Build Profit-Generating Digital Marketing that Stands the Test of Time
When I started doing digital marketing nearly 30 years ago, the only help available were technical manuals that told you how to build things but not why and how to apply them. Foundational principles had to be figured out by trial and error. This led to a lot of wasted activity. As time went on, I began to see that things that worked had principles behind them, and applying those principles as a framework gave strategic inertia to my marketing. Through these struggles and applying good principles, I was able to apply technology strategically to digital marketing for my employers and then clients. By applying these strategies and tactics, I was able to help new startups see breakeven points years earlier than expected. I was able to help struggling companies reach profitability in a matter of months. Growth rates of 30% to 40% year over year become the norm.
This principle-based approach to digital marketing led an e-learning company I worked with from their three-year reliance on investor capital to a break even on year four. Considering that this was a company with dozens of employees and multiple revenue channels, turning this ship toward eventual profitability required a sound strategy and clear direction on the marketing front. Time for wasting money was over, they applied a principled approach to see results.
The Most Innovative Digital Marketing Work Is Based on Principles
People doing the most innovative digital marketing create a vision of what they want to accomplish and apply sound principles regardless of technology. They then adapt technology to their advantage, flying past the competition. They use the principles of intelligence, targeting, review and iteration to focus in on the 20% of their marketing bringing in 80% of the results. Learn the principles that drive successful digital marketing regardless of technology.
Within these pages, you will find principles for building a lasting, evolving digital marketing machine. You’ll find time-tested strategies and tactics for managing digital marketing processes, and hopefully, you’ll develop a set of habits for evaluating new technologies and approaches in your own digital marketing. Learning about and implementing new technologies is a big part of digital marketing. However, the best marketing organizations aren’t the ones jumping onboard with every new plug-and-play technology, but the ones who use technologies according to foundational principles, sound strategy, and proven tactics. Gain the foundation to assess circumstances and make decisions about how to build and optimize your digital marketing.
Within these pages, you’ll find detailed descriptions and hard-won, winning tactics on:
- Intelligence – including marketing intelligence needed to move forward, building intelligence into marketing processes, and processes for analysis and action
- Target – identifying and avoiding the wrong markets, assessing target efficiency, methods for establishing targets early, and refining targets
- Alignment – aligning your marketing with targets, aligning marketing across the customer lifecycle, maintaining internal alignment in your marketing
- Breadth – how to reach more customers with breadth of content, when to use different media types and channels, and capitalizing on winning media efforts
- Depth – setting the right targeting and timing to keep prospects engaged, essentials for progressing buyers toward purchasing, and accelerating buying with a tightly targeted conversion path
- Review – how to run reviews that get results, gathering group input into action plans, and the right way to challenge assumptions for maximum effect
- Iteration – how to engage the four points of iteration that lead to better results, methods to make realistic iterations toward improving effectiveness, and how to achieve greater conversion by eliminating gaps and redundancies
- Curation – how to keep your marketing lean and relevant, avoiding content fire drills, and the long-term benefits of warehousing your content
I recently spent time with a friend in marketing who explained how her company had engaged a firm whose SEO processes were completely outdated. Outdated to the point of having negative consequences on the company’s organic search. It became clear that if the leadership in her company were practicing the first three principles of intelligence, target, and alignment, they could have better assessed the agency’s proposal and either asked for a revision or gone elsewhere.
Leaders may delegate the investigation of new technologies, but they ultimately have to make decisions. And making those decisions according to time-tested principles greatly improves the odds of choosing wisely.
As I’ve thumbed through the litany of books being churned out on digital marketing. The reason for such a prolific outpouring of content becomes clear. Each book professes to give the reader everything they need to know to get started running digital marketing in their organization. They list scores of technologies to use and the best ways to use them. The problem with this prescriptive listing of technologies is that most technologies quickly get replaced by newer, better technologies – sometimes multiple times over. A list of specific technologies to use limits both the usefulness of the book and the digital marketer’s scope innovation.
The goal: Set the foundation to assess and decide about how to build and optimize your own digital marketing
This Is NOT a Promotion for My Consulting
Not every small business or startup has the money to bring in a consultant to ramp up their marketing. This is why I wrote this book, so small businesses can set a foundation for doing their own marketing. I was tired of seeing promising ideas disappear just because of a lack of practical, foundational understanding of digital marketing. Digital marketing isn’t the sole domain of big companies and tech startups. It can work for anyone willing to apply the principles that make it work. I’ve been adapting it for companies big and small since the 1990s.
My background living through the churn of technologies spans decades. As the industry matured and dozens of promising technologies came and went. Along the way, I’ve tossed out technologies, but hung on to the principles behind their original adoption. The principles were the nuggets of gold plucked from decades of testing, trying, and rebuilding. Now they can be yours in the book I wish I’d had at the beginning of my journey.
You won’t find any cookie-cutter approaches about which technologies to link together or how to configure them. You will find principles for building a lasting, evolving digital marketing machine. You’ll find time-tested strategies and tactics for managing digital marketing processes, and hopefully, you’ll develop a set of habits for evaluating new technologies and approaches in your own digital marketing.
I don't have "follow-up" or "advanced" courses to sell you.
I’m offering a book with real value because I’m actually tired of seeing marketers and entrepreneurs cycling through meaningless marketing activities that don’t drive growth. I would rather offer this information at the lowest price I can afford to see more people get wildly innovative in the right direction. I literally want to unlock the potential growth for even the smallest companies doing digital marketing.
Just $6.99 digital and $12.99 in print
(also available on Audible)
Why so cheap?
Good Ideas Should Be Well Marketed
First of all, I’m tired of watching good ideas dry up and die on the vine because the promoters didn’t know how to properly market them. I see them endlessly promoting to social media where they aren’t targeting the right audience, or I see them spend money on the wrong marketing that just doesn’t result in growth.
I also want to level the playing field for small companies with big competitors. Too often the little guys go swinging into the fray with their bigger competitors when there’s a pot of gold sitting untouched if they would just turn their marketing in the right direction. Digital marketing can be that big equalizer if handled according to time-tested principles. These principles are the same ones being used by even enterprise companies looking to get the most growth out of their marketing dollars.
If you want to lead a successful digital marketing practice, lean more on principles than practices.
Are You Looking for Long-Term Marketing Success that Grows with Your Company?
Principles apply across marketing stages.
- Elicit the first engagement with the prospect
- Influence interested leads to become a customer
- Retain customers – your most stable and cost-efficient revenue generator
Be like the operations services company I worked with who keeps outgrowing their space and hosting big “Moving Up” customer events. Growth brings challenges, but they are a lot more fun than the challenges you face going the other way.
Once you learn these principles, you can pass them on to others you work with. People I’ve shared these principles with are up and running with ventures of their own. Many have innovated way beyond the things we worked on together because they had a foundation. One friend now runs digital marketing in the foundation he co-founded. Another runs the marketing at his own restaurant. Still others have gone on to lead marketing efforts in thriving tech, product, and services companies.
Will you get the same results?
- Replace random activities that look like marketing with principle-based activities that drive marketing.
- Define what you need your marketing to do, then go about finding the tech to do it.
- Before you add a tech stack and start basking in the hundreds of metrics it provides, know the 5 that matter most in your business.
No system can promise success, but I can promise that these principles have shown to be essential in the successes I’ve seen at companies big and small.
Frequently asked questions:
Is this a step by step or more general information book?
The principles in this book should not be thought of as steps. Although I have taken pains to list them in an order that aligns somewhat with where they fall in developing a strategy, they don’t have distinct start and end points. Think of them more as overlapping considerations.
Would you use this as a template for creating a digital marketing strategy?
Each principle acts as a perspective from which to look at your strategy and ensure it is fully formed. And during the execution of your marketing, you can use these same perspectives to shift tactics and improve results. The end goal is that, as a marketer, you are continually thinking in terms of these principles.
How helpful is this book if I’m leading teams, but don’t actually do the hands-on marketing?
From a leadership perspective, leaning more on principles than practices with those you lead can have the effect of generating greater results than prescriptive practices alone would yield. By trusting in the talent of your people to follow the guidance of principles to excel and grow, you allow them to tap into their best work. Rather than thinking of employees as tools that function as an extension of your thinking, focus on sharing the principles and see what kind of bounty you can all harvest together.
Is this book available through Kindle Unlimited?
I’ve allowed Amazon to make it available their at their discretion. You can find out by clicking the Buy Now button.
About the Author
Bob Shawgo started writing marketing copy in college more than 30 years ago and went on to lead successful marketing efforts in publishing, software, wholesale, education technology, media, business services, and bio-tech. As a consultant and employee, he’s applied his marketing skills and mentored talented marketers in companies from start-ups to international brands. He currently runs Shawgo Group, a consulting firm, and writes articles and guides to help marketers and business builders find greater success in their marketing.