Marketing 101 strategy for being a successful Digital entrepreneur

Before Stepping into digital marketing as a blogger, freelancer, or mentor and starting any kind of business or startup, people should have knowledge about marketing.

But as a newbie, Overwhelming information available on the internet makes newbie confused

. Are you one of them? Are you new & upcoming in the digital industry but worry about how to learn the basics of marketing that helps you to become a successful entrepreneur?

Then you are welcome.

Many people believe this myth, Only having knowledge about digital marketing, automation tools, and marketing tools you can be a successful entrepreneur.

No, You can’t

You need to know the basics of marketing. Global and National Economic overview and other major components related to marketing.

Who this article is for

If you are a student, professor, or want to earn money online through digital marketing, a businessman, or an entrepreneur this article is for you.

What am I going to cover in this article?

I am giving you a brief idea of what I am going to cover in this blog.

1. Financial goal setting
2. Fundamentals of marketing
3. traditional marketing vs Digital marketing
4. Why are communication skills necessary for marketing?
5. The CATT marketing funnel
6. Integrated digital marketingIDM
7. Personal branding: Mass trust blueprint

Disclaimer — It may be lengthy. But I promise you when you finish it completely you will not have any doubt regarding the fundamentals of marketing.

1.Financial Goal Setting

How to set your financial goal to achieve success in digital marketing?

Setting a financial goal before starting any business is crucial. And you have started your digital marketing journey so you also need to set how much you invest and how much do you want to accomplish in any specific period.

A finance goal-achieving list & finance worksheet with a budget helps you to measure, where and how much amount you need to invest and in a specific year how much you have achieved.

The finance goal should be smart. If I expand the SMART finance goal.

It stands

S- Specific

M- Measurable

A- Achievable

R- Realistic

T- Time-bound

1. SPECIFIC- The finance goal should be clear and specific. I explain it broadly that you can set specific financial goals. Your specific goal should start with the following question.

1. How much amount do you have to invest in your business?
2. How much do you want to accomplish in a specific period?
3. Who is involved in your financial help?
4. Why do you want to accomplish that much amount?
5. When will it be accomplished?

2. MEASURABLE- Your invested amount and tends to accomplish amount should be able to track. If you track & measure where you have invested your capital and how you accomplish your amount, it keeps you motivated to achieve it.

3. ACHIEVABLE- The amount you have set to achieve should be achievable in a specific time. For instance, if you have set 1crore to achieve in a year, it should be achievable. And it would only happen if you commit yourself and work hard to achieve your target.

4. REALISTIC- The goal you have set should be real. You have to ask yourself: Is it going to convert into reality and how could you make it real.

5.TIME BOUND- The goal you have set to achieve, should be bounded in time. If you set a specific period, You feel more motivated to accomplish it. The time-bound must be less than 5 years.

2.Fundamentals of Marketing

“The no.1 key to success in today’s marketing environment is speed. The marketers who deliver the most valuable information to their customer or prospect first wins the game.” — — — -Dave Orrico

People have a different view to define the definition of marketing.

David Meerman Scott-Real time marketer and PR defines Marketing as

“Marketing is to understand consumers very well. From there products and information are created to solve their problems.”

Marketing is then, Getting customers to believe that your product and services are made to keep their pain points in mind and that they deliver a better value than your competitors.

Afterward, Marketing is to maintain a cordial relationship with your customers, they will be your long term buyer, and if your customer believes in your brand, they’ll bring new customers naturally.

Before explaining more about the law of marketing and principle, let’s have a look at some marketing myths.

1. There is only one right way of marketing.

Marketing is a tactic to make customers familiar with the product. It includes customer understanding, product creation, advertisement, sends the product to the customer, etc and the strategy, methodology, medium, and the way of marketing can be varied. It does not depend only on one way.

2. Marketing and advertising are the same.

Advertising and marketing are related to each other but both are not the same.

Marketing is a strategy that involves research and analysis. It is an ongoing end to end plan that includes design, creation, how to best align the idea of products and services that the right customer got the right result, pricing of the product, how to persuade customers to buy products and how to retain customer attention to the product or brand that they become a lifetime customer.

While the advertisement is a small segment of marketing to grab the attention of a customer towards the product by creating an attention-grabbing ads campaign and placing it on different channels or mediums.

3. Everyone is your customer

Look, there is lots of competition out there and different people have different needs. You cannot satisfy everyone. That’s why everyone cannot be your customer. For better conversion results it is advisable to customize your customer, create your buyer persona, and deploy your time and money to the right audience.

4. You don’t need a marketing plan

It really doesn’t matter how great your product or services are and how big your company and your brand. Your product won’t sell itself. It needs exposure to the public. You have heard this phrase

“ What you see is sold.”

Hence, every business requires a solid written marketing plan that outlines all tools, marketing strategy, and medium everything will be noted carefully to get your target sales goal.

Now let’s understand some laws of marketing.

Marketing is based on science not on creativity as many people think. They thought creating a beautiful ad campaign and slogan for a product would give maximum sales, but creativity is part of marketing strategy, it cannot be used without marketing.

Marketing starts before creating products. It starts with understanding the need and pain points of customers and persuading them to create a product that fits them.

If the product intends to solve customer problems, it will sell itself using word-of-mouth techniques.

Marketing is all about sending the right product to the right customers at the right time.

Marketing is not just about selling. It is also about keeping existing customers happy by communicating with them so they remain your customer for life.

The main aim of marketing is to build trust in your brand and product the company has created that it captures a position in the mind of the customer.

Marketing is a game of perceptions. Product is rooted in reality. Never let marketing become more dominating than the product. A great product sells itself by word of mouth medium. The product should always be a dominating factor.

A great product covers your customer into a brand ambassador. Words of mouth marketing are the best channel of marketing ever.

3. Traditional marketing Vs Digital marketing

Traditional & digital marketing both are the way of reaching to the audience. The only difference is one is an offline medium while another is an online and Internet medium.

Traditional marketing

Traditional marketing is an old way of marketing technique. It is an offline method to do promotion and advertisement of goods and services.

The traditional medium includes:

1. Radio
2. Television
3. Magazines
4. Newspaper
5. Telephone calls and text notification
6. Fliers and hoodies
7. Billboards
8. Industry event
9. Trade shows
10. Catalog

Some of the traditional marketing is useful for its simplicity and stability. Traditional marketing strategies are:

1. Telemarketing
2. Broadcasting
3. Face to face meeting
4. Door to door sales
5. Direct mail
6. Print- advertisement
7. Networking
8. Referral marketing

Traditional marketing is not completely outdated. Some of them are still in use. Some kind of business usually prefers a traditional medium rather than a digital medium.

But traditional marketing have pros and cons

Pros

1. The traditional market helps to reach local target audiences easily.

Radio, TV, and newspapers are traditional mediums used to target local audiences within a specific location.

2. It can provide your audience with a physical copy.

Newspaper, flyers, banners, and magazines are 3D objects which can keep people in the form of a physical copy. Physical objects retain their mark on the audience for a long time and are helpful to make a strong bond with the audience and product.

3. It provides consistency

As compared to digital marketing traditional marketing rarely changed and updated itself.

Digital marketing is an internet-based medium that relies on technology, since technology is constantly changing, Digital marketers have to adapt to the change and have to learn continuously to beat the competitions.

While traditional marketing changes rarely and hence Tv ads, radio, and newspaper ads do not have to learn regularly.

Cons

1.Traditional marketing is expensive

2.It takes a long time to execute and show results.

3.Difficult to gather data, how many people have seen your ads, printed news ads, pamphlets ads, etc.

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a modern technique of marketing. It brings a new revolution in marketing. It uses the internet and technology, which makes analysis, tracking, targeting of the audience easily and effectively. It is the best medium to reach customers globally.

It also reduces a lot of manual work by replacing it with highly automated tools.

This technique helps the marketer to analyze a wide variety of metrics such as

Digital marketing is the same as traditional marketing but the medium has changed and the Strategy of marketing is now funneled according to the digital medium. These digital mediums are includes

1. Social media marketing( Pay per clicks)
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
3. Social Media Marketing(Facebook,youtube,instagram,twitter,pinterest,Linkedin)
4. Content Marketing( Blog,vlog,videos,post,MEMEs,ebook)
5. Email Marketing
6. Display ads

Pros and cons of marketing

Pros

1.Brand development

2. Personalization

3. Wider reach

4. Accessibility

5. Greater Engagement

6. Measurable results

Cons

1. High Competition
2. Dependency on technology
3. Privacy and Security issue

Why is communication skill necessary for marketing & How to improve it?

Being a marketer, one question always bother

Is communication skill important in marketing?

The answer is absolute YES.

The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication and clear communication is necessary for success management. — James Cash

• Good marketing is all about good communication and negotiation skills.
• The ability to communicate effectively can help you in all aspects of your life, from personal to professional life and everything in between.
• If you are able to communicate your ideas, thoughts and intentions for producing your service and product then customers can find a reason to believe you and your product.
• Good communication does not mean you should be well-versed in English.
• Good communication does not care about vocabulary and grammar.
• If you are confident and comfortable in your local language, You can communicate in it, if your target audience is local. But if your target audience is global, it needs to be able to communicate in English.
• Since with the help of digital marketing, you can target your audience all over the world but for that, you should be good at English.

Here are a few tips for you, In that case, if you are not good at communication

1. Write a lot in English. The more you write, the better you can write and speak.
2. Listen to podcast and audiobooks
3. Read books, magazines & blogs.
4. While having a conversation with your family, friends or colleagues try to talk in English.
5. Think in English.
6. .Good listening skills can also help to communicate better, so always listen to another person’s point of view and try to understand it.
7. Watch subtitle comedy shows, movies, and sitcoms.

5.CATT Marketing Funnel

You have understood what is the basics of marketing, what is tradition and digital marketing, the digital marketing boom in the Indian economy, and how to set your financial goal to start your career in digital marketing.

Now you have to know in which niche you will enter and how you can make your marketing strategy

CATT is a marketing funnel that will help you to make a funnel for your business.

To understand CATT,1st know

What is Niche

“ A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.”

Let suppose,

You have a computer manufacturing and servicing company.

So you compter is your product and

Repairing of computer is your service

These two are your niche and you have expertise in manufacturing a computer and repairing it.

CATT funnel

“A marketing funnel is a roadmap of a customer’s journey from the point where a customer becomes aware of the brand to the point of conversion.”

CATT is that roadmap that understands customers or customer behavior, their requirements, what difficulties a customer faces while using another company’s product, and how your product helps to solve their problem.

It is called consumer research which is a part of the CATT marketing funnel. It gives an in-depth study of how to create a product to sell it to customers.

CATT has given the formula to understand the entire funnel.

Wealth = n៱CATT

It shows the funnel is a strategy to market your product, but if you want real wealth, you should have a unique and attention-grabbing niche.

Let's understand nCATT

n= Niche

C = Content

A= Attention

T= Trust

T= Transaction

Niche-

“The more you know about your niche the more wealth you can generate.”

Finding an interesting and profitable niche is a little difficult, But you can find your niche using this framework in the picture below.

Passion+Market=Lots of opportunity but no real sales offer

Passion+talent= Struggling artist

Market+Talent= Passionless job

You can see, all 3 scenarios are not enough to select a profitable and passionate niche.

So you need to have a combination of all 3 skills in order to become a successful entrepreneur.

So,

Talent+Passion+Market= Niche

Now,

You get the formula to find a niche. You follow these steps to drive out your niche from this formulae.

Step 1- Know your passion

Step 2-Study the market related to your passion

Step 3- Research and read a lot to make a passion to talent

Step 4- Adapt your passion to serve the market

Step 5- Equip yourself with the talent to succeed

Step 6- And finally execute and finetune your niche.

2. Content

You might hear this

Content is not the only king, it is the entire kingdom of marketing.

This is the most impactful part of the funnel. So focus on delivering valuable content. This is the key factor to grab customer’s attention towards your product and services.

Content will be in the form of a blog, videos, images, graphics emails webinar events, etc But in the present audience costumes more videos and images on social media.

By consuming high-quality content, they start believing in your brand and will trust you, if the product /services will solve their problem.

To deliver content consistently through various mediums like blog, social media posts, videos, ebook, email, etc.

3. Attention

Once the content is ready, your next work is to drive traffic to your blog, youtube & social media handles. You can drive traffic to your medium by

1. Organic method

The organic method includes SEO(Search engine optimization)that optimize your channel effectively, to rank on top pages of google search engine.

2. Inorganic method

The inorganic method uses paid advertisement by google and social media. These ads are

1. Display google ads
2. Youtube ads
3. Instagram ads
4. Facebook ads
5. Linkedin ads & so on

4. Trust(T)-

Building trust is more important to build your brand strong and it takes time, But due to digitalization it becomes easy for people to directly contact their followers and audience and can help with their service and product.

Interacting more with your customers brings you more close to them & it helps to build trust.

5. Transaction(T-)

Trust is the most critical factor that you need to build with your audience that they buy your product and services.

If you were able to follow the above steps correctly that means you have provided them quality content to trust youThen your audience will turn into potential customers. Therefore they are likely to purchase from you.

6.Integrated Digital Marketing

You learned how to make market strategy using CATT funnel,

But Wait,

CATT funnel will not work if you would not iterate all methods of digital marketing.

Integrated Digital Marketing

, Oh! A complex term like CATT and You get stuck.,

But relax,

It is not a complex term, It is a term to use whole digital marketing methods in the CATT funnel.

Let’s Understand

What is Integrated marketing IDM

It is basically an integration of all marketing strategies in such a way that you get a mind-blowing result. In Fact, CATT &IDM go hand in hand.

What is the need for IDM?

Most of the time, people use a single digital marketing channel to acquire customers, for instance, SEO to generate organic traffic or only email marketing for nurturing your customer or just paid ads.

These individual methods may be able to generate some leads or sales but it is not an optimum way to apply the CATT marketing funnel to get desirable leads and sales.

How does IDM work with CATT?

As you can see in this picture,

Content is the primary thing that you need for your product or service. It should be attention-grabbing of customers otherwise all your market strategy is just useless if your content is not good.

Content and product are always dominating.

Once you created your content for your services/product, the main work of IDM start

You need to drive attention to the content using paid ads, SEO & social media channels. Then build your trust, nurture your customer using email, marketing, and finally convert your leads into potential customers.

IMAGE

7.Personal Branding -Mass Trust Blueprint

“ Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” — Jeff Bezos

Why is creating a personal brand important in marketing?

Wikipedia resource,

Personal branding is an intentional effort to create your public reputation as an authority & specialist in a particular niche.

1. It helps you stand out from the crowd
2. It leads to opportunity
3. It inspires the audience to trust you
4. People start to follow you
5. The ultimate goal of creating a personal brand is to monetize your skill. The more strong brand you have, the more you earn.

How can you build your brand?

“Developing a personal brand takes time and it is not going to happen overnight. But once you do it, the benefits are endless.”

Here I am giving a blueprint of personal branding known as Mass Trust Blueprint of personal brand

This helps you to build a personal brand from scratch & helps to be authorized in a particular niche that people believe in you.

1. Learn- The 1st ladder in building a personal brand is learning. You have to learn more, research, analysis, and practice to become an expert in any particular niche in which you want to become an expert.
2. Work- The skills you have started to learn put these skills into work. You can start your own work or help others in the beginning as a freelancer. Working on a project gives you the real practice of your skill and you better understand it when you practice it more in a real project
3. Blog- starting your own Blog, social media post youtube channel helps you more to gain more expertise in your field. People start to know your skill with your work, you can solve their problem with online mediums. This helps you to build your community, people appreciate your work & also give feedback.
4. Consulting- Once your personal brand starts getting establish with your blog/youtube channel/social media, You can help people by consulting them. It can be one on one consultation or group consultation. It has two benefits:

1. You get more confidence whatever you have learned

2. Your consulting business pays you.

3.People believe it will turn into mass trust.

5. Mentor- Now people have started to appreciate your skill but in one on consulting you can only help few people. In mentorship, you can teach more students whatever you have learned. This will scale your understanding and explaining things to people.

6.Startup- Now you have expertise in your niche and have understood human psychology by consulting and mentoring programs. You can start your own something that gives your skill a new height.

These steps will go one by one aids to build a strong relationship with your audience and will scale your skill.

3. How you can gain the trust of your audience by personal branding

When you provide valuable, insightful information your niche by different digital medium platform e.g blog, youtube, Instagram, FB, and other social media, people will interact you if your information resolves their problem & inspire them.

They will start to trust you.

Regular visibility & interaction with your audience help them to trust you more. The reason behind this is people relate to a person more than a non-living brand.

Conclusion

In this article, I have mapped out some basic concepts of the fundamentals of marketing, How digital marketing is a more reliable platform these days, How you can Use CATT with the integration of digital marketing.

These all units will help you to start your journey in the digital marketing field and you are able to build your strong and effective personal brand in your passionated niche and get better results.

Wish you a very good luck

Leave your comment & give honest feedback, what you have learned from it.