How To Master Marketing?

Mastering Marketing takes time and effort. It requires consistency and patience. This article will outline the fundamentals and key concepts that you need to understand and implement to become a Master of Marketing.

Understanding Marketing Fundamentals

It is often believed that marketing is based on creativity however, the truth is marketing is based on science as it involves understanding human psychology.

A product or a service should fulfill a need or solve a customer's problem. You cannot market a product or service that has no demand or need in the market.

When your product fits into the needs of the customers, the product sells for itself, you just have to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

If you do manipulative marketing by conveying a wrong message, though you acquire a customer, if his need is not fulfilled, he would never buy again and you are losing trust and your brand's reputation in the Industry.

Marketing is not just about acquiring new customers, it also involves engaging them and retaining them as long as the product fits their needs. 

That's why marketing should start right before the product and it has to be an integral process at all stages of product development. 

When you have a great product that people buy, you don't have to market them every time, they buy eventually, you focus on your brand and quality as you capture the market share.

As Peter Drucker said: The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

Digital Marketing Vs. Traditional marketing.

As you understand the fundamentals of marketing and where your focus should be, It is also essential to understand two types of marketing from a broader perspective.

In Digital marketing we use digital channels like Paid ads, SEO, Email Marketing, Social Media, Websites, and anything that can be reached via the internet to promote products and services.

In Traditional marketing, we use offline channels like print media, paper ads, banners, hoardings, telephone to promote the products and services.

Both have advantages and disadvantages. 

Traditional marketing has a wider reach than digital marketing and digital marketing has a precise targeting than traditional marketing.

While Digital marketing can work well with the India-1 segment whereas traditional marketing can work well with the India-3 segment

Source: Sajith Pai

Integrated Digital Marketing

As there are multiple digital channels that you can use for your marketing, it is not ideal to invest only in one channel. As we often hear, do not put all your eggs in one basket.

To illustrate, if you heavily rely on Search engine traffic and not focusing on other digital channels, a single Algorithm update can wipe off the entire traffic and you are at high risk of losing all your business, the same applies to other channels as well.

Focusing only on one channel at a time might not give results and other channels are not complimenting the growth and playing different roles in the funnel. It might be frustrating for a marketer when the desired results are not achieved.

The best way to approach this is to have a mix of all channels which can withstand the market volatility.

This is called Integrated Digital Marketing. This can be achieved by following a CATT framework that we are going to discuss now.

CATT Marketing Funnel

Every business, product creator, and service provider needs to create wealth. The formula that decides their fortune is

Wealth = n^ CATT

The amount of wealth you create is dependent on your niche along with how well you implement the CATT marketing funnel.

CATT stands for

• Content
• Attention
• Trust
• Transaction

Using this funnel with an Integrated Digital Marketing strategy gives you huge growth for your products and services.

Let us understand the funnel in detail.

Content: Create great content to attract people that educate them and engages them. Some content ideas are Lead magnets, Guides, Blogs, Videos, podcasts, etc.

Attention: Once you have the content in place, you drive attention to it using SEO, Social Media, and paid ads. 

Trust As you have great content and users paying attention to it, slowly trust starts building. Some subtle actions that indicate users trust are, they subscribe to your email list, they follow you, they read your content.

As trust builds, you have to fuel it on a continuous basis, by retarteging and personalized messaging through marketing automation. You talk to them as if you are sitting beside them as a friend, teacher, and mentor.

Transaction: As the users already like your content, you have their attention on all Digital channels, you already gained their trust, selling becomes easy. 

They believe that your product or service will solve their needs. As we continue to provide great support, they become repeat customers and act as brand ambassadors for our products and services. 

Personal Branding: MassTrust Blueprint

The truth is people buy from people.

People like to talk to people, not brands, it's fundamental human behavior. People get influenced by people and try to imitate them.

One downside of a personal brand is you cannot sell it as the entire business is dependent on you. However, one upside is that you can elevate any brand or start a new brand and take it to great heights with just your personal branding.

That’s the power of influencing people and personal branding. 

The personal brand has to evolve over time and it looks something like the below blueprint. This is called as MassTrust Blueprint

Learn - work - blog - consult - mentor - startup.

You Learn first and implement the learnings and work on them and gain practical knowledge and hands-on experiences. Your decisions are based on insights and experience and not on mere assumptions.

You share everything that you learned and experienced in the form of a blog, video, or a podcast, where people can look up to you for similar solutions that you have solved.

People will see you as a brand as you build trust with your blog and they would like to get your solutions through consulting and you provide solutions on what has to be done and the execution can be taken care of by the client.

As you continue to build trust where mass trust begins to happen people look up to you to mentor them and be your loyal followers.

The personal brand and mass trust that you have gained over time will help you to start startups or boost marketing efforts of products within your niche.

The mass trust blueprint is a cycle and it becomes an integral part of life.

Once you put these laws of marketing into practice, practice, and practice over time you will become the Master of Marketing.

You can connect with me to learn more about Marketing. As I specialize in SEO, we can discuss more on how to improve your visibility on Organic Search.