Digital Marketing is just that. Marketing. But what would happen if you put an entrepreneur in charge of developing your digital marketing strategy instead of a traditional marketing guru?

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Typically, marketing executives and directors go to school to study marketing. They are hired for their knowledge and expertise. They understand the value of engagement and building awareness and have been trained to analyze a particular set of markers that if achieved, indicate a successful strategy.

Bingo. There’s the difference.

Marketers base success or failure on a prescribed set of rules. Whereas for an entrepreneur, everything you do is tied to return. How much does it cost? What are you going to get back? Every decision you make is based on that mantra. I’m going to the bathroom now – how long is that going to take? Can I make another call in the time it took me? But that’s not how a marketer thinks. Which is why marketers work for entrepreneurs, and not the other way around.

Does that mean we don’t need marketing geniuses? Of course we do. The point I’m making is that an entrepreneur is concerned about driving overall business performance, where as in most cases, a marketer, or marketing agency by extension, is most concerned about driving advertising performance.

An entrepreneur’s field of vision is considerably broader than someone who is just focused on marketing performance. The entrepreneur needs to look at what’s moving the needle every single day and determine how that is impacting the business. How do you do that? Look at your analytics. Numbers don’t lie. Look at customer lifetime value. The marketing costs of customer acquisition. The marketing cost to retain them. And so on.

Now imagine if that level of vision and clarity was used to determine the effectiveness of a digital marketing strategy? It would change the dynamic of marketing, media agencies and ad tech vendors, forcing them to evolve their business models and pricing to become more transparent and focused on driving business performance, not just advertising performance. It would mean advertising vendors would evolve into stewards of advertisers’ media dollars, with a focus on measuring how advertising impacts a clients overall business through ROI.

Might be something to think about the next time you are presented with a killer digital marketing strategy for your business.

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Written by Rik Klingle-Watt

About the author

Rik Klingle-Watt is a soulpepper and the writer of Not Business as Usual, an award-winning documentary about disrupting the business quo.

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