My Journey From Being A Writer To A Marketing Expert

Many have asked me to share the journey of my career, which is a path I have carved out with a lot of will and dedication. It actually began right when I was 7 years old. Unexpected, wasn’t it?

It was the first time I was impressed by a book- a horror story. The story was about a sinister cat, and then I read another book by the same author. This time the story was about a crow. The books were creative and got the young kid in me hooked and impressed enough to want to start writing. The author was R.L Stine. I am not sure how many of you are aware of him.

It’s amazing how I still remember his name at the tip of my tongue. Just so you know I’m terrible with names and have a tough time remembering them. With a shortcoming like that, remembering an author’s name from childhood is a pretty big deal for me. Anyway, I was so engrossed with the author’s concoction of cheap thrills and scares, that I wanted to create some of my own. I decided to write a story too, about a monster living underneath a house. Well, it begun then and today I am still writing. Something I’ve not got bored of doing for this long, means something really special.

After a trying my hand at diaries, blogs and stories, I decided to write for profession. It was not a very difficult field to get into. Especially if you’re good with words and as you can witness, I am pretty eloquent. Writing for hobby as well as for profession is a great feeling, it gives you the freedom of expression. It was a satisfying experience and also you can make decent $$.

For a restless person that I am, just writing was not doing enough for my soul. I wanted to showcase it. I wanted a platform for my words to reach out to people who may be experiencing similar feelings or undergoing situations like me. I wanted to share, to receive love, support and appreciation. So, I decided to start Infornicle.

With the creation of the website came the responsibility of having people know about its existence. So, that’s is when I decided, ‘Hey! It’s my child after all. I need to grow in order for my child to grow’. Thus, I began acquiring skills.

Here are some skills I acquired during my journey towards marketing:

Before you begin your marketing efforts (for a particular product or market), you need to be equipped with something called a GTM strategy. GTM strategy is a detailed, achievable and believable plan that answers the questions given in four circles below:

2. Campaign Strategies:

You can differentiate your campaign strategies based on the market needs, audience, platforms, product launches, end goals etc. Campaign strategies are better created with a bottom-up approach, i.e keeping the end goal in mind. End goal could be website traffic (footfalls on your website), impressions, downloads, registrations, event attendance, leads etc. Once you identify the business goals for a particular campaign, next comes breaking it down into smaller strategies across multiple channels, accounts & demographics.

3. Website Management and Optimisation:

A website is a doorway to a company. It’s the first thing a prospect will look at and hence is the most important aspect of your integrated marketing communications (IMC). Creating scheduled collaterals (videos, blogs, infographics, tutorials etc) and placing them optimally on the website is the base of any campaign. You give your prospects something to feed on to before you could get them interested in your offerings. Optimising the website includes creating visually appealing web pages, search friendly content that can rank higher on the search engines, building links & ensuring speedy loading of a website on a browser.

4. SEO:

The basics of SEO in a single sentence would be- Identify what your target audience is searching for and include the related keywords in your content. Simple as that sounds, there is a lot to it. Like a lot of research in identifying the target audience, the type of keywords they are searching for (using google’s keyword planner tool), and then creating content around those keywords.

5. SEM & PPC:

Although organic SEO helps, but there are millions of individuals and owners who are using the same organic search strategies to rank higher and the market is saturated. Unfortunately, this means if you want actual results from your Search Engine Marketing efforts, you need to shell out some marketing bucks to see your website emerge from the unnecessary cacophony and rank higher. SEM thus includes competitive analysis combined with paid listings through google adwords’ Pay-per-click, which is a good method to get your website ranked higher.

Side Note: Ads on other search engines like Bing tends to give more returns for your investment.

6. Google Analytics & Webmaster:

Google analytics is a free tool that is important to be understood by every marketer. There are even google certifications that can be taken up. It allows you to analyse the website data and the audience metrics like the number of visitors, demographics, keyword & content performance etc. The webmaster on the other hand allows you to find and fix any errors in the website, as it reveals your domain’s credibility through google’s eye.

7. Email Marketing:

Emails are still as much relevant as any social media, probably much more relevant. There is not a single day that passes by without me having checked my email and I’m sure it’s the same with most of the working class. For a successful email marketing strategy, you need to begin with segmentation of your target audience, and ensuring the right email reaches the right inbox at the right time. Huge strides have been made in email automations which emphasises on the importance of emails in today’s world. The traditional ways of email marketing through campaign monitor and mailchimp are more or less effective but with certain limitations.

Implementing account based marketing along with automation strategies by using tools like Marketo or Eloqua will ensure the right message reaches the right person at the right time.

8. Advertising:

Advertising includes educating the consumers and prospects about the company and its products or offerings. Finding the target audience is usually followed by deciding on the suitable platforms for promotions. Here, the content plays an important role as it needs to be catchy, unique and one that resounds with the audience. The ads can be placed over multiple channels like social media, apps, magazines, radio, TV, hoardings etc. A research on the advertising strategies of competitors will help you place your company in a better steadin terms of content, budget and the target media.

Advertisements need some serious marketing bucks! One of the clients, before offering to buy a product had told me, “It was like the universe was directing me to buy the product. I could see your company everywhere.” Well that was exactly what we intended to do, I gloated in my mind. That should be the goal of any advertisement- Awareness on a large scale.