Modern Marketing

Demystifying Marketing

The term “Marketing” is very often misinterpreted, as we never tend to understand the science behind good marketing. Marketing of any Product/Service starts even before creating it. It starts with understanding the customer’s need that leads to creating a product that fits. Marketing is about sending the right MESSAGE, to the right PERSON at the right TIME. Henceforth, the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

It is becomes very essential to know the fact that, Marketing is a game of perceptions and good perceptions can only be created, about products which have good quality. A good quality product automatically creates good perceptions and converts customers into brand ambassadors of the product. As they say, WORD OF MOUTH is the best channel of marketing ever.

Why learn Marketing?

Marketing is never getting outdated. As long as economies continue to grow and markets expand, marketing will always be required. It is rooted deep in human psychology itself. It is one of the most valuable investments as it gives an immediate ROI(Return of Investment).

None of the big companies that you see, could have build a strong personal brand without the aid of intelligent marketing. Advertising, Copywriting and Sales are all components of marketing itself. Also every entrepreneur should be a marketer, because marketing cannot be outsourced completely to an agency. The creator should always have a strategy and roadmap about how he/she is going to market the creation.

Choosing your Profitable Niche.

Selecting your niche(a focused and targeted area that you serve particularly well in the market) is very important before you start building any brand. Deciding where to compete is half of your success.

It is always advised to choose a sub-category or domain of specialization, whenever you decide to enter the market. Start small, start specific, start unique ; you can later expand expand your niches once you have achieved mastery in one.

Niche selection is the intersection of 3 traits, that is,

PASSION+TALENT+MARKET OPPORTUNITY(What do people want).

Besides your passion and talent, it is equally essential to understand where the market opportunity lies. Customers want to go from their current state to their desired state, and any marketer who can convince his customer about this thought naturally becomes successful.

A lot of experiments can be done to discover the market needs, to list a few:

1. Find out the top 10 blogs in a niche that you suspect has a market need.
2. Read the reviews on e-commerce sites for the products in a niche.
3. Read the comments on product review websites and consumer complaint websites. Find out the gaps in the market. What are your competitors not helping your niche with?
4. Do not enter a market with no competition. A market with no competition means there are no buyers and much of your hard work stands at the risk of going into vain.
5. Use keyword research tools such as Goggle Auto Suggest to find out what people are searching for?

Importance of Communication

Building good communication with customers is a challenging task, where everyday a single person has multiple options to choose from- keeping him engaged is only possible through regular quality communication.

A beautiful solution to this could be implementing the CATT model. Interesting? Let’s Understand.

CATT stands for C-Content, A-attention, T-trust, T-transaction.

1. Content-Good content should be the topmost priority for every marketer. A well-researched, well-written blog post or webpage can help you rank in the top of search results and bring you an avalanche of traffic. A good piece of content naturally attracts backlinks and improves your search engine ranking. Content Marketing is the solution to almost every problem.
2. Attention-Attention is a follow up of good content. Driving attention to your content can be through social media, Paid ads and referrals or through SEO.
3. Trust- Once people start paying attention to your content it is time now to win their trust or the Mass Trust of your Audience. Trust can be built through engaging and promising conversations with customers.
4. Transaction-Finally when you have build trust with your audience then you can convert your leads into paid customers with Natural sales method.

An amazing estimation of the wealth that you can likely earn form this model is n^CATT.

Integrated Digital Marketing

Modern age Marketing is all about integrated digital marketing techniques such as:

1. Email Marketing- It is about generating potential leads and subscribers and send marketing messages to them directly. It is the best communication tool available to online marketers today. It helps in sending out information about new content and follow up with the prospects to constantly keep them engaged with the product or service they want to buy.
2. Search Engine Optimization Marketing-Traffic from search engines contributes to a large percentage of the revenue. Search engines rank websites according to their quality and relevancy. Do on-page optimization for your website according to the guidelines set by the search engines. -Page SEO optimization is a misnomer. You cannot off-page-optimize a website. There are only off-page signals and those signals have to be sent by your users and not you.
3. Facebook and Google Ads-Paid advertising can also drive traffic and attention towards the product very effectively. Instead of using paid ads to directly jump to sales, the traffic from the ads can be channeled into content which will help build trust and educate the prospective customers and in turn increase social media activity, search traffic and email subscriber list.
4. Content marketing- Quality content is the driving force behind the whole integrated digital marketing process. Information comes before transaction. So instead of blindly investing money in display ads for branding and taking people to sales pages, it is much better to educate the customer about their needs, ignite their desires and then present the product or service in front of them when they naturally feel ready to buy and are convinced that you are the best one in the market. Social media can be one of the most straight forward ways to share content and spread the word.

This brings me to the end of the article. Happy Marketing!