Dive deep in Marketing

I was a book worm from my childhood. As I grew up I wanted to put my imagination on paper so I started to write but there was no reader for it except my family members.

Suddenly I came across a public forum where people write their stories and get readers so I also started to write there. Sometime later one of my friends who came to know about it told me “why are you increasing their content and their views? Why are you contributing to increase their profit? ”

I was shocked as I thought they gave a platform to publish many authors’ content without cost but had no idea that they were making a profit from it. That day he gave me an idea of blogging and content marketing and advised me to write in my own blog.

After getting advice on blogging I googled about it and I got excited to start. Now the question was what should I write as I wanted to write something useful for people. After thinking a lot of time I decided to write about events and festivals. So I started my first blog which was an event blog.

Again an old friend of mine said: “it’s good that you started your own blog but you should learn Digital Marketing to reach more people and monetize your blog.”

I was again in dilemma now what is this Digital Marketing? He asked me to start with marketing and then come to digital marketing and then my learning process started.

As I started to learn I got to know that there are many people who don’t have any idea about Marketing

How to market their product or service?

Why is marketing so important?

How marketing can change their life?

What they need for marketing their product/service?

So, I thought to write this article for you if you want to get some overview of marketing which I learned this far in my journey to learn Marketing.

In this article, I tried to explain in easy language what I learned so you can understand easily.

What is marketing?

Maximum people have the concept that Marketing is all about advertising and selling products and services. But marketing isn’t only about advertising and selling.

According to the dictionary marketing is the action of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.

In easy words marketing is a series of actions taken to create a product, understanding your audience, building and maintaining a relationship with them through communication, promoting your product or service to your targeted audience, and making a sale. But marketing doesn’t end with a sale. It continues to nurture the customers till you gain their trust for your future products and services.

Marketing is a combination of educating people, branding, public relation, content, promotion and advertisement, customer service, and sales.

Who needs marketing?

In one word everyone.

If you are an individual, agency, startup, small business or big company trying to sell their product or services to other businesses or people then you need marketing.

If you are an influencer and want people to view your content then you need marketing.

Actually, If your answer for any of the following questions is yes then you need marketing.

Do you want to

know the scope of your services/products in the market?

reach more users?

tell about your product/services to more people?

more people to know about your content/video/product/services?

tell what unique things you are doing / what amazing product you developed?

sell your products/services?

Get feedback on your product/services?

A review from your existing customers about your product/ service?

resell your existing customers again?

ask for recommendations from your existing customers?

make a brand of your own?”

Why do you need marketing?

Marketing gives you lots of information, opportunity, and insights. So, there are lots of reasons you should consider doing Marketing for your business.

• Marketing gives you clear guidance of action according to your objectives and goals.
• Marketing gives you information about the market, lets you know your customers well, and all about their needs and problems.
• Marketing educates your prospective customer.
• Marketing is an effective way to engage with customers. It keeps the conversation going on.
• Marketing is a good way to build and maintain the Company’s Reputation
• Marketing is a great tool to build and develop a Relationship Between a Business and Its Customers
• Marketing helps businesses to grow and scale.
• Marketing helps you to know various Insights About Your Business
• Marketing helps you to maintain relevance.
• Marketing boosts your sale.
• Marketing helps you to Make Informed Decisions

Fundamentals of marketing

Marketing is a very useful part of your business. It can connect with the right customers and build your brand. But before you start there are some fundamental rules of marketing you need to follow.

• You need to understand your customer and users better. If you understand them you will get to know their problems, pain points and preferences which is a very important part of your market research.
• Figure Out how to reach your target audience properly. You have to be where they are because they will not come to you; you have to go where they are.
• Explore every possible channel to reach your audience. You have to be in all the places where your prospective customers are so that wherever they go they get you.
• Build your product or service which solves problems for your audience. If your product solves their problem they will automatically buy your product/service without pushing.
• Understand your competition well. Knowing your competitor analysis will give you the opportunity to offer what they failed to offer.
• You need to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. otherwise, all your effort will be wasted. If you reach those people who are not interested in your product then your campaign will fail. You need to deliver the message to those people who are interested in your product or service and at the time when they are searching for it.
• Try to maximize the engagement of your audience with your brand. As much as they will speak about your product you will be known. Your customers are your best brand ambassador.
• Never compromise with quality. Because if you compromise with the quality then with time you will lose your customers.
• No matter what Always stick with your commitment. If you fail in your commitment you will lose your customer’s trust.
• Try to build trust because if people trust you then only they will buy from you.
• Listen to what your customers are talking about you and your product. It will help you to improve your product and service according to their need.
• Don't stop your marketing after the sale. You need to nurture your customers after they sell also. So you can sell your product to them in the future also.

What you should avoid in marketing

A Marketing campaign helps you to reach your target customers, introduce your product or service to the media, build your brand, and set up your business for financial success.

But Marketing mistakes can cost you quite a lot in case of revenue, reputation, public relations problems, etc.

So before you dive into your marketing strategies try to avoid these marketing errors.

1. Lack of Research and Testing:

The most common marketing mistake people in hurry skip the proper research.

Proper market research saves time and money by predicting the reaction of your prospective customer to your products and how your promotions will perform before you launch your marketing campaign. So you can plan your marketing campaign around those points or review your strategies.

2. Marketing Without a USP:

Your unique selling proposition (USP) sets you apart from your competitors. It shows your customer how your product directly addresses the needs of consumers in a way no one does.

Are you solving a problem of people what no one else is solving? Are you giving them good quality for a low price? Are you providing something none are providing?

All marketers are asking for the attention of customers. If you don’t present a USP in front of them then your business is going to lose in the crowd.

Your USP will help customers to understand why they need your product or service and how it is different from your competitors.

3. Failing to retarget existing Customers

One of the common marketing errors is focusing entirely on getting new customers and forgetting your existing customer who can again buy your product or service.

Getting new customers is important, but retargeting your existing customers is more profitable. According to statistics, selling to a new customer is five times more expensive than selling to an existing customer.

A repeat customer has already trusted your business once and it will be easier to convince them to buy your product or service again rather than convincing a new person to buy from you. And one secret is that people like to be loyal, the more they buy from you, the more likely they are to continue buying.

4. Lack of Focus on Potential Customers’ Needs

Ask yourself How well do you know your customers, their problems, their pain points, and what problem they want to solve?

You need to find out one need for people that you can solve. When you will solve their problem they will automatically buy from you.

After having the best planning and marketing strategy also you can make a marketing mistake. If one of your campaigns doesn’t give expected results. Then don’t panic, sit down analyzing every aspect and data, and learn not to repeat the same mistake in the future.

Traditional vs digital marketing

Nowadays the most common term in marketing is Digital Marketing. So the obvious questions which can hit your mind are

What is digital marketing?

What are the differences between Traditional Marketing and Digital marketing?

How Digital Marketing is different from Traditional Marketing?

Which one you should use?

So, here I am going to answer all your queries related to this topic.

Let’s start with what is Digital Marketing?

In simple words, Digital Marketing is the method of marketing that uses digital channels such as websites, Search Engines, Social Media, etc., and a marketing strategy conducted online.

Now, what is Traditional Marketing?

The method of marketing is not conducted online. They use print media, TV, radio to reach their audience.

Here I am trying to explain the difference between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing.

1. Cost

Traditional marketing is more costly than Digital Marketing

2. Channels

Traditional marketing uses Print Media( Newspaper, Flyer , Magazine, Billboards, etc.), Television, Radio

Digital marketing uses channels like Website, Blog, Social media, Email, Video, Display ads, etc

3. Real-time result (ROI)

With Traditional Marketing you need to wait weeks or months to get results.

In the case of digital marketing Easily measurable. You can easily get the numbers and matrices.

4. Communication

traditional marketing is a one-way communication

Eg: Billboard or TV ad

In digital marketing, Communication is both sided. Users can easily contact the business or show their reaction.

So they think that they are being listened to and served.

Eg: email marketing, social media marketing

4. Targeting Audience for advertisement.

with traditional marketing, It’s tough to target a particular audience.

in digital marketing, people can customize their audience and can show your advertisement to those who are interested.

5. Exposure

Traditional ways are limited in a particular geological area.

Digital advertising can reach out to the entire world.

6. Engagement

traditional marketing has less engagement with customers

In the case of digital marketing, you can easily engage with your customers in real-time and it generally has a high engagement rate.

7. Time

In traditional marketing, It takes time to show its result so you need to wait to plan your next move

in digital marketing, It shows results in real-time with all data and metrics which allows you to analyze your data and track action quicker.

8. Interruption

traditional marketing approaches are interruptive and don’t give people to skip if it irritates them.

digital marketing approaches gives people the flexibility to choose if they want to see the ad or not.

9. Analytics

In traditional marketing, it takes lots of time to get results and difficult to get all the needed data. So getting properly detailed analytics is tough

digital marketing gives numbers and matrices in real-time. So analyzing and processing data is an easy and less time-consuming process.

10. Strategy Refinement

In traditional marketing, It takes time to draft the marketing strategy as after-action it’s difficult to make any change in strategy.

in digital marketing After getting real-time data, it’s easy for the marketing team to change their strategy easily.

11. Publishing

in traditional marketing, Publication can not be done by self and it takes time.

in digital marketing, Publication can be done by self and it takes very little time to publish online.

12. Documentation

Traditional marketing provides hard copies of documents that can be read again.

Digital marketing provides soft copies of documents that can be used anytime from anywhere.

14. The age group of Customers

traditional marketing is good for senior citizens as they use newspaper, Tv, radio more

Digital marketing is useful for the young population as they are more likely to use digital platforms.

The last question regarding this is can they exist together?

And the answer is absolutely. Nowadays maximum big companies use both ways together. They wanted to engage their customers in both places.

Niche selection or niche research

So you got a fair idea about marketing, marketing techniques, and methods. You also get to know about traditional and digital marketing and their pros and cons. But before you dive into marketing you need to select your niche.

So what is a niche? Niche is a small segment of a market or you can say subdivision of a subdivision of a market.

So let’s find your niche. To find your niche you need to follow a few steps.

1. Identify your area of interest

The 1st step of finding a niche is identifying your area of interest and following your passion. Because if you do anything which you are not interested in then you can’t provide a quality product or you will lose your interest pretty soon.

So ask yourself

What do I like to do in my offtime?

What is my passion?

What magazine do I like to read?

What I can do better than others?

What topic can I talk about endlessly?

After getting all these answers you will know what are areas you want to venture into.

2. Identify the problem of society you can solve

So you now have a list with you. But that’s not enough if you want to establish a profitable business then you need to solve a problem.

Now you need to find out with your area of interest or skills which problem of your target customers you can solve. For that you can follow these steps.

• You can have a one to one conversation with your target customer to know about their problems and pain points.
• You can go to any forums such as quora and check the solution for what problem your target customers are asking about.
• You can check what your target customers are talking about in social media with help of some social media monitoring tools.
• Check google trends and AdWords with different keywords.

Hopefully, you narrowed down your list.

3. Competition research

Now you come to the third phase of your niche selection where you need to do competitor research.

Here you also need to do research about your competitions. You need to know there are many businesses that are targeting the same customers with the same kind of product. And where you stand out the competition.

4. Determine profitability:

Now you have very few niches in your mind as you narrowed down the list and have very few in mind.

So you need to know how profitable the niches are. How much money you can make from them. So go to the web and browse the products and services of that niche.

There are several tools that will tell you how many people are searching for those terms. .It’s bad news if the search volume is low as it means people don’t need it much. And you will also find good offers or deals. If you don’t get any offers that are not a good sign. That means none were able to monetize the niche. so in both cases, you need to rethink your decision.

If your search comes with a decent result but not overflowing then you are lucky you got your niche

Market research

Market research is the process of gathering information about your targeted buyers’ personas such as age, preference, financial capacity, social status rtc. to determine how successful your product or service would be among these people.

To do your market research you need to consider a lot of things but one of the most important things is the economy.

Economy

According to dictionaries, the economy is the state of a country or region in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money.

So to know more about the financial condition of your buyer persona, market condition, and to understand how profitable your product or service for the market is you need to understand the economy a bit. All good marketers and entrepreneurs are well aware of this subject.

You need to study the economy of the country or state or area of the place from where your target customers belong.

Select product/service

Now you need to select a service or product which you can offer to your targeted audience. Hopefully, you have already got a fair idea about that by now.

Targeting people

For a long time, I have been talking about target customers. Let me clear here what this term means.

Targeting in marketing is a strategy that helps to break the large market into smaller segments and allows a particular group of people to serve.

You can’t serve everyone as a mentality for various groups of people are different You need to choose specific groups by their Demographic ( age, gender, education, marital status, race, religion, etc.), Psychographic ( values, beliefs, interests, personality, lifestyle, etc.), Behavior (purchasing or spending habits, user status, brand interactions, etc.) Geographic Areas (neighborhood, area code, city, region, country, etc.) and find your target audience.

The role and importance of Communication in Marketing

One of the must-have skills for a good marketer is communication skill. If you notice you will observe maximum grat marketers are also great communicators.

Communication plays a major role in marketing. Importance of communication in marketing is-

1. Effective communication helps to build and maintain relationships. A marketer needs to maintain a good and interpersonal relationship with employees, clients, and customers. If you know how to use your communication skills properly then you can build long-term relationships with your customers and clients and can convince them to buy your product or service.
2. Communication facilitates Innovation When Marketing. You need to be creative and innovative in marketing your product and service. If you have good and efficient communication skills then you will be able to come up with innovative and creative ideas while intersecting with your customers. You will also be able to keep your customers engaged with your product or service.
3. Communication enhances transparency. Transparency is very necessary for any kind of business. You should be transparent with your employees as well as customers. And regular communication is the only way you can maintain transparency.
4. Communication overcomes many marketing obstacles. language and cultural barriers are a big barrier for many marketers. They can not express their ideas to the clients in an excellent manner. But if you are a good communicator then you can overcome these barriers.
5. Efficient communication gives the impression of professionalism. You need to reflect professionalism to impress your clients and you maintain a friendly customer but not to interfere in their personal life. So you need to have good command of language and have good communication skills to excel in every situation.
6. Good communication boosts confidence. Good communication skill gives the marketer the confidence that he/ she can express all ideas and plans in front of clients or customers. Confidence and motivation is very important for any marketer.

Nowadays, you don’t need to communicate with your target customers and clients face to face only. You can now communicate with your customers through your website, blog, email and social media. So use your communication skills to bond with your customers. Content marketing and social media marketing are great tools for digital marketing.

Marketing Funnel:

A marketing funnel is a visualization for understanding the process of turning leads into customers. In simple words, a marketing funnel is your customer’s journey with you from the initial stage. Funnel marks their journey from awareness to conversion.

There are a few stages of the marketing funnel-

1. Awareness — when people come to know about your business.
2. Interest / Educate — Here you are educating people regarding your business and growing the interest of your customer in your business.
3. Desire/ Consideration — it’s the stage when your prospective customers will desire your content and think about considering to buy your product.
4. Conversion/action -it’s time to take action for your prospective customer and buy your product or service.

CATT funnel

So after hearing the term obviously you are thinking about what is CATT. let me explain to you

C- Content

A- Attention

T- Trust

T- Transaction

• 1st you need to create good content that will give value to people and publish it through Website, Blog, Youtube Channel, Webinars which will give value to people and attract them to your business.
• 2nd you need to drive people’s attention or traffic towards your content through various methods like SEO, SEM, Social media Marketing, email marketing, etc.
• 3rd is building Trust with your audience.
• And lastly, you need to motivate your prospective customers to take action and convert them into customers through sales.

Trust building

Building trust is very important in marketing. If people trust you then only they will buy from you. You need to build Mass Trust to develop your business and scale it.

To build trust you need to provide value, educate people, build your brand etc.

Integrated digital marketing

There are lots of approaches to digital marketing like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing etc. email marketing is good to increase your social media followers, social media marketing is good for building your email list. But it’s good if you use all these together. You should give your audience an option of more than one option and be in every place where your users are. This approach is called integrated digital marketing.

Branding

Branding is the process of marketing that a company or person can use to create a name, symbol, or design that is easily identifiable as belonging to the company or person. You need branding for standing out from the crowd and making your own identity. Your brand can catch the attention of your target customers, transform first-time buyers into lifetime customers.

So you need to build your brand. Now branding is two types one is branding your company and personal branding.

Branding for a company is to develop a brand for your company and maintain its reputation.

Now comes Personal Branding. Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create influence for an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry. If you can build your personal brand then you will be the authority of your industry and will stand out from the competition.

Lastly, I want to say personal branding is a good practice for small-scale businesses as it gives a boat to your business but you need to know when to take a back seat and let your business brand grow out from the shadow of your personal brand.

I tried to explain the Marketing basics in this article. But it’s just a start. You need to read a lot of books about Marketing if you want to grow your business.

Leave a comment letting me know what you think about the information discussed above and how relevant the article is for you.

Thank you