Digital Marketing Blueprint

The one number

A marketer's CV can be a single line: the return they get on ad money, and how much money that return was measured on. A large spend makes the number believable. A small one makes it a guess.

ROAS means return on ad spend. Take the sales that came from the ads. Divide by what the ads cost. If 500 went into ads and 2,000 came back, the ROAS is 4.

The deck shows a CV with exactly that: one ROAS figure, averaged over five years of spend. Nothing else on the page. That is the point of the slide.

100 hours, not 10,000

The famous figure is 10,000 hours to master a skill. At four hours a day, that is close to seven years.

1,000 hours at the same pace is about eight months. 100 hours is 25 days.

The session's argument is that 100 hours is enough to start earning. Mastery can come later, paid for by the work.

The T-shaped marketer

The top bar of the T is breadth. Seven areas: content, email, data and analytics, paid media, search, social media and ecommerce. Know enough of each to talk to a specialist.

The stem of the T is depth in one. The deck's example is paid media, going down through Facebook ads, Google ads, Instagram ads and LinkedIn ads.

A generalist with no stem has nothing to sell. A specialist with no bar cannot see where their channel fits.

Know who you are selling to

Ten questions about the audience: who they are, what they like, what they dislike, what they buy, what they see, what they do, where they go, where they hide, where they show themselves, and the who-what-where-when-why behind all of it.

The deck splits a workforce into five generations, each with its own habits. It also names the people born on the edge between two, such as Xennials and Zillennials. Treat these as a starting guess. Your own customers will be more specific.

Study the ads that are already running

Before you make an ad, look at a hundred. Search a brand name plus the word ads in Google Images. Then open the Meta Ad Library, pick a country, and search the brand. It shows every ad the brand is running, and when each one started.

This costs nothing. It tells you what a real budget is buying in your niche today.

The terms, with the arithmetic

CAC, customer acquisition cost: total sales and marketing cost divided by new customers. 1,000 spent and 20 customers won is 50 each.

LTV, lifetime value: what one customer pays across the whole relationship. 50 a month for 24 months is 1,200. If CAC is higher than LTV, every sale loses money.

Conversion rate: people who did the thing, divided by visitors, times 100. 10 sign-ups from 100 visitors is 10%.

CTR, click-through rate: clicks divided by views, times 100. 50 clicks on 1,000 views is 5%.

Engagement rate: likes, comments and shares added up, divided by views or followers, times 100. 275 on 5,000 is 5.5%.

The rest are ideas, not sums. A funnel is the path from seeing to buying. Retargeting shows the ad again to someone who looked and left. A lookalike audience is a new crowd built to resemble your best customers. A/B testing runs two versions and keeps the winner. A growth loop is customers bringing in customers. Social proof is people copying what others already do.

The homework, in order

One: pick a niche. Two: pick a few brands in it. Three: study their ads, using the method above. Four: make posts of your own. Five: measure the response. Six: make ads. Seven: show the ROAS.

Step seven is the whole point. Steps one to six exist to produce that number.

What to be careful with

The deck says the market is worth a trillion dollars and that there are 3.1 million jobs. Neither figure names a source. Check your own market before you repeat either.

The session also lists books, courses and people to follow. A list is not a plan. Pick one course and the seven steps, and finish both before adding more.

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