The owner of an online coffee shop in Almaty sends you a WhatsApp message: "I want 100,000 followers on Instagram. How much will that cost?" It's the same shop as in the lesson on RFM analysis: it sells freshly roasted beans, ships them all over Kazakhstan, and the average order is 15,000 ₸. The shop and the numbers in this lesson are illustrative.
You could quote a price right away, but first ask what the shop needs them for. Money comes from customers, not followers, and the CRM shows who they are. Over the year the shop had 2,400 customers and 7,200 paid orders. 1,560 people ordered once, and the other 840 placed 5,640 orders, almost four out of every five. The shop lives on the people who come back, so the owner's real question is a different one: how to get more people who will order a second time. Questions like that are where marketing starts.
Marketing in practice
Marketing is a set of decisions made for one business goal: who you sell to, which of their jobs you do for them, what you offer, at what price and on what terms, the words you use to talk about it, where you find these people, and how you know all of it brought in money. The American Marketing Association's definition sounds more academic: marketing is the activity, institutions and processes through which offerings of value to buyers, clients, partners and society are created, communicated, delivered and exchanged. The order is the same: value for the customer first, then talking about it.
Of everything on that list, advertising handles one thing: it carries the message to people through a channel. Who sees it, what it promises and why the business needs those sales are settled before launch. If they aren't, advertising adds leads but not payments: an English school doubled its budget and got 21 payments instead of 20.
It helps to line the decisions up as a chain of seven links. Each one answers its own question, and the answer depends on the link before it.
Seven links, using the shop as the example
| Link | Question | At the shop |
|---|---|---|
| Business goal | What has to change in orders or money? | More new customers who place a second order |
| Segment | Who are we selling to? | People who make coffee at home every day, in an espresso machine, a moka pot or a cezve, and buy their beans at the supermarket |
| Customer's job | What does the person want to get? | Good coffee every morning from fresh beans that don't run out unexpectedly |
| Offer | What, at what price, on what terms? | Beans roasted this week with the date on the bag, 15,000 ₸ a kilo, delivery across Kazakhstan in 2-5 days, pay by card on the site or Kaspi QR to the courier |
| Message | What words do we use? | "Beans for home, roast date on the bag. 15,000 ₸ a kilo, delivered in 2-5 days" |
| Channel | Where will these people see it? | Instagram ads across Kazakhstan, Google search for queries like "buy coffee beans" |
| Metric | How do we know it worked? | What the first order cost and what share of new customers ordered again within 60 days |
The order matters. The owner started at the sixth link, the channel, and took the metric from there too: a follower count is an Instagram counter, and none of it reaches the shop's till. Goal first, then people, then everything else.
"Everyone who drinks coffee" doesn't work as a segment. Someone who grabs a cappuccino on the way to the office has no use for a kilo of beans, and a message written for him and for the home barista at once won't land with either. Describe a segment so it's clear who is left out. When several groups fit, pick one using the STP rules: the one you can reach and whose job you can do better than others.
The roast date came into the offer from the customers themselves. The owner called ten people who had ordered more than once and asked why they had stopped buying beans at the supermarket. Seven said the same thing: at the supermarket you don't know when the beans were roasted, and here the date is on the bag. That is how you learn the customer's job: you ask the customers, and you ask about what a person has already done rather than what they would do. In-depth interviews are built on that.
Price, delivery and payment are part of the offer, and the marketer doesn't decide them. The owner sets the price, the roaster sets the roasting schedule, the courier service sets delivery times. The marketer's job is to describe the offer in the words customers themselves use for the job. "Coffee you fall in love with" fits any café in town. "Roast date on the bag" fits only a shop that actually prints it.
Someone typing "buy coffee beans" into Google has already decided to buy and is choosing where, so the price and delivery time are enough. On Instagram they are scrolling the feed, and the ad has to explain on its own that the beans will be delivered to their home with the roast date on the bag. Channels are picked where the segment already is, and the message is fitted to where the person will see it: in search or in the feed.
The shop's goal is second orders, and the ad account can't tell those apart. It will see orders if the site sends it purchases, but whether an order is someone's first or fifth it won't know unless you tell it. A new customer's second order shows up in the CRM, and UTM tags in the link show where the first one came from. Customers who ordered more than once have a median of 28 days between orders, so the window for a second order is 60 days: a little over two such intervals.
Where the chain breaks: lots of impressions, no orders
The shop already runs Instagram ads. The ad shows a cappuccino with latte art on a table by a window, with the line "Coffee you fall in love with from the first sip." In a week the ads spent 20,000 ₸: 40,000 impressions, 2 orders and 23 direct messages. 14 of those asked for the café's address and opening hours.
The owner suggests showing the ad more often or adding TikTok as well. Both options show the same cup to more people, and they will decide it's a café just the same. People didn't understand who the offer was for or what was being sold: the picture is a cup in a café, and the shop sells beans for home. The gap is between the segment's job, the offer and the message, and more frequent impressions won't close it.
For now each order from the ads costs 10,000 ₸, while the shop keeps 6,000 ₸ per order after beans, roasting, packaging and delivery. But two orders in a week are too few to judge the ads by. The messages say more: 14 people out of 23 were looking for a café. So the message is what gets fixed. The new ad shows a bag with the roast date on the label, a cezve on a home stove, the price per kilo and the delivery time, in other words the "Message" row from the table. Budget and audience stay the same.
A week later, the first thing to look at is the messages: how many questions about the café's address. There will again be few orders in a week, so the ads get compared on orders after a month. A more reliable comparison is a Meta A/B test: it shows each version to its own part of the audience, so nobody sees both, and compares them on cost per result.
The business goal comes before the channel and the budget
Now back to the 100,000 followers. Before choosing a channel and a budget, find out two things: which business result this audience is supposed to support, and how you will check its contribution. For the shop, the result is second orders. Followers can help with that: a customer who follows the shop sees a new roast in the feed and remembers the beans are running low. The contribution of that audience shows up in the CRM: how many repeat orders came through tagged links from stories and posts. The follower counter won't show it.
You can also collect followers with a giveaway: "follow us and win a kilo of beans." The counter will go up, but it won't tell you how many of the new followers make coffee at home and live where the shop delivers. The cost per follower at a competitor and which format gives more reach right now are next-step questions. They help you reach people more cheaply, but they don't say which people or why.
The goal for the owner is written as one line with a number. According to the CRM, a quarter of new customers over the summer placed a second order within 60 days, so the goal could read: "By the end of the year, a third of new customers place a second order within 60 days." A goal like that also calls for different channels: a card in the parcel with the date the kilo will roughly run out, a WhatsApp reminder after three to four weeks for those who agreed to receive messages, and Instagram for customers who follow the shop.
The promise is tested after the purchase
The chain doesn't end at payment. The shop promises beans roasted this week, and the customer checks that when they open the parcel. If the bag carries a date from three weeks ago because the warehouse shipped old stock, the shop has broken exactly the promise that, by their own account, made customers leave the supermarket. A second order from that customer is hard to count on: the ads did their part, but the shop fell short of its goal.
The promise and the date on the bag
Promised
Beans roasted this week
Received
Roast date three weeks ago
The owner and roaster align the message with the roasting schedule.
The marketer doesn't run the warehouse or the roasting, but checking the promise against what reaches the customer is their job. Once a month, order as an ordinary customer and write down the date on the bag and how many days the parcel took. If the roaster roasts every two weeks, either the message changes to "roasted within the last two weeks" or the schedule does, and that is for the owner and the roaster to decide. Ad copy can be rewritten in an hour, a roasting schedule can't be changed that fast, so the ads promise only what production delivers every week.
Exercise: the chain for your own business
Take the business you drew the customer journey for in week 0 of the Start track, or any business near you: a café, a dental clinic, a shop on Instagram. Fill in the seven-link table for it, the way it was done for the coffee shop.
If your goal line says "more followers" or "more reach", that's a channel metric, not a goal. Think about how the owner would notice it in money, and write that down. A segment like "Almaty residents aged 25-45" is too broad: it lumps together people with different jobs, and no single message will reach all of them. A message is easy to test by substitution: replace the business's name with a competitor's. If the sentence is still true, it says nothing about the offer. And if the metric line stays empty because the business has no idea how many customers came back, you've found the first topic to raise with the owner.
The finished table is seven lines and one marked link. With it, the conversation with the owner starts from their goal, and the question "how much do ads cost" comes later, once it's clear who the ads need to reach and what they need to say.