Give your Marketing a new approach

This article will begin with the basics of marketing and then we will learn the advance and deep concepts of it. We will understand how digital marketing is related and different from traditional marketing. Then we will focus on how to succeeding in Digital Marketing. At the end of this article we will also take a look on personal branding and why you should start creating one for you.

Let’s begin :)

What is Marketing?

In simple words it is about taking your product/service to the people and creating revenue from it. It is about letting people know of your product/service and spreading awareness of it.

Marketing is always related to a product, service, or a brand. You must have seen some Television Ads, Watched some Hoardings and banners while walking in the streets, heard a vegetable seller shouting Aaloo le lo Bhindi le lo or even received a recommendation from a friend about a tuition class or a teacher. These are all examples of Marketing.

Marketing is based on science.

What?

Yeah, Think of a chemical reaction that needs two elements to react and form a compound provided ideal conditions. If you do your experiment with the right elements and also provide the right environment needed like the room temperature or so, the reaction is definitely gonna take place and you will see the desired results.

Same is for marketing. You can think of the two elements as your product and your audience. So if you have the right product and you know the people who might be interested in it, Success and growth is guaranteed provided that you also create the right environment. And Here it becomes complex because a chemical reaction is just an example of scientific phenomenon while Marketing itself is a Science. Now let’s talk about the right environment in the Science of Marketing.

Science of Marketing: The Right environment

The idea of Marketing starts even before creating a product. What I mean by that is one should think about the marketing before s/he creates the product. Why?

Let’s assume that you start building your own search engine and you spend years doing that.

Now that you have built it, you need to take it to the people.

Be honest, not even your closed ones are gonna use it. simply because there is no market for it as it is already occupied by Google.

So one must think about the market and it’s opportunities and then start creating a product to fit in.

Now that you are convinced that Marketing should start before creating the product, Let me tell you about the laws of marketing to succeed.

The First Law is to identify the need of your product Only once you identify whats lacking in the market, you can think of a product that is a market fit. Once you understand the need of your audience you start building a product for them and it keeps on growing in the journey.

Don’t just go about the need of the audience, you can also find opportunities in the market. I call that Need of Market

Here is a classic example of Yahoo and Google.

Before Google was launched Yahoo was the world’s most trafficked website with $125 billion market value.

So Yahoo was already there occupying the market with some other search engines.

They had a few hundred websites and then hired dozens of workers to sift through requests from websites to be added to their directory.

Here the creators of Google found the opportunity and encountered the Need of Market. They were more rooted in technology and they knew that internet was going to be huge and so will be the number of websites.

So they came up with a different algorithm that crawls the internet to collect content. It quickly outperformed Yahoo’s index. And from there, they never stopped. They created Gmail, Chrome, Google Maps, Google translate and what not.

The Second Law is to build a Quality Product. Never Let the marketing become more important than the product. If you build a low quality product, you’ll have to keep on marketing for it. You may gain some profit in the short period with good marketing but one day people will realize that your product is shit and all your marketing will go waste.

The Third Law is about understanding the marketing goals. You understand the need of your product and you’ve also created a quality one.

Now it is about sending the right message to the right person at the right time.

But marketing is not just about selling it is also about keeping your existing customers happy. Marketing should not just help people discover your product but should also create a good perception about the product in people’s mind.

The ultimate goal or marketing is to bring it to an end. Yes, your marketing is successful when you don’t have to do it anymore for your product. Pause for a while and think of all the products that you use daily but don’t see their ads anymore.

Take an example of Zara, one of the world’s largest retailers. They are so popular and such a big brand that they don’t have to advertise about them anymore. Instead what they do , they buy storefronts next to luxury retailers and make themselves a leader in affordable luxury.

Advertising, Copywriting, Sales, these are all just components of marketing. Great product followed by good marketing starts selling itself. It converts customers into brand ambassadors.

And the word of mouth is the best marketing channel ever.

Till now, we have understood the base of Marketing Now let’s understand

Traditional and Digital Marketing.

Tv ads, Newspaper ads, Radio, All of these are examples of traditional marketing. Tv, Radio, and Newspaper are different mediums of traditional marketing.

Google ads, Emails, A call from a telecaller, these all are the examples of digital marketing. Cellphones, Laptop, and desktop are mediums of Digital marketing.

Traditional marketing is preferred for products that are generic with a very wide audience. For an example tv ads can reach millions at a low cost and Apple iphone do tv ads because it is a generic product that everyone can use.

Tv has a reach of 800 million to 1 Billion people in India and Digital marketing is nowhere close to it based on the numbers only. (source: Wikipedia)

Digital Marketing is the best channel to reach a specific set of audience. Currently approx. 100 million users in India are in such digital platforms.

While the reach of traditional channels is more it can not be personalized because it is generic. On the other hand you can personalize your digital marketing campaigns.

This blog can be used as one of the channels of digital marketing. Since you are reading this blog on your phone or a laptop, you are my audience and I’m marketing my content to you digitally. It is personalized and specifically for people who are interested in Marketing.

Let’s understand Digital Marketing in depth.

Importance of Communication skills in Digital Marketing

The base of your Digital Marketing is your communication skills. No matter what method you use, No matter how you do it. Communication skills are needed to succeed in Digital Marketing.

Every product or a service is build or created with a vision. and if you are unable to show that vision to your audience, your marketing fails and your audience will not be interested in your product.

To improve your marketing you should communicate well and you must be able to transfer your thoughts to your audience.

In order to transfer your thoughts just like how you think about it, you should write just like you would talk to your friend explaining him your thoughts.

Don’t use sophisticated english and keep it simple.

It doesn’t matter how good your vocabulary is, what matters is that your audience understands the importance of your product just like you do.

If you want to write better that can convert, you must understand your target audience well. You should try doing one-to-one conversation with them. Try to get what is in their mind and what are their pain-points.

What are their fears, their goals, dreams, passion…

Whenever you write an email to your audience or talk with them, try to join the conversation that is already present in their head.

For an example let’s say you’re starting to learn Digital Marketing and looking for ways to get clients in order to make money.

I write an article about how I got my first client and made 1000$ from him/her in a month.

I send it to you via email with a subject line that says how I made 1000$ from digital marketing in one month?

Ask yourself, Would you read that email?

Probably yes. because I joined a conversation that is already there in your mind and I know what you want so it becomes easy for me to market my content to you.

Now let’s say I send the same email to some marketer who is already experienced with Digital Marketing and currently struggling with some different aspect of it.

Even though he works in the same field, hes probably not going to read my email because it is not joining the conversation that is in his head.

The basic thing you need to to in order to improve your communication skills is writing.

There are so many benefits of writing.

When you write you take a lot of pauses and think a lot. hence it slows down your thought process, gives you clarity and leads to have a better understanding of the topic.

Write a lot because it will also help you talk fluently. It will help you organize your thoughts, so that you remain calm and explain your thoughts/ideas to your team or maybe an investor in a much better way.

Now let’s talk about One famous Digital Marketing funnel.

The CATT Marketing Funnel

Where

n= Niche

C = Content

A= Attraction

T= Trust

T= Transaction

Let’s try understanding each aspect of this funnel.

[n] Niche:

Niche is a particular area that interests you. You target a specific audience in that area only. For an example lets say you love teaching others and you are good at every subject. you find out that it is Mathematics that you are best at. So mathematics is your niche and your target audience are only Maths students.

Let us take another example of a Niche. In Medical field there are many different categories like Surgery, Radiology, Cardiology, and Psychiatry. A doctor who has found his interest in heart related diseases or who knows about the heart better than any other organ will choose to become a Cardiologist because that is his Niche.

There are so many bug trackers in the software testing domain. The market is mostly occupied by Jira. But still Moolya, who are one of the best testing companies in India, found what was lacking and built Bugasura which excels in specific bug-tracking process like speed, Bug severity and priority and others.

Science that you can follow to find/decide your niche.

You can follow the graph above to find your niche. It is an area overlapped by Your Talent, Passion and the Market.

Talent is what you have developed with experience by working on it, something at which you have invested your time.

You need talent in order to provide quality, it is obvious that if you’re not good at drawing, you can not make people pay you for your drawings.

Passion is what you are naturally inclined at.

Passion is something that will help you in personal terms. If you’re not passionate about something you will eventually lose interest at it after some time.

Passion is needed to keep improving your product or service and it is also required for being happy. If you’re doing something that you’re master at because you’ve done it billion of times and then you’re also selling it and it is providing you enough wealth, you will start losing motivation because you’re doing it only because you’re good at it and not because you love it.

You may end up following your talent and making money from it from Monday to Friday and then using that money to buy happiness in form of drinks or whatever in the weekends.

This is what a big corporate population is doing these days. They’re making money but they’re not happy and satisfied.

You are only satisfied once you create. And creation is only possible with passion and talent. If you’re doing what you love to do you would want to do it more.

Since we are talking about a niche that will create wealth for you we need to take the Market in account.

Now you have to combine talent and passion with the market opportunity. Wealth can not be created with talent and passion alone.

Why Finding your niche is not just important, its the most important thing for your business’s success and wealth?

People recognize only the Number 1 not even the number 2 let the other positions alone.

Evey Indian knows name of the first prime minister of India, Nehru, right? but hardly anyone would remember the second one even though he was also a Prime minister.

But if you ask who was the first Female Prime mister of India. Indira Gandhi, everyone knows this. See, the power of a niche?

A Niche helps you remove your competition. You need to understand that you need to be The only One not the Number 1.

Entering a competitive market is hard and it requires money and efforts to gain trust of an audience who already have a solution for their problems. And you need to be perfect even from the start because if you aren’t and there are better solutions than you, you leave a bad impression.

But if you are the only one solving their problems you don’t need to worry much and you can take your time to be perfect.

Now that you know how to find your Niche let’s talk about Content, Attention, Trust and Transaction. The reason why I gave much attention to the Niche is because remember it is the most important element of the formulae Wealth=n^CATT

[C] Content:

Content is your asset that will attract people into you and your business. blog posts, videos, documentation, live webinars, and your newsletter emails these are some forms of content.

Any information related to your product/service and you is your content. A blog post describing benefits of your product and use-cases of it is an example of your content. The better content you’re having on the internet the more users you will attract.

[A] Attention:

Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Direct emails are some of the mediums of getting attention.

It is an important factor to boost your Marketing funnel. Drive attention to your content with SEO, Social Media, Paid advertisement, and etc.

You can see the picture above for better understanding.

[T] Trust:

Once you have the attention you need to build trust. Build trust with trip wires, Marketing automation, and re-targeting. People seem to miss it but it is really important because at the end if your funnel You want your users to make a transaction and transaction between two parties is only possible if there is a trust between them.

The more you personalize the communications with your audience the more they will trust you. This is known as Deep Marketing

[T] Transactions:

At the end, transaction is also important you must create an environment for your users so they can pay with ease.

Convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods.

The Integrated Digital Marketing Framework

Many people approach digital Marketing in a way that from each and every segment, they try to get results separately.

People do content marketing and expect sales to happen but nothing happens then they complain about it.

They put all their energy in SEO and expect the sales, Nothing happens. Same goes for social media, they say people from social media don’t buy.

Some only do Email Marketing, They collect a bunch of emails and run campaigns. They complain that people are not buying.

Same goes for Facebook ads, and Google Ads.

What we can do instead of using these components separately we can try to assemble them together so that it works like a machine.

Instead of selling direct from paid advertisement you can use it to drive traffic towards your content. Use paid advertisement to ask for attention rather than asking for payment.

Once you have attention to your content that is your blog or YouTube video or anything, you can get people to subscribe to your newsletter so that you can do deep marketing. Your email list is your best asset for marketing and brand, we will talk about this in another blog.

Whenever there’s a new update or you publish a new article, you can send it to your newsletter and people will start searching for your content.

Once people start reaching to your content via search, your content will start sending signals to SEO and google will start ranking your content.

Then you can also use Social Media and share your content there. More people will be coming to your content from there and they will also share your content using social media.

This is how it works in real time.

You have Content in the middle.

Use Paid advertisement, SEO, Social Media to drive attention to your content.

Then use email marketing to build Trust.

Then you go ahead and transact with them using sales and conversion.

What is Personal Branding and why is it Important?

Let’s also have an overview of Personal branding.

Whatever you’re doing in some way, ends up building your personal brand.

The Best Known will always beat the best.

If you are good at something but the world does not know about it, Nobody is gonna hire you. It is not enough just to be good at something, People should know it and then only they will reach out to you.

People want to hear from People, Not from brands.

When you do communication with people. They want to hear from you, not from your brand.

If a company is trying to communicate with people, it sounds unnatural. How can a logo understand my needs?

That is why personal branding is very important to establish yourself.

Have a clear story about yourself so that people can relate to it and they can remember you. Put yourself out into the world just like how you would identify yourself.

Elon musk has bigger following than SpaceX and Tesla. Eventually you will see that CEOs of the companies have a bigger following than their company.

Downside: A downside of personal branding is that it can not be invested in and it can not be sold out.

Why would an investor invest in your personal brand which is you and you can not be sold.

Upside: A personal brand can give rise to many brands from his/her influence.

For example, Elon Musk is a very strong personal brand and if he chooses to start a brand new company, it won’t be hard for him to attract customers because people already know and trust him.

A Personal Brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies that they start.

You can think about combining the downside and the upside in such a way that you benefit from the both.

You can start up with your brand that is your personal brand and then you have your influence. Once you have reached a certain level you can rub off your personal brand into a company brand.

Evolution of a personal brand

Lets look at how will your journey look like if you want to evolve as a personal brand.

The first step of this evolution is that you learn a new skill.

[Learn]: You learn a new skill through concepts, facts and procedures.

Understand the concepts, Remember the Facts, and practice the Procedure.

Whatever you’re doing you have to learn a new skill if you wanna be a personal brand.

All the actors, singers, and athletes, They have a skill right? They learn a skill and they practice for years.

[Work]: Then you need to work. Put your new skills to work. Implement into the real world whatever you have learned. Once you implement it into the real world you will have better understanding.

[Blog]: Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, You understand it better. Blogging will also help you building your personal brand.

When you write better and your concepts are clear, people will start learning from you, They will start looking up to you as an authority and eventually they will start asking for your consultance.

[Consult]: Now that you have personal branding from your blog and you have work experience and have learned the fundamentals. Start consulting to other businesses rather than working for them.

Consulting means just getting paid for your advice and maybe a little of execution.

[Mentor]: Mentor others who want to become like you.

You learn a subject, then you work. You write(blog) about it. Then you consult others. Then you can mentor a group of people.

Mentoring will help you getting your understanding to another level.

[Start up]: In the end you can start your own product or service with you understanding that you have developed from the market, the problem and your own skills.

Hope you liked the blog. If you have read it so far, please leave a comment :)