What is Marketing and How it Works?

Let's accept the fact that for most of the business people out there, marketing equals advertising.

But marketing is the act of defining the uniqueness of your product. Marketing is what you say it and how you say it when you want to explain how awesome your product is & why people should buy it.

In this article, we will go deep into discussing:

• Marketing and its fundamentals
• Difference between Traditional and Digital Marketing
• The CATT Marketing Funnel
• How Integrated Digital Marketing works
• Personal Branding and its effects on Businesses.

1. What is Marketing?

According to the American Marketing Association — "Marketing is the activity, set of instructions, and practices of creating, delivering, exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

Now, coming to the real world.

Marketing, for many business people, is simply selling on a large scale. But, marketing is not just selling but also a process of keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they can remain a customer for life & become an advocate for your brand.

Marketing is purely based on Science. It starts with creating a product or service by understanding the consumer & consumer's need, promoting it well to the targeted customer, and moving it through the appropriate selling channel.

There are 3 core principles of marketing. Marketing is about sending...

1. The right message
2. To the right person
3. At the right time.

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sell itself." — Peter Ducker

The process of marketing is to build a brand & capture the position in the minds of the customer.

A lot of time, business people focus only on marketing their product than the product quality. What they don't understand is — Marketing is a game of perception, the product is rooted in reality. Never let marketing become more important than your product. A good product sells itself. It converts your customer brand ambassador. The purpose of marketing is to build a brand and capture the position in the minds of the customer.

2. Traditional v/s Digital Marketing

The main difference between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing is the medium through which an audience encounters a marketing message. While traditional marketing uses traditional media like magazine, television, radio, and hoardings, digital marketing uses digital media, such as social media, website, and email.

Let's discuss the main topics that explaining better contrast among them:

Reaching v/s Attracting:

Brands using traditional strategies investigate ways to quickly capture the audience's attention and make an impact or leave a mark every time an ad is displayed.

Digital channels rely on relationship building & making connections. Instead of only reaching the customer, digital marketing uses meaningful content to attract new customers & engage with them.

Scope of Interaction:

A big difference between traditional & digital marketing is the method of analyzing the brand-client relationship.

Newspaper advertising is a traditional way of opening straight to your audience, but it is only advertising & doesn't work for sales. You can also leave a call to action, but you can't measure it precisely as it is not the only medium you must be using.

In digital marketing, interactions are vital. You can build a marketing funnel that flows from advertising to building a closer, more direct, and controlled connection with leads. Also, it is measurable to a great extent.

Result Tracking:

Seeing the audience's reaction in real-time is what sets both ways apart. Think about TV advertisements.

How can you detect exactly how many people watched it? What they did after watching it? How did they perceive your brand & product?

Impacts like that take time and a lot of effort to measure in traditional advertising. But measuring all this is much easier in digital marketing.

With a well-structured campaign and good KPIs, you can test various approaches at the same time, monitor multiple channels, and understand which of those works better for you.

Costs:

A digital marketing campaign can cost the same as a traditional one, but the main reason businesses migrating to online is the scope of optimization. Digital marketing provides more data & tools to analyze the activities and audience's response to them, which helps the company to invest in the channels that give the best results.

Before digital marketing, most campaigns demanded huge investments in reach but with unpredictable results.

Return on Investments (ROI):

Optimized campaigns generate better results, either it's brand awareness or sales.

Traditional marketing still works and sometimes generate a satisfactory ROI, even better when it comes to promoting cheap consumer-end products or generating awareness of new clothes sale for a shop.

But online channels offer customized price points & demands that can fit any goal or budget and hence gives another chance to optimize and sell more while spending less.

3.CATT Marketing Funnel

To get the desired outcome of the marketing campaign you need to have a good marketing funnel.

Marketing Funnel is a way of breaking the journey of your customer from the awareness stage (when they first know about your product) to the purchase stage (when they buy your product).

There are many marketing funnels you can choose from. But it is important to know which marketing funnel works best for your business.

Here we are discussing the CATT marketing funnel.

CATT stands for Content, Attention, Trust, Transaction. There is a numerical representation of this funnel.

Wealth = n^CATT

Here,

Niche (n): Niche is finding the right market requirement & fulfilling that requirement with your product or service. Your success and wealth depend on the niche you choose.

Content (C): Content is the only way you can communicate with your customer and attract them to your product. Content can be in the form of video, image, blog, email, or podcast.

Attention (A): Grabbing attention is the act of attracting the customer to your content and making them stay connected till the end. It is very much necessary to consider the target audience while creating content for better attention.

Trust (T): Building trust with the audience is an important factor for building a brand, and it takes time. This is why digital marketing is more preferred over traditional ones. Using digital media, you can easily connect directly to your customer via marketing automation and retargeting.

Transaction (T): Finally, when you have written amazing content, grabbed customer's attention, build trust, now it's time to directly pitch for sales and convert the lead into paying client.

4.Integrated Digital Marketing

Integrated digital marketing is a well-structured and well-defined marketing plan. It includes the combination of digital platforms & activities to attract the customer, inform about the product, build trust, and sell the product. It is the application of the CATT Marketing Funnel that we have discussed before.

Rather than concentrating on a single element of digital marketing (such as SEO only, just email marketing, or paid advertisements only), you can integrate all of these elements to make a solid marketing funnel that can be more effective than utilizing them individually.

Instead of directly approaching sales via social media ads, you can...

Step 1: Attract the customer to your website via ads.

Step 2: There, you can provide plenty of information and ask for an email id in return for a free pdf guide.

Step 3: Now, you can send personalized emails to built trust with the potential customer.

Bonus: You can also use retargeting ads to make them remember you regularly. It will help you in brand building.

Step 4: After building trust, it will be easier to pitch for sales and convert them to paying customers.

5.Personal Branding

So, what is personal branding? In simple terms, a personal brand is the marketing of the individual. And personal branding is the strategic activity of individuals marketing themselves, their career, and what they do as a brand in their own right.

But is it worth investing in building a personal brand? How personal branding will help you in business?

With a personal brand, you connect with people, tell your story to the public, and share your skills, experiences, job titles, and overall personality.

In some cases, personal brands become more popular than the company they work for or their own. Some great examples like Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk are more popular than their companies Tesla and Vaynermedia.

"Too many people are scared to share their visions and thoughts in public or even in board-rooms. Having a strong vision is important for your personal brand. Don’t be afraid to say what you think. Ever. That said, don’t forget to listen, either." — Gary Vaynerchuk

3 Reasons how having a personal brand will give you an edge in your business:

1. Personal branding offers a competitive edge: Consumers are more likely to buy from the brands represented by a human face. In fact, 82% of people surveyed said they are more likely to trust a company when its senior executives are active on social media, and 77% of consumers are more likely to buy when the CEOs of the business uses social media.
2. Personal branding increases sales: One of the most popular benefits of personal branding is the increase in sales. Audience that trusts you are 7 times more likely to convert into actual customers.
3. Personal branding attracts more customers: Majority of people trust the recommendations from an individual, either from a friend, relative, or an influencer on social media. No need to say how a single tweet of Elon Musk affected a sudden change in stocks and cryptocurrencies price.

If you are interested in knowing the step-by-step process of building a strong personal brand, do let me know in the comments.

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