As a part of our ASK RODINHOODERS series, it’s awesome to have our in-house Internet Marketing God Abey John with us. Abey likes to call himself the Motor Mouth (if you’ve read any of his comments you’ll know why!!). Now Abey is not as scary as his online avatar seems to be; don’t misjudge him by his candidness or his “french”. He actually loves therodinhoods to bits and will go out of his way to help a fellow rodinhooder!
ps: He has a lot of Rodinhooder clients who are very happy with him!
And in real life (yeah, I’ve actually met Abey when I visited Pondicherry last year) he is a gentle guy who drives a mean machine. He actually took my seven year old on a motorbike ride through town!!
Abey’s ‘About Me’:
“I am a sci-fi, star trek, enlightenment/liberation, rock-n-roll nut, and I suppose a repressed RTS gamer who accidentally stumbled into SEO, Google Adwords, Copywriting, Conversion Optimization, Email marketing, Remarketing and blah blah blah. The whole ball of internet marketing wax. Ooooh wow all these dials and numbers, you mean we just need to adjust the system for these dashboard thingie of metrics to rake in the moolah? #fuckyeah bring it on! Not as good as teleportation but then… we gotta take it as it comes.
I started my internet marketing stint after reading up on SEO and optimizing a site for it. Six months later when I checked, the site was #1 in Google for their primary industry keyword. That’s when the realization hit me: this shit actually works.
The next realization followed close on its heels ‘coz even though the site was #1 it had very few enquiries: You need more than SEO to actually get leads and conversions.
Which send me down the rabbit hole chase of all the rest. Which effectively made me into a firehose of knowledge about internet marketing.
Which, to be frank, is perfectly useless to you unless you learn how to deploy it in the proper sequence based on your growth, your current fiscal objectives, your market “capture” objectives, and other “dirty factors” like the resources (money, time, talent) you have in your arsenal.
What you can ask me about
Ask me anything – life, the universe, everything – but read this first.
Here’s a fact. 90% of all startups fail. There are a gazillion reasons why startups fail. I’ll try and help you eliminate marketing from that bucket list.
As an entrepreneur, marketing is critical to your success. Alok will say no. I agree. 🙂 It’s a zen thing.
Let me explain.
One of the greatest direct response marketers of all time, the late Sir Gary Halbert, asked the only question that actually matters. “What do you need to sell?”. And he gives the answer: “A hungry crowd”
(FYI the “Sir” honorific is the direct response marketing community’s bestowal of knighthood on him, not the Queen of England. :))
Marketing is about finding your “hungry crowd”.
Alok depends on the platform and organic discovery to bring him his hungry crowd. He focuses on the masala and vada pav the hungry crowd is clamouring for: Addictive Game Play. In the games market that’s the only thing that really matters.
Gamers are ravenous beasts who will sniff out a new game and devour it. You don’t need to market to them, you just need to send out whiffs of game play scent out into the interweb tubes. They’ll find you. In fact active paid marketing to them maybe counterproductive.
Dark side of the gaming industry: The addiction with one game wears off after a while and then you need to feed them again. Zynga after its stratospheric climb is now what? They tried to clone farmville with facelifts calling it any number of different things. But the game play essentially remained the same. That particular gameplay addiction had worn off and you can’t fool gamers with graphic overlays and new reward labels and icons.
Explicitly or implicitly your marketing has to focus on three areas:
Reach – how many people in your “hungry crowd” know about your product or service? how many people in your “hungry crowd” recognize your brand? What strategies, tactics, and methods will you use to reach?
Engagement – how many people in your “hungry crowd” are interacting with your brand, product, service? What strategies, tactics, and methods will you use to get them to click, like, comment, share information about your brand’s product or service?
Conversion – howmany people in your “hungry crowd” are buying (including non-monetary “buys” like page impressions) from you? 1% Conversion? WTF! 99% dont buy from you? Don’t quote me industry averages!
Your job, as the chief honcho of your enterprise, is to build a marketing machine that will: Reach your hungry crowd consistently, pull them into a conversation with your brand consistently, and finally convince them that your solution will satisfy that growl in their belly.
Once you have that nailed then you can figure out the hows and wherefores – SEO, copywriting, UX facelifts, etc.
In everything you need to keep asking the question: What’s the shortest path to the money with all this tamasha? And you have to be brutally honest with the answer. Sometimes the shortest path is an excruciatingly painful undertaking. So, be ready to tighten your belt and plunge in and get dirty.
Ask me anything in the comments and I’ll give you a no bs answer.”
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As you can imagine, Abey is very much following this page!!
On twitter he’s @sunfever
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