’ stage. And the quality of the idea that you are selling (product/service) defines the quality of the ‘after’ stage.

This will allow you to re-work how your message and offer needs to target the customer and the way campaigns should be aligned so that the customer is able to extract value from the messaging as well as becomes willing to spare their attention for what you’ve got to share with them.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article.