Succeed with Digital Marketing and Personal Branding

With the easy accessibility of the internet, the number of people using the internet and going online is increasing day by day and it will continue to increase more in the future. Nowadays everyone is using the internet with their smartphones, tablets, and computers for all sorts of reasons.

These days, people spend lots of time on the internet looking for the products that they want to buy or looking for information for any particular services or products before they buy the product.

Over the last decade, the internet has changed the way business is being done. So enters Digital Marketing. So what is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing means marketing a product or service through digital channels such as social media, search engines, emails, and other websites.

Nowadays, if the business doesn’t have their websites or networking platforms or their brand, then they are missing out on sales. So before understanding digital marketing and how it works, we need to know what is marketing and what the fundamentals of marketing are.

What is marketing and what are the fundamentals of marketing?

Marketing is “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”, according to Google. In simple words, marketing is the selling of a product. But there is a lot more in marketing other than just selling products.

Firstly marketing is a science and not just creativity. Many business companies think that making advertisements will be enough to sell their product, this may not work all the time.

Marketing starts even before the product is made. In marketing, one has to do a lot of research and understand what the consumer’s needs are, and telling them about the product you have to offer.

Marketing means to make the right offer at right time and in right place. Giving information about your product to the consumer, telling them what you have to offer, and how your product is going to help or solve their problems and help in the betterment of their life. Providing the consumers’ solution to their problems or services that can upgrade their life in a better way. All of the above, when done collectively can be termed as Marketing.

To say it in more simple term, marketing is a process of

Communication: To be successful in business, communication is very crucial. Effective communication is very important to build and maintain a relationship. As a marketer, one must have an emotional connection with consumers. When you make your consumers feel valued and cared for, it helps in building trust in your product. One-on-one communication with your consumers will help you in long run in building your brand and reputation in the market.

Product: There is a saying that “A great product sells itself.” Create your product after you have done a thorough research of the market and understanding the needs of consumers. So when a product is perceived with the above factors, you create a brand. When you provide a high-quality product to your customers, this helps your customer become the brand ambassador of your product. So never let marketing take over your product.

Customer satisfaction: Marketing is not only just about selling your products, but also about keeping your consumers happy and satisfied so that they remain life-long customers of your product or service. In today’s scenario, consumer satisfaction has become the number one fundamentals of marketing.

Building a Brand: One of the most important steps in building a strong brand is building a company. Branding gives the company a unique identity and positions the company differentially from the competitors so that it can attract the right consumers. It also helps in creating effective sales strategies and marketing. The three essential elements of branding are:

Consistency: Doing consistent and focused branding of your product, the customer knows what to expect from your product. One has to be very clear about what your brand reflects, what does your company provides to consumers, and how you want to be recognized in the marketplace. Being consistent with the consumer experience promotes trust and trust brings about increased sales and loyal and life-long consumers.

Community: Once you have zeroed in on your branding, you can target the right customers who have the same values and personality as same as your organization. A consistent and well-defined brand allows the company to draw like-minded consumers which helps in creating a community.

Content: With good content, you can build good engagement with consumers in your community. By sharing content like how-to, and expert knowledge related to your product with your consumers, so that they can use what your product offers and need of the consumer is fulfilled.

The three main components of marketing are advertising, copywriting, and sales.

“Take a risk and keep testing, because what works today won’t work tomorrow, but what worked yesterday may work again.” — Amrita Sahasrabudhe

Now, let us understand the different strategies of marketing and which strategies work the best for our business. This brings us to Digital Marketing versus Traditional Marketing.

Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

While preparing the budget for marketing for any business, it is very important to spend it the right way so that it reaches to right audiences. Using the right market strategies to target the right audience to convert the leads to conversion.

Marketing is all about communicating the message with the consumers effectively. The principle remains the same, the only change is the medium. Both traditional and digital marketing communicates to the audiences through different mediums.

Traditional Marketing: Traditional marketing is marketing that is done offline. The medium used in this includes magazines, radio, television, newspaper, billboards, flyers, and pamphlets. In this, ads are seen by a vast population. If your product is generic and for general use, traditional marketing works best here. This marketing is more expensive. In this, you cannot measure the ROI as you are communicating to a vast population.

Digital Marketing: Digital marketing is marketing that is done online. The medium used in this includes social media, blogs, emails, SEO, SEM, and website. In this, business focuses on a specific audience for their specific product. This marketing is very cost-effective. In this, you can measure the ROI easily through Google Analytics.

Both traditional and digital marketing have pros and cons. For example, a business that has a generic product with the need of extensive targeting, should go for traditional marketing, i.e., TV advertisement which helps the product to reach millions of people. Whereas if your product is made with a specific target (specific age group, specific customers) can send use social media to target that specific audience.

It is a very must that you must develop a strategy based on your product and goals before choosing the marketing strategy. Based on your product and goals, the business can combine both traditional and digital marketing to achieve the goal.

So after understanding what marketing is and what strategies to use while marketing, we need a framework that will helps convert our leads to conversions. For this, we need a marketing funnel.

CATT MARKETING FUNNEL:

The main purpose of marketing is to generate sales. A marketing funnel is a path that customer does from the stage of learning about the business to the stage when they buy the product or service.

CATT is the formula for creating wealth with effective marketing and selling.

So the formula is Wealth = n^CATT

So CATT stands for Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction.

n is for Niche: The second and most important factor after understanding marketing is to find out your niche. Niche is a focused interest and skillsets that you have or will choose which makes you unique compared to others in the market. It is a combination of talent, passion, and market.

Wealth and success are dependent on the niche you choose. So choose your niche according to your talent, passion, and worth in the market. After selecting your niche, get your niche tested by consumers, get feedback on your niche, this will help you with understanding the market for your niche. According to feedback, you can always refine your niche to perfection.

C for Content: Creating unique content around your Niche will communicate your messages to consumers. Effective and unique content will help you to build a strong relationship between your product and consumers. Content can be in the form of audio, video, image, poster, or writing blog for the niche.

A for Attention: After choosing a niche and writing valuable content, increase traffic to your content using social media, paid Ads, referrals, and SEO.

T for Trust: Trust is the most crucial factor in any relationship. You need to have good communication with your consumers. You have to build trust with your consumers and maintain that trust with the help of tripwire, marketing, and retargeting.

T for Transaction: Final step of the funnel is to convert your leads into conversions because now the consumer trusts you. You can do the transaction by doing webinars, sales pages, or sales calls.

Integrated Digital Marketing:

Integrated Digital Marketing is the blend of all marketing strategies available today in such a way that each digital marketing channel complements the other by playing its strengths rather than trying to reach the goal of increasing sales and consumer base on its own.

By combining the quality content with other marketing channels like Social Media, Search Engines, Email, and Paid Ads, you can make your marketing strategies work effortlessly for you.

PERSONAL BRANDING: MassTrust Blueprint:

Last but not least is personal branding.

For example, Elon Musk has far more followers than his Tesla and SpaceX.

It is said that “The best known will always beat the best.” Usually, people always have a psychological affinity towards stalwarts, celebrity and there is an honored trust and their influence makes the consumers buy the brands they are in.

Personal branding is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want the world to see. You promote yourself through your personal branding. It allows you to stand out among your competitors.

A person with good personal branding helps raise the level of other brands that he promotes by increasing their sales. People will buy that product or service because they trust you.

Investors do not invest in your personal brand but will invest in the business or the company which you promoted through your personal branding. This is one downside of personal branding.

So we can build our personal branding through MassTrust Blueprint Model.

The MassTrust Blueprint has six stages that help you in evolving your personal brand.

Learn: The first step to personal branding is to learn a new skill set and master that skill and being updated on that skill. The more you learn your skill, there is more interest in that skillset.

Work: Once you have learned the skillset, the second step is to implement it. You have to work on your skillset by gaining more and more experience when you face challenges on those skills. This way you will know all the in’s and out’s of your skill.

Blog: Now once you know each and everything about your skill, you share the knowledge you gained while implementing your ideas or the failures you had to face. So writing about your experiences and sharing them with other people will help you to connect with like-minded people and targeted people.

Consult: Now that you have mastered the particular skill, you will be able to consult other people and help to overcome the problem they are facing.

Mentor: Teaching or mentoring about your skill to other people, will help you to understand your skill to a different level and also help you build your trust with people.

Startup: Lastly you can start your own business or startup with all the knowledge you have mastered of your skill.

Conclusion:

So now we know that marketing is a science that begins even before the product is made. So before diving into the business world, first find your niche, understand what your consumers want before creating your product, build trust and maintain the relationship with consumers, and with appropriate marketing strategy, you run your business.

I hope with this article you gained knowledge about digital marketing and how it works and helps you to start on your marketing journey and achieve success.

Note: This is part of the Digital Deepak Internship Program. If you want to get people to apply for this course, https://deepak.me/internapply