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INNOVATE MARKETING
BEYOND
DIGITAL SOLUTIONS
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All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form,
by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means,
including information storage or retrieval systems,
without permission in writing from both the copyright
owner and the publisher of this book.
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ISBN Number Here

First Published Date by

Publishers Details Here
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by

www.print2demand.co.uk
Westoning

Table of Contents
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Table of Contents 7

Background 9

Preface 11

Why Do You Start a Business? 14

Is Your Business Marketable? What is the Marketability Score? 16

Win With a Great Brand Name 21

What Do You Have to Offer? How Will You Win? 22

Checklist Before You Start Anything Digital 28

What is the Internet Business 101? How Do Giants Become Giants Using the

Internet? 30

What Are 10+ Ways to Market Your Business Online? 36

Think Like a Giant, Plan Like a Giant, Act Like a Giant? 40

Mastery of the Technical Work Reference 44

Innovate Marketing Beyond Digital Solutions 45

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Background

In mid-century Europe, there was a man named Ivan who grew up

witnessing how his uncle built a successful farm with horses, sheep, and
blossoming flowers and rich crops and vegetables. He was of young age yet
he started his venture of building a successful farm like his uncle’s. He started
this project by trying to capture horses and sheeps in the wild. He chased
them for a week by setting traps, following wild goat, horses, sheeps without
getting close to them. He eventually got exhausted but upon looking at his
uncle’s farm that he so admires, he started gathering hope again and vowed
to not give up.

His uncle is amused of his nephew’s effort and he advised Ivan not to give
up. Instead of encouraging him to catch the wild animals, his uncle gave him
seeds. He told Ivan to grow these great seeds first. However, Ivan does not
have an idea what kinds of seeds there are. There were many colors and
different variants. But he listened to his heart through his uncle’s advice.
Instead of chasing wild animals, he started farming first. He picked an ideal
location next to the river. He then planted the seeds in the soil and started to
see the seeds growing into grass, vegetables, and different kinds of flowers.
After some time, he went back to his uncle to talk. His uncle gave him
wise advice again to be patient and keep doing this until he is able to build a
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great garden. Ivan listened and continued to grow the seeds. Soon, the garden
started attracting the sheeps, horses, and goats. The trees that he grew were
also used to build the fence around the farm to keep animals in. He also built
the nest and put it next to the rivers to catch fish. He started growing schools
of fish too in this pool built within the nest. This is the story of Ivan, a
metaphorical representation of how digital marketing works in actual life.
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Preface

Marketing is an intriguing game — from creating a tagline that evokes

a sense of familiarity to consumers to touching their psychological and
intrinsic needs. It aims to provoke a sense of curiosity in its target consumers,
causing wide-eyed wonder as they see an advertisement that catches their
attention and interest. Promoting a memorable TV commercial that leaves
a mark on a child’s memory is one effective example of a marketing
implementation. Marketing, before the digital age, was more about human
psychological and behavioral understanding to the point of manipulation. In
the digital age with artificial intelligence technology, including big data
computation and mobile internet, successful marketing deployment now
becomes the mastery of both the science and art.
I had once setup a digital agency that aimed to provide an AI platform
of online marketing tool sets that served thousands of small medium
businesses (“SMBs”). Although most business owners have unique sets of
products/services that could be offered to their customers, most of them did
not understand marketing nor digital marketing. For example, a bakery
owner, who could make a unique bread does not think it is necessary need to
learn the skill or obtain the knowledge of marketing and digital marketing. I
attempted to build a platform that can address this problem. Such system
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could be called marketing automation but has not come to true existence. The
today’s largest SMBs advertising tools from Google and Facebook require
their users master the skills of marketing and digital marketing in order to
compete in today’s market. From over thousands of small and medium
businesses, I learnt is that in between bridging the gap of business owners’
unique product and service offerings, as well as the marketing advertising
platforms, the brand and marketing management perspective and knowledge
is lacking. This could start from missing an appropriate brand name for the
business to not understanding to put an advertising message and make use of
the advertising tool from Google or Facebook.

This book, Innovate Marketing Beyond Digital Solutions, is intended to

fill the gap of what SMB owners lack in order to succeed in the digital
platform. The first part of the book depicts the core marketing skills and
knowledge that SMB owners need to acquire to adopt to digital marketing.
The second part of the book brings readers to understand how a well-
positioned and thought-out business makes use of digital marketing solutions
to succeed.
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Why Do You Start a Business?

You are tired of your nine to six Monday to Friday job so, you started
a business, or maybe you got a great new idea that you truly believe to be in
the next Forture 500 businesses. It could also be that you possess unique skills
that you can bring in an unique service or product to your customers. Starting
a new business is uneasy; in fact, 80% of new businesses fail during the first
year of operation.
Indeed, there are many reasons why someone starts a business, and
each has his own. But, certainly, only a business that

brings a new value to the market

is worth being created and started. Whatever the motivation and reason of
starting a business is, you must bring in a new and unique value to the market
in order to survive and compete. This is the underlying answer to the question
why out someone starts a business.

Ask the following questions to your business offering:

1 . What it the current customer habit?
2. What are the unmet needs?
3. What are the suggested problems to be solved or potential gains to be
created?
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4. How does your business address this?

5. What is the deeper level of need behind the question 2 above? Are there
alternative offerings? Is your solution better than the alternative offer?

In the non-internet market, the consumer and suppliers are scattered

whereby there is an information discrepancy when customers and suppliers
make an exchange on the market. When marketing and serving on the internet
market, the information is almost transparent for customers to learn about the
choices.

Companies must then show distinctly different values in the market

in order to sustain the business both in short and long term. The winners on
the internet market will take all. This is uneasy and this is why it is important
to work on a business/product and service that you are passionate about. You
will spend thousands of hours on a subject that you love, resulting to being
an expert in the field, thus creating new value that others fail to see. However,
you must keep in mind that customers will not be able to recognise this until
you introduce the product and amuse them with its benefits.
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Is Your Business Marketable? What is the

Marketability Score?

Assuming that you have a business that you are passionate about and will
bring in new value to the market, you have to ask yourself this question: is
your business markable?

The 8 Marketability Score

1. You have a unique offer that brings new value to the market
2. You have a low-ticket offer
3. Your business is considered a repeat business
4. Your products and services are not price-sensitive
5. Your customers have an obvious need and demand
6. The consumption of the products and services will enable bringing
in customers
7. You are in a growing market
8. The product/service is in a high margin business

Marketability
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1 Unique offer

2 Low ticket offer

3 Repeat purchase

4 Non-price sensitive

5 Obvious demand

6 Current customers bring in new customers

7 Growing market

8 High margin

Total score

Add the score together and you need a minimum 4 points. If you are below
4, you need to reassess your business offering and change your game plan.
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Adjustable Marketablity Items

Unique Offer – Why do your customers only choose you? Are you less
expensive? Do you offer more features? Do you offer higher quality and a
simpler solution?

Low Ticket Offer – If you start with a high ticket offer, ensure that you
also come with a low ticket offer to enable closing the deal, gathering visitors,
and eventually acquiring interested parties to become your customers.
Repeat Purchase – Most customers can be turned into a repeating
consumer, and likewise, a business can be developed into a repeating one,
even when selling hardware. Let us understand the concept clearly. Let’s say
that the product is an vacuum cleaner. Most people would think that selling
vacuum cleaner is a non-repeating business.
However, if such hardware businesses appear to be one-time
businesses, then why are so many giant businesses in this one-time business
and continue to survive, considering that getting into a one-time business is
costly.
Below is the product life cycle of selling and marketing your product.
Let us assume that you have a unique and great product that can cover up to
100,000 of customers in this lifetime. When you sell your products through
retail channels, or directly with a regulated control of demand/supply, and
you have managed well in the product life cycle curve, you will end up
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turning the business income into a repeatable business over the course of the
product life cycle.

Current Customers Bring In New Customers – How do you change the

consumption of the products and bring network effect? This is a million dollar
question but most business processes can actually be adjusted to enable some
network effects.
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Non-Adjustable Marketablity Items

These four marketability items are pre-defined when you choose the
business/product/market to get in. It’s harder to twist.
● Non-price sensitive
● Obvious demand
● Growing market
● High margin
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Win With a Great Brand Name

Many business owner/product owners who indeed have new value and
unique products to offer on the market neglect the importance of having a
great brand name. Now, more than ever, it is important on the digital market
to have a great and catchy brand name. Essentially, a great name enables free
traffic as SEO bases its ranking score on related domain names. A great name
results to a higher conversion, since a brand name that resonates to consumers
establishes trust in visitors.

Certainly, an ideal brand name needs to be the following:

- Relevant to the product/service
- Easy to remember
- Associate with the value offering

To begin with, we are going to employ a perceptual map assessment. This

sets a long-term goal of how you want your customers to perceive you in the
market. In addition, you can cross-check whether your brand name also fits
your company’s vision.
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What Do You Have to Offer? How Will You Win?

Now, you are soon ready to start your online business.
1. You have a unique value and you have created extra value. It is
also something that you are passionate about.
2. Your product and service is highly marketable.
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3. You have a great name to market your products/service.

Customers/consumers easily recognize your brand and product, and
associate your the brand name with the right perception.
Let us thoroughly review how the business market and research work to
further understand your business market. Most businesses are a continuation
of the previous business with existing customer demand and suppliers. It is
thus unlikely that you can create a new market with a new product on your
own. A new market is created by multiple players’ efforts or infrastructures
being built by key drivers or even with the government’s involvement.

We are going to use the mobile phone as an example. Prior to mobile

phone’s existence, people connect with each other via a fixed telephone line.
Mobile phones then tap into the existing market of fixed telephones, with the
same customers demanding for the same solution, which is establishing a
connection to people via mobile networks.
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Mobile phones tapped on the infrastructures of fixed telephones and

escalated from there. Given that, most likely, you are building your business
with already existing solutions, you need to know the ins and outs of your
business in order to win. In addition, you need to define your partners,
competitors, support system, and evaluate yourself regarding your short-
term, mid-term, and long-term game plan.
Note that this perspective may change over time and it is good to
review this from time to time to ensure that you are in a winning position.
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In line with this, here’s a table where you can draw and enumerate existing
products/ services in relevance to products/ services that you intend to offer,
as well as relative solutions. You should also determine your suppliers and
competitors, and elaborate how your partner can support your product/
service in the market. Lastly, you should visualize how you will interact or
get support from different parties if you become a key player.

Who How

Competitors

Suppliers

Partners’ Support

Relative Solutions

Existing
Product/Services
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Run Tests! Run Tests! Run Tests!

In this part, we will validate your assumptions with little investment.
Today, it will only cost you a few hours and a hundred dollars to validate
your business before you further invest.
1. Set up a Facebook page
2. Create a testing video
3. Start promoting with budget of USD 20 a time
4. Pivot and adjust to learn about your customers
5. Talk to 30 of them to learn.
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Checklist Before You Start Anything Digital

Here is a checklist to help you start preparing. Go back to review the
materials that you need to help you get ready before you start with digital
marketing.

Description Check point Revisit

Are you going to bring new

value to the market?

Do you have the right brand

name?

Are you on a right business?

Do you have a winning formula

in place to start with?

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Have you run a test and are the

results positive after talking to

30 of the potential customers?

Assuming that you have renovated your business, there is one more thing
to know before you start. The digital solution execution will not succeed in a
straight line. It is very similar to the development of a startup in two
principles. Firstly, you will undergo some ups and downs as you continue to
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experiment, learn, pivot, and scale. Secondly, you cannot rush your digital
solution execution; from point zero to your first successful milestone, it goes
through a sequential growth and not a big leap. In sum, it takes continuous
efforts and adjustments to achieve a successful digital marketing deployment.
Once you have done this, you are now ready to put your business in the
digital market.

What is the Internet Business 101? How Do Giants

Become Giants Using the Internet?

I will illustrate how giants such as Google and Alibaba become the giants
that they are today. Google dominates the search engine in the world while
Alibaba dominates the ecommerce market in China and sourcing hub
worldwide. In the end, it is all about building your own control (monopolised)
business ecosystem. This is not something that you can copy but it serves as
a good reference to understand and to give it a shot if there is an opportunity.

Alibaba.com
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Thebeginning

Alibaba has a clear vision to help small businesses operate and sell online
conveniently. They endeavored to offer services that allow businesses to
engage with their clients more effectively.
● The market situation
The market is highly competitive. There were other sources globally, such
as DHgate, and traditional trade events competing with each other.
● A path to scale up the business
Ailbaba partners with Yahoo, thus an infrastructure was established with
lots of traffic in the USA. Yahoo becomes a great traffic sources for Alibaba
to eventually gain traction.
● Dominate position

A high level of repeat business and an efficient management of

information flow between sellers and buyers contribute to the success of
Alibaba.com.

Google
● The beginning
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Google developed a searching algorithm that provides the most relevant

results that humans search for.
● The market situation
Despite having several competitors in the search engine business, Google
was introduced as a search engine at an earlier date.
● A proof to scale up the business.
Internet browsers have Google in their search tabs and have also set
Google as the homepage. This strategic partnership developed a consumer
behaviour that enables usage of Google search engine as the first portal on
the internet.
● Dominant position
As the leading search engine, Google also introduced AdWords/ AdSense
that gathered millions of purchases from advertisers and increased usage for
Google.
Most startup stories are in the same loop. A startup is the amplifier of the
development of business. Your business, when taken on the digital platform,
will go into the similar development stage.
1. You market your value proposition and it is starting to be
recognized.
2. You start to face stiff competition as you reach your early traction.
3. You find effective means to market a repeat business/service and
exclude your competitors.
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4. Your customers eventually develop develop a habitual usage of

your product/ service and you now own your traffic.

This is the mindset that you have to possess to win in the market. This is
the path of how giants progressed and entered the monopolised market.
Moving forward, let us understand what technology on the internet is used to
monopolize and win. But first, one needs to understand the foundation of
internet business and real-time bidding advertising.
The internet is a business that entails building your own traffic source.
Your customers will then acquire value from you with or without cost. You
can also then employ extra traffic that is underutilised and as a result, those
parties will purchase and will resell to other companies that have digital value
to visitors. One ideal example is Youtube.
The platform that has the traffic to sell is called Suppy-Side Platform or
Sell-Side Platform (SSP). Moreover, the party that pays for the traffic is
called Demand-Side Platform (DSP). In between these two, there is the most
important party on the system called Data Management Platform (DMP).
These three platforms are the backbone of the internet business.
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Let us set Google as an example of SSP. You have tons of traffic and you
also own the DMP making you aware of each of your customers' needs,
profile, and what they intend to do next. When Google offers the advertising
space to the advertisers, the advertisers offer a glimpse of time called Real-
time bidding.
Now, think about who will want to pay for the traffic. If you know this
customer is about to buy your product, you will offer the most visible to your
potential customers. Hence, the advertisers who also possess in-depth
knowledge of the customer being possessed on the DMP will be the most
advantageous.
When you understand this logic, you will see how Alibaba becomes the
king of ecommerce in China; they own the SSP, DMP and they run the
ecommerce and payment to get their product advertisement ready when the
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customers are looking to buy something via search engine or video research.
Now, think about building this closed loop system on your business. This is
indeed achievable with the technological tools provided by Facebook,
Google and other marketing digital tools. This is exactly what you are about
to build like a giant internet player.
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What Are 10+ Ways to Market Your Business Online?

When you market your business, there are 3 types of practices. I call them
farming, fishing with a casting net, and throwing a spear. The three practices
are used together at the end with the ultimate objective of getting results at
the most effective cost.
Farming – build content consumption pools or a pool of content
consumption websites. This will enable your consumers to continue
becoming your brand audience with the lowest cost.
Fishing with a casting net – make use of a one-time marketing campaign
to acquire the interest of customers to get to your farm at the lowest cost.
Throwing a spear – Make use of direct effort to acquire customers at
lowest cost.

Direct Response vs Brand Awareness

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Value Ladder & Sales Funnels

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In this chart, Caya, the CEO of Slidebean, explains the 19 channels that
business owners can maximize to reach out to their potential customers. To
begin with, Viral Marketing pertains to a referral system wherein one
consumer refers a trending product/service to another potential consumer.
Next is Public Relations or simply gaining exposure through press
publications and other news channels. There is also Unconventional PR,
Search Engine Marketing (e.g. Google, Youtube), Social & Display Ads
(Instagram, Twitter, Facebook), Offline Ads (e.g. billboards, magazine ads),
Search Engine Optimization or increasing the rank of your website on
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Google, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Engineering as

Marketing or employing apps for growth, Targeting Blogs (e.g. employing
influences to promote your brand), Business Development, Sales, Affiliate
Programs that work as referral programs wherein customers get rewarded
for referring the product or service to other potential customers, Existing
Platforms, Trade Shows, Offline Events, Speaking Engagements, and
Community Building.

Think Like A Giant, Plan Like A Giant, Act Like A

Giant?

The LTV: CAC (Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition

Cost) Ratio

The results of digital marketing programs are measured by two formula:

CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost
LTV - Lifetime Value

Profit of your Business = LTV – CAC

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You can scale your business as long as you have a positive profit limited
by your capacity and the marketing fatigue of the campaign that you run.
Note that your CAC would increase as your marketing campaign experiences
fatigue.

The steps to optimize your result are listed below:

1. Set up your sales funnel and value ladder.

You need to gather visitors as your audience with different offers starting
with the lowest ticket offer.

2. Enable word-of-mouth marketing, cross-referencing, and

start farming.
This will enable higher conversion rates which will help the CAC. Starting
the farming method is crucial and will be a long-term investment. However,
the effort and reward will eventually build up. Besides, they are the
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foundation of the businesses to make the next two marketing activities

effective.
3. Throw the fishing nets and climb it up.
These activities will bring batches of audiences to your farm. Start with
the least cost that will influence the higher expense cost to reduce the price.
Each batch will increase your total audience size.

4. Throw tons of spears and remarketing spears.

When steps 1 to 4 are well established, you will now have an optimized
CAC wherein you can run as many different direct marketing campaigns to
get people to know about your brand, your service and your solution. Chances
are that they will be caught by your farm and your fishing net later on.
Direct marketing with remarketing setup will allow you to control the size
of the audience to take in but, this could be more costly. However, as you
have properly optimized the CAC and positive business per CAC – LTV, you
can scale up your business in a shorter time thru direct advertising.

5. Monopolize your own internet traffic.

Internet giants are able to use the data from Data Management platform
(DMP) to acquire customer traffic at the point before the purchase happens.
Even if you lack such resources, you could still build your own monopolised
internet traffic by habit training.
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Once you have a farm that you acquired via the sales funnel and you have
your lead created by fishing net and spears, what you need to do now is to
farm your customers as habit training. Build a habit of treating them as to
how you are accustomed to. For example, every Monday, publish useful
media that you like to review. Provide the treat on a regular basis. Eventually,
your brand becomes a part of their daily lives. When the demand for high
ticket purchase comes up, your company will be the first name that they will
think of.
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Mastery of the Technical Work Reference

Website/SEO

Forum/Blog/FAQ

Email marketing, Live support

Facebook/Youtube

CRM

Podcast, KOL

Press
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Innovate Marketing Beyond Digital Solutions

‘Innovate’ refers to introducing “new things, ideas or ways of doing

something” (Oxford Learning Dictionaries, n.d.). The title of the book indeed
means to introduce changes and new ideas on top and beyond digital
solutions. Digital solutions are tools that are used to communicate, interact
with customers and consumers online; however, they are not the core of the
business or marketing of the business.
The business needs to bring new and extra value to survive and win a
market. The marketing of the business is beyond art and digital solutions but
it also comes with practical principles in science of behavioural and
psychological theories and engineering mindset to create, test, pivot, and,
ultimately, perfect the architecture of your business presentation/framework.
Most of the companies that I helped indeed believe that digital solutions
help them but I knew that their core business and marketing require a lot more
effort. Maybe one day, in the emerging technology of AI, the business owner
and product owner can spend 100% effort on providing great value and
service and let AI to handle the fundamental marketing part of the business
and also design, execute, and deploy digital solutions.
Before this day comes, we need to innovate marketing beyond digital
solutions, that is to go back to the foundation of business practice and
embrace technology framework.
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References

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2rpBhMY0ys

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/innovate