Are you losing your time & energy by not learning marketing? (10 mins read)

Almost everybody is interested in becoming a business tycoon without learning about the principles that run marketing. The common misconception grasping people's minds is that marketing is based on creativity. However, that doesn't stand true because marketing is based on Science. It is the art of effectively communicating with your customer with a mindset of helping them. Let us learn further how science governs marketing.

Firstly, marketing starts way before creating a product. The initial & most important step is to first understand who your intended audience will be and what are their needs that will assist you in making a product that naturally fits their life. When the product is created with a perspective of the customer's intent and needs in mind, it would never fail to impress customers and generate revenue simultaneously. Thus, the bottom line here is to create a product considering your customers' needs that will itself take care of your product's success & company's goodwill - "A great product converts your customers into brand ambassadors." Marketing is about conveying the right message, to the right person at the right time. It is not just about selling, it is about keeping existing customers happy by communicating with them so that they can remain customers for life. The word of mouth can become your biggest marketing asset.

The eventual goal of any marketer or businessman is to create good wealth and reputation by selling out their products and services. However, sometimes setting up a higher financial goal becomes overwhelming as it always seems impossible to achieve. The solution to this is setting up a goal logically & creating a plan to achieve it rather than thinking of a vague financial goal, for example if your plan is to create a crore in any number of years, the way to achieve this is by either setting the product price at 100 & selling it out to 1,00,000 customers or set the product price at 1000 & sell it to 10,000 customers & so on. Breaking down your financial goal in this way makes it more achievable.

Marketing education is rooted in human psychology and that is why it has a long shelf life, which means marketing won't end until the needs of the customers are constantly increasing. To create a useful product is to gauge what your customers are searching for. Therefore, it is worth investing in marketing as society's needs are ever-evolving, and understanding their needs will give your business direct returns. Everything other than Marketing like Production, Manufacturing, HR, and Accounting administration is an expense that doesn't generate an immediate Return On Investment hence, marketing is the most valuable investment in any business. Marketing & Sales is rooted in human psychology. Marketing is a subject that has been alive for thousands of years & will be alive for thousands of years in the future. Marketing is a game of perceptions & perceptions can only be created by humans, never by robots. Therefore, there will be no artificial intelligence algorithm that will rule marketing & replace humans. The time, energy & money that you invest in learning marketing will undoubtedly have a long shelf life.

Do you ever ponder if marketing could be done without learning communication skills?

If yes, then pondering over this thought is worth thinking about as good communication will lead you to generate more leads & hence will help in good marketing. Good communication doesn't mean sophisticated English. Good communication means communicating your thoughts effectively to your customers.

In order to improve your communication skills, you need to write as you talk. The key point is to keep your conversation extremely simple & also, refrain from using heavy vocabulary to grab your customer's interest.

Lastly, your communication will always be effective if you understand your target audience well. When you know whom to sell your product or service to, it becomes easy to initiate a conversation in your customer's minds that will nudge them to know more about your product or service.

The evolution of Digital Marketing

Before the advancement in marketing, people sold their products which were quite generic in nature through Television or radio to reach a wider audience, however, it lacked the personal touch with customers and that was the biggest disadvantage of traditional marketing. Digital marketing now has the power to reach the right audience & deliver the right product which is more favorable than delivering a product that might be unuseful to the majority of people. Digital marketing is the best medium to reach the affluent English-speaking population in India with a spending power of 100 million users.

Let us now learn about the fundamentals of Digital Marketing

1. CATT marketing funnel - This is the funnel we can use to achieve our goals. CATT means Content, Attention, Trust & Transaction. When you have good quality content which helps in solving users’ problems, then you get more attention from users and they will give you the opportunity to build trust. This trust will convince you to make a transaction with the people.

It is the secret to boosting and marketing in our niche by applying the CATT marketing funnel to create wealth.

Wealth= n^ CATT

Where ^ denotes power. Where your niche (n) will be successful and powerful with the CATT that you will apply.

[N]—– stand for Niche. The category/expertise/interest you are going to offer to your audiences. Your achievements and wealth depend on the niche you choose. We choose a niche for a hungry market. These people have some problems and you are going to solve their problems with your product and services.

[C]—– stand for Content. Content is king. Create useful content, that attracts people to your blog posts, videos, podcasts, live webinars, and lead magnets to generate leads for your tribe.

[A]—–stand for Attention. It means driving attention (traffic) to your content using SEO, social media, Paid Ads, and Referrals.

[T]—–stand for Trust. Building trust with your audiences with tripwires, marketing automation, and retargeting. One of the methods of building trust is deep marketing where you send out communication that is much personalized based on who your target audience is so that each and every person feels like you are communicating with them directly to the point.

[T]—–stand for Transaction. It means converting your leads into customers with natural sales methods.

CATT funnel is how your audience will go through with you in the entire journey.

2. Integrated Digital Marketing - This is the framework so we know what to execute to achieve our goals. CATT is the framework of how an individual user goes through different stages. Integrated Digital Marketing is the framework that will have people at every stage of the funnel at all times.

Integrated digital marketing is a method of engaging customers and prospects with your company or brand that combines all parts of marketing communications to work together and assist the customer along their journey of awareness to loyalty and advocacy. A great example of Integrated Digital Marketing is Coke's 'share a coke with' campaign, which used unified messaging across TV, Social, Outdoor, and Display leading to a 7% uplift in Coke consumption by the target demographic, making it one of the most successful Coke campaigns in history.

3. Personal branding - It is imperative to build your personal brand in your niche to build up trust and reputation among your audiences. Personal branding Inspires Trust in Your Audience. Many people, especially those of the millennial generation, don’t trust larger businesses that utilize traditional advertising, that’s why there’s such a big push nowadays to “shop small”, and why influencer advertising is so successful. People are much more likely to buy from, and listen to, someone who looks, talks and acts like them as opposed to a large corporation. An upside to using personal branding is that it can give rise to many brands through influence & at the later stages the personal brand might get less popular than the brands that you helped.

To evolve a personal brand, a few things are required-

(i) Learning a new skill through concepts, facts & procedures. Understand the concepts, remember the facts & practice the procedures.

(ii) Put whatever you learned into practice through your job or through your own projects.

(iii) Write everything you learned & experienced through your work in a blog. When you write, your thoughts get sorted out while simultaneously building your personal brand.

(iv) You can now start consulting other businesses instead of working for them because you now have a personal brand, work experience & have learned the fundamentals.

(v) Now that you have enough experience & expertise in your niche, you can mentor other people who want to become like you. It will help deepen your knowledge more.

(vi) Start your own product or service with the knowledge that you have gained.

The framework that we can use to evolve our personal brand is MassTrust Blueprint.

You are building trust with a lot of people. You start with learning then you work on a particular subject & then start blogging about it and then you start consulting, then you do mentor, and eventually you can start your own startup. It is a circular cycle that will never end and you will keep learning through the process.

This brings us to the end of this all, I would like to appreciate you all reading my blog till the end & want to reiterate what we learned. In this blog, we covered the fundamentals of digital marketing, CATT marketing funnel, integrated digital marketing, personal branding, and digital marketing vs traditional marketing. In order to learn marketing, it is crucial that we start implementing as we learn so that we can create value as well as wealth out of it & help not only other's businesses but we can start up our own too.