Everything You Need To Know About Marketing Fundamentals

Is marketing only about creativity ? No. It’s a process, it’s a science.

People think marketing is only about advertising and selling. But it’s just a misconception. Marketing is making profit through customer satisfaction.

Though we have experienced a rapid change in the modern business, from past so many years, the fundamental concepts of marketing remain the same. Marketing has evolved from traditional process of informing, delivering, and exchanging value with customers to proactively creating value for customers, contributing to the overall customers’ satisfaction and retention.

This article aims to explain the basics of marketing, building a brand, understanding the importance of communication skills, the role of market economics, the concept of mass trust and lastly basics of integrated digital marketing.

Basics of Marketing :

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.” ~ Peter F. Drucker.

Marketing is crucial to the success of any business. It is more of a science and starts even before creating any product. Regardless of the types of products or services a firm offers, customers are the ones who decide whether the products or services generate any utility or have any value to the society at large. Hence, marketing helps to prevent firms from wasting their resources on futile products by conducting research to identify a gap in the market and designing a product that fills the gap perfectly. A good market research is very essential as it helps in creating a great product.

The ‘marketing concept’ proposes that an organization should anticipate the needs and wants of potential customers and satisfy them more effectively than its competitors to achieve its organizational objectives. Market research and market segmentation are important steps in marketing process.

Building trust is building a brand :

In today’s competitive world, building and sustaining a brand is not everyone’s cup of tea. Knowing your customer is crucial in marketing. Marketing involves deep psychological understanding of customer needs. It is a sort of game that plays around perceptions. Digital marketing has opened up a new world of possibilities when it comes to understanding your customers better and building relationships with them.

Building trust is a two step process. Step one is to earn it by developing a relationship with your customers. And step 2 is inspiring trust with credibility indicators, testimonials, assurances, etc.

So we can conclude that trust depends on relationship first, and then on reminders that the relationship is valuable.

Be it traditional or digital marketing “trust” is a inseparable aspect in Marketing.

Author Frank Sonnenberg echoes this sentiment when he said, “Trust is like blood pressure. It’s silent, vital to good health, and if abused it can be deadly.”

Adding a bit more value to each interaction with your customers is possible for businesses of all sizes, as it is a matter of identifying what would make an experience more personalized. It can be anything like responding quickly to a customer on social media, going an extra mile and paying for a customer’s purchase to correct a quality issue. Showing a person that your company cares about them and is ready to put in a little bit of extra effort in order to deliver an enjoyable experience can help make all the difference.

Once you have successfully achieved this trust, you already have built a brand. Brand is not created by a company. It’s created by it’s customers. Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. It’s your reputation. It is something that exists in the mind of your customer. Only experiences can change the perception of a brand in the mind of the customer.

Standing out from the crowd with a positive image defines your brand success. Why should someone prefer you when they have similar cheap options available in the market? Differentiating yourself from your competitors is the key element in brand building process.

For example : Apple. It’s known for a clean design and ease of use. Apple’s slogan is “Think different”. From unique packaging to their announcement events, Apple always reminds customers that it’s products can be used right out of the box.

Before you can build a brand that your target audience trusts, you need to know what value your business provides. Hence always focus on your mission statement as it simply defines the purpose of your existence.

For example , we all are well aware of the Nike tagline — “Just do it”. But how many of us know their mission statement? Their mission statement is “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in this world. Followed by a footnote “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” Their mission is visible in all of their products. Due to this strong reputation and brand following, Nike is now able to increase the target to accommodate every “body”.

Also, same is with Starbucks….. It cares about delivering the best coffee. The experience that you get in Starbucks sits deeply inside your mind.

Thus we can say that marketing helps build brand through great experiences.

Good marketing is all about good communication skills :

What to communicate, how to communicate and when to communicate is very important when it comes to marketing. Introducing your product in front of clients, requires effective communication skills. Transferring the right information and thoughts is very essential.

Your style of presentation, communication, vocabulary, body language and listening skills helps in creating an image of your business in front of people. People tend to remember how well the product or service was communicated to them.

Everything that we do in marketing right from social media posts to blogs, radio ads to TV ads, search engine ads to display ads, seminars to webinars, from offline to online, everything is just about communicating what we are and what we offer.

Hence understanding the target audience and effectively transferring the information is essential, which requires good communication skills.

Good communication always builds and maintains good relationships with customers, enhances transparency, establishes professionalism and also facilitates innovation. It helps to bring everyone on the same page.

The ability to express your ideas perfectly in front of your audience will play a significant role in boosting your morale. Hence whichever mode of marketing you are using, either online or offline, you need to have effective communication skills to win customers.

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Understanding market economics :

Market economy works on the concept of demand and supply. This helps to determine the appropriate prices and quantities for most goods and services in the economy. Economy of any country is dependent on income generated by its people expenditure and utilization of the money by the government. Economy will boost when the spending power of common man increases. Loans are a source of income for banks and government. Interest gained from loan is utilized by them. So the money is getting circulated in the market. Debt creates money. If this money circulation is stopped the market and economy of the country will go down. Hence one should keep an eye on global as well as local economy while defining marketing strategies.

Traditional vs digital marketing :

Traditional marketing is any type of marketing that isn’t online. It includes print media, broadcast, phone, newspapers, radio, outdoor advertising like billboards. Traditional marketing is not only the oldest form of marketing but also the most researched one.

Traditional marketing plays an important part in reaching local audiences. Ads can be kept for a long period of time, if they’re physical. In addition, there’s an audience who is easier to reach through traditional marketing than online marketing.

Digital marketing is about using digital channels such as websites, social media, email marketing and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising as tools for marketing communication. It is a form of online marketing. An ad that pops up on your screen while using Facebook is nothing but digital marketing.

Check out the Top 100 Digital Marketing Agencies in India

As the world becomes more digital, the way we market has evolved. Not only is digital marketing sometimes more cost-effective than traditional, but also it is a more direct way to connect with target audiences globally.

Of course traditional marketing doesn’t mean it’s old fashioned. Traditional marketing still plays an important role in people’s lives with the ever growing need to step out of the digital world.

The immersive experience of Amul newspaper print ad has an impactful commercial and tactile nature of capturing the important news are as important today as they were 20 years ago because of their lasting effects on your memory. Subconsciously you attach yourself to their brand emotionally, meaning they will stay at the top of your mind.

In the same way, digital marketing is just as important as traditional if not even more so. Digital marketing uses every touch point of your daily use of the internet to reach you. People spend several hours on internet, digital marketing just uses this to it’s advantage by cleverly weaving in marketing communications into every digital channel.

The success for any business lies in using the perfect mix of traditional and digital marketing. It mainly depends on the type of product that we are offering and what your customer want.

Digital marketing makes it easy to measure your campaigns and hence optimize the strategies at the right time. It makes clever targeting of audience possible.

Building your own personal brand :

There was a time when a company’s brand meant everything, and founders/employees were simply a byproduct of that brand. But with the advancement of social media over the past decade, real-time networking has brought personal brands to the forefront.

Personal brand building doesn’t happen overnight. It can take several years. But it’s of great worth for your efforts and your business. The more personal brand exposure you get, the more brand exposure your business will also get.

For example : Bill Gates has more followers than his company Microsoft.

No matter what you are trying to achieve in life, personal brand will always ensure that you achieve it.

Personal branding has its own advantages like establishing credibility, increasing online influence, securing future projects, generating sales and attracting potential partnership for investments.

Building a personal brand will help set you on a path for personal development, it challenges you to improve, to collate your thoughts and to have a clear vision of success. A personal brand will help you find focus and drive your ability to take steps to achieve your goals.

The CATT model

The CATT model is a model for building your personal brand. Once you build your personal brand, everything becomes easy. A personal brand becomes an influence and makes you the brand ambassador for the companies that you run. Personal brand can be used to become an affiliate marketer, a freelancer or a mentor.

Lets understand the CATT Model:

Initially the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) funnel was used for sales. It was one on one sales system which is not scalable. But CATT is a mass trust system. It is building trust at a large scale. Main aspect here is communicating through personal brand.

Wealth = n ^ CATT

n = niche : Select your own niche. Your success and wealth is directly proportional to the niche you select. You need a combination of talent, market and passion to select a niche.

C = Content : Publish quality content to attract people from your niche. You can publish it in various ways like blogs, you tube channel, social media, as books or ebooks, or via webinar.

A = Attention : Drive attention, pull traffic to your content using SEO’s, social media, paid ads (Google ads, Facebook ads. Quora ads, LinkedIn ads), referrals.

T = Trust : Build trust with your audience with repetitive engagement. Hook the audience by subscribing them to email list, subscribe to you tube channel, follow on twitter / Instagram. Marketing automation and re-targeting are necessary.

T = Transaction : Convert your leads into actual customers with traditional sales methods. Here your offer matches your need (niche) to get the desired result. It involves persuading the leads with sales triggers.

The effectiveness of your content, attention, trust and transaction determines how much wealth you will create.

Wealth created can be used in different ways and also for creating a new niche. So does the cycle continues.

Evolution of a personal brand involves following steps:

Integrated Digital Marketing:

Integrated digital marketing is the integration of multiple marketing strategies to form a cohesive online approach for your business. The main focus in integrated digital marketing is on quality of the content.

Integrated digital marketing will utilize the combined strengths of all strategies or components and produce a result much more bigger than the sum of individual achievements of the components.

It involves the following components :

1. Content marketing : Quality and relevant content helps to gain attention of customers and build trust.
2. Email marketing : Emails are widely used online marketing tool. It helps to share new content and take feedback from targeted audience. It works well when combined with subscribers.
3. Social media : Social media acts a platform to showcase your product to focus group. When people discover good quality content which can improve their personal or professional lives, they are compelled to share it again with their network so that their friends will thank them for it. This helps to get new followers or subscribers.
4. SEO : Search engines rank websites according to their quality and relevancy. It is helping customers find your content by directly searching for it.
5. Paid advertising : Paid advertisements in all forms — digital display ads, social media ads like LinkedIn ads, Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Instagram ads, etc. have great potential to ignite and speed up the entire integrated digital marketing process.

The Search-Social-Email trio along with powerful content acts as a catalyst for the paid ads to maximize the return on investment and also gives intangible benefits like building a tribe or community.

6. Sell & Convert : There is hardly anyone one who would buy a product at its first look. Converting a prospect to a customer involves a careful effort to persuade the lead by providing quality information and giving enough transparency.

Conclusion:

Whether it be traditional or digital marketing, it is all about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. If the niche chosen is targeted well, it always helps in customer retention and building trust and brand. Building trust with the target audience is an integral part of any business. Along with business, nowadays it is also important to develop a personal brand to reap the maximum benefits from marketing.

Instead of using a single marketing strategy it will always be wise to use integrated digital marketing in order to maximize return on investment.

The future of digital marketing will rely on the use of artificial intelligence and big data analytics, which have the potential to take the marketing to the next level.