Warning: Don't let your marketing hold you back

All of us have appreciated the marketing of some of the products and services somewhere in our lifetime. Many times it happens that we see some ads and fall in love with the product and want to purchase it, many times the packaging of the product in the departmental store we go creates an urge to buy that instantly, and sometimes we buy the products we might never put in use as well. How does that happen? Isn’t it some form of marketing that includes branding, creativity in packaging, the content delivery while ads and the list goes on. 

Also as there is a proverb that do not judge a book by its cover. But don’t we all make a first impression of the book by its cover. Isn’t creating a better cover so that the sales of the book can be maximized is a form of marketing itself?

This article is for anyone and everyone who wants to learn basics about marketing. Marketing is not only required by companies to sell their products but marketing is a way of life. We need to be better marketers to sell our skills in interviews, to negotiate with parents for our wishes, to make people understand us in a better way, to be a better student who is able to communicate what he has studied to name a few. If you look in the corporate world and the startup world being a good marketer is of utmost importance to sell your idea to investors, to sell your products to consumers and to make everyone fall in love with the products and services you offer.

If you see around yourself all the companies which have scaled up and are pioneers in their field are because of great marketing efforts. Apple is one brand which comes in my mind when I think of remarkable marketing. There are so many brands which sell cell phones but when we think of the iPhone we think of the class, sophistication. It is because it has built that persona in the mind of users about the brand. And the fact that Steve Jobs was an extraordinary marketer isn’t hidden from all of us.

While thinking about marketing a lot of questions pop up in our mind.

• What does marketing involve?
• Is sales a part of marketing?
• Is content a part of marketing?
• Are graphics a part of marketing?
• What can I do to improve skills

We will be exploring the inclusions of marketing, how can anyone become a great marketer and the article will be really useful for entrepreneurs, bloggers, content creators, youtubers, someone who wants to grow their personal brand and anyone who wants to become better at marketing. So let us now start with understanding what exactly marketing is in some depth.

First of all let us understand what all you should have/ know in order to become a better marketer?

How to become a better marketer

• First and foremost differentiator between a good and an average marketer is the ability to communicate. Good communication skills are essential to become a good marketer. It doesn't necessarily mean to have good language skills in certain languages. What a good communicator does is that he is able to clearly explain his thoughts to the other people.
• Being positive, selecting the right niche and being number one in your niche is essential. It will help you become the leader in your category and gain the trust of people towards you.
• Next important thing to be a good marketer is to know your end goal. For example, having 1 crore till next year can be an end goal. You can further divide it to subgoals per customer needed for making these as per your product price.
• Learning about the target market helps in becoming a better marketer as our efforts are much more directed. Example if we are aware of the fact that our target people are those who have cell phones and internet access and mostly stay in metros we would be able to create our campaigns in a better way rather than creating for the whole of India.
• Also getting as much information about diverse areas and the domain in which our product/ service is helps us become a better marketer as the more we know the more we grow. Reading and increasing our knowledge base helps us in getting a different perspective to the same approach if required.

• Having a knowledge of economics also helps us as marketers to get some more insights about the audience and the how the economy runs in general.

Let us now start with getting some insights about fundamentals of marketing

Fundamentals about marketing

“The best marketing doesn't feel like marketing.” — Tom Fishburne, Founder & CEO, Marketoonist

This is my favorite quote about marketing. Marketing should be such that it should fit the consumers purpose and should not feel at all pushy. Think about an advertisement that you see on TV and you just can connect to it at a deeper level but that in the real sense is true marketing. Before some time I watched an advertisement on whatsapp and they just showed the daughter talking to her mom over video call and it would be so relatable to a lot of people. The right amount of expressions, emotions, the right content , and the right message to right people at the right time is what good marketing should do.

Another thing what marketers should consider is to understand their audience really well and try to fit the product with the audience's needs. Marketing is an iterative approach where the marketers have to evolve at every stage with the feedback of consumers, with the seasons, with the advancement of technology and with some unpredictable circumstances like COVID. You can't follow the same marketing techniques all the time. Change is the real game of marketing.

The major role of marketing is to create brand awareness, to let people know about the brand in a real sense and to make people understand about the uniqueness of the respective brands. It lets create a unique persona about the brand in the audience's mind. What a good market does is that it helps the product to position in the market the right way. For example, even though make my trip and Oyo both of them allow you to book hotel rooms but their marketing has helped them in positioning their brands in a different way. It is only because of their marketing efforts that we know that the Oyo is a hotel aggregator.

We must be aware of the fact that even the best marketing efforts cannot save a product that is of no use to consumers. So as a marketer it is our responsibility to be authentic in our marketing and not to list out the unrealistic advantages and benefits of our products to consumers. We should always focus on improving our products to an extent that word of mouth becomes the best form of marketing for those.

Components and the evolution of marketing

Lot of people get confused with marketing as only branding or copyrighting. But in real sense marketing is a lot more than that. Marketing starts even before the launch of the product by understanding the customers, getting insights about the market and continuing even after the sales by providing best customer support and taking measures to get the regular feedback and keep the customer happy. Marketing includes various components which in integration create a good marketing technique for positioning of any brand and putting across the relevant audience.

Here are some of the components of marketing

• Research
• Competition study
• Advertising
• Sales
• Copyrighting
• Customer support
• Marketing analytics
• Product placement
• Public relations

Now let us find out how marketing evolved from the traditional approach of in person to the digital age marketing.

Evolution of marketing

• Traditional marketing

Some 20 years back we were not even aware of the digital forms of communication and media transfer. The best mode of marketing using a traditional approach was hoardings, banners, TV ads, newspaper ads and using other print media like magazines. 

This form of marketing is still widely used by big companies who can invest a lot in their ads and who want to reach a wider audience who are not having the access to the digital media.

This form of marketing can still prove to be most beneficial for some forms as still people listen to radios and 65% of people in India can be reached via radio( Source: Financial express)

Even TV is in 197 millions of homes in India ( Source wikipedia) so the reach of the traditional form of ads is massive compared to digital ones.

However these ads are really expensive and cant be measured instantly. So that is why the focus of brands have shifted towards digital marketing as well.

• Digital marketing

With the use of digital marketing the best thing is we can connect with the target audience and we can connect to the people who are looking for the information or product we are trying to sell. This creates a need and the demand at once and helps in increasing the conversion rate.

Another benefit of using Digital marketing is that it is a direct response marketing in the sense that it acts as an instant response marketing for the audience to take necessary actions instantly.  

Also using the digital marketing techniques we can track our campaigns and modify after analyzing the data from the previous ones which proves to be helpful again in getting to know our customers in a better way and create products accordingly.

Also, the cost of digital marketing is comparatively low and it can be adopted by anyone who has a small budget for marketing to start with.

The Marketing process

Now as we are aware of the types and how the marketing has evolved it is also important to understand the how to go about the marketing for our product or services.

• Niche selection

The marketing should be well though into before even launching a product. The first and the very foremost step is to select your niche. It can be health, can be food, can be educating about certain topics can be digital marketing can be travelling etc. The niche should be selected very carefully as your success depends on selecting the right niche.

While selection of the niche you should consider

1. There should be a demand of the topics/ products you are going to market for
2. The niche should be of your interest and passion
3. You should have the necessary talent to be an authority in that particular niche

• Content: C

Once you have selected your niche, the next major step is to create the content around that niche. The content should be engaging and should provide some value to your users. It should attract them to come back to your page/ blog. The content can be anything that adds value; it can be posts, articles, newsletters, blogs, videos or even webinars.

• Attract: A

Now once the content is created and you need to start sharing it across with the right audience through social media, seo, sem, paid ads etc as product and content about which people do not know is same as no product. So you need to make as many people aware about your content as you could and attract them towards your content.

• Trust: T

Next step is to build trust amongst your audience, this can be done by various techniques like re-targeting, sending regular emails to people who have subscribed to your newsletters, and also by adopting marketing automation to make your life easier.

• Transaction: T

Now once you have the attracted audience who trust you by the means of your content the last step is the crucial one. It is to make a transaction, a deal, sell that product with the natural sales where audience is willing to pay the price as they feel that there is the need of the product/ service you are offering.

This whole process is called the CATT marketing funnel where the wealth you are creating will depend on all the above explained steps and your niche.

Wealth = n^CATT

As we have progressed ahead and learnt the whole funnel of marketing it is also important to know how to implement it. 

As we now know digital marketing can be done through various methods like social media marketing, Email marketing, SEO, SEM, display ads and content marketing.

What do you think is the best approach for your marketing campaigns?

Integrated marketing approach

Don’t you think each of these have their pros and cons for example SEM can be costlier, social media campaigns might need to shuffle a lot, SEO has become too competitive, E mailers people might unsubscribe to and so on. 

So do you agree with the same school of thoughts that the best approach to follow is integrated marketing where we combine all the various methods so as to maximize our marketing returns.

One example can be to write a piece of content that provides value addition, get audience through SEO, SEM and social ads for this content and again do the SEO, SEM on this content so that it ranks more, get the email ids from this content,increase your subscribers, retarget the audience with your content and then get the transaction done.

This whole approach is called integrated marketing where we take benefits of all the different methods of marketing and increase our sales and brand awareness.

Now after getting some insights about how, why and the approach towards marketing our first step is to take the necessary action. It is of utmost importance that people know about you so as to establish your authority in a particular field. For someone who is looking to progress ahead in their career it is essential to create their personal brand.

Let us see some of the advantages of having a personal brand:

1. People know about you 
2. People can trust you
3. You have an upper hand compared to the equally qualified people but lack personal brand
4. You have a platform to showcase your work to your clients.
5. Your brand becomes your CV.

How can you establish yourself as a personal brand?

1. Select your niche
2. Learn/ Read and get in depth knowledge around your niche
3. Put your knowledge to use, get some freelance projects, work somewhere and enhance your skills
4. Start a blog and even a youtube channel and start posting continuously
5. Start consulting people in your own field
6. Start mentoring, this is the best way of growing.
7. Startup your venture.

So now after going through this extensive write up about marketing I am sure a lot of the queries you had related to marketing would have been resolved. I tried my best to cover the core concepts of marketing, how to become a better marketer, how to enhance your personal brand presence, the whole funnel and the process of marketing and also the different approaches for marketing. I would love it if you could leave a comment on what you learnt from the whole article and if there is something I missed which I would love to cover in the next article.

Also I would love to hear from you about your thoughts and approach towards marketing that you are currently following. I have also written an article about whether marketers are born or made. What do you think? Give it a read and find for yourself. Also I would love to take this opportunity to thank my mentor digital Deepak for helping me to uncover mysteries about marketing and yes you can get the mentor ship from him by enrolling in his internship program https://deepak.me/internapply