Do you want to have better career prospects?
Do you want to have a blog of your own and explore your interests?
Do you want to start a business? Or maybe promote an existing one?
If you said yes to any of these and have zero knowledge in marketing, you have come to the right place.
In this article, I’ll be talking about the basics of marketing. To become a good digital marketer, a person has to first become a good marketer. If you know how to market and sell, you’ll have a great career and are safe for life.
Marketing has a long shelf life and can’t become obsolete. It existed even hundred years back and will continue to exist for the next hundred years.
Let’s assume that you are running a business. You think you can outsource your marketing completely to an agency and step back? No. The founder should also be a marketer and be the strategist.
This is why you need to invest yourselves in learning marketing.
The law of Marketing
Marketing is science, and not just creativity. It starts even before creating a product - with understanding the customer and customer’s needs that leads to creating a product that fits their needs. It is about sending the right message to the right people.
It is not just about selling. It is also about keeping an existing customer happy through communication so that they remain a customer for life. A Mass Trust has to be built with them.
The purpose of marketing is to build a brand and capture a position in the minds of the consumers. When you think of Search Engines, Google automatically pops in your mind. It is similar to the cases where Goodnight overpowers Mosquito repellents and Maggi overpowers Noodles. Once you have a very strong brand, the need for putting effort in marketing becomes nil. The power of the word of mouth becomes your biggest ally and your product sells itself.
Never prioritize marketing your product over your product itself. People can market their products of low quality in a great way and may even get good business. But in a long run, it would not survive. A great product converts your customers into your future brand ambassadors. Your product’s reputation can make or break your game. The choice is yours.
Finally, after making a great product, marketing not only helps people discover your product, but also have a good perception about it.
A peek into Global Economics
It’s essential for every entrepreneur to learn about Global Economics and make their business decisions according to it.
A country’s economy goes up as the average age of the people in the country goes up. In developed economies, people are already aged and spend very little. Even if a recession happens, people would not spend on something unless they need to. In developing countries like India, there are a lot of younger people and as a result, more spending. Hence, starting a new business focusing on developing countries would be beneficial.
Another point to know about is that, debt creates money. When people deposit money in banks, that money would be used to give out loans and create debt. More debt in economy means more cash in economy, which is what inflation is. In a world where inflation is increasing, people will spend more money as the cash flow in the market is increased. This will cause further development in the economy, bringing more price increases in different products.
The central bank reduces interest rates to encourage debts and more so during recessions. Recessions create strong companies and drives the weak ones out of the market. Inefficient companies not having a frugal mindset would die!
Understanding Traditional Vs Digital Marketing
A generic product with wide targeting can make use of television ads which can reach millions at low costs. More than half the homes in India has TV. With an average of 4–5 members in each household, TV has a reach of 800 million to 1 billion. Newspapers and radios also gives great reaches for generic products as about 460 million people use them. The reach of Digital Marketing is nowhere close to this.
Where Traditional Marketing falls back is that the communication cannot be personalized; also deep marketing and natural sales also cannot be done. This is where the role of Digital Marketing becomes important as it can reach the affluent English speaking population (around 100 million)having the major spending power.
The CATT Marketing Funnel
Here’s a foolproof formula for Wealth as a way to your success:
Wealth= n^(CATT), where:
n- Niche- People have problems. You can choose it as your niche and find solutions for those problems.
c- Content- Create useful content that attracts people in your niche such as blog posts, videos, live webinars etc.
a- Attention- Drive traffic to your content using SEO, social media,paid ads and referrals.
t- Trust- Build trust with your audience using marketing automation, re-targeting etc.
t- Transaction- Convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods.
Choosing the right Niche
A right niche can be obtained only if all the three factors- talent, market and passion- are combined.
The work of person having passion and talent in a field having no market is not of much use. A person having talent in a field of market would not enjoy his work f he doesn’t have the passion. And finally, a person having passion in a field of good market is of no use if he doesn’t possess the required talents as he wouldn’t survive in the field. So a niche where all these three factors meet in the considered Venn Diagram would be ideal.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Now that you have identified your niche and built quality content on it, how do you market yourselves effectively?
This not requires doing any single methods of marketing, like Search Engine Optimization(SEO) or Email Marketing or Social Media Marketing, but an integrated marketing method which incorporates all of these at the same time.
People would not randomly trust you and buy your products. It’s you who has to give them reasons to trust you. So we have to concentrate on achieving that first and invest in Paid Ads.
Paid Ads boosts the entire momentum of Integrated Digital Marketing. They can lead to your content like newsletters. You can ask people to subscribe it through which you collect their email IDs. Using this Email Marketing,you can get people to come back to your content. You can then list you content on the search engines and it ultimately will lead people back to your content. It is the same in the case of sharing your content on social media too. This way you build people’s trust on you and achieve good sales. This framework becomes the engine that drives the CATT Funnel.
There will be customers who will have different levels of trust on you. It’s up to you to market yourselves right to an extent that you wouldn’t need to do it anymore.
Personal Branding and its Evolution
Personal Branding means establishing your public persona for your target audience. It will involve carefully and accurately communicating your values, beliefs, goals and purpose. Your Personal Brand exists whether you create it or not. It will exist even if you want people to know nothing about you. The content you post will reveal aspects of your personality and that develops your Personal Brand. Like Jeff Bezos has said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
The best known will always beat the best. People wants to hear from people and not brands. So Personal Branding would help you talk to your customers on a personal level. Also when you build a Personal Brand first, building a Brand later would become much easier.
How does a person evolve into a Personal Brand?
- Learn - Learn a skill through concepts, facts and procedures. Remember them practice regularly.
- Work - Put your new found skills to work. Move from practicing to implementing it, which means taking up a job or freelancing or working on own projects. Implementing it in the real world would give a much better understanding of it.
- Blog - Write about what you experience and learn through your work. This is the stepping stone to your Personal Brand.
- Consulting - Now that you have a good fundamental knowledge, have work experience and have a Personal Brand through your blog, start consulting other businesses instead of working for them.
- Mentoring - Mentor others who wants to be like you. Mentoring will help you scale up your understanding to a whole new level.
- Startup- Start your own product or service business with the understanding you have developed about the market, the problems that can occur there and also of your skills.
This is what we call the ‘MassTrust Blueprint’. Understanding this deeply and working in this format would definitely make your successful Personal Brand. It is when people doesn’t start from the scratch they face issues in building their Personal Brand.
The catch here is that you never stop learning. Even if you start your own startup, there will definitely be something which you don’t know and again you have to implement this same cycle.
I hope that you have caught some basics of Digital Marketing and Personal Branding which is very essential to thrive in this field. I have covered topics like law of marketing, some basics of global economics, the CATT marketing funnel, choosing the right niche and MassTrust Blueprint.
Please wait for further write ups on this. If you have reached the end of this article, please encourage me and comment your thoughts. I’d be happy to address your doubts.
You can check out an article from the blog I started using these methods.
You can also check out another perspective of this same topic
See you soon.
