Your Guide for Marketing and how to Earn

Whenever we decide to start our business or sell any product or service what does come in our mind?

How to do marketing? Who will be our targeted clients or customers? And most important thing revenue and profit.

This article is for

New startup,

Start-ups struggling to get desired space among top existing brands,

New Entrepreneurs having strong idea but afraid because of very strong and big brands are already available in the market.

To address all above issues we will discuss on the following points

? The fundamentals of marketing and Product

? Digital marketing vs. Traditional marketing.

? CATT Marketing Funnel

? Integrated Digital Marketing

? Personal Branding

Apart from the above we will also discuss how to set financial goals for your startup .

And how to reach the first milestone of Rs. 1 crore per month sale. 

How to understand socio economic relation between marketing and your business. And the most important thing here I would like to tell you is that whatever points we are going to discuss are not temporary or work in certain situations or in geography these fundamentals are universal truth of marketing world and always useful in every situation, and everywhere and useful.

First let’s start with Fundamentals of marketing with the definition of American Marketing Association 

 “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.” (Approved 2017) 

It is clear from the above statement that for our dream business it is very important for us to know our customer and their socio economic category. 

Know your customer-KYC this term everyone has heard many times it has its importance always. It’s a universal truth. 

People think marketing starts after identifying the customer and identifying the product or service but marketing starts right from knowing your customer. Collecting information about customer is part of marketing  

Most of the time marketer or business owners make mistakes here they start doing Marketing to everyone. They think to target as many as people. They just corner the fact that everyone cannot be their customer. More is not necessarily always better.

 The science applies here. Focus is better. Like the same training you cannot offer to marathon and short distance runners though both are running but technique, training and supplement requirements are different. 

If you have all the answers about your customers like who are they? What do they do? Where can you find them? What are they like? It means half battle win because knowing the customers need leads us to create a product that fits the customer. 

 Instead of targeting the larger audience if we target specific audiences, those really fit for our product, strengthen product impacts on customers and save our resources and money both.

Right Message to right person at right time. It is very important for us after KYC at the right time and to the right person we have to start the customer education process about the product.  

No matter how strong is your competitor? If you educate successfully your customer nobody can stop you from getting customers from the market. 

There were so many products launched before the time and to wrong customers, they failed though they were great.

I am sharing one example from the training industry.

IStare Skill development Pvt. Ltd. They were running a government sponsored ‘Din Dayal Upadhya skill development program for rural BPL youth.’ 

About 2 to 3 years back. IStare started online training through LMS. They had trainers at Bengaluru and were providing training to Bihar and other states candidates. They have hired very good trainers. Their methodology was no doubt great but they failed to educate the clients about the product. Timing was also not right. Online education was not that much acceptable and popular at that time.

They should have implemented it along with traditional training and gradually they could have educated their customers about the benefits of the product. Now online training is the need of time. It’s very common.    

There is an example of success from the same training industry ‘Digital Deepak’ at the right time he has started doing digital marketing webinars, educating his customers about the benefits of digital marketing, during webinars completed the process of KYC and finally pitched his different programs to different people. About 1000 aspirants are getting trained in his 4th internship program at the time of writing of this article.  

 The following diagram of https://www.skilljar.com/customer-education/ is self-explanatory.  

Marketing is not something to sell someone your product and leave the old customer and start chasing new. It is about keeping an existing customer that will build your client funnel and it keeps your existing customer happy and they remain your customer for life. 

Marketing does not confine within the efforts of merely buying and selling; it is something more than that. 

Perception and Brand building Perception and values varies from person to person. Though a group of people can be your potential customers but every individual has different perceptions and most important thing for us to understand no one has developed perceptions by his/her self. Perception and values always we get from our surroundings.  

As per my theory no one is right or wrong, good or bad whatever type of personality we are, it is because of others, people around us, the socio economy environment of the society and country. Once we know the potential group for our product we have to start developing perception for our product through marketing. 

If we see the larger picture marketing is all about developing the perception only. And always remember no Marketing strategy is bigger than a Product. 

Many marketers or business owners think that by strong marketing they will sell but if the product is weak, created perception through marketing will not last for long time and customers will develop negative perception about your brand. 

 You educate them and people will discover the product, like Apple. Whenever a new model comes people just wait outside the shop in line to buy it. It’s the fine example that product 

Category selection in the process of brand building right selection of category is very important.

After category selection define the brand in the way that whatever you want to convey should reach to the customer directly. 

Build your own platform as when you are doing your marketing through an external platform you have no control on an external platform.

Any time Facebook, instagram or YouTube can change their policy or remove your advertisement then you will be left with no option so building your platform is very important.   

Become the leader It is always desired to become leader in the industry but if it is not possible become leader in a sub category like Zoom cannot compete with Google so they set themselves in to the subcategory of video chat. 

 Fifth most important thing is to stand with integrity and product in the process of developing a brand. Certainly changes are required in product but speciality is required in one segment. Like Digital Deepak has speciality in digital marketing. He is a good mentor but it doesn’t mean if he gets some customers of social science, he will start doing webinars on that subject. We have to stick with our niche. About Niche selection we will discuss later in the article. 

In marketing and brand building integrity is very important most of the time people compromise with integrity and use marketing tools unethically that can give you a short term gain but in the long run it fails your brand.

Clear and catchy names always help in brand building. Your brand name and logo should be self explanatory and if you are delivering value to the customer brand will become automatically strong.   

Above are the universal fundamentals of marketing world. Let’s now discuss the vehicles for marketing. 

 Traditional marketing Vs. digital marketing 

 Spending a marketing budget in the right direction is very important for any start up. For anyone it’s not an easy decision to select right vehicles for marketing. There are two options available: traditional marketing and digital marketing. 

 One right decision can make huge difference in the result of marketing

 If we study both, the method of marketing has their own significance. If your product is generic with an average wide target group TV advertisement can work for you. 

 On the other hand if a product is related to consumer durables, ecommerce, training etc. digital marketing can play a vital role. 

 To make the decision easy analysis the following statistics and projections  

In India 197 million homes have TV out of 298 million homes with an average of 4 to 5 members per household. TV has reached 800 million to 1 billion people. (Source Wikipedia)

Radio has reached of 65% of Indian population (Source Financial Express) 

Print readership in India jumps 4.4% to 425 million in two years: Report. The Indian Readership Survey (IRS) data released for Q1 of 2019 reveals that the overall readership of newspapers has grown from 407 million readers in 2017 to 425 million readers at the end of the first quarter of 2019

 And in another side 

There are over 280 million Facebook users in India making it the top country in terms of Facebook audience size. (Statista, 2020)

The number of Twitter users across India was estimated to be over 34 million in 2019. (Statista)

In 2020, India had nearly 700 million internet users across the country. This figure was projected to grow to over 974 million users by 2025, (Statista) 

And i it is very important for us to understand the role of digital marketing in Ecommerce as this segment covers most of the products and services-

? Global B2C ecommerce sales are expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021. (Shopify Plus, 2019)

? 51% of shoppers surveyed say they use Google to research a purchase they plan to make online. (Think with Google, 2019)

? According to a 2019 study, search traffic generated 65% of total ecommerce sessions, 33% was generated through organic search, and 32% was generated through paid search. (Statista, 2019)

? 59% of shoppers surveyed say that being able to shop on mobile is important when deciding which brand or retailer to buy from. (Think with Google, 2019) (Source: https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics)

Since India is a young country and also literacy rate significantly improves in past years so digital marketing has an edge on traditional marketing. 

 AS discussed above marketing is a tool and product is king and all the methods are components and Both methods digital and traditional have their advantages and disadvantages so it’s always suggested as per your targeted customers and their understanding, business financial plan, you should fix the percentage of budget for both. 

 When a start up does any marketing they need to focus more on direct response methods. 

Niche Selection is an important thing for any business, especially for start-ups their success and wealth creation mainly depends on it. 

 For selecting your niche you have to have the combination of all three mentioned above market, passion and talent.

 If you are new to any business and you have a market and passion then hiring talent is possible and you can start your new business with the help of others talent and from them and by the time talent can be developed.  

But if you are missing either one market or passion there is no chance of success in the business. 

CATT Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel describes your customer’s journey with you. (Source www.sproutsocial.com) 

Wealth creation and success is not just luck or hard work. It is your collective efforts, planning,hard work, desire to take risks, and come out of your comfort zone. CATT Marketing funnel describes about 

Wealth=n^CATT 

 N- Niche Your wealth creation and success depend upon the niche you choose as discussed above in niche selection for self. ‘Niche marketing’ is in trend nowadays in the digital marketing segment but it is equally useful in traditional marketing. Niche is one of the perfect ways to reach out to customers and make sales.

Niche audiences can be defined in many ways according to their socio economic culture, demography. And in case a product or service developed for a niche customer needs to have qualities that fits the customer. 

C- Content is king in the market. We need to create quality content, videos, blogs, posts, that attracts people from your niche. Like Amazon, use ‘Ghar ki Dukan’. Your content should have a personal touch for the audience so that they can easily relate them with you. Content should be a perception creator.

A - Attention Content should reach your targeted audience. You have to get the attention of people for it. We should use SEO, paid ads, social media and referrals. 

T- Trust is the most important thing because of it customers can be retained and regular wealth can be created. Trust can be built through good service and quality products, personal mails, occasions like festivals, birthday greetings or small gifts.

T- Transaction if successfully trust is built then leads can be converted into customers and sales. Here the product plays a role to retain the customers. We should always focus to retain the customers.  

Let’s take an example how to create wealth

 How to achieve a 1 crore sales target within a few months in a start-up ?

If we did our niche selection carefully and followed the above discussed methods then making sales of Rs. 1 crore per month within the start of few months of your business is possible. This we can easily understand by the following method

If a product costs Rs. 100 then you need 100,000 customers, if you change your niche and increase product cost to Rs. 1000 or 10000 accordingly you need less number of customers to make 1 crore.

 If any start up plan accordingly niche selection as per the product, only then they can set the effort required and measure the results of the effort.

 To explain the above method I am taking the example of one of the new start up Delivaro. They have started Vegetables and grocery delivery business after the lockdown. Since in the grocery segment there are many big E-commerce players available like Big Basket, Jio Mart, Amazon so they decided to fit themselves in the sub category ‘Fruits and Vegetables’. All the big players are also delivering the vegetables but quality and freshness is compromised because they don’t have direct monitoring everywhere.

Delivaro procure everyday fresh vegetables and ensure to deliver the same day to their category A customers and remaining vegetables they sell with less margin to Category B customers. If even then vegetables remain with them they provide it to poor people free of cost.

 By delivering consistently quality service and products they have built great trust with customers and respect in society for providing free vegetables to the poor every day in the evening.

First month they have 800 customers and on average every customer spends Rs. 2500/- only on vegetables in a month, and if we include grocery also it will be 3 or 4 times more. We can consider 3 to 4 members every household. 

 They fixed their niche market of 10000 customers and Rs. 1000 Product. That's why from the start of business within 2 to 3 months they achieved a minimum 1 crore sales target every month. 

Delivaro is the best example of right niche selection, trust and brand building. And future expansion of business can be understood by Growth aspects in Indian Economy. The median age in India was 26.8 years old in 2015, meaning half the population was older than that, half younger. This figure was lowest in 1970, at 19.3 years, and was projected to increase to 38.1 years old by 2050. India has the second largest population in the world, after China.  

 Since India is a young country and Indian young population is the strength of Indian economy. If we retain our customers they will remain customers for at least the next 50 years. And through referrals and CATT, a strong customer base can be created.

There is no doubt India is a potential big market for any new start-ups.

 So far we have discussed the fundamentals of marketing, Digital vs. Traditional marketing, Niche selection and how to make wealth. For getting a successful result we have to integrate things smartly now further we will discuss integrated digital marketing.

Integrated digital Marketing gives us a better idea of how many of our customers are in which state. Let’s try to understand integrated digital marketing through the below framework and how CATT works in this frame.

 There are so many people who raise the issue that digital marketing is not working for them, people do Facebook boost, SEO, Email marketing but the issue remains that the same leads are not getting generated, it’s not a best way to build trust.

Actually we need to integrate all the tools and make it a full machine. No tool delivers the finished product but when we add the tools and it becomes a machine we can get a finished product . Same with digital marketing, we need an integrated approach.

 Second mistake we make, we pitch direct sales. First we should develop communication, make people aware, and educate them about products. We need to keep content marketing in the centre and go for paid advertising, SEO, establish communication through social media and collect information about our customers and send them personalised emails. And once trust develops it converts to sell.

CATT funnel works through this framework. It creates a proper pipeline where there are people at different stages at the same time and it is an ongoing process. 

It works in different manner business and product wise. In the long run it creates loops for either we get the same customers again and again or customers through referrals.

We build a brand, company but personal branding is equally important and it won’t build automatically. Now we discuss about

 Personal Branding

 Brand or company does not speak and people want to hear from people. That's why every big brand's CEO’s are also very popular and they are themselves a brand in the market.

 To understand the personal branding let’s see the Compelling Personal Brand Statement Examples

 “If you have a story that influences people towards positive change, I can teach you how to find the right stages that scale in both revenue and reach” Pete Vargas

“I help entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and teams discover a powerful new relationship to who they are and what they do through my proprietary methodology called The Campfire Effect.” Chris Smith

From the above statements it is clear that self-branding has a strong role to create a product brand and there are so many other examples like Ratan Tata is a big brand. Tata is known by the name of Ratan Tata. He can create any new brand just by endorsing only.

Personal brand is also important because people can easily relate with you not with logo, brand or company. That’s why it is very important to create your brand.  

Ratan Tata is an influencer and the brand ambassador for the companies run by the Tata group. 

The downside of personal branding is that people cannot invest in Ratan Tata but upside is that Ratan Tata can raise many brands just by single endorsement even just his one Tweet can create a brand.  

The Mass Trust Blueprint of Digital Deepak explains about the evaluation of mass trust blueprint. It’s continues process starts from Start-up and one cycles goes up to mentoring. Since learning is a continuous process and it is applicable for every one so it’s we can say it is an endless process.

In my next article I will be discussing in detail about personal branding and evaluation of personal branding.

We can conclude that marketing is very important for any business and an appropriate budget smartly has to be allocated for Digital and traditional methods to educate the niche customers and create the perception.

Copy writing, paid aids, webinars, etc. are just components, and the product is the king. Marketing just makes people aware about the features of your product and the product sells itself. So we can say marketing is an end. 

While we are developing any brand it is also important as an entrepreneur to know your niche and develop personal brand also so that the audience can communicate to you and you can express your brand.  And Never and Never forget PRODUCT IS A KING.