Before learning how to do marketing — there are a few fundamentals that you have to learn.
These fundamentals have to be learned both by marketers as well as the founders of the business.
Often founders have a misconception that any product or service can be sold — if they can perform a good marketing stunt.
But, it’s not entirely true. Your product and service have to provide some value by solving some problems of the customer.
If the product needs heavy marketing to get sold, then it might not be having a good product-market fit.
Marketing is not about selling the product you want to sell, marketing is about selling the product that your customer needs.
Let’s look into some of the fundamentals every marketer should know:
Marketing with Financial Goal
Most marketers think only about the acquisition of customers.
Reaching out to customers and displaying the product you have built is not enough.
You should be marketing with the planning that includes the sales and revenue.
Because when you are sales driven marketer, you tend to know — How many people you should be reaching out to. You should be spending your marketing budget based on the output you need.
For example ( from the picture above ), you might have a financial goal of making 1 crore in total revenue.
Then your target to reach customers will vary based on the product you have.
If you have a product that is worth 100 Rs, then you will have to acquire 1,00,000 in sales.
Marketing is about spreading awareness of your product’s existence and building trust in the brand with the customer.
But the way you build awareness and trust will have a profound effect on sales of the product.
Understanding the Customer
Marketing is a combination of art and science. It also involves careful planning and execution.
Create an advertisement on social media or billboard — both require some amount of creativity to capture the attention of the audience.
But this creativity should be backed by science. You must know your customers so well.
To apply your creativity in the advertisement, you should acknowledge the science behind human nature.
You must know the psychology of the human brain, about how their brains behave when they pay attention to certain product showcases.
Marketers should know certain things about the way customers’ brains behave and use that to gain attention.
Customers will never look into your product if they never pay attention.
Attention is the new currency. And marketer’s job is to communicate how their product might solve their problem — within the span of that attention time.
Marketing doesn’t end with the sale of the product.
Marketers should maintain the retention of their customers with the brand for a long time.
That’s how a loyal relationship is built between a brand and a customer. And that’s the way to make customers come back again and again.
If your product is great, then the product will sell by itself.
Your customers will turn into brand ambassadors. And they will perform a word of mouth marketing for your product if they love your product.
So, never let marketing become more important than the product
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” ~ Peter Drucker.
Building a Strong Brand
To build a brand, you don’t need to destroy other brands.
You can follow your roadmap to improve your product or service than copying and competing with other brands.
Creative monopoly means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.
~ Peter Theil ( Book: Zero to One)
Competition is an ideology that distorts our thinking.
Rather than following your path of creating a better product or service, you might fall into the trap of competing with other brands.
The unhealthy competition will only saturate the existing market.
Build a brand in a way that your customer will start to use it as a verb.
For example: In most places, Maggie is used as a verb instead of noodles, and Colgate is used as a verb instead of toothpaste.
If you can’t be the market leader for a category, you can still capture the sub-category of the same industry.
For example, you can be the market leader of your regional market than competing with the global marketplace.
If you are going out for competition, you might lose a huge market share, as humans are most likely to remember the top one or two brands of the specific industry.
Having a USP (Unique selling point) or a unique angle can help you to survive outside of the competition. But you might have to work on differentiating yourself from other brands of a similar category.
Need for Marketing
Marketing is not an expense it is an investment.
If your target customer didn’t know that you have a valuable product that can solve his solution — he is not going to buy it.
Creating awareness about the existence of your product or service to your target customers is important to improve your sales.
But marketing cannot be outsourced completely to a marketing agency. The founder should also know the aspects of marketing.
If the founder doesn’t understand his customer, he will not be able to make a product that is needed for the customer. And the customer will never buy a product, if he thinks — he doesn’t need it.
If your product is good, and if you know how to market and sell — then you will thrive.
Methods of Marketing
There are various types of marketing, like — Digital marketing, Traditional marketing, Influencer marketing, Viral marketing, referral marketing, and so on.
But here we are going to discuss the most popularly debated method
Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing
The real difference between these two types of marketing is, the medium they are used to communicate the information to customers.
The medium that traditional marketing includes are newspapers, magazines, radio ads, and billboards. They are around us for a long period.
The medium that digital marketing includes our social media, websites, and any form of medium that takes place through the internet.
It is not good to debate these two types — because each has its pros and cons.
The choice of using the medium should be based on, where your customers are. And how accessible are these mediums to your customers?
You have to be marketing where your customer is, not where it is easy to market.
But mostly so many of them use the digital medium as it is cost-effective and has the most benefit of return on investment.
Traditional Marketing — Pros and Cons
- They can be effective if used for the masses that are not on the part of the internet.
- In traditional marketing there is no option for them to skip ads or use any ad-blockers.
- But, it is not possible to track the customer’s interaction with the brand.
- It is hard to define a detailed user persona for the traditional way of advertisement
- It is not a cost-affordable option.
- Effective when it is used to create awareness locally but not efficient if you want to reach customers globally with a very less budget.
- Retargeting a specific set of customers is not possible.
- Hard to experiment with a different set of advertisements with the same set of customers.
- There is no audience feedback loop as it acts as a one-way communication channel.
- Traditional marketing doesn’t have a good way to measure the results of the campaign.
Digital Marketing — Pros and Cons
- There are so many options for engagement. You can target the same set of people in multiple ways. And it will help turn the cold audience into warm.
- Easier to track the results of the specific campaign.
- Makes the process of collecting feedback from customers easier.
- Gives us a way to understand the customer’s behavior better.
- Retargeting the specific set of customers is possible.
- More space to experiment with different types of campaigns simultaneously.
- Digital marketing is possible with the lowest budget possible.
- It is a two-way channel of communication and hence it is easier for consumers to connect with the brand.
- The ability to gain attention is easier as the way communication is done to digital devices directly
- But, digital ads can be blocked using ad-blockers
- The organic way of marketing has evolved according to the change in algorithms.
- Need to constantly learn and upgrade with the latest tools to run the campaign effectively.
CATT Marketing Funnel
When it comes to marketing, most people think about advertisements. But, marketing is not all about advertisements.
Organically achieving customers is also a form of marketing.
And the best way to get customers through organic way without spending a dime of money is through content.
We can use the content as a lead magnet to get people into our funnel.
Funnel is the most important part of every marketing, that is how we filter out the target customers from the masses.
Each marketing technique has its efficient funnel. You can also create your funnel by applying your strategy for marketing.
One of the best strategic funnels that I came across in organic marketing is the CATT marketing funnel.
The important formula to acquire wealth through organic content marketing is,
Wealth = n^CATT
In which,
[n] is for Niche: Niche is the market or the category we are trying to target. You need to pick up a niche before starting to put out content for individuals or businesses. It is necessary to define a niche so that we don’t lose focus and stick to the path which leads to the destination we want to be.
Your product is not going to solve all the problems out there. Your product or service must be solving a specific set of problems out there — and the category where you solve problems in your niche.
The major portion of success in marketing goes to defining the niche carefully.
[C] is for Content: Content is for gaining attention from people by giving the information they need. Your content is your asset, it remains there once it’s created — it will act as a magnet to get people to look at your business. And it will people look at the products and services that you offer to solve their problems. Content is a way to gain attention by providing information in return.
[A] is for Attention: As I said, You need to create content in a way that holds the attention of the people. If the information you provide through the content is not good enough, then it will never get attention from the people. And then the content without attention is almost useless. You can also use paid ads to gain attention to your content and then if they pay attention to the content — you will get their lead through the content.
[T] is for Trust: In digital marketing, the hardest thing to get from people is Attention. And gaining the trust of the people is the hardest thing ever. You need to get attention from people multiple times to show them, how they can trust you. You need to nurture the leads, to make them feel safe about our brand. If they can’t trust you, then there is no use in how useful your product or service may be. The more you nurture them in a personalized way, the more you will build trust with customers.
[T] is for Transaction: This is why I said, a marketer should also think from a financial perspective. If you don’t get the transaction done, then there is no use for the attention and trust you have built with the customers. If they give attention and trust you, they will naturally buy the product. But still, there have to be some initiatives taken from our side, to make their decision-making process simpler.
Niche Selection
If the majority of the success of this funnel goes to niche selection, it is very important to choose a good niche.
If you have read the concept of Ikigai, you may find this concept more similar.
Your niche is the intersection of the circles of your talent, market, and passion.
Before selecting a niche, you have to ask yourself these questions:
- What kind of talent did you have from your childhood? (Talent)
- What are the things you were learning and doing in your spare time? (Passion)
- Is there a need in the marketplace for your talent and passion? (Market)
After you get answers to these questions, you can create a customer avatar.
A customer avatar is nothing but a persona that you are creating that you think they are your ideal customer. They are the ones who need your product or service the most.
Come up with the basic customer avatar by defining the details like age, gender location, marital status, job title, annual income, and education.
If you can match your customer avatar with a real person, who can get any benefits from your niche- then, Congratulations — you have found your niche.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Digital marketing has many branches to it and using most of the branches to get effective results is called integrated digital marketing.
Integrated digital marketing is about integrating multiple ways of marketing to get the most out of every form of marketing.
For example, you can use;
- Paid Advertisement — To make the people land on your content page to gain their attention to the content.
- In a way, you can acquire leads from the same people through an email form
- And then you can do Email marketing to nurture the leads you acquire through paid ads and you can convert them into your customer.
- And you can also use the same method by using SEO — to make people land on your content page.
- And you can also make people land on your content page by sharing the links on social media.
- You can also make people follow you on your social media by nurturing them in emails.
- If they follow you on social media — they will stay connected to your up-to-date content.
And by integrating all these methods, you will get the most attention from people.
And the more you get attention — the more you have the power to build trust with them.
The more they trust your product, the more there are chances of them becoming your customer.
And that’s how you get your product or service sold.
The power of personal branding in marketing
The first and most important thing is people, like to associate themselves with other people, not some weird logos.
Remember, the trust factor from the CATT funnel — it is easier to build trust if there is the face for the brand.
If people can associate you with your brand then there will be a strong relationship between you.
You can get customers for your product and service without any marketing if you have a strong personal brand
Just like, how CATT is used as a funnel for content marketing — there is also a blueprint for building a personal brand.
The downside of the personal brand is — you can’t sell it to someone else.
You have to put your neck out, the logic is simple — high responsibility yields a high reward.
There is a blueprint, by which you can establish a strong personal brand.
This blueprint is called as Mass Trust Blueprint.
The Evolution of a Personal Brand -MassTrust Blueprint
- Learn: Learning new skills is necessary for building a personal brand. You should learn the nuances of a specific skill. You should know all the concepts, facts, and procedures. You should be experimenting with the skillset for yourself before sharing it with the world.
- Work: Share your skill only if you have done something with Learn, apply and then share. Don’t share what you have learned, share what you have implemented. Show your work to people to understand the skill’s use case in a better way.
- Blog: Document and share your experience with the outer world. It can be any form, but knowing how to blog will be a game-changer for you. Even if you have to take videos — you have to write scripts. So blogging will help your audience to associate with you very strongly. Blogs can be edited multiple times but this is not possible in other forms of content.
- Consult: After having a certain amount of experience, you will be capable enough to consult others through their journey. At this point, just having a blog is not enough — you can build more credibility by helping more brands and businesses instead of working for them. The best part is you will be building relationships with new people and you will be getting paid for doing this. Don’t forget to add more value than you take.
- Mentor: With your experience, apart from helping businesses to grow — you should also help people who want to become like you. Mentoring is creating kings, it has an unmatchable experience over blogging and consulting.
- Startup: With the built credibility, you can start your product or service to solve the problems in your niche. And your personal brand will help in building a startup in so many ways.
If you have to summarize shortly; Learn a skill — work to gain experience — then share the experience — help other businesses to overcome their problems with your experience — guide other people, who want to become like you — create a product or service that solves the problems in your niche.
Conclusion
People often think of marketing as an expense but it is an investment.
If nobody knows that you have created a product or service, then who is going to buy them
And if no one is going to buy them, then how will your company sustain itself in the future
Every business needs marketing to create awareness to the target customer, that you have a product or service that will help them in solving their problems.
Use these fundamentals as a guide to learn marketing and lay down a blueprint for yourself.
