Marketing for Non-Marketers – Stepping into a creative world
Hello Marketers !!!
Good day, I am a new bird in this beautiful, thriving and a very creative marketing industry.
As being a beginner and especially coming from a non-marketing background, I am penning down my learning, thoughts and small but very valuable experiences (especially for me) to share with likeminded people.
I would not say this is just an article but would like to put it as my notes and I welcome everyone to share the feedback wholeheartedly. This article is based on my ongoing learning and experience on Marketing and especially Digital Marketing.
Marketing is a very fascinating and a creative world but for majority of the people it’s like a difficult term to grasp in the real life. Many people whom I have met, thinks that Marketing is not their cup of tea, they just cannot do it. Why it is so? To, me It’s just because they have never tried it seriously.
In reality, we all have done marketing at some point - knowingly or unknowingly.
Let’s take a real-life example. I bought a new phone few months back from a well-known company and its a great value addition to my gadgets list. It works flawlessly. Can you imagine what would be my next step?
I will share it with my friends, colleagues through various social media, social talks, word of mouth. So, what does this mean? I am marketing a product or a company without I am being a professional marketer.
In a nutshell at some point, we all do marketing through various approaches. Word of mouth itself is one type of marketing. Innocently, we all are marketers – without an MBA in marketing – do you agree?
Well, agree and disagree – but let’s understand a little bit more methodically about – What is Marketing? Is it a process, a science, a trick or an approach? You will get enormous views on this.
Some will say it’s just a trick to get the attention of a product or just statement told in different way.
My learning says, it’s much more than that.
I would like to steal a quote from the father of Marketing and world-renowned author, consultant and a professor - Philip Kotler.
“Marketing takes a day to learn, unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to master.”
Let’s dwell into more details to know more.
What is Marketing?
As Philip Kotler explains
“Marketing is an administrative and social process through which individuals and groups obtain what they need and desire by the generation, offering and exchange of valuable products with their equals”
It’s basically an activity which company undertakes to promote Its products and services. I would say, where there is a need, there is a want and wherever there is a need and want, there is a marketing to address the demand.
A marketer’s job or duty is to understand the human needs and sell those specific services, products which satisfy human needs.
As the year passes, business grows, thoughts, vision of the people gets changed and so as how we do marketing has also evolved.
Things changes and evolves over a period time, and we can see the direct impact on how we perceive things like buy, sell, consume and that has a direct impact on marketing. In the recent years, digital medium has taken a firm place in our life and that has created a storm into the marketing world. A storm – for good reasons but it’s revolutionary in its nature.
Yes, we are talking about Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional Marketing refers to the marketing done through Print Medias, in store marketing, hoardings, Tele Marketing or Telephonic Marketing and broadcast medias.
Before the age of digital marketing, this was the only choice for marketers to showcase their products or services.
The traditional marketing methodology was more of targeting to a very broader audience. The scope to personalize ads was very limited or NIL.
Digital Marketing
Today we look at our digital device first to know more about a company, product, services, reviews. If you rewind 15 years – we look at News Paper ads, we talk to our friends, we walk into stores. But things have evolved over the years.
Companies and marketers now rely heavily on a various digital medium to reach their prospective customers or buyers. Customers prefer to look for sellers on digital mediums instead of walk ins to store.
Things have changed 360 degrees. Companies are now learning more and more about customers to know them better and position the product to respective target audiences.
There are plethora of tools and techniques available in digital Marketing. Let’s look at some of the most well-known for our better understanding.
Digital Marketing can be categorized as below
- SMM: Social media marketing
- PPC: Pay-per-click advertising
- SEO: Search engine optimization
- SEM: Search engine marketing
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Content marketing
One question comes in everyone’s mind is – why Digital Marketing is so popular?
A simple answer (yet a bit complicated) is: It’s all Digital. Let’s look at our life today. We breath internet, for any small thing we look up to internet. Isn't it? Every thing in our life now corners around Digital tools – right from Mobile, TV, our Work. Everything is online.
Why would companies want to ignore this change? Their entire audience is online. Not only this, with the use of Digital Marketing tools and techniques, marketers can easily study customer behavior, buying habits, perform detail analytics and come up with amazing results which can then be used to create and target products only for a specific segment.
This saves cost – how? Let’s look at a real life example. Imagine a company wants to introduce a new product in the market related to a credit card/banking retail segment.
How will company study the consumer buying behavior? If they use traditional marketing than they need to physically collect survey and study the customer buying behavior or habits. This will take days and months to come up with a result.
Let’s move to Digital Marketing
Company can create an online Survey, can be used by millions of customers, there are analytics, Machine Learning and AI based software which can provide results in a matter hour (after feeding the data) and companies can start analyzing and brainstorming about the new products.
The Route - To - Market – will nearly be cutdown approximately by 70 to 80% as compared to Traditional Marketing. Companies/marketers can use different social tools to engage customer and sell products services as per their requirements.
This was very difficult in traditional marketing. As digital medium evolves so as challenges and becomes more important that prospective customers are not lost in the digital Jungle. To address such situations, it becomes imperative that marketer's records customer journey, understand them well through a very disciplined approach called CATT.
CATT expands to: Content, Attention, Trust and Transaction.
One of the important areas here to know and learn about it is CATT Marketing Funnel. It’s a disciplined approach to sales funnel which increase your business sales.
CATT is a mass trust system. It all begins with learning about your target audience, a customer journey till there is a transaction. Let’s look at the below image for a better clarity.
Building trust is important in case of Digital Marketing and one of the best ways to build trust is through a personal branding. CATT plays a bigger role here.
Wealth = n ^ CATT
n = niche
C = Content
A = Attention
T =Trust
T =Transaction.
Niche comprises of Passion, Trust and Market. A personal brand is the way to build Passion, Trust and a Market.
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Now, Let’s understand Integrated Digital Marketing
What is Integrated Digital Marketing?
Once you know your audience better, you have built a community. It’s time for you to reach out through a proper medium and it requires a well thought of strategy. This strategy is called as Integrated Digital Marketing where you don’t limit yourself to one specific type of Marketing but expand your reach through multitude of tools, techniques and methodologies.
By using this strategy, you can Get a better conversion rate, increase your sales, awareness about your product, product you are promoting, focus on right messaging and understand your audience better.
Importance of a Personal Brand
It’s utmost important find your niche and have a very strong content which helps build your content. Slowly you start building a community around you. You can also use different social medias to grab attention of your audience and you can perfectly master the integrated digital marketing.
Personal branding is a MassTrust System. It's just about Selling but it’s about You and your career journey. It is an ongoing process of developing yourself into a brand. People look at you with a trust for your knowledge.
Top 3 advantages you get by developing your personal brand
- You are more reachable.
- People trust you, believes you
- You are considered as an SME (Subject Matter Expert) in your area.
In a nutshell, Digital Marketing has evolved into an industry in itself and progressing at a very fast pace. As I have explained earlier, there are many facets of Digital Marketing and it’s has become imperative for marketers, companies to carefully leverage the tools, techniques for better reach.
I hope you have enjoyed my article. Feel free to share your thoughts, feedback which will help me share more such information.
Happy Reading and Learning !!!
Harsh Shah
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