Digital Entrepreneurial Marketing to Prepare Future Entrepreneurs

By: Dr. Tayyab Amjad, Lecturer, Department of Marketing Strategy and Innovation at Sunway University Business School (SUBS

Business schools have been teaching traditional marketing for decades. Its evolution over time has been amazing. Traditional marketing education has certainly helped many large businesses that we see today (for example, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and McDonald’s) grow worldwide.

Traditional marketing mainly follows a top-down approach as it starts with formal market research, followed by segmentation and choosing target markets, and then positioning the product or service using communication tools. It is mainly practised by large organisations that have plenty of financial resources to conduct various costly activities like formal market research and mass advertisements.

While business school graduates often seek job opportunities with these large corporations, not all of them get employed. Many end up working for small firms or choose to start their entrepreneurial careers. Such nascent graduate entrepreneurs typically start with small businesses, just like any new entrepreneur.

Small businesses, often face financial constraints, which makes the top-down marketing approach unsuitable for them. This is a major reason that fresh graduates who have studied traditional marketing alone face entrepreneurial failures in their new businesses. The surviving and non-graduate small business entrepreneurs however commonly practice entrepreneurial marketing which follows the bottom-up approach.

Using this approach, small business entrepreneurs first choose the target market or segment, then get to know the needs and demands of their targeted segment through personal relations, and then serve them in the best possible way. This approach is both cost and resource efficient.

Small business entrepreneurs rely heavily on their personal networks to collect information (for example, customers’ needs; or product or service feedback); and for product or service promotion (through word of mouth). Thus, entrepreneurial marketing is informal, low-cost and ad hoc in nature.

After the emergence of digital marketing in recent years, small businesses and large organisations both have adopted this because of its widespread reach. Small business entrepreneurs are particularly inclined towards it due to its low cost which organically aligns with entrepreneurial marketing. Due to this compatibility, a new term- ‘Digital Entrepreneurial Marketing’ has been coined.

Today, many small business entrepreneurs are practising artificial intelligence, establishing online stores, analysing big data, and launching targeted advertisements to compete, survive, and grow in the competitive markets. All of these practices are part of digital entrepreneurial marketing.

The common practice of these skills in today’s era makes them highly essential to learn for the current students at business schools, so they can become successful graduate entrepreneurs in the future. Teaching these skills using active learning pedagogies will also help business schools counter a common argument by small business entrepreneurs that business schools’ education is irrelevant, outdated and has a wide theory-practice gap.

For those who are not associated with any business school but wish to become digital entrepreneurs in the near future, you have numerous other options to learn digital entrepreneurial marketing. There are many learning platforms available, most of which are online and economical, for example, Udemy, Teachable, and YouTube. Many students and professionals are currently using such platforms as entrepreneurial minds are often skilled at researching, exploring and evaluating all options available for them to use as stepping stones for progress.

In fact, according to the ‘Think with Google’ statistics, seven out of 10 YouTube viewers use the platform to get help for a problem they are having with their work. And there are 500 million views of learning-related content on YouTube every day.

The ability to adapt and grow with emerging trends is crucial for any business to survive especially with technology evolving rapidly and affecting businesses, both large and small. Therefore, if you are a future entrepreneur, you need to adopt a quick-to-learn and open mindset to ensure that you continue to progress. This in turn will develop a strong economical landscape that will help boost personal and economic growth and stability.

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