12 min read.
Hello my dear aspiring digital marketers, in this article I am going to talk about the fundamental of marketing, Digital marketing or Internet marketing vs Traditional marketing, CATT marketing funnel, Integrated Digital marketing, Personal branding. This article will be helpful for bloggers, professionals, freelancers, mentors and entrepreneurs.
The basic principle of marketing is that it is based on science and not on creativity. It is the art of effectively communicating to your customer with a mind-set of helping them.
Marketing starts before creating the product. It starts with, understanding the customer and customer’s needs so well that it helps in creating a product that fits customer needs very well.
Marketing is about conveying the right message, to the right person at the right time. It is not just about selling, it is about keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they can remain customer for life.
Marketing is a lifelong process which doesn’t end with sales. You have to regularly communicate with your existing customers and build a relationship of trust with them.
Identifying your “why”—is what makes you different .Know your weakness in addition to your strengths and understand your competitors strength
Marketing is just a game of developing trust with lots of people at the same time, especially strangers. The word of mouth will become your biggest marketing assets, quotes by marketing guru “Peter Drucker”
The purpose of marketing is to build a brand and capture a position in the minds of the customer. Never let marketing become more important that the product. A great product sells itself. If your product is not good then all your marketing will go to drain.
Marketing and good marketing will accelerate the death of your company, if you do not focus on product quality
A great product converts your customers into brand ambassador. Word of mouth marketing is the best marketing ever. People trust the recommendation of other people’s in this age.
The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
- CATT Marketing Funnel
This is the technique/funnel we can use to achieve our goals.
2. Integrated Digital Marketing
This is the framework so we know what all to execute to achieve our goals
3.Personal branding
It is imperative to build your personal brand in your niche to build up trust and reputation among your audiences.
4. Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing
CATT Marketing Funnel
C.A.T.T. – means Content, Attention, Trust & Transaction. When you have good quality contents which help in solving user’s problem, then you get more attention from users and they will give us opportunity to build trust. This trust will convince you to make a transaction with me. When I sell something, you will pay attention to me because you trust me.
CATT Marketing funnel is the technique/approach we can use to achieve our goals.
It is the secret to boost and market in our niche by applying CATT marketing funnel to create wealth.
Wealth= n^ CATT
Where ^ denotes power. Where your niche (n) will be successful and powerful with the CATT that you will apply
[N]—– stand for Niche. The category/expertise/interest you are going to offer to your audiences. Your achievements and wealth depends on the niche you choose. We choose a niche to a hungry market. These people have some problems and you are going to solve their problems with your product and services.
[C]—– stand for Content. Content is king. Create useful content, that attracts people to your blog posts, videos, podcast, live webinars, and lead magnets to generate leads to your tribe.
[A]—–stand for Attention. It means driving attention (traffic) to your content using SEO, social media, Paid Ads and Referrals.
[T]—–stand for Trust. Building trust with your audiences with tripwires, marketing automation and retargeting .One of the method of building trust is deep marketing where you send out communication which is much personalised based on who your target audience are so that each and every person feels like you are communicating with them directly to the point.
[T]—–stand for Transaction. It means converting your leads into customers with natural sales methods.
CATT funnel is how your audience will go through with you in the entire journey.
The most important things that you should know even before creating the products are to identity customer and its needs.
Do you really need to create the product that satisfies the customer needs? You need to ask yourself, who need these product?
Before find your customer you need to build the customer avatar or persona. How much are these avatar are going to pay me for the product?
How is this product going to help then?
Will they be your one time customer or are they also going to buy your next level course in next six months or 1 year
Once you have all these clarity in your mind, then half the journey is complete.
Marketing is about conveying the right message to the right person at the right time.
Marketing is about understanding the customer psychology that is why artificial intelligence will not be able to replace marketing. Marketing requires close understanding of customer’s need and what they want and how the product can move then from current state to the desired state.
Niche test to find your Niche
To know your niche you need to know 3 things.
Do you have talent or skill?
Are you passionate about that skill?
Is there market for that skill that you have?
If the answer is yes, then this is the niche you should go for.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Integrated Digital Marketing
Integrated digital marketing as the name suggest is the integration of various forms of digital marketing together.
You have to focus on all 3 areas, then only you will succeed in your niche. If you focus on only one area out of these then you are bound to fail. You have to use all the techniques together in an integrated way.
Personal Branding
Personal branding is very important to build the trust and reputation among your audience. People love individual to individual communication rather than business to individual communication. Branding should be your key strategy if you want your business to grow.
The evolution of personal branding is achieved through these steps below:
Learn:
Invest in learning a new skill through concepts, facts and procedures. Understand the concept, remember the facts and practice the procedures.
Work:
Put your new found skills to work. Go from practice to implementation. Implementing it in real world will give you better understanding. Work can be either job/freelancing/own project
Blog:
Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, you not only understand it better, but in the process you also built up your own personal brand.
Consult:
Now that you have your personal brand through your blog, you now already have work experience and have learned the fundamentals, start consulting other business instead of working for them.
Instead of doing freelancing projects for them, you can tell people how it is done and you will get the authority only when your write the stuff as a blogger and you will be having a very clear understanding of the subject that you write.
You will get consulting projects where people will pay you just for getting your advice.
Mentor:
Mentor others who want to become like you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to whole new level. If blogging is level 1 of clarity, then consulting is next level of clarity, mentoring is whole new level of clarity.
Start-up:
Start your own unique product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, the problems and your own skills and then launch it in the market
In a nutshell:
Learn a subject———Work——–Write about it in a blog———Consult other people (1 on 1) ———Mentor group of people——–Start-up
Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing
Traditional marketing
Traditional marketing refers to any type of marketing which isn’t online .It is a rather broad category that incorporates many forms of advertisement and marketing. Mostly traditional marketing fall under one of the four categories:
- Print- This includes printing advertisements in newsletters, brochures, newspapers and magazines and other materials that are used for distribution. The newspaper has a reach of 465 million people (as per Business standards)
- Broadcast: Broadcasting includes advertisement shown on television, radio and in theatres. India has TV in 197 million homes, with an average of 4-5 members per household.TV has a reach of 800 million to 1 billion people. The reach of digital marketing is nowhere close to TV based on members alone (as per Wikipedia).Radio broadcast has been around since 1900s has a reach of 65% of the Indian population (as per Financial express)
- Direct Mail: The direct mail includes letter, brochure, postcards, catalogues and fliers sent through postal mail to attract customer. It also includes materials that are send to the customer for marketing purposes.
- Telephonic marketing or Telemarketing: This involves sales call made to convince consumers to buy a product or services or to build up rapport for growing the business.
Disadvantages of Traditional marketing
Static:
In traditional marketing the static text is used for marketing. You cannot update your ads in real time. For example, if you place ad in a newspaper and you run out of stock, then you cannot edit your ad, which will result in unhappy customers.
Personalise:
You cannot personalise the communication as you cannot address each and every customer by his/her name.
Deep Marketing:
Traditional marketing does not has the advantages of deep marketing. Deep marketing engages with the customer to gather their insights and opinions, which, in turn drive actionable knowledge.
Because it operates online, Deep marketing can be pursed much more rapidly and at significantly lower cost than traditional surveys and focus groups.
Natural sales:
In traditional marketing you cannot do natural sales, which means when you do digital marketing, you run paid advertising campaigns to your free contents, to get the customer attention first, rather than asking them for payments for selling your product/services.
People would buy your product and service automatically, if they liked your free content or product/service quality, which is called natural sales.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is very different from traditional marketing as what works in media like TV, radio and prints won’t always work online or vice versa. Digital marketing is the best medium to reach the affluent English speaking population in India with spending power of 100 million users.
Digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channel such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. It is a method by which companies endorse goods, services, and brands.
The major categories of digital marketing are:
- Search engine optimization[SEO]
- Search engine marketing[SEM]
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing[SMM]
- Pay-per-click advertising[PPC]
Advantages of Digital Marketing
How much will it cost?
Marketing and advertisement cost is one of the biggest financial burdens that business has to face. Marketing via digital marketing platform offers more affordable alternative to traditional marketing method.
With just few buck you can subscribe to an email marketing provider and send direct emails to thousands of customers on your mailing list
How do we measure?
The success of digital campaign can be easily ascertained as compared to traditional marketing where you have to wait for weeks or months to evaluate. With digital campaign you can almost know immediately how your campaign is performing. There are certain software like email marketing, which allows users to track the performance of their emails. Google analytics is a very effective tool for measuring the performance of your website or blog. Google AdWord manger allows users to measure the performance of their ads on Google search; it helps in monitoring how many people viewed their ads, and show information about conversion rates.
Are there any return on investment?
The thing that matter most for any business is the returns it makes from the investment. Digital marketing offers a substantial return on small investments.
Marketing through email marketing, social media campaign cost very less as compare to traditional marketing techniques
Are we engaging customer well enough?
In this highly competitive business world, it is utmost important to ensure continuous engagement with your audience through different digital media channel. These channels allow users to do deep marketing to get the insights of their customer.
This can be achieved by regularly posting useful blog post, newsletters, shows, promotions, special offers and videos that adds value to your customer. The idea is to hold the attention of your customer through various engagements for as long as possible while building your credible reputation and brand.
Are we targeting customers precisely?
Traditional marketing is just like placing an ad and leaving the rest on prayers, hoping that someone will read or like the ad and make positive approach. Marketing on digital platform on the other had is very precise and targeted.
Ads campaigns are targeted to specific age, gender, demographic, and specific area of interest of customer. This helps in increasing the sales and cutting down on marketing cost
How to build brand?
Today business can use digital platform to build up their brand and reputation. Having a blog/website or social media channel can help in building up your brand and business as it is highly interactive with the audience and increases your brand visibility.
Summary and Conclusion-
In this article we have discussed about fundamentals of digital marketing , catt marketing funnel, integrated digital marketing, personal branding, digital marketing vs traditional marketing.
You cannot imagine a world without marketing in your life. All humans are marketers at some point of their life, whether it is your job interview, generating sales pitch for your leads or pitching your idea to your boss, we all promote or market ourselves for betterment of our future and getting the desired results.
The procedure to acquire new skills is to learn new skills through understanding the concept, remembering the facts, and practising the procedures.
Start practicing your new skills by putting them to implementation in real time, which would help you in understanding in a better way.
Find some work in freelancing, or work on your own projects or do some job on your newly acquired skill.
You can start with blogging as writing down what you have learned will give you a stronger hold on the concept and will also help you in building your own brand and reputation
Once you master the art of blogging you can evolve to next level as Digital coach or mentor. When you teach someone it also helps in consolidating your own learning and teaching someone else is itself a creative field.
Start-up is the last step of your journey where you market your own projects and services and apply whatever you have learned so far
If you have reached here then I would really appreciate and thank you that you are already on the journey of your evolution. I really appreciate your dedication and enthusiasm that you have shown for your personal growth and want you to grow as a professional in digital marketing. All the best.
