Have an awesome product or service but have no idea how to get it to your ideal customer? Read this article to know all about the fundamentals of marketing, economics, selecting your niche, and personal branding. This short guide will help anyone who is a student, an entrepreneur, a novice in digital marketing, and any business that struggles to keep up with the changing landscape.
The Basics of Marketing
Right off the bat we’re gonna start with Marketing. Marketing has been around for 100s of years and has stood the test of time it’s deeply rooted in human psychology. To put it simply marketing is making an audience aware of a product or service you’re offering which would solve a pain point and make their life easier while making a profit for your business. Marketing helps you to sell your product to a prospective customer and keep them coming back for more. In order to start selling your product you first need to know all about your average customer and have a persona. Before selling it’s necessary to know who you’re trying to sell. If you build matrimonial service chances are it would be hard to stand out and differ yourself from the industry experts on the other hand if you have a matrimonial service for people of the LGBT community that might work as no one is currently paying attention to it and it has a market.
Although traditional marketing(Tv, billboards, radio, newspaper ads, yellow pages) has been around for quite a while digital marketing is in its nascent stage and has been around for roughly 25 years. The basic principle is the same in both digital and traditional marketing getting the message out and nudges the audience to take the desired action, both are different in many ways.
Digital Marketing VS Traditional Marketing
While the goal is the same, both of them should be used like yin and yang while complementing each other. The main difference comes in the way in which the audience encounters the marketing message. While traditional marketing uses traditional media like magazines and newspapers, digital marketing uses digital media, such as social media or websites.
Traditional Marketing offers challenges like being quite expensive, inability to measure results or effectiveness, limited targeting options, no direct interaction with the customer it can’t be denied they’re permanent, an immersive experience, impactful, highly produced, and memorable. Yet not everyone has the resources and budget to get a slot on primetime tv, billboards, and magazine covers.
While Digital Marketing can become a part of the online habit of your customer and is cost-effective, gives quicker results and returns, affordable, measurable, offers multiple channels with personalized customer experience at every step of the marketing funnel and allows targeting around the word with any parameters like age, gender, time, preferences, etc.
Yet at times can be highly intrusive, annoying, less permanent, forgettable, and is constantly evolving with a learning curve.
Any smart business would get the best of both worlds by using them at different stages of a customer cycle and improve their marketing efforts. Getting to customers online requires careful planning and an automated cycle of content, attention, Trust, and Transaction.
The CATT Marketing Funnel
Wealth=n^CATT
In order to have a successful business or a product, it’s of utmost importance to select a profitable niche. Selecting a niche isn’t hard it’s a combination of what you know and has a passionate about, what the people need, and the marketability of the product/service you provide.
A Halloween decoration and costumes store won’t do that well in January. If you are in a saturated market you’ll struggle for attention where as in a scarce market with few players you might get noticed but not a lot of audiences would spend money on your product. A niche that fits demand, your expertise, and has customers is a great fit for your business. For example, consulting services for businesses struggling with Paid ads.
The best-case scenario for any business would be to devise an automated cycle in which new users find out about them through their content.
They interact with your content which would grab their attention towards your brand, now after a while of going back and forth between finding content from your brand they’ll trust your brand for the solution and start coming on their own. After the audience trusts your brand they won’t have to think twice before buying from you thus completing the transaction.
People trust People. It’s easier to trust someone you know rather than an annoying pop-up ad. Ergo word of mouth marketing would start on its own if people enjoy using your product like the Digital Deepak paid internship. The best online strategy is one that utilizes different channels at different points of their marketing funnel which brings us to integrated digital marketing.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Using the internet to market your business and services can be tricky. With different channels like SEO, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing it can be confusing to decide what fits where and how. Focusing on either one or two without any strategy can lead to a funnel with holes in it from which customers drop off at any point and provide a bad user experience. Therefore smart brands use integrated digital marketing for different stages of their strategy.
For example, a brand selling sewing machines can use SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media, and paid ads for brand awareness and visibility, they can team up with influencers, active members of the sewing community whenever a new product launches and can use social media giveaways to attract newer audiences.
Thus using different channels of Digital Marketing can help you stay in the loop with your customers.
Is your audience technically sound and uses complicated jargon or they prefer a simple straight forward message? Are they doctors or stay at home moms? Do they like to surf the web or read books? Communicating with your audience helps to serve them better and change your product accordingly. The best way to connect with your audience is to speak in a language they will understand. Thus effective communication skills will get your message across the masses. But no one will but from a total stranger and why should someone trust a logo online? Which brings us to Personal Branding and building Mass Trust.
Creating a Strong Personal Brand
Who is this person? Are they really an expert? Why should I trust them? A strong personal brand helps you get recognized as someone with authority in a particular field or industry. People have built their entire brands and businesses on social media like the Kardashians, Mr. Beast, Shane, Nick Minaj, Jenna Marbles, Troye Sivan they’re all by-product of social media.
A strong personal brand sets up as the best person for the job. Brands like Dominos, Apple, Nike, Vogue, Billboard have set themselves apart as the best in the business by maintaining a popular name for themselves. They no longer need to spend on ads as they are wildly known and you’d go to them without any second thought. Being a well-known brand not only makes you popular but helps you get clients. Elon musk was already the PayPal guy before Tesla and Space X. People are more likely to trust a person rather than a brand.
Anyone can build a personal brand in any niche and gain the mass trust of the audience. It starts with learning a skill which can be acting, editing, singing, painting, running, singing, etc. The next step is to use that skill in work and gain experience, while working you can document your learning in the form of content which will help others. After learning and working when you’re good enough your skills can be used to consult others and offer them advice. After a while, you’ll have a strong personal brand with mass trust, now any new project of yours will be backed by your experience and brand name which will help it jumpstart and give it an advantage over faceless brands.
Conclusion
Marketing comes before the product and when you have a great product it doesn’t require much marketing efforts. Marketing is a personal experience and a skill that can’t be replaced by AI. It can be automated but not completely replaced. You are the one who knows your product the best therefore completely outsourcing marketing won’t help when things tough. A personal brand can provide an edge in fierce competition and saturated markets. In future marketing will only get more dedicated and personal. Keep experimenting and find out what works best for your brand.
