Content Marketing for Personal Branding!

Marketing a buzzword that is generally visualized as the mode of increasing the sale for a company. 

Instead, it is the most important practice used to spread awareness about a product, service, brand, etc. to the mass audience. 

Marketing is a scientific process aiming at first researching the consumers in such a depth so that the sale of product/service offered is effortless. 

Marketing not only targets acquiring new customers but also it works on retaining the existing customer for a lifetime. Indeed the product offered should maintain the high quality as well. Apple iPhone marketing campaigns are the best suitable example.

 Advertisement is an essential tool of marketing and let's discuss how this brings an impact on the overall marketing process. The prominent advertisement mediums are TV, Newspapers, magazines, flyers, Flex Holding, Social media, promotional SMS, etc. The advertisement based marketing is broadly categorized based on the medium used (i.e.) Traditional and Digital marketing, but the content is the king, which defines how effective the advertisement is.  

In the last century & even now, the traditional modes of marketing were widely used and are mostly based on interrupt based marketing to the masses. Also, the modes of communication used by traditional marketing require huge costs, and still the results can only be estimated. There are very few ways to find out whether the campaign of a particular product/service was successful or not. 

With the ease of access to the internet, the social media portals are accessed by millions of people and the reach of the content to distant parts of the world is much easier than in the early days of public internet access. And, due to the rise of social media and related mediums of communication, running the marketing campaign is much easier, with the lesser cost involved and higher target audience reach with minimal efforts. And due to the availability of nearly real-time analytics allows the campaign managers to measure its effectiveness. It also allows you to make changes to the campaign on the go. Therefore digital marketing has an extra edge over traditional marketing and takes much lesser time for the whole process. 

Earlier, we have said that marketing is basically a scientific process and whatever medium you use, Content is king. Also, the content is prepared based on the principle of “sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time.” So, in digital marketing, there is a concept called CATT(Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction) marketing funnel. 

Now as we mentioned the right message to the right person at the right time, means we need to target the right set of people, which can be very specific to a particular niche interest. 

Why? because this will help in creating the intended content as you cannot write anything about everything! And you cannot sell anything to everyone.

So, the CATT marketing funnel works on following four steps for each individual niche and mind it, it is an iterative process:

1. Content: Create useful content that attracts people from your niche. Now the type of content which is prepared depends on what message you want to convey to your audience. So, it would be blog posts, videos, live webinars, lead magnets, etc.
2. Attention: As the content is ready, to get some traction, it is supposed to get some eyeballs to read. So one way is that, while preparing your content you should be optimizing it as per search engine’s parameters or you may drive the traffic to your content using social media shares, referrals, paid ads, etc. 
3. Trust: to sustain your marketing strategies for longer periods of time, it is important to sustain your audience's trust. So you have to be consistent in generating quality content with a specific frequency and then using the tools with marketing automation, retargeting through ads your content will get credibility with new as well as existing users.
4. Transaction: This is the final stage, which ultimately gets your leads to convert into customers with a natural sales method as you have been churning out the content, which brought you some credibility of skill in a particular niche and once it is proven people do not hesitate to invest as it could save their precious time and efforts if they do it on their own.

Now, it does not stop here, the key is to bring the harmony of all the channels together (i.e) content marketing leading to email list generation and then using the email list for selling the products. So that instead of marketing a particular product/service, the content will be published and marketed through organic or paid channels. Ultimately reducing the efforts in the sale process of direct product/service which is basically an integrated marketing funnel.

 Now one of the biggest challenges an individual marketer faces is how to generate new content every day for a particular product niche when you are not even an expert in it. This is where your learning skill plays an important role and will lead to a part of building a personal brand. As we have already mentioned about the trust in your content will only be earned if you produce consistent quality content. So you may follow the approach for a personal brand building like:

• Learn the skill in your niche through learning the concepts and facts, and then practicing the procedures implementing those concepts. This will help you to strengthen your learning. 
• Look for work based on the learnings, solve real-life problems by working for others.
• Once you successfully complete the real-world assignment, write a detailed article explaining how you used your learning to solve the problem for a real-world situation. This practice will help you to have a better understanding of your thought process about the skill as when you try to teach a concept to someone it strengthens your learning. Doing this in the right way will accelerate your personal brand building process.
• Now you have enough hands-on experience related to skill and credibility in your niche, this is the time when you can start consulting other businesses on projects relevant to your niche.
• Also start creating your tribe and mentor them who are keen to work with you on a similar niche. This will help you to scale your learning to a higher extent and definitely helps you in your own work/business.
• Finally, you will get to a stage where you can start your own business and build your own product/services for the masses.
• And just like the CATT marketing funnel and integrated marketing framework, personal brand building activities are also iterative in nature if you are expanding your niches.

So, digital marketing not only brought a huge opportunity of direct marketing to the right set of audience but also to the individuals with a great platform to build their personal brand to lead themselves to reach new heights in their professional careers and design their journey to become an entrepreneur.

At last, I want to extend my courtesy to Digital Deepak for sharing this knowledge, as this will definietly help us all in this difficult time of Covid19 economic depression.