Digital marketing roadmap for a new brand.

Read time: 5 minutes

We kicked off the first ever A to Z of SEO masterclass with great energy and enthusiasm yesterday.

The fundamentals of anything we do are the building blocks of success and with this masterclass, I aim to provide the clear, non-faff fundamentals of SEO which I hope the participants will use in their jobs and witness the power setting the foundation right.

If your business is only dependent on ads, brace yourself, one update, one spam, one hacker, once you violate Meta or Google’s ad policy and you are at risk of losing access to your account impacting your overall business.

Over the last 9 years, I have seen many businesses that only focussed on performance marketing and died their own death.

Do not get me wrong, performance marketing is great for your business but it is also like a drug, it gives you instant gratification but only so much. And what happens if you start living your life on drugs? You lose your senses and die a slow death. Very much like many businesses are today.

If your business is only dependent on the drug of performance marketing you are already at a bigger risk than you know.

The longer you stay in this trap, the more difficult it is to get out of it.

This is a phenomenon not only in India but outside as well.

Businesses that I work with outside India also face exact same challenge that businesses in India do. Those challenges are either:

• High CAC (Customer acquisition cost) or

• Low RoAS (Return on Ad spends) or

• Unable to scale

While the businesses that have done well are the ones who have a slightly different thought process.

Any business or founder that is in a hurry to grow because digital is trackable and gives instant results, struggles.

The fundamentals of a business do not change, whether you are a Direct to consumer business or not.

Hence instead of running the race of growth, it is essential that businesses follow The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop when they are new.

The sooner you can build an MVP (minimum viable product), measure the results, learn from the insights and feedback and make the product or service better, the better it will be for your business to find a product-market fit faster (Product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company’s target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company’s product in numbers large enough to sustain that product’s growth and profitability).

Once you realise that you have a product-market fit then you define the digital marketing roadmap for your product or service.

Building a sustainable roadmap:

Everything starts with solving a problem.

If your product or service solves a relevant problem and you are able to narrate that story to your target customer while being native to the platform where he or she is, your battle is half-won.

Step 1: What’s your story?

Your brand’s narrative, positioning, stand, tone of voice, your product’s positioning the story of ‘why’ should someone consider buying your product are integral parts of your business.

We live in a noisy world, a person probably sees up to a thousand ads a day, if your story is not standing out if it is not catching attention by being relatable or meaningful, then there is a problem.

If you have been thinking that you will make a website, an Instagram page and will start running ads and will get sales out of it. Well, the ad algorithm may give you some initial sales as well because of its advanced learning capabilities but 9/10 times, it will not sustain.

Hence working on your content strategy and executing it multiple times to test and learn what the audience is reacting to more plays a key role in your roadmap to digital marketing.

If yours is a new business, do not be in a hurry, spend time testing different communication routes for your product or service and while you do this, do not go overboard in spending, do it in a lean manner.

Step 2: Build a fundamentally strong website.

No shortcuts, no free tools, no AI tools (at least the tools available as of date), and no skipping of SEO best practices.

Think big and start small with your website. It’s fine to create 10 or 15 pages only to begin with but ensure they follow Google’s Search essentials.

When a user lands on your website, give them a reason to shop, if not shop give them a reason to come back, and give them a reason to subscribe to your newsletter or chat with your chatbot.

The more time users spend on your website, the more digital footprints and insights they leave for you to get them back on your website and shop.

If you have an app, do not force users to download the app, especially if your business is new. No one wants to add another square icon on their phone screens especially when do not know you enough yet.

Implement marketing automation from Day 1 on your website. No one will buy from your website in the first interaction, people learn about you, evaluate options, do their research, and read reviews before buying. Create content for all of these stages and place them on your website.

The more you are visible, the higher the chances of them remembering you when they decide to shop.

When I was working at Future Group, we realised that for a discount focussed fashion brand people visit the website 2 times before making the first purchase, for niche fashion websites 3 times, and for premium fashion websites up to 9 times.

What are you doing to ease this research process for your audience?

Stage 3: Kick-off SEO and ads

While you have already kicked off the basics of SEO in the previous step but those basics will not give you organic traffic or conversions, to begin with.

This is the stage when you probably hire a resource or hire an agency and draw a clear roadmap for SEO.

Remember SEO fundamentally constitutes of 4 things:

• Assessing the market with keyword research and screening

• Content creation and optimisation

• Technical optimisation

• Link Building

This is the stage where you kick off all 4.

And be patient. If you are not willing to stay invested in SEO for about 8-10 months. Don’t invest in hiring an agency or resource.

SEO is no magic wand, it is a slow burner and great websites stay invested in this before they see organic growth.

SEO does take time, hence you should do the complete due diligence of the SEO agency you get on board, do not get an agency that is inexperienced, and has no relevant case studies or references.

This is where I also help many brands, connecting them with strong, trusted, result-oriented agencies.

For a few select brands, I do SEO myself as well along with my small team. Because I love doing it, the joy of seeing the traffic and conversion growth on a website you manage is unparalleled.

Because you are about to use the services of this SEO agency for at least 8 months, better make the right decision.

You do not need the best SEO agency out there, you need people that understand your category, people that are hungry to deliver, and people that are realistic and do not make tall claims.

Apart from SEO, start experimenting with ads at this stage: Instagram or LinkedIn boosting is a good starter.

If you boost on Instagram, do not expect sales to happen, it won’t.

In fact, I would say, 3 posts out of 5 that you boost should be about the story of your product or service, or any educational post or any intellectual stand your brand is taking.

It’s ok to boost them for ₹1000 for 7 days to see what profile visits, follower growth or DMs it is resulting in before scaling a few.

Also, activate a few product-centric ads via Facebook ads manager. If you are an e-commerce player, leverage newer and dynamic campaign types or features Meta has.

Be cautious when you run Google ads at this stage.

Google ads is a double-edged sword. Loads of traffic is the positive side, and low conversions and high costs are the negative side.

If there is decent demand for your product or service on Google, get expert help to plan Google ads for you.

Google ads are more tactical and need monitoring and optimisation frequently in the initial phase.

If the demand is low, forget about Google at this stage. Look to activate it at a later stage, when you have created some brand recall.

Otherwise, if you start Google ads at this stage, you will compete for the top 4 spots on the Google search results page, in all likelihood the other 3 brands are better-known brands than yours, and most of the users will click on your competition search results.

The more people see your search ad, and the lesser they click, the lower will be your Quality score, the higher will be your CPC, and even higher will be your CPA or CPL.

That’s why be very cautious when you do Google ads.

For categories like FMCG, fashion, beauty, skincare, and hair care, I do not even recommend exploring Google ads if monthly spends are less than ₹5 Lacs.

For B2B, Google ads strategy has to be very different, if you only want to compete in bottom-funnel searches, you are again aiming for short-term (drug gratification) and you are bound to hit the saturation point soon enough.

At this stage, also ensure that all your tracking on the dashboards is working fine. If there is a gap in tracking, no ads optimisation will be able to help.

Stage 4: Repeats.

Although Indians (most Indians) are not loyal to brands, but as a brand owner or marketer, you still have to give reasons to people to come back and shop from you.

Repeats vary a lot from product to product. For a mass fashion brand, it is safe to assume that loyalists should shop from you once in 3 months while for a premium brand, this number can be twice a year.

For the haircare or skincare industry, the product that lasts 30 days, brands target repeat purchases to happen every 45-60 days.

For the Insurance industry, the target is the renewal of the insurance policy and cross-selling the user with certain top-ups within a year.

For the travel industry that sells international holiday packages, once a year is a decent frequency for international destinations.

For residential real estate, it is probably just once in a lifetime.

For education, like for sorted, 2 courses a year is what we chase because we only provide specialised digital marketing courses at a reasonable cost.

However, for Upgrad, which sells courses at a much higher ticket size, getting one conversion is a good bet.

However, to increase its market share, Upgrad has launched smaller ticket-size courses as well.

The scenario is different for different product categories but depending on your market research, you should keep a target of repeat purchases for yourself.

Keeping that target and back calculating to an engagement+promotion plan for your audience is important.

One of the activities a few brands do really well is following a structured and more predictable D0 to D90 plan.

They define what communication will go to the users on Day 0 (when they first leave their digital footprint with you) till D90 and automate the entire process with the help of a marketing automation tool and coupon functionality.

If you can, make use of effective and useful referral programs as well. They still work. Word of mouth with a layer of referral code can drive substantial business in the long run.

A few brands that I work with also connect their Whatsapp, Facebook, and google ad accounts to the marketing automation platform to chase the same user on website+app+google+facebook+whatsapp with certain frequency logic.

Stage 5: Evaluate

Evaluation of the activities you are doing will probably start from stage 3 when you kick off ads.

However, this is the stage you will evaluate that all the activities you are doing should come together to generate the topline.

One of the Ayurveda-based skincare brands I work with looks at the efficiency of Google by evaluating the sale of a particular SKU from Googe ad, Nykaa, amazon, purplle and SEO. For their SKU-specific search on Google, marketplaces rank on top and within these marketplace websites, their SKU is usually in the top 5 results.

The unit economics for that product should make sense. And it is a great way of looking at the overall performance of an SKU.

While they focus on each channel separately and have a strategy in place for marketplaces, google ads and SEO but there is a category head who is looking at overall performance and thereafter uses the insight to come up with more variations or stocks.

At this stage, the evaluation has to be more holistic and detailed. Someone from your team needs to use the cross-learning of one product or SKU with the other.

That’s it for today, folks!

If you like what I mentioned in Step 1- What’s your story? If you want to learn more about how to create one for your brand, consider signing up for A to Z of Content to business masterclass by Aarti Samant.

Have an awesome Sunday ahead. And if you are part of the ongoing SEO masterclass, I will see you at 3 PM today.

Cheers,

Apurv