How Marketing and Digital Era are going to make the world a better place in future? and Why Entrepreneurs should learn it?

Overview: 

The following are things which you will learn for better understanding:

• What is marketing?
• Fundamentals of marketing.
• What are CATT MARKETING AND INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING FUNNELS?
• Traditional vs Digital Marketing in the lieu of the present Indian economy scenarios.
• Personal Branding: Building MASS TRUST BLUEPRINT.
• Why entrepreneurs should focus on being a marketer rather than outsourcing to marketing agencies?

What is “MARKETING”? Why Entrepreneurs should learn it? A booming career in which all industries go Hand in Hand in this Internet Era.

You’ve probably heard the term ‘marketing’ before, right? Well in simple words, ‘Marketing is The backbone for every future business’. It starts even before you create a product/service. It creates a channel between vendor and customer for the sale of products and services using different techniques to attract customers.

The internet is evolving and so the consumers are changing and engaging differently with brands. The evolution of the consumer buying decision process is bringing in a new marketing mantra(Digital Marketing).

For the modern marketer (i.e. business, entrepreneur, website, startup), different streams of marketing are what builds trust between you and your potential customers.

The founder himself should be a marketer for the betterment of the business.

For better marketing response you should yourself into the shoes of customers and try to analyze the real problems you might face from a customer’s perspective. Then only you would realize what to give and what not to.

It is basically any type of information that you put out into the world that communicates a message to your audience. This is traditionally seen as a written article, newspaper classifieds, an advertisement hoarding, paper pamphlets or you may come across while gazing at different screens out there in this digital world, it includes podcasts, social media posts, and graphics - really anything that you’re publishing online or offline that ultimately helps grow your business.

FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING:

A good marketing strategy turns or attracts a specific set or you can say product or service craving observers into a raving fan. It helps you become a thought leader in your industry. It builds loyalty between your brands and builds a basement for your present as well as future customers.

It’s all about sending a “RIGHT MESSAGE” at “RIGHT TIME” to a “RIGHT PERSON”.

But how? It’s all about the problem you’ve faced and made a product yourself and solved it thereby achieving comfort. And now, you should communicate the same by joining the conversation in people’s minds and building trust out of it.

Most importantly, it’s a way to sell your products and services without any hassles. This is why I love marketing because I can truly help people and at the same time direct them to my own products that can help them even more.

A well-rounded marketing strategy also includes traditional paid advertising and digital marketing techniques too. We live in a world where people are constantly on the search for information to consume. Marketing fills their desire for information (both educational and entertaining). Traditional forms of advertising work less effectively now with the overabundance of digital information in this era of the internet and smartphones. Most major businesses have added new Digital marketing as an important strategy to their marketing plan.

Obviously, traffic is important. With better content, you’ll get more traffic to all of your web spaces - social media, content platforms like YouTube, and your website itself.

THE C.A.T.T. MARKETING FUNNEL (CONTENT, ATTENTION, TRUST, TRANSACTION)

WEALTH = n^CATT

Niche:

Your niche selection is going to depend on your actual skillset where you are going to excel. If you choose to go wide focusing on many things at a time, it’s just like sailing in two different boats at the same time, ultimately you go wide and drown.

You need not be the number one in the segment. BE THE ONLY ONE. It is more than enough.

CONTENT:

Your content is the actual representation of your product/service to attract the real world.

Define Your Marketing Strategy Before you even think about creating actual content i.e. (videos, articles, tweets, posts, lead magnets, etc.), you should have a solid vision for why you are creating content.

What is your vision? Think about where you want your business to be in the next 10 years. Why did you start your business?

 ● Are you trying to make the world a better place?

● Are you demanding to become a major corporate in your industry?

● Are you making it easier for people who are finding it hard to get more comfortable?

Once you have a vision, the next step is figuring out who your target audience is.

 Attention:

Without attracting a specific set of the target audience to your product, it’ll be hard to create content that is engaging and fulfills its purpose of growing your business. By understanding the demographics (age, gender, location, interests), places and communication preferences like different forms of digital/social media i.e. (Twitter vs. YouTube vs. Facebook, podcasts vs. videos), and pain points (what do they struggle with?), you’ll have a much easier way of driving attention by using SEO, SMM, PAID ADS, REFERRALS, etc.

TRUST:

Your strategy should be that your customers should blindly choose only your services compared to other competitors.

And how to achieve it?

Well, these are the few steps you should follow in real-time to fetch it:

ü  > You should empathize and put yourself in place of customers to understand their perspective of what they want and how they wish to acquire it? Just ask yourself first.

ü  > You have to join the conversation in people’s minds thereby getting to the point where you and customers agree on the same point. 

ü  > Introduce it by communicating through different digital media or traditional media, they should be convinced that you are the only one who can solve the problem.

ü  > Support is the backbone of building trust after the transaction has been done.

ü  > Use tripwires, marketing automation, retargeting customers who already showed interest.

ü  > Address customer's concerns whenever they reach you.

ü  >  A customer should be in touch even after the sale.

ü  >  Respect is what every human craves. Respect your customers and they will be more joyous even before buying your product/service. Make them feel they deserve it.

Transaction:

Transactions are nothing but your product/service sales. At the end of the day, unless you are just running a business for fun and have another stream of income to pay the bills, you’ll want to see actual monetary results from your efforts. Based on your marketing skills, it will bring people into the top of your funnel. Thereby the process of C.A.T.T. comes into the picture alongside the INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING FRAMEWORK which will be discussed below.

INTEGRATED DIGITAL MARKETING FRAMEWORK:

The core of an integrated digital marketing framework is your content which you use to make content marketing thereby attracting and reaching the target audience thereby creating a line of trust and then target them to land for a transaction or a sale to be done.

The content marketing could be free at first or be released at an introductory price of your product/service is very expensive. You can use different methods like SEO, S.M.M., or paid advertising to target and gather a particular set of people who have an interest in what you offer. Then you build trust out of your content by sending emails and create an email list to send every update you make. And after building trust you make them visit your new updates or content and once they satisfied with your service they will end up paying for it.

This entire thing becomes an automated cycle where paid advertising builds a push for your services using S.M.M and SEO and then email marketing builds trust by your content and then targeted or interested people buy your service.

Traditional vs Digital Marketing:

For a better understanding of traditional and digital marketing, First, we need to know the basics of the Indian economy.

Below is a table of contents categorizing the Indian population into 3 different specializations by Mr.Sajith Pai.

It's divided into India 1, India 2, and India 3.

Digital Marketing:

The people in India 1 can be connected through a digital medium easily because of the availability of services and the spending power they have. 

When It comes to India 1 the people are going through a transformation. They have become empowered, quite experimental, highly quality conscious, and are buying intelligently. It is reflecting in their buying behavior, they are more vocal, expressing their vows, and demanding a better experience. A huge change in consumer dynamics is being witnessed, with a large-scale shift from offline to online consumption of goods and services. 

So, from the above-mentioned info, it is easy to reach India 1 category through digital marketing that involves Digital ads, Content marketing, SEO, SMM, Email marketing, etc.

Traditional Marketing:

When it comes to India 2&3, they mostly happen to serve India 1 population to balance the economy and they are not enough aware of the use of digital services and acquire things through digital media. 

But they can be reached through conventional methods like a door to door advertising, Television, Radio, Pamphlets, Print Media like newspaper classifieds and hoardings. Which makes it quite a challenge to reach a large number of people to consume your product.

Personal Branding:

Getting personal means both sharing your unique voice, story, and personality in your content, and also writing to your specific audience’s needs. 

Don’t just write in the general world. Speak directly to the reader/viewer/ follower. Know your target audience’s personality, and talk to them in that way. If your audience is a bunch of Engineers/Working professionals, you’ll write much differently than to a bunch of teenagers. 

Your personality comes across not just in the words, but also in the visuals. Create a graphic brand identity with specific fonts, colors, imagery - and be consistent with it. Showing off your personality in your content will make it more entertaining and help build more of an emotional connection with your audience.

Example: SRK and HYUNDAI CARS

Ultimately your customers become your brand ambassadors by spreading the word about your product/service. Because you trust your best friend not a brand ambassador like SRK. Do you think he drives a Hyundai i10 daily? C'mon!! you know it. It's all about people who use your service that make a brand sustain. It's all about how you build your personal brand.

MASS TRUST BLUEPRINT:

Well, You impart all your knowledge and experience which you've learned in the previous years and implement it the real-time scenarios which get you clarity about where you might fail. Then you can make case-studies and make written articles and publish them online. And, now you can get that trust and gather interested people follow you and consult people to grow your business or service widely through consultation. Now, comes mentorship where you might guide thousands of people under your guidance. Finally, after all this, it gives rise to your potential to a start-up business.

CONCLUSION:

Marketing is not a crash course that you learn for a few hundred bucks. Its an ocean of knowledge with many modules that you gather together in years to come. It all depends on exploring new avenues and sticking to a particular field where you feel that you are the one that could do it.

In the journey of starting a business from scratch to becoming a successful entrepreneur, there lies a point where you may face a do or die situation and may get confused. It's all about learning, implementing, developing skills and the main thing is to remain CONSISTENT. 

Learning skills and implementing that knowledge towards the working environment with consistency will help you in a better understanding of realtime scenarios thereby easing the process of growing your business.

Hope this helps you in a better understanding of how marketing and digital can go hand in hand for the improvement of business through the internet.

Thank you and See you soon with more updates and information.

THIS IS AN ASSIGNMENT GIVEN UNDER GUIDANCE OF MR. DEEPAK KANKARAJU UNDER DIGITAL DEEPAK INTERNSHIP PROGRAM ASSISTED BY KAMNA AND KRISHNA.

FOR MORE DETAILS PLEASE VISIT: DIGITAL DEEPAK INTERNSHIP PROGRAM