The end of this second decade began with a tectonic shift, a shift that ushered in challenging times, literally forcing businesses to make several uncomfortable choices. Most businesses were shaken from their very foundations and pushed into the digital land. Adapt, adopt, employ the best marketing tools and techniques or perish. Those were the only choices.
As a business owner one may well be facing several questions. How to move the business ahead with effective marketing strategies? Should one shift entirely from conventional advertising to online marketing? or adopt the middle path? Does one need to build a personal brand at all? How does one effectively communicate their ideas to their market?
So many questions and yes, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed. This of course can easily lead to dilemma and inaction. There’s so much marketing and technical jargon floating around. The marketing terminologies and different aspects that need to be clearly understood are many. A barrage of questions crisscrossing the mind is normal.
In this article ahead, we seek answers to the above questions and more;
There’s so much that goes into building a successful business. Covid has massively catalyzed and accelerated the shift from traditional to online mediums. A lack of understanding or overlooking any of the major elements can have a major impact on the business.
I want to start this article by mentioning that establishing a love for marketing and the digital medium can fuel one through these difficult times. Strive to drive your business ahead, with greater confidence, with the help of proper marketing principles and medium.
Business owners balked at the online marketing and sales side of the business, now it’s become a critical and central aspect. It doesn’t matter how great a business you’ve had in the past. Evolving and rapidly adapting to the online medium comes from a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of sales and marketing. There’s a lot that goes into your business when your marketing and sales activities shift from offline to online. To that end, we’ll look at the aspects of marketing that have everything to do with your success in the online world.
Leave alone small businesses, many companies continue to shy & stay away from marketing themselves on the Internet. The power and importance of digital marketing in the present scenario cannot be understated. If you are seeking information on how Internet marketing / Digital Marketing can improve your business and online presence. Below are some insights on why you must seriously consider internet marketing:
For most small businesses, the lines between advertising, marketing & sales are often blurred. Many small businesses tend to operate by word of mouth and often combine that with placing advertisements across various physical mediums. While there is no substitute for word of mouth business, widening the customer base and adopting the digital medium has become critical to survival and long-term business growth.
Why Digital Marketing?
The mass market now have easy and convenient access to the internet via their smartphones. Billions of people now enjoy easy & quick access to various online platforms. Many people are seeking out better, faster, and cost-effective ways to solve their problems and overcome their various challenges. The opportunity for businesses to reach out to their target audience is immense. Ensuring that your business stands out. Positioning a business at the right place and time to solve people’s problems, enables a business to be well placed to attract leads and prospects.
Traditional Marketing suffers in comparison to the digital medium. With the conventional medium, communication is one way only. You advertise, promote through various physical mediums like radio, tv, banners, newspaper & magazines. People read it, listen to it or view it. There’s zero direct feedback via the medium. You test, try and experiment with what works constantly. This all happens without any engagement and interaction directly from your prospect or customer. Of course, there’s zero measurability coupled with poor insights and assumptions and guesses.
While this does not mean that conventional medium is to be ignored and done away with. It all depends on understanding digital and traditional forms of marketing and determining a suitable medium based upon the products to be marketed. The reach of each medium is different and finding the most cost-effective way to create a presence in the minds of the largest users is the key.
What makes one medium superior or better?
It all starts with studying and understanding your markets, studying the market trends and customers to find out what works. It’s all about getting into the minds of your prospects.
Digital Marketing has the distinct advantage of being a two-way medium. All communication happens engagingly. The customers stand to gain a richer & deeper experience that provides a better look and feel of the products. The online medium provides immediate & instant feedback from the target audience. Interaction is fast and it’s able to address concerns, make improvements, and solve queries. All interactions can happen quickly and are often done in real-time. The digital medium offers great & deep insights into customer behavior through their engagement with your brand, products, and behavior patterns.
The advent and popularity of Social media in the last several years has cost-effectively catalyzed the visibility of businesses. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc, has given businesses the ability to reach out and engage like never before. Wide engagement with thousands and thousands of people rapidly and effectively is now possible.
Digital marketing cannot be ignored in today’s times, simply because a lot of businesses have adopted the digital medium. This can well mean and include your competitors as well. The first and fast movers are the ones who gain exposure and create a lasting presence in the market. If one does not keep up with the trends, then the consequence and price to pay for the absence are substantial in the long run.
What are the benefits of Digital Marketing?
- Enables two-way interaction
- Creative and engaging medium
- Comparatively, cost-effective
- Targeted & Customised approach
- Works 24 hours for you
- Active engagement with customers
Digital Marketing enjoys an unparalleled advantage of reaching out to the literate population. This English-speaking population of over a 100million people commands the market with its spending power.
What are the advantages of Conventional Marketing mediums?
- The TV medium. Cost-effective with a very wide reach of 800–1000 million people.
- Radio: An impressive reach to 65% of the Indian population
- Newspaper: Achieves a reach of 465 million people.
For generic products that need wide targeting, the TV stands out apart. It has a massive advantage of being able to reach +800 million homes, and that too at highly competitive costs. Often the advertisements can be coupled with direct response marketing to generate an instant response or call to action.
The major drawback of conventional marketing is its inability to provide specific and measurable results. Measurability, engagement is the key differentiators that are the big pluses of the Digital medium. Being able to make effective use of either or both of these mediums requires a deeper and better knowledge of core marketing principles and their fundamentals.
Why does one need to invest in Marketing?
Understanding the Markets, their needs, demands, and requirements all become inherently possible with a good education in Marketing disciplines. This education can provide the highest ROI for a business. With its ability to drive the business forward and to provide direct returns, marketing happens to be an extremely vital aspect of running a business. All other aspects of business cannot return an immediate ROI. Having an edge in marketing can often be the difference between being a leader and being successful in a given market.
The Basics of Marketing
Marketing starts by developing an understanding of Marketing itself, which is nothing but a means to an end. It’s all about creating a perception in the minds of the customers.
The objective of marketing is to understand a customer’s needs so well that your product or service fits him like a glove. It just ends up selling itself, on autopilot.
“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous” Peter Drucker
What is marketing?
Marketing starts well before creating the product itself. It begins with understanding the customer completely. By figuring out the customer’s needs perfectly, you create and position a product that’s a perfect fit for your customer.
Marketing is all about conveying the right message, at the right time, to the right person. The purpose of marketing is to keep an existing customer happy. This is done by establishing and engaging and open communication with them. Making the customers happy ensures retention so that they happily become your brand ambassadors and loyal customers for life.
Marketing continues to be a lifelong process and that which does not end with a sale. Having a regular communication channel with existing customers goes a long long way in fostering and nurturing a relationship that gets built on trust.
Identifying your “why” — is what makes you different. Knowing your weakness in addition to your strengths and understanding your competitors’ strengths are aspects that give one an edge.
The whole purpose of marketing is to build a brand that captures a pole position in the minds of the customer. At the same time, it’s also vital that the product stays supreme and above the marketing. A great product ought to sell itself.
Ensuring that the product or service is very good at all times, ensures that the marketing activities go a long way in propelling and sustaining the business growth. A great product converts your customers into brand ambassadors. There’s just no competition when it comes to the word-of-mouth business. People will simply buy based on their strong trust in the recommendation of their friends and families. It’s a known fact that deep trust within a large number of people leads to excellent word of mouth publicity which results in long-lasting business. Building word of mouth trust is a business's biggest asset and a long-term strategy.
With this, it’s also imperative to understand how to correctly position the business uniquely in the minds of its customers. This comes with an understanding of the market.
Niche Research & Selection
Often the only reason businesses survive the first three years is if they have prepared themselves well. It is in the first three years where most businesses get extinguished.
Businesses that understand their areas of strengths, their focus, their market, and work diligently to establish their unique presence in a particular niche begin by looking & studying a small focus area thoroughly. They go into depths to study how many other businesses are operating in the niche. How much work is required, what are the pain points in a given niche that’s been overlooked by others? Eventually, they uncover a difficult area, requires a fair amount of work and preparation and positioning.
Networking, reaching out and connecting, and communicating with others helps to brainstorm ideas, understand challenging and problem areas.
If you have a niche in mind already, do your research. See how viable it might be. Speak to several whom you know, who are in a similar line of activity, especially in or around that niche. Try to get different perspectives and establish a picture of what the customers expect, need & desire.
Understand fully what is important, determine the profitability potential, and be prepared for it. Once you are armed thoroughly with all information needed and you’ve made your choice of niche. It’s time to test and evaluate your niche. Take action and test the waters, measure the results and study the insights.
There is no perfect process for discovering a niche. Just do the homework well, and take action. Dive in. The learning & lessons come to the doer. The process of improving and ultimately experiencing growth will come from practical experience. Marketing and the need for it in all its various forms will come from a thorough understanding of the prospect's needs and experimenting. What other areas should you be aware of?
Integrated Digital Marketing Campaign
Brands are constantly fighting for the attention of their customers. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you come across hundreds of them everywhere. Whether it’s the physical medium or the internet, it’s common to see hundreds of them vying for your attention.
So, intending to achieve better results, establish a solid brand presence, and ultimately driving more sales, a business needs to have a better all-encompassing approach. The need to be noticed is done by achieving a deeper presence in people’s minds. Building lasting trust and nurturing them from a prospect to becoming a loyal repeat customer.
What exactly is the Integrated Approach?
The whole idea of digital marketing is creating a unique and distinguishable presence across all channels and mediums. It’s a strategy that forms a blend and mix of all your marketing tactics. Each campaign and approach are designed to complement each other, and go a long way in creating a consistent image of the brand and product in the minds of the prospects and customers. By having a consistent and memorable presence, you’re able to establish a strong & deeper presence in the market.
Having an integrated digital marketing approach means creating and defining a well-structured marketing plan.
How does one create a unified presence?
By developing a plan and method to create an identical experience for your audience, your marketing efforts work together and end up making more sense and connecting better with your customers.
People at various contact points experience seamless communication and expression. This means that your campaign works across different types of advertising, like paid media, organic search, social media, and email. All of your marketing campaigns are consistent across all forms.
Being able to come up with an integrated approach comes from a deeper understanding of marketing concepts and the basics of marketing. To this end, it’s vital to understand the basics of marketing and “The CATT Marketing funnel”.
What is the CATT marketing funnel & framework?
CATT stands for Content, Attention, Trust & Transaction. Having good quality content that helps in solving people’s problems by grabbing their attention and building trust is the goal of this framework. It is the act of giving value first that helps and goes a long way in building and establishing trust. This trust ultimately translates into transactions. When you intend to sell something, the prospect who has now developed trust in you will pay attention because of the established trust factor.
CATT Marketing funnel is nothing but an approach to achieving your business goals. By applying the CATT funnel, you can boost your market in your niche, and that ultimately ends up creating wealth for you.
Wealth equals n^ CATT, where ^ denotes power. Your niche (n) can be successful and powerful with the CATT funnel you build and implement.
Niche is the category or specialty of expertise you offer or operate in to cater to an audience. Identify and choose the right niche in a hungry market, and your achievements and wealth depend on your choice of the niche. A group of people that have some major pain points or challenges is identified in the first step. Next, you position yourself as the authority and help them to solve and overcome their problems with the aid of your services or product offerings.
Content and good content rules supreme. Go about creating highly useful & purposeful content that’s placed strategically over the internet. Content like blog posts, videos, podcasts, live webinars act as lead magnets and begin to generate leads for your business. Your content works for you and starts to attract the targeted audience.
Attention to your content is achieved by driving traffic to your content. This is achieved organically by SEO tactics or social media, and inorganic is achieved by paid ads using Facebook and google ads networks.
Trust and building trust with your audience using marketing automation and retargeting methods is carried out. Personalized communication tactics based on your target audience via email, enables each person to feel they are being communicated with personally. This method of building trust is called deep marketing. This is a highly effective form of marketing since the person feels that you understand their pain points better and with authority.
Transaction and means ultimately converting your leads into customers with the above natural sales methods.
CATT funnel is how your audience goes through the entire marketing to sales cycles journey with you. The most important thing that you should know and be crystal clear even before creating the products is to understand and identify your customer and their needs.
- What problem am I looking to solve with my product or service?
- What product do I need to create that will satisfy and exceed the customer’s needs and demands?
- You need to ask yourself, who needs this product?
- Will they be my one-time customer or will they continue to buy and need the product or service for a longer duration?
Once you have the answers and clarity in your mind, then half the journey is made. Marketing then is about conveying the right message to the right person at the right time. Once the customer psychology is understood along with a close understanding of their needs then the product can help them move from the current state to the desired state.
How does one communicate effectively?
Successful marketing begins by having and acquiring good communication skills. Having the ability to artfully communicate and persuade the audience is invaluable and highly desirable. As a business owner augmenting your skill sets and abilities by being savvy in conversational skills, writing, listening, and being able to articulate your ideas effectively. All these can go a long way in being able to understand your market and position yourself effectively as an authority and leader in the desired choice of market, and this comes with Personal Branding.
Personal Branding
Personal branding is a word that is seemingly filled with tons of dread & fear. Many have not considered this aspect at all. Several tend to disregard this aspect, as they perceive this as fearful, difficult, and dreadful.
Whether you’re an outgoing type or an introvert, talking and getting comfortable with random people can be intimidating for many. However, this aspect of connecting with the right people has undergone a sea change with the advent of social media. While nothing comes close to face-to-face connections that establish deep and lasting relationships, joining and participating in the right groups, and being within the right communities online can and does make a big difference in establishing connections and an online presence.
So how can one take Personal Branding further & wider?
Building a strong brand image starts with the purpose of establishing a presence of yourself over time and getting widely known in your field of business. This aspect required consistent & diligent focus. It starts by giving and working with the intent to foster and build trust. Eventually, this dedicated effort helps in building a solid reputation, and in being known as the best in what you have to do and offer.
The business owner identifies closely with their business and becomes the face of his business. People communicate with people, and the business owner is the voice of his business, turns into a role of influencer, and is the best brand ambassador of the business.
It’s very important to build trust and reputation among your audience. People love individual to individual communication rather than business to individual communication. Branding needs to be your key strategy if you want your business to grow. The evolution of personal branding is achieved through these steps below:
Learn: Invest in learning a new skill through concepts, facts, and procedures. Fully understanding the concepts, the facts, and practicing the correct procedures.
Work: Apply the new skills, and put them to work. Move from practice stage to implementation. Experiment, measure, and track in the real-world scenario to ensure a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
Blog: Share and write about what you have learned. Freely share valuable insights and nuggets that you’ve experienced through your work. By the act of writing, you not only gain a better and deeper understanding, but the process leads you to also build up your brand and authority in your niche.
Consult: Once you’ve established a personal brand through your blog and various content online, you also have work experience under your belt and have become an expert. Consider providing consulting services to other businesses.
Help people to understand how it is done and you will stand to gain authority through your writings. Only when you write the stuff as a blogger will you gain more clarity and a better understanding of the subject that you write.
Mentor: Mentor & inspire others who strive to become like you. Mentoring helps you to scale your understanding to a whole new level. If blogging is basic level one in clarity, then consulting is the next level of clarity, and mentoring brings in a whole new level of clarity.
Start-up: Start your own unique product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, its challenges, and problems. Couple the expertise of your skills and abilities, and experience and then launch your startup in the market
In a nutshell, this cycle runs as under and the process of learning, development, and growth is an unending cycle:
–Learn a subject — — Work — –Blog about it — — Consult other people(1 on 1) — — Mentor a group of people — –Start-up–
Summary and Conclusion
In this article, we have discussed the fundamentals of digital marketing, digital marketing vs traditional marketing. the CATT marketing funnel, integrated digital marketing approach, personal branding,
Businesses cannot imagine and survive without marketing. All humans per-se are marketers at heart. The procedure to acquire new skills and abilities begins by learning new skills through understanding the core concepts, remembering the facts, and putting into practice the learned procedures.
Start practicing your new skills by implementing them and experimenting. Taking massive action is the only way one gains a deeper understanding of the various Marketing aspects
