Are you having trouble lately with marketing your products or services?
No matter what your businesses are, you may not get the desired results you are looking for.
We have seen many businesses taking a low drive because of many factors such as stiff competition, lack of competent persons, more expenses, less revenue etc.
It may be in the case of traditional businesses or in the case of online businesses also.
Most of the time people don’t realize where the actual problem lies.
In this article I am going to point out that problem for you so that you can run your business in a much more efficient way and get success in your business. Of course, success never ends, it’s like a journey you know, you cross one milestone after another in your journey towards success but your journey never ends.
Now I am going to discuss about the issue, for which you are eagerly waiting for.
Most of the time people doesn’t realize that the main reason behind all the problems in their business is related to marketing and marketing only. We must remember that marketing needs the most attention among all other segments in a business. Any deficiency in proper marketing can lead to significant loss in the business and in acute case, even lead to winding up of the business.
The bottom line is – if you wish to build a solid business, stop loading your business with unnecessary segments and activities and start making your business better nourished and better functioned with a strong focus on marketing your products and services in a more scientific way.
You might say, “you are babbling too much about marketing but what is marketing in it’s perspective, anyway”? That’s what I am going to discuss with you now.
WHAT IS MARKETING.
Marketing is based on science not on creativity. Marketing starts before creating the product. It starts with understanding the customer and customer’s need, that leads to creating or supplying a product that fits the market.
Marketing is about sending the right message, to the right person at the right time.
Marketing is not just about selling. It is also about keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they can remain a customer for life.
Marketing refers to all activities a business person or a company does to promote and sell its products or services to consumers. Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to the consumers.
At its most basic level, marketing seeks to match business products and services to customers who want access to those products. Matching products to customers, ultimately ensures profitability.
Marketing makes use of the four Ps – product, price, place and promotion.
Product.
Product is an item or items the business plans to offer to the customers. The product should seek to fulfil an absence in the market, or fulfil consumer demand for a greater amount of a product already in the market. So, it is important for the marketers to understand what product is being sold, how it stands out from its competitors, and whether there are substitute products in the market.
Price.
Price means, how much amount of money the product will sell for. Price should be based on considering the unit cost price, marketing costs, and distribution expenses. Also, it must consider the price of competing products in the marketplace and whether the proposed price is a reasonable alternative for the consumers.
Place.
Place refers to the distribution points of the product. It includes whether the product will be sold through a physical store or online or through both distribution channels. When it’s sold through a store, what kind and quantity of the physical product should be placed there? When it’s sold online, what kind of digital product should be placed there?
Promotion.
Promotion is the integrated marketing campaigns. It includes advertising through TV, Newspapers, brochures, flyers. It also includes word of mouth spreading, public relations etc.
Here I can not help but quote that famous man ’Peter Drucker’. He said,
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product and service fits the person and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous”.
Marketing is a game of perceptions. Product is rooted in reality. Never make marketing become more important than the product. A great product sells itself.
Make a great product or service, it will do its marketing itself. You just need to focus on supplying or creating a great product or service and everything will fall into place.
Fundamentals of Marketing.
Know Your Target Audience.
Who are you trying to reach? Have you identified your product or service? What is their “buying persona”? What do they do? Where you can find them?
If you have done your homework properly, you should be able to answer all of the above.
Often business owners and even marketers think that if you cast the net wide you will reach more people, but the opposite is true. When you cast your net wide you miss the ability to hone your craft, tailor your message and reach the pain points of those you are looking to serve. More is not necessarily better. Focus is always better. Know your audience like the back of your hand. Why will they purchase what you offer? Why will they object?
Narrow down your focus. A narrow focus empowers you and strengthens the impact you can have in the marketplace. It's like marketing yourself as a general doctor versus a doctor specialized in gynaecology.
Educate on Your Benefits.
Now that you know your audience, you can educate them on benefits, features, and why they should buy your product or service. You've eliminated the noise, and you can speak directly to them. What do you want them to hear? What do you want to tell them about what you offer? What do you want them to remember about your business?
Brainstorm. Bullet out those features if you are selling to consumers and bullet out the benefits and cost savings if you are trying to reach other businesses. Do your bullets pass the "so-what" test? If so, you are ready to move to the next step.
Craft a Strong Call to Action
Now you've identified your target, and you've listed out your features and benefits. A great work done. You now must focus on what you want your prospects to do. What's the call to action?
If you are focused on a particular campaign what are the success measures of that campaign? Do you want them to call? Do you want them to buy something? Do you want them to submit an inquiry?
Be clear about your expectations. Once you've identified the course of action you want them to take, make sure you've removed any obstacles from them doing so. For example:
Is your telephone number clearly seen?
Does your inquiry form structure work?
Can they purchase via telephone, online or in a brick-and-mortar store easily?
Test the process. You'd be amazed at how difficult we make it for prospects to complete the desired action. Make the transaction easy, no matter what the call of action. Zero tolerance for obstacles.
Measure, Monitor, Log, Report, and Learn.
Now that you've put in the work and you are ready to push your campaign live be sure to measure and monitor the progress. Learn from your efforts; it will come in handy for each campaign that follows.
What were the results? Did they meet your expectations? If so, why? If not, why? Know the answers to these questions, understand the answers, identify how you can make a campaign better, identify what worked. Log these answers, analyse the data and work to make each subsequent campaign better.
Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to all the marketing strategies that are executed online on various electronic devices. It is currently the most popular marketing strategy adopted by large, small and medium-sized companies across the globe
As the internet is perhaps the most common form of technology used by people, digital marketing can be used to connect to millions of potential customers worldwide. According to IBM, more than 55% of customers research on social media platforms before buying anything online.
As per another research, more than 73% of e-commerce sales will be from smartphones by 2021.
Three major things are common for both digital marketing and traditional marketing.
These are Talent, Market and Passion.
You should have talent for research on your market, you should know your market well and you should be passionate about your business. Then only you will be able to find the products or niches that will be fit your business.
The major types of digital marketing are as follows –
Content marketing such as blogs and videos
PPC (Pay per click advertising)
Email marketing
Affiliate marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Flow Chart of Digital Marketing.
Advantages of digital marketing.
The interaction with your target customers is high. If you launch an ad campaign on a social media platform, you can see what everyone thinks about your brand through their comments, shares, likes, etc.
You can easily measure the effectiveness of your campaigns through tools like Google Analytics. This will help you see what is working for you and what is not, all in real-time.
In India, your target customers are those who have credit cards, have laptop or desktop computers, have car and make more than Rs. 5 lakhs per annum. All your target customers are mostly concentrated in the top 10 cities of India.
Disadvantages of digital marketing
- Digital ads, emails and social media ads are not permanent. They can be ignored and the user does not have any copy of it. If you fail to grab their attention, they will scroll away to something else
- Some ads may seem annoying to customers and they may deliberately ignore it, hide it or remove it
- Creating, launching and managing online campaigns is a time-consuming job. Plus, your entire marketing strategy is dependent on the internet
What is Traditional Marketing?
Traditional marketing is a conventional marketing strategy that uses various offline promotional and advertising methods to reach customers. It is the oldest form of marketing and is tried & tested. Until the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, this was the only marketing strategy in use.
We come across different forms of traditional marketing every day, such as newspaper ads and billboards. Thus, this is a fantastic way to reach local audiences who don’t use the web. The major categories of traditional marketing are –
Print ads in newspapers, magazines, leaflets, brochures, etc.
Outdoor ads such as billboards and flyers.
Broadcast ads in TV and radio.
Telemarketing.
Face to face marketing via sales personnel
Advantages of traditional marketing
An engaging TV commercial ad is easy to understand and remain in the customer’s mind for a long time.
Putting ads in local newspapers, FM radio stations and flyers or pamphlets are very effective for attracting local customers
The hard copy of the ad – such as a magazine or a flyer- will stay with the customer until recycled
Disadvantages of traditional marketing
Instead in stores or shops,
No direct customer interaction with the masses. You won’t be sure as to how the customer will react to your ads or campaigns
Posting ads on TV, newspapers, and magazines are often expensive
Unlike digital marketing, there are no ways to analyse the success of your marketing campaigns
THE “CATT MARKETING “FUNNEL.
You might be aware of the CATT MARKETIN FUNNEL but it is very important to know about its framework which is as given below.
Wealth = n power CATT
(n) is the niche. Your success and wealth depend on the niche you choose.
Niche should be narrow, for example, “where people have problems (health disease or anything like that).
Finding such an audience is very important for your success.
- (C) stands for CONTENT.
Create useful content that attract people from your niche. You may do it through Blog posts, Videos, Lead magnets, Live webinars etc.
Content will be your asset which will be going to attract people to your niche.
- (A) stands for ATTENTION.
Drive attention (traffic) to your content using SEO, social media, Paid Ads, Referrals etc.
- (T) stands for TRUST.
Once you drive attention, you need to build trust with your audience with trip wares, lead magnets, profit maximiser, retargeting and marketing automation.
- (T) stands for TRANSACTION.
Convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods.
Natural sales mean, you have already built trust with your target customers and the customers have already trusted you with your target price. Then the sales will happen naturally, you don’t need to push them to buy your product.
This process is called Deep Marketing.
INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING.
Digital marketing has a lot of modules in it. To be expert in module is next to impossible. So, it’s better to execute digital marketing in an integrated way than to muster all the modules.
Each module is powerful enough on its own, but when combined in a unique way, its power grows exponentially.
Integrated Digital Marketing is an intelligent method of using all the modules in such a way that each module complements the other by playing on its strengths rather than playing on its own for getting effective results.
It is worthy investing time, energy and money in this system.
It is like investing in a machinery which will magically multiply the effectiveness of each component in it.
Some of the common digital marketing methods are:
- Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
- Search Engine Optimization (Organic Traffic)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Digital Display Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Search Engine Marketing (PPC)
- Search Engine Optimization (Organic Traffic)
Out of the above digital marketing methods, SEO and SEM were very powerful tools in the early days of digital marketing but now they have become obsolete. This is because of rapid development and various algorithm updates by the search engines, afterwards, in this segment.
3. Email Marketing
Email marketing was and is still popular at present. The goal of email marketers is to collect leads and subscribers and send marketing messages to them. But when the subscribers started getting too many emails, they started unsubscribing to all the marketer’s messages which added no value to their life.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media advertising gives a very low conversion ratio because people seldomly look proactively for a product or service in social media.
Of course, Marketers need not completely abandon social media but treat it as a 3rd class advertising option. Social media, when used in a proper manner can bring intangible benefits to the table that other channels never can.
5. Digital Display Marketing
Display ads, on newspaper and magazines.
These types of ads don’t serve its purpose because these interrupts the reader’s attention.
Also, online ads are not at all advisable because those animated and interactive banners, distract the readers.
Forbes recently published an article about how display ads cause a brand awareness black hole. It should be an interesting read if you feel the same about display ads.
6. Content Marketing
It is said that Content is the king of online marketing.
A good quality content pulls the reader to the subject matter and it suits best to the marketer’s intention.
Forbes had rightly mentioned that “The bottom line is that there is only one true branding mechanism online and that’s content marketing.” But content marketing won’t be effective if the other digital marketing methods are not used in conjunction with it.
That’s what integrated marketing is all about.
Integrated Digital Marketing is like serving Content as the main dish of a menu and the other methods are like side dishes with the main menu.
The above flowchart describes the process of integrated digital marketing. Each one serves a unique function:
And that’s why Digital Deepak call this integrated digital marketing process as Content Marketing 2.0!
Personal Branding: Mass Trust Blueprint
Choosing a category and becoming a leader in that category is the most important thing when it comes to branding. Your success is half done when you decide where to compete.
Personal Branding starts with your “About Page” on your blog or whatever you do, online.
Write a beautiful story about you so that people can remember you in the long run. Its all about branding yourself in such a way that ultimately your Personal brand overshadows your product.
Digital Deepak is a bigger brand today than many other digital marketing companies because it is personal and it is deep.
Elon Musk is a Personal brand because he has a bigger following than Space X or Tesla in twitter and other social medias.
A personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the online businesses they run.
But this doesn’t happen overnight. You will have to work for it persistently and consistently on a regular basis. Learn a new skill through concepts, facts and procedures. Put your newfound skill to work. Go from practice to implementation. Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, you not only understand it better but you also start building your personal brand. You hone your writing skills better; people start trusting you while you are going ahead with writing your contents and one day you build a mass trust on your online business and in the process, you become a personal brand yourself.
