122 – The secrets of digital marketing with Dave Scott

Dave Scott is an expert digital marketer who has focussed his career on helping businesses to sell online.  He arrived in the digital space after spending the first part of his career in sales and marketing with some major US retailers.  After a friend started a digital marketing agency he joined as a partner and began to refocus his expertise in the online space.  In 2017 he struck out on his own and founded Scott Marketing.

Dave works as a sales and marketing consultant for online struggling online businesses.  He has a very different approach to the job.  Many consultants arrive at a new clients office with laundry list of criticisms.  Dave tries to approach the job from a much more empathetic place. No one wants to deal with angry people.  He believes being a positive person is the best way to help people.

Dave works with B2B clients who are anywhere from $2-20 million dollar companies.  The biggest complaint he hears is that digital marketing is incredible nebulous and confused.  Navigating the morass of social ads, websites and content generation isn’t easy.  He preaches the model of the five P’s which are plan, persona, publish, promote and purpose.  Those five P’s should encompass every marketing strategy no matter how big or small.

The first P is plan.  The best plans Dave has ever been involved with have been written on the back of a napkin.  Too often companies jump into things like podcasts, Snapchat or Facebook without a good plan.  You need a good structure that encompasses things like creating a persona and implementing a promotion strategy.  If you don’t have a consistent short and long term strategy you won’t get the result you want.  The plan should be short – no more than 10 pages.  The best parts of the plan come from the needs of your ideal buyer.

The second P is persona.  The ideal buyer is a fictional representation of your perfect customer.  Dave has a process to create that ideal buyer.  The first step is figuring out who is not your ideal customer.  Often companies will have a customer base that is difficult to sell too.  Ask questions like what is the title of the person you’re trying to sell too?  Are they a man or a woman?  Where are they located?  Are the risky or risk averse?  What kind of car does he buy?  Those kinds of questions will lead you to constructing the perfect customer.

Once you construct your perfect buyer you can start to design the kinds of content you should be creating.  That’s the third P, publish.  Dave is a big believer in email marketing.  It’s the number one way to get a great return on investment.  Your business should be implementing strategy to capture customer emails through your website or by buying a list from a service like Sales Genie.

There’s lots of different ways to promote your content.  You have to make sure you’re getting that content in front of the right people at the right time.  There’s no silver bullet to figuring this out.  It’s hard for business owners and for digital marketers.  The first step is to build out your website with a really compelling tagline.  You should be able to put your website in front of someone and within five seconds they know what you do and where to buy your service.  You should be using platforms to promote your company that aren’t going to hijack your business.  The latest changes to Facebook’s publishing rules has many digital marketers very nervous.  Google Ads used to be very cheap but they are getting much more expensive.  That said Google is a great way to focus on specific groups of people.  Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

The final P is purpose.  You want to talk about things that are really important to people’s lives.  There is no one way to measure you marketing.  You should you use a scorecard with four or five results on them.  Two or there of them are activity based and the last two are results based.  Google Analytics is useful but data can’t be the only measurement.  Make sure you understand what your customers are doing as well. An example of a scorecard that Dave uses can be downloaded here: Marketing Scorecard scott digital marketing ds