Quick Guide to Digital Marketing, Branding and Economics
Hello Everyone,
I recently enrolled in the internship programme by Digital Deepak, who is one of the Top Marketers of India and I feel blessed already. Unlike other programmes, which promise to help you towards the execution of learning but often fail to deliver the programme by Digital Deepak is unique & a knowledge bomb that concentrates on the fundamentals of Digital Marketing and provides incentives for execution.
In just Week 2 of the Internship Programme, the focus was on topics that even after being a Digital Marketer, you might not think were relevant. This article will open your eyes to various topics, and give you better clarity on some. Even if you are not a Digital Marketer, but a business owner, having knowledge about them will help you get your Digital Marketing plans alligned. This article will be full of evergreen content, which will help you no matter which field you belong to.
Whether you are a marketer, entrepreneur, freelancer, professional, or a student, this will surely help you widen your horizon towards a more clear understanding of marketing.
Let’s dive into a few fundamental concepts of Digital Marketing. You will get to know more and in-depth about them in my future articles.
- Law of Marketing
For all the people who thought that marketing was all about creativity, you couldn’t be more wrong. Yes, you need a sense of creative thinking when you want to differentiate yourself, but, you need the thought process of a scientific marketing thinker to send your differentiated thought to the right people at the right time.
Ex - All 80's and 90’s kids would remember the HAPPY DENT ad which used to run on TV Ads where people would pose as lights and their white teeth would spread light in the room. That was some creative thinking for sure. This ad would have mostly done well at that time.
However, why do I feel that every kid would mostly remember the same? Because of the placement of the ads. The ads use to run in between the ads of the 2003 Cricket World Cup. No matter which team played, who got out,e or who scored a century. The Happy Dent Ads had made their way to each and every Indian Household.
That’s the power of scientific thinking when it comes to marketing.
Marketing is also essential in the process of building a strong brand. When I say building a strong brand, then it’s not a one day process. It’s a time-consuming process that requires a high-quality product and consistency. You know your product is good when people start recommending you, and you know you are consistent enough when you have a long term goal, and you know you are working each day towards it.
While building a brand, it is important for you to have a clear understanding of your niche. If your Niche is overcrowded or saturated, you should do an in-depth specialization in a sub-niche and work towards making a strong brand for yourself. Entering a competitive market is not a bad idea, but entering a competitive market without knowing what you will do to overcome the issues you face is!
Building a strong brand reaps you benefits not instantly, but with time. Few of them are
- Your name becomes synonymous with the product you are selling.
Ex — If you want to buy chocolate, you often go to the store near you and say, DO YOU HAVE CADBURY? Cadbury is a chocolate brand that has consistently been a part of our celebrations. Thus, we resonate chocolates with Cadbury. - Once you build a strong brand and once you have created a certain amount of trust amongst your users, you don’t need to market the same product again and again. A great product then starts selling itself.
- People start talking about you and your brand which helps in building a #MassTrust amongst your existing and ever-growing community.
2. Why is Marketing Important?
Marketing is one of the most valuable assets of any business. There are a few scenarios that can be looked upon
- Good Product + Bad Marketing = Good Product not reaching out to correct people.
- Bad Product + Good Marketing = Bad Product reaching out to people, but the product doesn’t survive because of its quality.
- Bad Product + Bad Marketing = Bad product doesn’t reach out to people, and Product owners blame the marketing team.
- Good Product + Good Marketing= VOLLA! This combination couldn’t get any better. A product that ads value to the lives of the customers is now going to be part of their lives because of Good Marketing. Because of the great product quality, the product is now going to market itself and can eventually turn into the next big thing.
That’s the amount of importance that every company with promising products should give to their marketing team. Therefore, no matter who you are —
- A Marketer
- A Freelance
- A Professional
- or An Entrepreneur
you should definitely have a working knowledge of marketing your own brand.
You surely need to have an integrated approach towards marketing, but which source do you want to keep as the Hero and which source do you want to invest the most in, is totally your call as per the understanding of your product and skills.
Correct marketing is the one that can give you the quickest ROI. This is the one thing which helps you in putting forward your product to the end customer.
If you feel, that the process of marketing starts when your product is ready, I couldn’t disagree more with you. The process of marketing starts before you actually build your product. Understanding the problem of your customers leads to creating a product that solves their problem. Hence, creating a product which can be marketed to the people with those particular problems.
One of the most effective skills that you need is COMMUNICATION
By communication, I don’t mean that you need to have a great flair for English. But you surely need to know how to transfer your thoughts effectively from one person to another in English, if you are thinking about things globally.
If your product is local and you don’t aim at expanding to different cities or countries, the local language should work well for you.
3. Marketing, Products, and Economics
The Economics of a country or your target market defines the spending power of your customer.
The spending power of your customer defines the quality and price point of your product.
Product quality defines the amount of marketing you will need to make the product work for you.
I had personally never that, that how interrelated the economics of our country or your target country could affect the growth of your product. Thanks to the mentorship of Deepak Sir, that I started thinking in these lines too.
Focusing on developing while launching a new product can be a great idea. This is because, as and when the company grows, the spending power and trust of people in that country also grow.
A lot of people are concentrating on India, as it is developing and growing each day. The market is not saturated in many respects and there is always a scope for improvement.
4. Traditional VS Digital Marketing
Being a Digital Marketer, you might have always advocated that Traditional Marketing doesn’t work much anymore. My dear friend, let me correct you on that.
Whether traditional marketing will work for you or not will actually depend on your product.
Ex — Coco cola is a brand providing aerated drinks. This product is consumable by any and everyone. Whether it’s good for you is something that is left to the choice of its consumers. A traditional approach towards marketing a brand like Coco-Cola is not a bad idea. You need to run Newspaper and TV Ads, You need to have banners and brand ambassadors for these products to maintain their brand positioning.
However, if you have a more target audience, running digital ads would be more effective.
Therefore, Traditional Marketing is not redundant, it is just that you need to choose the product for which you think traditional marketing will be useful.
5. Direct Response Marketing
When you think like an entrepreneur it is important for you to understand that everything that you do needs to be measurable. If you cannot measure the things/ activities that you are doing for the growth of your business, you are doing something which is not right.
Direct Response Marketing is a concept which focuses on Call to action given to the viewers, which makes the campaigns that you run measurable. Whether people are responding to your required actions or not defines if your campaign is being successful or not.
Sharing an engaging story on Instagram is not enough. Measuring the response with the no. of people who saw your story is what will make your strategies stand out.
6. The CATT Marketing funnel.
Don’t worry. It’s not as complex as it looks. It is the most basic fundamental when it comes to marketing, and expressed is in the easiest way possible. Many marketers often forget that if someone is investing in you and your skills, the end goal of the investor is that you provide them with appropriate ROI.
CATT Marketing funnel can be understood as
Wealth = n^CATT, wherein
[n] = NICHE
It is important to define your niche, sub-niche, and hyper niche if you want your product to stand out! Various factors like, how competitive your niche is, how vast the target audience of your niche is, etc defines how much wealth can you generate from your niche.
This is the first, foremost, and most important component of the CATT marketing funnel.
The best niche that you can choose for yourself will be where your talent, market & passion, all of them will come together.
[C] = Content
Content can be provided to your target audience in various forms. The quality of content plays an important role in the wealth generated by your brand. Content in the form of Blogs, Social Media, Videos, Lead Magnets, Email, etc can be provided by you to the audience.
[A]= Attention
No matter what you do, grabbing the attention of your audience is the most important thing. You need to hook the audience to your content. That’s when you actually provide value to your audience.
[T]=Trust
Once you have grabbed the attention, and people respond well to your content, you can start to believe that you have started generating a certain level of trust amongst your users.
People start responding well to your content when you start using marketing tools like trip wires, business automation, retargeting, etc. You need to be constantly visible in the eye of people who are interested in you and your product.
[T] = Transaction
Transaction is the most crucial part of the process. When everything that you’ve done above falls in place, that’s when people actually take out their credit card and pay you the money.
People need to understand your niche, love your content, be hooked to your content, and build an appropriate amount of trust which leads to them transacting money to your account.
7. Integrated Digital Marketing
When it comes to Digital Marketing, this is one of the most important things that people tend to overlook.
When you plan to go Digital, it is important to understand that it is an integrated process. There are various verticals in Digital Marketing. However, only when you can execute the various verticals together and in sync with each other, you will be able to ace the game of Digital Marketing.
If you just concentrate on building an e-com website and not track its performance, your efforts go in vain.
If you are active on social media but don’t have a payment gateway, your conversions become half of what could be.
If you don’t create a database of emails of your tribe, you have to make similar efforts while launching your next product.
Therefore, it’s important to have an integrated approach to marketing to get the best possible results.
8. Personal Branding
It is important to understand that in today’s world people trust people and not a brand logo. With Social Media and the Digital Media, we know so much about each other’s life that what’s there in our reel life, seems like our real life.
With people being so approachable via different mediums, and so much competition around what ultimately counts is, how your network is. How you’ve built and nurtured your tribe and how valuable have you been in people’s life.
One of the biggest examples is none other than the Indian Prime Minister — Narendra Modi. He nailed the game of personal branding during the elections. He had a pre-defined story of his own which every household knew. He did everything possible in the personal branding text book, mixed it all with his Carisma and we all know that he is the most powerful and influential people in India.
That’s the power of personal branding.
However, like every coin has a flip side to it, so does the power of personal branding. You cannot ever sell the personal brand of a person. A personal brand is irreplaceable.
LAST THOUGHTS
I hope the information shared in the given article was constructive for you in understanding the fundamental concepts of Marketing, Branding, and Economics.
You can look forward to reading more in detail with respect to the above-mentioned topics.
I keep sharing tips, tricks & hacks on Digital marketing on my Instagram Account. Follow me to stay updated -https://www.instagram.com/vedikadwania/
If you have anything which you would like to add to the article, do let me know in the comment section below.