 All right, there's obviously lots of reasons they can be crystallized into these 10. No market need, right? So selling the wrong product or service. No marketing plan or no budget or too small marketing budget or poor marketing. No clear value proposition, no differentiation versus competitors. Wrong pricing, lack of control over costs. Poor product and service delivery, ignoring customer feedback. Ineffective business model. Personal, right? So you've got this harmony in the team. You've got burnout, lose of focus, this is a passion. Wrong team actually working on the wrong startup. Lack of investment or funding. And then finally losing track of the market, right? Losing touch of that where the market is heading. Today we're going to address the point number two, so marketing. And we're going to concretely look at how do you develop your marketing strategy so that you can do more of the right things for your business to make sure that you make it. So who am I? So my name is Marielle. I know for some people it's difficult to remember, you can also call me Mickey. I head up the EMS, that's my own company I started a couple of years ago. We do marketing for startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs. Everything from branding, websites, integrated campaigns, so enter and service. And I really love working with entrepreneurs and helping them achieve their goals. And besides being basically the founder of the EMS, I'm also an investor through LIC. And I also consult for quite a few startups and businesses and also entrepreneurs helping them set up and also, you know, go global and overcome their challenges. So that's a bit about me. Before I continue, I wanted to get a bit of a sense of the room. So who of you is selling a service with their website? Hands up. Okay, one person. All right, so everybody else is doing products, e-commerce. Okay, who's doing dropshipping? One person, okay. And finally, who's struggling getting good traffic to their website? Okay, one person's brave. All right, who doesn't know why they're struggling? Okay, one other person is brave. Actually, it's the same person. So everybody else is fine. In case you're not quite fine, like I said, the objective today is to take a step back and rethink about how do we actually approach this topic of promoting e-commerce or website to make sure that you're actually getting your business in front of the right customer. If you get your business in front of the right customer, you're definitely more likely to succeed. So strategic marketing, that sounds great. But why does it really matter? So if you're strategic in your marketing, you will get clear on your goals, clear on your target audience. This will help you also define the right channels to promote your business. It will help you improve the quality of your website traffic, caveat if you've got a good website, and also, of course, conversions. It will also help you to better optimize your marketing spend and how you're spending that budget. And finally, it will help you to ensure that you're doing more of the right things to basically help your business succeed. So how does it work? Step one, define your objective. The big question, why are you doing this? It seems really obvious, right? But actually a lot of the companies and entrepreneurs I talk to, they go straight to step three, which is, oh, I want to do a Facebook campaign. Great, but why? Is it really relevant for your business? Is it really relevant to your current challenge where you are right now? To understand your challenge, it really helps to look at the marketing funnel and where you are in terms of the journey. So basically the marketing funnel starts with awareness, right? Does your target customer know about your business? Then it's about education. Does your target customer understand what you do, what your business is about? Do they understand why they should go for you? Finally, in terms of consideration, it's also linked, right? What makes your business unique? Why should they choose you? Do they understand your value proposition? And finally, that should lead to conversion, right? To a sale, to a lead, whatever you're currently basically doing in terms of that. Well, this room sales clearly. And throughout all of it, you basically have branding. Why is branding important? Branding helps your customer identify your business and if they also have a clear understanding of your brand, they also understand what your business is about and essentially why they should choose you. If you're drop shipping, which is just one person in this room, this is really important because if you don't differentiate, there's lots and lots of competitors obviously selling the same product. So branding's really important. So all of these are interlinked and it's really important to understand where you are in this journey because if you, for example, get external help or you think about your business and you start promoting it, you would think, okay, obviously it's all about sales. It is at the end of the day, but think about it. If you've just started your e-commerce shop and let's say you're selling a t-shirt and your first ad is, okay, buy this white t-shirt from me, you know, great special price, free delivery, boom, that's it. They come to your website. Done. Does that really work? There are probably 50 other or probably way more businesses selling the same or similar t-shirt. Why do they go for this t-shirt versus another t-shirt? Again, this is where branding and awareness, et cetera, comes in. You need to have a reason why customers choose you versus others, especially when you're in a similar product niche. So when you're starting out with designing your strategy, if you're challenged, if nobody knows your business, you need to take active steps and design your marketing strategy to achieve awareness. Not necessarily straight go into just purely sales-driven things. For example, you can do a very simple test. You can run Google AdWords just targeting your core brand term. Based on that, you will see if people are searching for your brand term. If nobody's searching for your brand term, is really Google AdWords your first point of call or do you really need to educate your audience about what you do and why that's different and unique and why they should choose your t-shirt versus somebody else's? And based on this, based on where you're on the funnel and you will also evolve as your business evolves and grows, you can decide what tactical steps you need to take also in terms of your channels and how you basically deliver your message to engage your customers to do more of the right things. Step two, know your audience. Your business doesn't exist in a vacuum. Your business exists because you have customers. If you don't have customers, you can actually just stay in bed. The objective is to get customers. So who's your target customer? I love to ask this question. It's my number two question. A lot of people tell me, ah, I don't know. And then the other answer is everyone. Obviously everybody wants to buy my product. Well, everyone would be 7 billion people on this planet. Trust me, 7 billion people on this planet are not going to buy your product, sorry. Unless maybe you're Google. And that still excludes children. So not everybody's going to buy your product. If you don't know who your target customer is, how do you know where to find your target customer and how to engage that target customer? If you can't engage your target customer, how can they buy anything you're selling? And if they're not buying from you, how will your business survive? So really you do need to take some time to identify who is your target customer. So take a step back and think about it. What age group are they? Is it women, men? What are they doing professionally? What does their day-to-day look like, right? If you're selling children's goods, for example, who's the key decision maker buying this? It's the mom, right? How do you connect with that mom in her day-to-day life? When does she have time to actually consume what you're selling or think about what you're selling? Is it maybe during the daytime when her kids are off to daycare? Probably yes or maybe no. Maybe she's washing her hair because she's finally got a minute to do that, right? Not too many moms in the room, but I know that's one of the challenges. So really understanding your target customer will also help you choose the right channels. It will help you design the right message and connect with your customer in a more relatable way and make it also more obvious how you're solving a specific problem or need or desire, right? And based on that, you can just become so much more concrete, right? You can save time as well and money by doing things that connect with your target customer because you know exactly who that is and where to find that person. And you know exactly what goal you want to achieve. Okay? So that brings us to channels. It's not about being everywhere. It really isn't. It's about being in the right place. It's not about being in the channel that's hot right now because that's going to evolve every single day. It's really about whether that channel is right for you. How do you identify the right channel? It's really overwhelming, right? Just look at the social media space. There are gazillions and so many more channels every single day popping up. Should you really be on all of them? No, you can take really an active approach, a strategic approach to decide where you should be if you've answered step one and two very well, right? And also if you understand which of the marketing channels really well, right? So if you understand, you want to achieve sales, right? That's your core priority. If you don't make sales this month, tomorrow the lights are off basically, right? So then that's your core objective. Which channel is going to help you do that most effectively in the fastest way, right? Then that's the channel to go for example. Is your target audience also on this channel? Great. Are they consuming that channel in the way that you need them to, right? I.e., if you're B2B business, are people really going to Instagram to find out about, I don't know, what tech platform you've launched today? Probably not. If you on the other hand have a fashion business, probably yes. Vice versa with LinkedIn, nobody's looking to buy clothes on LinkedIn, right? All these things are quite, should be relatively obvious. But it helps to basically understand the channels, understand that each of them are good for something. They're not necessarily all good for everything. Understanding how that relates to your challenges and whether your target audience is there. And then one by one, you can literally become very concrete on where you want to be. So remember, if your channel doesn't achieve your objective, it's not the right channel. If it is not where your target audience is, it's not the right channel. And if your target audience doesn't use it in the way that's relevant to your business, it's not the right channel. So I sometimes have conversations with people that are launching a book, right? And then I ask them, okay, great, what are you doing to promote that? Oh, yeah, I'm starting an Instagram account. Okay, great. But shouldn't you first go on to Amazon and sell your book? Probably yes, right? So this is just one example, you know, where these things can go quite wrong. All right. Then let's think about creating your message. And this is where you can get really creative. But it's really important to stay true to your brand. And here we're just going to have a quick look at a little video. Let's see if it plays. Are we looking good so far? Do we have sound? No? No sound? Oh, a bit of sound. No, it's always risky playing a video. Yeah, let's see. Okay, let's try again. Are you ready? Okay, maybe we can hear some things. All right. We think first of vague words that are synonyms for progress and pair them with footage of a high-speed train. Science is doing lots of stuff that may or may not have anything to do with us. See how this guy at a lab coat holds up a beaker? That means we do research. Here's a picture of DNA. There are a shitload of people in the world, especially in India. See how we're part of a global economy? Look at those farmers in China. But we also do business in the USA or want you to think we do. Check out this wind energy thing in Indiana and this blue collar guy with dirt on his face. Also, we care about the environment loosely. Here's some powerful rushing water and people planting trees. Our policies could be related to these panoramic views of Costa Rica. In today's high-speed environment, stop-motion footage of a city at night with cars turning quickly makes you think about doing things efficiently and time-passing. The less you think we're a faceless entity, look at all these attractive people. Here's some of them talking and laughing, and close-ups of hands passing canned goods to each other in a setting that evokes community service. Equality, innovation, honesty, and advancement are all words we choose from a list. Our profits are awe-inspiring, like this guy who's looking up and pointing at a skyscraper or kite while smiling and explaining something to his child. Using a specific ratio of Asian people to black people to women to white men, we want to make sure we represent your needs and interests, or at least a version of your skin color in our ads. Did we put a baby in here? What about an ethnic old man whose wrinkled smile represents the happiness and wisdom of the poor? So, what do you think? Is it a good video? Is it a great branding video? The visuals are great, but it's all over the place, right? Today we're doing this, and then we're doing that, and we stand for everything, and we're for everyone, and everybody's represented here. You can't be representative to everyone, right? Not everybody's going to relate to everything that you're doing. You need to take a standpoint, at some point, in your journey, and it might be difficult to do that at the beginning because you're also still figuring things out, but at some point you need to take a brand stand and you need to become clear on what you stand for because that's going to connect with your tongue customer. It takes a bit of guts because it might mean that you're excluding some people, right? Because maybe some people will not connect with your message, but it will make the bond with your customer that this actually resonates with a lot, lot stronger, right? So, the magic really behind branding sits in consistency and clarity, and if you think about the world's biggest brands in the world, that's exactly what they're doing, and they've been doing this for years and years and years, and that is why they are some of the most successful brands in the world, right? Think about Apple. What does Apple stand for? Come, in the room. What does Apple stand for? Think different, design. Maybe it used to be a bit more on the innovation side, but innovation, right? That very slick design is like an experience that you expect when you buy an Apple product, and it's in everything. It's not just your product. It's also the packaging. It's also when you go to the Apple shop, that entire experience. Everything is led by design, right? Think about Coca-Cola. That's, you know, fun family moments, et cetera, right? When you think of Coca-Cola, do you really think of a fizzy drink that's brown and sugary? No, right? Nobody thinks about Coca-Cola that way, but that's actually what it is, right? But because they're telling a story, they're selling an experience, you buy Coca-Cola for that reason, not because it's a brown fizzy sugary drink, not really, right? The same, well, I mean, Google is the champion, obviously, of search by default, but when I ask you, what does Google mean to you? Is it really, oh, yes, Google. That's my search engine. No, Google is because it's fun. It's innovative. It's doing cool stuff, right? It's in Silicon Valley, right? So all of these companies, and these are just some of the examples, right, are really very clearly, consistently across time and space, and of course their brands evolve, but the core of the brand stays the same. And they take a very clear brand stand, and it's not going to resonate with everyone, but it is going to resonate with their core consumer. And what they essentially do is they don't sell products. They sell an experience. They tell a story, a story that you as a consumer connect with. And you know what? You can do that, too. You can absolutely take those principles into your marketing, whatever channels you're using to connect with your audience. And I'm going to show you a few videos of companies that are doing this really successfully. I don't want to show you this to make you feel, oh, I need to absolutely do video. Video is not the end of all, but it's just to inspire you and just to show you an example of what that concretely means. Before I show you that, what makes a good story? A good story is genuine. It's relatable. It's inspiring, entertaining, or educational. It doesn't need to be all five. It could be just one of those. But these are like five guidelines that you can use to create really interesting content that connects with your user beyond just, oh, I'm selling you a product. Right? So let's look at those examples, as I mentioned. Sound, please. That will do everything. We still have to push forward. Are you ready to shake up the world? Me, too. Me, too. Me, too. How did that make you feel? Anybody brave? Was Google selling you their search engine directly? Not really, by it, but they were taking you through the year's events connecting with you or trying to connect with you on an emotional level. Maybe some of these events have, you know, created an emotional bond for you. And thereby trying to sell their product. I'm going to skip over the next one and skip to the last one, which is a more recent one by Hannigan. It's just one minute. Nico, it's just one line grab. Position. Just one second off first place. No, thanks. Come on, Nico, it's just one beer. I'm still driving. This is an interesting one, right? This is an actual alcohol company or brand taking a stand on drinking and driving. Who would have thought? Did they sell you beer? No, actually, they told you not to drink a beer. But actually what happened is you got reminded of Hannigan. You're probably going to have Hannigan later, right? It's clever. All right, let's talk about step five, implementation. So this is obviously the stuff that, you know, day to day everybody's doing this. So having a well-planned strategy is obviously not enough. You actually need to implement it. So now you're probably going to say to me, what are you talking about? I just spent all this time creating my strategy. Obviously I'm going to implement it. Well, what I sometimes see is people spend a lot of time designing this beautiful marketing plan or business plan and then they put it into a nice folder or they put it somewhere on their desktop. And then it just becomes a bit dusty as they continue with their day to day. And, you know, they try it a little bit and then other things take over and it just kind of goes out of the window. Maybe some of you have faced this. But when you're going to design your marketing strategy, be strict with yourself and actually implement your vision and then really trust yourself and stick with your vision, right? So don't launch your first ad. And then after, I don't know, two hours feel like nervous. I'm sure none of you guys do this, but maybe you've faced a time where you did. You know, after two hours be like, oh, nobody clicked on my ad. Let me shut it off completely. My entire approach doesn't work, right? Don't do that. First, set yourself parameters. Set yourself how much time you're going to give yourself, how many impressions you want to reach, how many clicks you want to get to your website, how much traffic you want to see, how people are actually responding to your ad and to your website, et cetera. Set yourself parameters and base that on benchmarks in terms of what's the typical click through rate, what's the good bounce rate, et cetera. And then assess your performance based on that. And this is where we come to step six. So based on that, measure, learn, and then adapt your strategy. Definitely never take your strategy at face value and just plow on, you know, like, oh, this is my strategy. It's not working after three times. I'm definitely going to stick with it because this is my strategy, right? No, this doesn't work. Especially with digital marketing, we have the great feature of instant feedback or almost instantaneous feedback after a certain volume. So definitely don't be afraid to learn and adapt your strategy. You definitely have to. Also, especially as your business evolves. But first of all, really do try to stick with and be rigid or be a little bit strict with yourself and do actually implement your marketing plan. After all, you did actually spend a bit of time on it. Right. So these are the six steps to success. We ran through all of them. And essentially that is the key to strategic marketing. If you enjoyed today's session and you want to learn more, I'm doing a workshop on Thursday at WeWork at 6 p.m. It's at the Beach Center. And we're going to go through these tools or skills. So how to create your elevator pitch, how to develop your strategy to find your target audience, the right marketing channels, differential business and also ensure that your business can actually work. So your business idea can actually work. If you want to come along for that, I'm talking to me after today's presentations to get your thoughts. Okay. Any questions? No, we'll do that later. Okay, questions. Please don't ask me technical things about WordPress. New stuff, old stuff. Doing this already. Yeah. Like a course or something? Okay, well that's selling something. Or do people not pay for it? Okay, but the end game is basically for people to sign up, right? Whether people pay for it or not, essentially the objective at the end of the day is the same, right? You want them to convert. And if you've just launched, especially if it's a product or, well, a product or service or a community outreach like this, it's especially really important that people understand what you're doing and how you're adding value and why you're actually doing this and how they will benefit from it. So let's start with that. So you know your goal. You know your target audience, I assume. And then think about what are the challenges of your target audience. And then think about what are the key messages that you can communicate to them first. And then obviously the channels will be relevant to, well, the channels that these guys are on. So I don't know exactly what you're doing, but that's one approach that you can take. But it's really important with these type of products to be very clear on the value that you're providing. Any other questions? Yeah? Yeah, there's actually a lot of online shops that kind of improvise chatbots nowadays to interface with the customers. Yeah. Do you think it has any practicality or is it, you know, does it, is it effective? It definitely has practicality, right? If you're running multiple commerce shops or you have a really big one, it maybe isn't feasible for you to be online 24 seven answering every single question. I think it's always dependent on how good is that bot. I mean, and some of them are becoming really good at emulating how we would be as a business. And then what's really important is to also have quite a clear brand voice again. Like how are you engaging with your customer? So you like your brand should even be trickling down through that, right? So the standard answers, you should really change that to something or it might automatically do that depending on what you have. But if it's manual, you should definitely change it to how you would respond to a customer. So it still feels like a personal interaction. I think to add on, because I'll be speaking on e-commerce at the moment, the statistic is that when you, when you actually have a phone call, right, like a phone number, contact number, or that you call into your customer support line, right? Your conversion rate increases by 11%. That's like what they measure. For my own business wise, I would say it's roughly about 10%. Yeah, and that is a physical number that they can call. So if you have live chat, it will probably at least increase the conversion rate by maybe 70%. I think it's important to just speak and let people know that it is a bot that is not trying to emulate a human. You can sort of say that this is an automated system. You don't expect a complete human response. So at least separate that too. So you're not kind of, you know, trying to confuse people that way. You're trying to sort of confuse people, I guess. I think the chat bot part is just sort of help people when you go have an active live person but because you usually ask the common questions, then it's when you can actually keep them answered and also let them know that this is our human. Yeah, that's good advice because sometimes it feels a bit random, right? What more questions for a start-up business and what stage you should invest in the branding? Day one. Day one. No, not really. I know what you're doing. Yeah, that's heavily on me. Oh, heavily. For full-flagged branding strategy, you give us examples like a Google Code and those big brands, right? I don't know if at day one, you invest a lot on that, so I just wanted to see your opinion on what stage. I know you have to do that. It's not a cup of tea for each and every start-up business. Oh, yeah, so I just want to be very clear. I'm definitely not telling you to go out there tomorrow unless a great video agency and blow all your money on a big, big fat video. Please don't do that. So I would say every company grows at its own pace and evolves at its own timeline, so I don't think there's a predefined time. What I would tell you, though, what I mean by day one, obviously you should have a very clear logo and just a brand stand from day one and you should interweave that into your communications and everything you do from day one, right? I mean, for some companies that are doing these big brand activities now, it's just a day-to-day, they have to do that to maintain sales, et cetera, but for some of them, it's also brand refresh, maybe. You know, sales dropped off, et cetera, so there's different reasons why companies do these branding activities, but I would say in the initial stages it's really important to first get your fundamentals right, like get your awareness where it is, get your education where it is so that your target audience understands you, et cetera, and then obviously have the right sales, but in all of it and everything that you're doing interweave your brand. Don't let it be something you do later. Have it from the beginning, because, I mean, you never know, right? Like your business could take off really, really quickly and then you just had this random logo and then, I don't know, five years down the line, you think, ah, maybe I need to update this logo and then people hate it. You know, I mean, I saw some really bad feedback that Slack recently got, for example, for their brand update. So I would really say, like, spending that initial effort to get that right, it makes a difference from day one. I think for the, when you talk about brand, it's actually more than just the people and all this, like what Mario said, it's actually your experience, when you give the customer the experience as much as you can control it. That is actually the brand. Exactly. That is actually the brand. So are you running the e-commerce, physical product business, or are you running a service business? Providing content. Providing content. Content, yeah. Suspicion model. But I have designed my logo by myself. I understand. But I'm just thinking, this is a state-by-state approach. To begin, I probably invest a lot on branding but then to focus on content creation. But again, you have to keep in mind about the brand strategy from the very beginning that as you said, you can understand what the audience is really into. It takes a long time to corrupt a real effective brand technology. It has to start from the very beginning. You have to start from the very beginning and it will obviously evolve with your business, right? When I say evolve, it doesn't mean, okay, today we talk about X and tomorrow we talk about Y. It needs to be gradual. But you should think about it really from the beginning because if you don't, later when it actually matters, you're going to have to do so much more work to actually educate your audience on your brand. So if you had that in there from the beginning, they grew up with your company and your service with your brand. So how important is it to niche? How important is it to niche? Well, based on today's presentation, well, I would say it is important to niche. But at the end of the day, not every product is going to be extremely niche. I think it's also quite important that you do things or represent things that you like and feel passionate about. For myself, for example, I really like fashion and I'm trying to find my niche or something unique within fashion. That's challenging because let's face it, there's a lot of e-commerce companies out there. But I would just be such a fraud trying to sell laptops. It's not something I feel extremely passionate about. So I do feel it's important to find your niche, but when I say niche, you can still find your niche within a broader category. It could be age group, sports, specific things. But I know there are some people out there that just go for one product and then try to find that winning product and just push that. I mean, that's one approach and I'm sure that works great for some people. But personally, I feel it's quite important to feel passionate about what you're doing as well as having a niche. On that niche, it's easier to target your target audience. Absolutely. Because you know specifically more about that person, so you can only start small. And I guess with a niche, you don't always have to just focus on that niche. It may be your communication strategy, but it's not to say that you don't sell other related products or other related services. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. I have a question. Blackagem is also part of branding, right? Yes, dropshipping. Yes, I know where you're going. Yeah, it's a challenge, right? I mean, depending on what system you're using, sometimes you could communicate with the dropshippers to... I can communicate directly. Right. Oh, okay, all right. I mean, further down the line, I don't know how far you are in this journey. I mean, in the ideal world, you would really introduce your own packaging, all of that from the get-go. But sometimes maybe you want to first see if it works at all, and then maybe do that later. So I understand that chicken and egg feeling completely. That's what I also want. Yeah, so maybe you can ask them to include a flyer or something at least on your brand or some sort of marketing material, you know, come back next time, 10% off, something like that. So I mean, if you're already dealing with them directly, I would ask them to chat with them if that's a possibility. Okay, great. Thanks so much, guys. If you have any more questions, see you later.