Today, I'm going to talk about the importance of building a support network around you. This is something that I set up when I first started my business because it was recommended to me by people who have set up their own businesses and went through the entrepreneurship journey. One of the recommendations given to me was to find people who could act as my mentor, someone who had been through the same experience or has been in their business for two to three years that I could speak with. I was really fortunate because I had a number of people in...
After you've come up with your idea, decided that there is potentially a market for it and have gone through the process of developing your one-page business plan; by mapping out your business model canvas, figuring out your value proposition, who your potential clients are and how you think you might be selling this product or service in market, the next thing to do at this early stage is to start talking to some potential clients. This is a lot easier if you are already working in the industry and have a deep understanding of what your customer pain points are, and...
In the last blogpost I talked about the importance of writing down all the ideas that you are coming up with as you start to think about what product or service you are developing and want to go to market with. After you have captured all of those ideas down, the next thing to do is to start putting some rigor around whether there is going to be a market for that. The place that we generally start with is the business model canvas which I have used when I was developing out Re/Digital and with our clients as well as...
Sometimes, I get asked, "How do you come up with an idea?" People are really keen to understand what it's like to work for themselves, they want to be their own boss but they are not sure about how they should get started. Here are a few things that I have suggested to them. When I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I consider myself very fortunate because I really love what I do and that is working in marketing and advertising, seeing the intersection of technology with that and also exploring how we can use that to...
We just completed a huge piece of work in the last quarter of 2018 where we mapped out what digital marketing transformation looks like across all key areas of marketing including paid media, content, creative, data, analytics, insights and CRM. The purpose of the project was to develop a very clear map of digital maturity across all the key functional areas within marketing. We developed “Crawl, Walk, Run” scenarios for People, Process and Technology under all the key functional areas to create what is effectively a map that we use with clients to help them figure out where they are...
To be honest it never really is the perfect time. But I do have some suggestions for people who are starting to think about doing this. Starting a new business and actually building up your product offering and getting in customers will take a lot longer than you think. If you think it will take 3 months, it will take 6. If you think it will take 6 months, it will probably take 12 months I suggest you make sure you have enough savings in the bank to cover your personal and business expenses for 6 months. You need to...
“Is technology killing creativity? was the topic for what was a very lively panel discussion for the Singapore Advertisers Association last week. We had a great debate with the perspectives of creative, media and clients presented thanks to Guan Hin Tay, Jospehine Tan and Lizi Hamer. I've included some of the highlight questions and my thoughts below. Firstly to answer the main question, I think the general feeling was “yes". My answer to this question is that yes it’s started to - but it’s not game over just yet. And I believe there’s a more important place for creativity than ever...
I’ve been recording a new training session for our Strategic Digital Marketing course and I was thinking about one of the concepts that we teach in this course. Its a concept that we regularly use to stress test the strategic work that we develop for our clients here. We use this concept to ensure that we are always on track. Its a simple concept with 3 key questions, where are we now, where do we want to get to and how do we want to get there Firstly, where are we now. You need to have good understanding of what...
So, a few days ago, i gave a training session at Hyper Island where I was talking about different types of tactics, tools and technologies that go into growth hacking. We were looking at thinking about your overall marketing strategy and how does growth hacking feed into that. As a part of that discussion, one of the key things I really wanted to talk about with the team is that growth hacking isn’t just about the tools and technologies you can use but its really about mindset and thats also for digital marketing, not just growth hacking specifically. When we...
So i just gave a presentation at spikes asia recently where I was talking about the importance of moving from a tactical digital thinking to strategic digital thinking which is a topic that’s really important to me. I think particularly because I’ve seen the shift from when digital was something that was still really new and wasn’t getting on plans and wasn’t getting into strategies. Now it’s become quite the opposite and in some cases I’m seeing a lot of clients and agencies who just automatically defaulting to digital as a core part of their strategy. And the thing i...
