Why You Might Be Failing at Digital Marketing
What marketing really is according to your perception? Getting a real understanding of marketing helps you to implement it better or achieve success.
In this article, you are going to learn the fundamentals of marketing. Here you also learn that Marketing is not just about selling. It is about keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they can remain a customer for life. You also understand that a great product sells itself and converts your customers into brand ambassadors.
Digital Marketing Vs. Traditional Marketing where you understand Traditional and Digital Marketing play an important role in marketing and are the best in itself depending on the type of product and the target customer base.
Direct Response Marketing: Here you understand what is Direct Response Marketing and here you can use methods to track how many customers viewed your ad or responded to it.
The CATT Marketing funnel is the secret recipe to become successful marketers.
Here Wealth=n^CATT
where
[n] is the niche you choose, [C] the content you create, [A] the attention you drive towards your content, [T] the trust you build with your audience, and [T] is the transaction which happens when you convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods.
Next is Integrated Digital Marketing where you understand how the different marketing mediums like Content marketing, Social Media, SEO, Email marketing complement each other and can be used in a way such that it helps you to reach your goal of increasing revenues and customer base on its own.
In Personal Branding: Mass Trust Blueprint you are going to learn why Personal Branding is important and eventually how a personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies they run and how you can turn your present customers into your lifetime customers.
This article is going to be an eye-opener for the Digital Marketers who are failing and helps them get a better understanding to become successful marketers by helping them get a better understanding of the term marketing, how better communication helps existing customers remain customers for a lifetime.
Basic Understanding of Marketing
This article is an assignment as a part of the Digital Deepak Internship Program. The content of this article is the learnings from the internship program.
Many believe that the basic problem in marketing is convincing the customers that you have a better product or service. But that’s not true. If you have a small market share and you have to battle with larger and better-financed competitors, then your marketing strategy is faulty in the first place.
The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. It is better to be first than it is to be better.
People always remember the first in a category. For example: When we ask “Who was the first person to land on the moon?” Everybody remembers it is Neil Armstrong. How many of us know who was the second person to land on the moon? It was Buzz Aldrin.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself… The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” - Peter Drucker
You need to have a great product. Marketing not only helps people discover the product but also have a good perception of the product.
You need to choose a category and become a leader in that category. Deciding where to compete is half success.
People remember only the #1, or maximum the #2 in category leadership. In the long run, every market becomes a two-horse race.
The customers perceive marketing as a battle of products. It’s this kind of thinking that keeps the two brands on top: “They must be the best, they are the leaders.”
Marketing has a long shelf life because it is rooted in human psychology and understanding the market. Marketing existed since civilizations originated.
If a company can design a product or service that meets the needs of the market, offer it at an affordable price, sell it in convenient locations and let the target market know about it with effective promotion, it will be successful.
Traditional Vs. Digital Marketing
The main difference between traditional and digital marketing is the medium through which the message of marketing is conveyed.
While Traditional marketing uses traditional media like broadcasting(TV & Radio), print media(newspapers, magazines), billboards, and fliers, digital marketing uses digital media like social media and websites.
If a product is generic with very wide targeting- TV ads can reach millions at a low cost. (Ex: Apple iPhone)
Apple iPhone is a very generic product and anybody and everybody with money can become an Apple customer. So Apple does hoardings, TV ads.
You have a lot of companies doing TV ads and we cannot understand the power of TV ads especially if you want to pretty much reach the entire country.
India has TVs in 197 million homes out of 298 million homes. Around 100 million homes don’t even have a TV. 197 million homes have TVs. So with an average of 4–5 members per household, we can say that TV has a reach of 80 million to 1 billion people.
The reach of Digital Marketing is nowhere close to TV based on numbers alone. (Source: Wikipedia)
Digital Marketing is the best medium to reach the affluent English speaking population in India with spending power which is 100 Million users.
However, if your product is generic and you target a large customer base, you can use TV ads.
You can use Radio also which has a reach of 65% of the Indian population(Source: Financial Express)
Newspapers have a reach of 465 million people. (Source: Business-Standard).
This is the reach of traditional marketing. Besides this, the main disadvantage of traditional marketing is we cannot personalize the communication, can’t do deep marketing and natural sales.
Whenever you are selling a low-end consumer product, traditional marketing can be used to reach out to people at a very low cost.
In traditional marketing, it is easy to reach out to local customers using traditional marketing media. In digital marketing, you can reach out to your targeted audience globally.
Traditional marketing has more of a personal touch as it involves personal interaction with the customers. Digital marketing doesn’t need your physical presence and yet you can make a finite number of customers.
In digital marketing, customers have various platforms to give their feedback or interact regarding their concerns or queries like social media sites and different apps where their feedback can be recorded. But in traditional marketing, customer interaction is very less as the promotional medium does not support the flexibility for customers’ interaction.
While in traditional marketing, we have to wait for weeks or months to get results, digital marketing gives quick results and helps to get real-time marketing results.
In traditional marketing, consumers are forced to watch the advertisements which cause interruptions to them. Digital marketing enables the customers to skips the ads which interrupt and continue with their work.
Traditional marketing doesn’t mean it is old fashioned, it still plays an important role in people’s lives when trying to step out of the digital world.
In the same way, digital marketing is as important as traditional marketing or even more so as it uses every touchpoint of your internet usage to reach your customers.
Direct Response Marketing
What is Direct Response Marketing?
Most people who run ads do not know if the ad works or not.
It is difficult to track the reach and leads generated using Traditional marketing mediums like TV ads, newspaper ads, hoardings, etc.
Marketing executives in big companies run branding campaigns using which they do not give specific and measurable results. Increase in “brand awareness” is not measurable.
For a startup, it is very important to use digital channels and do direct response marketing.
“Direct response is a type of marketing designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take a specific action.” — MarketingEvolution.com
If you run an ad for an application, then you can ask the customers to give a response by filling the application form. If you are asking the customers to download an ebook, then you can give it in return for their name and email Id.
You can track what is it costing for every response and you can also track how many of these people are going to buy your products and services. There is a direct response in this marketing and so it is called Direct Response Marketing.
One of the advantages of direct response marketing is that you can track if your ads are working.
An ad in the newspaper with a phone number to call, a late-night infomercial with a phone number to call and order, an ad leading to a landing page with a lead form, a sales with a product with a link to purchase the product are examples of direct response marketing campaign.
The CATT Marketing Funnel and Framework
Wealth=n^CATT
[n] Niche: Your success and Wealth depends on the niche you choose.
So you choose a niche with a hungry market and here you are going to solve the problems of the people here with your products and services.
You need to go narrow and choose your niche correctly. You cannot teach everything to everybody. So try to focus and choose a niche where you are the first or you are the only one.
You can find your niche with the help of the tools like Keyword Research tool, Audience Research tool to know the people who would be interested in your products and services.
Finding an audience segment interested in your products and services is important to achieve success.
[C] Content: Once you have the niche selected, you have to create content to attract people interested in your niche. Blog posts, videos, lead magnets, live webinars, etc. are forms of content.
Content is the magnet through which you attract your tribe, people to you, and your business.
[A] Attention: You need to drive attention to your content using SEO, social media, paid ads, and referrals.
[T] Trust: You need to build trust with your audience with tripwires, marketing automation, and retargeting. Without trust, you can’t make them buy. Deep marketing is the best way to build trust with your audience.
Sending out personalized communications to your target audience makes them feel that you are communicating to them directly to the point.
After building trust, comes the transaction which is sales.
[T] Transaction: You have to convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods. When you have selected the niche, have a targeted audience, have built trust with the audience, then the sales happen naturally. You don’t need to push. Thus it is called natural sales.
You need to make sales using a sales call, sales webinar, sales page, or a video sales letter. Without sales, you cannot convert your leads into customers which is important to complete the entire funnel. This will create wealth for you.
You got the niche right, you create content, you drive attention to it, you build trust with them and then you transact with them.
Once you have saturated a niche, you can go and use these profits to build new niches as well if you want. So
Wealth=n^CATT
The effectiveness of your CATT funnel determines the wealth you create.
You choose an effective niche and multiply the effectiveness using CATT.
How to choose the right niche?
You have talent, passion and market. You have to choose the right combination of this.
You have talent and passion. What if there is no market for the products or services you provide? You cannot monetize it.
If you have the talent and there is a market but no passion you can’t survive here either. You get tired and someone with passion will take over.
You have the passion and there is a market but you don’t have the talent, you can’t survive. You will be out of the market soon.
You have the talent, say you are a dancer and you are passionate about it. There is a market for it. When you have all these, you succeed in your niche.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing has a lot of modules in it. Each module is an ocean in itself.
It is difficult to achieve expertise in every module.
It is important to execute digital marketing in an integrated way than building expertise in each marketing module.
Most of the people in Digital Marketing try to do each segment separately and try to achieve success separately.
Let’s say, a lot of people do content marketing and expect sales but nothing happens.
Some do Social Media marketing, expect sales to happen, and complain social media people won’t buy.
Some do Email Marketing collecting a bunch of emails and sending out emails to them, but nothing happens.
Some do SEO, expect sales to happen but nothing happens.
Some do Facebook Ads, Google Ads alone, and expect sales to happens.
When you integrate all these components of Digital Marketing in such a way that they become a machine they become efficient altogether and give results.
You should not do Facebook ads and google ads for selling the product. Instead, you should use them to drive attention to your content in your blogs and YouTube.
When people visit your blog, it adds up to your email list. Through this, you can notify your subscribers whenever you publish new content.
Through this, you get more email subscribers which again can be used to drive attention to your content and nurture your audience.
First, you should concentrate on building attention from your tribe not focus on making money. Later this attention builds up trust and makes selling easy.
Now you can list your content in a Search engine and the search engine ranks your content and brings traffic to your content.
Social Media brings back more subscribers and increase your traffic to your content when people like and share.
Paid advertising is boosting the entire momentum of Content, Email marketing, Social Media, and SEO through which people end up building trust with you which is the Content, Attention, Trust, Transaction funnel.
You have Content at the centre, then you drive attention to it using paid advertising, social media and SEO and build trust using Email marketing.
Finally, you transact using sales and conversion.
This is the way it works in real-time. When you put the CATT funnel it is very linear and the way the CATT funnel is executed is through the Integrated Digital Marketing Framework.
CATT is a framework how an individual goes through different stages. First, there is a niche. Then there is Content, Attention, Trust and Transaction. Integrated Digital Marketing Framework is how you execute it.
You have people communicating with you at all the stages at all the time. There will be people who are transacting with you, there will be people building trust with you and there will be people who are attracted to your content using different attraction mechanisms like paid advertising, social media and SEO. This framework is like an engine that drives the CATT funnel.
Personal Branding
A personal brand is a unique way of putting forth the skills and expertise you have in a particular field or subject.
Building a brand buys you an opportunity to demonstrate yourself before your audience, the skill you know and why you have it which helps you to stand out among your competitors.
A personal brand is a building block that paves the way for your success in the future.
The best known will always beat the best.
If you are good at something and the world doesn’t know about it, then nobody is going to hire you.
It is not enough to be good at something. People should know that you are good at something and that is when people will reach out to you.
People won’t be able to discover with you have marketed yourself.
People want to hear from people, not from brands.
When you start your business, you have to build your personal brand along with the company brand.
A personal brand is very important to establish yourself and you have a very clear story about yourself about who you are so that people can remember you.
Elon Musk has a bigger following on Twitter than SpaceX and Tesla.
Many companies CEOs’ have a bigger following than the companies they have started or co-founded.
The Downside of a personal brand is that it cannot be invested and it cannot be sold.
The Upside of a personal brand is that it can give rise to many brands from his/her influence.
A personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies that they run.
The Evolution of a Personal Brand
Learn: Learn a new skill through Concepts, Facts and Procedures. Understand the concepts, remember the facts and practice the procedures.
Work: Put your new-found skills to work. Go from practice to implementation. Implementing it in the real world will give you a better understanding. (Work=Job/ Freelancing/ Own projects)
Blog: Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, you understand it better and also start building your personal brand.
Consult: Now that you have a personal brand through your blog, you have work experience and have learned the fundamentals, start consulting for other businesses instead of working for them.
Mentor: Mentor other people who want to become like you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level.
Startup: Start your own product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, the problem and your own skills.
Mass Trust Blueprint
With this hope you got the rough idea about what is marketing, Traditional Marketing Vs. Digital Marketing, Direct Response Marketing, CATT funnel, How to find a right niche?, Integrated Digital Marketing and Personal Branding:Mass Trust Blueprint.
For more information, please refer to Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman, Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy.
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