The Entrepreneur’s Case for Investing in Digital Marketing Mentors Programs in 2023

Online is the way to scale. Every entrepreneur knows that if you want to see exponential growth in your business in 2023 and beyond, you need to invest in building a solid, lucrative digital presence on the platforms where your customers are. The internet gives businesses the ability to reach out to a global audience, the potential to drive costs down, and the ability to test, validate, and iterate quickly. 

But it’s not as simple as it seems. Businesses, especially those with not a lot of experience in digital marketing, kick off their digital campaigns full of enthusiasm only to realize later on that they may have started a bit too early with too little planning. 

The case for mentorship

As easy as it may seem because of the availability of tools, scaling your business online is not a walk in the park. It has a steep learning curve that requires you to sit down and take at least a few hours a week to learn the fundamentals with someone who can provide detailed, structured mentorship. If you decide to do it alone, you’ll have to spend more time than that, with plenty of tearing your hair out in frustration figuring out which guru is right. Here is where investing in digital marketing mentorship becomes useful. 

Some of the most pressing questions about what should be done don’t have clear-cut, definitive answers. It always depends on the specific details of your business, such as your customers’ pain points, your offline marketing strategy, and your general and specific business goals. 

Do you know where to go?

While the internet may provide you the potential to reach out to an audience of 4.66 billion—that’s how many people are going online in 2023—how do you start? You can’t speak to all 4.66 billion at once. And you don’t need to speak to all of them. 

Yes, the lack of geographic restrictions will facilitate quick growth, but only if you know where you are starting from. A clear understanding of your customer is a must. But you also need to become familiar with the online platforms they are using and how you can make the most of these platforms to deliver a message that resonates with them. Mentorship, in this case, must come from someone with proven experience in the platforms you have chosen. 

What does the data {secretly} say?

Another way many entrepreneurs fail to fully take advantage of digital marketing is when they end up incorrectly interpreting data and make uninformed business decisions because of these. 

All digital marketing platforms provide you powerful tools to analyze customer data. Facebook, for instance, has Insights for its Business Pages, which gives you a detailed look at audience demographics and behaviors so you can identify your best and worst-performing content and refine your strategy from there. Google also provides the same thing for your website, blog, and other company-owned assets that are hosted on your own domain. Email marketing tools also have similar functionality. 

All the most reputable online business tools give you the ability to harvest data to help you make better decisions. However, only someone with plenty of experience analyzing what the data is saying can truly help you make the most out of it. 

Can you communicate well online?

Customer engagement is where a lot of the seeming magic of digital marketing happens. Years ago, customers had very little recourse when they had something to say about your product or service. And so communication between you and your customers had to happen just like it did with personal communication—often only one-way and always too slow. 

With the internet opening up all these different avenues for one-on-one and mass communication, customers can now easily and quickly get in touch with someone from your company and expect to receive a reply instantly. Tools like email and instant messaging have dramatically sped up the way we communicate. 

The downside of that is you must also know to respond just as quickly in a way that lets them know there’s a human behind the brand. Personal communication is crucial online. All of the available communication tools can only do so much if you don’t know how to use them properly to engage your customers in a way that increases satisfaction, encourages loyalty, and creates repeat business over and over again. 

Can you keep up with how fast everything is going?

Going online also allows you to test and validate new campaigns, products, and services at the push of a button. You have access to a plethora of software that can help you execute campaigns across a variety of platforms. You can also integrate these campaigns with A/B testing tools that are designed specifically for your testing needs. Within a few weeks to a few months, you will be able to determine what elements of your marketing campaign are not working as well as you would like so you can change them. 

But how will you know how to modify these campaigns? And how do you make modification decisions so that you don’t have to keep modifying every few months. The reality is digital businesses will always need to keep testing so you can optimize your campaigns and offers. Having a mentor on your side can simply make things faster by providing you insights about what typically works best in your market. They can help you adapt to general market changes and specific customer feedback so you can decide fast and implement faster. 

Where to cut corners

Finally, digital marketing is cost-effective for the most part. Not so much when you don’t know how to choose which platforms, processes, and people to invest in. Being able to drive down costs by going online is one of the most attractive pulls of digital marketing. You often see a lot of eyes lighting up when entrepreneurs find more reasons to cut back on things such as rent, electricity, and all the other costs associated with having a physical store. 

But there are also digital tools you will need to invest in. The trick is to find the right tool that can help you streamline and eventually automate your processes. But which processes need to be automated? And which ones require full human intervention? Managing inventory and processing orders, for instance, will not require too much time from a human, but content strategy and production will still need at least one pair of human eyes to oversee. 

Finding the right mentor-entrepreneur fit

The problem when entrepreneurs invest in digital marketing mentorship programs is that they tend to think all programs are the same. This cannot be further from the truth. All programs are not equal. If you don’t take the time to evaluate if a program is the intuitive fit for your business, you may be spending more time, money, and resources on mentorship that will not deliver. Your decision must be based on which program will help you get closer to your goals in the manner with which you want to get there. 

For example, some digital marketing programs will have you focusing on special platforms. Others work with entrepreneurs who belong to a certain demographic, such as Marie Forleo, who largely works with women who believe in woo. Some programs, such as Y Combinator’s accelerator program, are best geared toward entrepreneurs working in specific industries. In this case, Y Combinator works with scrappy young startups in the tech space. 

There are other programs that zero in on entrepreneurs’ most pressing pain points. Execution, for instance, is one of the biggest challenges holding businesses back from going all out on scaling their businesses online. This is understandable because an online business has so many moving parts. It can be difficult to be accountable to yourself simply because of the sheer number of tasks you and your team need to do at any given time. 

The Beusail Academy Online Masters Program addresses this concern by providing mentorship and execution at the same time. You receive one-on-one executive-level strategy while your marketing team works with an experienced full-stack marketer so you can implement right away. 

Takeaway

Mentorship is nothing more than idea sharing and pep talk if implementation doesn’t follow. In other words, it is useless if there is little support for execution. Mentorship can bring in fresh ideas, open you up to high-potential opportunities, and break open new grounds. However, none of that matters if you fail to take these ideas, opportunities, and new ground outside of the boardroom and onto the floor where things are getting done. If mentorship is going to become a worthwhile investment, it has to be in a program that builds wide open avenues for quick, effective execution.