Most people think marketing is just about execution, running ads or emailing.

It’s more than that. Before you can run marketing, you need to do marketing research. Primary research. Secondary research. Surveys!

Market research is all about understanding the landscape. Who is your customer? What options do they have? How much are they willing to pay? Are they even aware of your product? How do they refer to their problem? Do they even know they have a problem / need?

After you conduct research, the next step is to strategize. Plan out what you’re going to do. Whether it’s in google docs, asana, or trello, completely fill out your campaign plan. What’s your hypothesis? What’s your goal? How much will you spend, by when? When will you stop? How do you know if it succeeded? What defines success? How are you even going to measure results?

This is where you’ll have to make yourself familiar with apps like Domo, Heap, Google Analytics, or even plain UTM codes in a spreadsheet. Whatever it is - you need to plan in advance before you spend a dollar. Because let’s say you get 2000 app downloads in a month, after running Facebook ads, email marketing, and paid search, how will you know what channel to invest more money in?

Again, most people think marketing is only in the execution part. It’s not. That’s just the last step. Actually, second last step. Because then you review, optimize and then double down.