The Realist Approach to Digital Marketing

Human-Driven Digital Marketing Masterclass

Course overview and goals

This is the digital marketing class that gives you a deeper understanding of how it works by focusing on the human element, from both customer experience's perspective and a marketer's perspective.

Why?

Because most digital marketing courses you can find in the market are specialist ones (Google Ads, Analytics, social media marketing, etc.) These are narrow areas of "digital marketing" that do not give you a big picture perspective. While "digital marketing" itself is a broad area of practices and specialisations that are useful for your organisation or business, you don't have the time for everything with your limited resources. You either want to choose the right technologies and approach to use for your business or you may want to decide which areas of specialisation you would like your marketing staff to focus on or get trained up. If you intend to outsource marketing work, then this Masterclass will help you speak the language of digital marketing and be smarter when confronted with jargons and ambitious proposals.

You will make agile Customer-centric decisions based on sound business needs, not hype in the media or hidden agendas.

At the end of this Masterclass, you will not be a "digital marketer" because that isn't the purpose. Instead, you will be a well-informed marketer/business person/educator with knowledge of human behaviour in the digital world and the technologies that help businesses connect to their customers online. You will have insights on how to setup your operations, plan your next big marketing project and where to spend your limited resources.

Learning outcomes

In this 2-day Masterclass, you will receive strategic, practical and hands-on digital marketing knowledge and skills. You will learn about:

  • The various digital marketing channels, technologies and platforms that make up the digital marketing practice and how each will impact your organisation or business
  • Lean frameworks and strategies that you can use to develop your team or your business' marketing initiatives using the digital tools and platforms that you need
  • One digital marketing framework that you will master because it is the most sustainable, Customer-centric and rooted in the foundation of the Internet

Who Should Attend

  • Business leaders or managers who want to understand the entire big picture of "digital marketing" and make better business decisions through this knowledge
  • Business owners or startup founders who are looking to expand their marketing activities into the online world with a well-informed approach
  • Marketing, Sales or other business professionals who seek the "digital marketing" truth before they further their education or training into specific digital marketing specialisation
  • Academic or technical educators (marketing or otherwise) who want real industry view and case studies of up-to-the-moment digital marketing technologies and practices

Masterclass Format

This Masterclass is part "digital marketing bootcamp" and part "marketing management and strategy workshop".

What is different about this Masterclass:

  • I will cover key digital marketing topics over the two days. I will emphasise the important focus areas and will light-touch the non-important ones.
  • You will have some hands-on on digital marketing technologies but not too much.
  • You can ask a lot of questions across a variety of marketing or digital marketing topics. I am not a technical specialist, but I can give you realist and humanist answers to your questions based on my corporate and practitioner experience. No hard selling. We are neutral although we believe some technology vendors truly have our interest at heart.
  • You will bring YOUR business case to the Masterclass and we will seek possible solutions together, using all possible marketing strategies and techniques.
    • You will be asked to prepare your existing business problem or digital marketing issues. Or you may choose not to.
    • Every day, we will address at least four of your business cases during the Masterclass. Remember, there is no paint-by-number approach to digital marketing and every situation is unique. This open consultation method will benefit everyone in attendance as we look at different issues from different perspectives.
  • At the end of the 2-day Masterclass, it will be very clear to you that one particular "digital marketing" approach I tend to emphasise is the most sustainable and effective among the various possibilities. While there is no wrong or one right approach, this framework works for Enterprises, medium-sized businesses, small mom-and-pops, independent consultants and freelancers even. This approach still needs a fair bit of work on your part although it is truly the gift that keeps on giving.

What will we cover

  • How to roll out "digital marketing" for your Enterprise or small business
  • How to deal with new technologies
  • Where to find free world-class digital marketing training for your team or yourself
  • How to guide and develop marketing talent in your organisation
  • How can a small business start winning at marketing
  • Agile strategies and practices to help you with your "digital marketing" journey

  • How the internet fundamentally works is often left out in digital marketing courses. Most courses teach you how to buy ads on Google and Facebook, but yet ignore the critical main ingredient. All that paid internet traffic that you generated with hard cash and limited budgets need to go somewhere. I will cover this core area and get you to understand some of the technologies that are used to build websites and landing pages. It is not rocket science but it gives you the knowledge and confidence to speak to website developers on what you need based on fundamentals of marketing and human behaviour. Avoid wasting thousands of dollars on "beautiful websites" that sits pretty on your domain's URL.
  • One step further, I will share why outsourcing this effort is an extreme waste of opportunity to learn about your business and your customers. With some effort and the Agile mindset, you can shape your brand and craft your messaging to your customers in real-time, simply by learning basic web development skills and knowing what technology to use.

  • How Google and search engines actually work. You want that organic Page 1 search result spots that everyone covets (and pay zero dollars for). SEO is a highly complex world, Google keeps its secret close to its heart and even the experts have to continuously learn to keep on top of SEO. However, if you can understand Larry Page and Sergey Brin's motivations, you will learn that it's simple and common sense. I will share SEO techniques and tips that you can use immediately. Most importantly, I will bring it all back to how brand building and positioning are really important aspects of SEO that are usually not covered in digital marketing courses.

  • How does Google Search advertising work? Should you buy banner ads on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn? How about mobile ads? I'm not an expert, but I have spent millions of my employers' money to hire media agencies to buy these ads to understand the good and the bad. If you want a practitioner perspective, I can share my experience as an entrepreneur running my own Google Ads (Search), Facebook and LinkedIn campaigns and the results I have observed and learn from me. We'll get our hands dirty but not a lot because this isn't a specialist course. Your time is precious.

  • Social media is your company or business's public face. If you are a business owner or people leader, it is also your public profile. Yet, most of us struggle to find time to understand how to manage social media and how to use it to our advantage. We equate it to wasting time (yes, the algorithms are built to cultivate addiction) but consultants are making millions of dollars advising businesses and leaders on how to benefit from LinkedIn or Facebook presence. It must be working. We will peel back the noise and look at how social media is truly an extension of your customer service and, more importantly, a platform to build customer trust and belief. While it may look deceptively simple, it's not an easy area to master so we will look at the art & human science behind social platforms and the commercial motivations of the corporate giants that own these services and their commitment to their shareholders.

  • The industry trend in the last few years has been focused on inbound or content marketing. Every respectable marketer is on the "content marketing" bandwagon. I always thought the marketing practice has always been about marketing content anyway. So now that everyone's doing "content marketing", how is this a differentiator to your business or company? We know the more hyped up it is, the less it becomes a competitive advantage because everyone has it. So how do you win at "content marketing"? I will provide you with the big picture view and why fundamentally this is one of the critical areas you need to focus on. It's hard work, but it's worth it and you don't want to waste effort and limited resources by approaching it wrong. Or worse, pay silly money for it.

  • Everyone's interested in data analytics while never giving it enough time to understand what goes on. We will have an opportunity to look into Google Analytics and discover the world of human behaviour and web interaction. We will look at how to track campaigns and interactions through simple tagging. By asking the right questions, we can explore how to translate digital insights into real world action to achieve business outcomes. Marketing agility is about learning and iterating from data so this will be an important segment in the course.

  • For any businesses, understanding where revenue comes from, who are the best customers and how to make revenue repeatable is critical to keep marketing and sales costs low. But yet, we treat our marketing automation systems like glorified email marketing platforms instead of important analytics platform. We pay large sums of money to purchase marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) technologies but fail to fully utilise them.
  • My goal is to help you understand how great a combined marketing automation and CRM system can be, both for small businesses and large enterprise. For large teams, the technology is available for our marketing and sales teams to work together in a transparent manner and to respond quicker to changing customer preferences and sentiments. For the entrepreneur, it's a one-stop service to manage your marketing efforts and track your leads and opportunities. I will show you the relevant technologies you can use to achieve these synergies.

  • Artificial intelligence, blockchain, retargeting, programmatic, messaging bots and voice. These are some of the digital technologies that the media and technology vendors hype up all the time. But what does it mean for your company or business? Are these really worth worrying about so that you don't "miss the technology boat"? I will unpack each tech for you in simple terms so that you can make better decisions on whether to ignore (for now) or to integrate immediately and what's the impact of your choice. If you have something new and fancy that I have never heard of before, we can have a discussion during the Masterclass to assess suitability for your business on a scale of "full of hot air".

  • The Importance of Doing, Measuring, Learning and Doing It All Over Again
  • Bring Lean into your marketing operations for better Customer-centric outcomes

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      Trainer Profile

      Isman Tanuri

      Testimonials from Past Training Participants

      What do they say

      "Very effective and impressed"

      Overall the training was very effective and impressed on the way the content was delivered.

      - Regional Manager, Dialog Axiata

      "Patient..knowledgeable..engaging"

      He was patient, knowledgeable and a great help...It made the sessions engaging.

      - Account Director, Ace:Daytons Communications

      "Extremely organised and client focused"

      He is a consummate professional, extremely organised, and client focused in all his work. Isman’s brilliance encompasses all his activities, and his integrity make him a highly desirable project leader, partner or contributor.

      - Director, Hosture Technologies

      "Not boring, not difficult to understand"

      Simple and interesting. It was not boring and not difficult to understand with some of the social jargons that are out there. Thank you and good luck!

      - Chief Manager, Dialog Axiata

      "Eats, breathes and sleeps digital marketing!"

      His enthusiasm and passion in teaching and sharing his vast knowledge about this industry made me take interest in exploring and learning what digital marketing is all about.

      - Implementation Consultant, Sambaash

      "Ready to share knowledge"

      Isman is a humble, patient and knowledgeable marketing professional who is always willing and ready to share his knowledge with others.

      - Senior Regional Manager, AdAsia

      Where I have trained and taught

      Academic & Training Organisations