Marketing simplified like never before – A must read

Is marketing as difficult as one thinks? How does marketing differ from Sales? Is traditional marketing losing its shine to digital marketing? Does the concept of marketing remain the same forever?

Well there are definite answers for all these. Let us understand what exactly marketing is.

Marketing is nothing but the process of understanding your clients/customers, building and maintaining relationships with your clients/customers. Marketing starts right from the point of creating a right product. Yes, you read it right; marketing doesn’t mean you need to be innovative and creative to sell a product. It simply means how you understand your customer and what exactly suits your customer and how you meet the requirements of your customers. It becomes easy to decide before you create a product to the customers rather than selling a product creatively. Marketing is not just about advertisements and creativity; it’s about how satisfied your customer is when he makes purchase of your product. A good product doesn’t need marketing and a bad product cannot be sold in the market without marketing.

Traditional Marketing has its own place and advantages over digital marketing. For example, an FMCG product or a Pharmacy product doesn’t need any targeted audience like Facebook ads, Instagram ads or Google ads. FMCG product and a pharmacy product still works better without any need of customization and the use of these products is the entire population of a country. They can be advertised in television, newspaper and Radio channels. However, by this time you have an idea, where the digital marketing does fits into. Yes, you guessed it right, digital marketing requires targeted audience. For example, if I need to sell a stock market training course, I can’t just go and do advertisement in newspaper or television. Because I definitely know as per the statistics, there are hardly 5% of the total population of our country interested in stock market courses. How do I identify is the biggest task, if I am able to identify them, the work is done. Yes, identifying them is the primary benefit of digital marketing. I know working professionals and business people are interested and I know their age group as well. If I target the particular segment of the society, I would be lowering my cost per sale.

Nonetheless, one should always keep in mind that the concept of marketing never changes; it’s only the medium of marketing which changes. As mentioned above, there can’t be a better example how traditional marketing differs from digital marketing.

Whether you are a multinational brand, domestic brand, big brand or a small brand, the concept of marketing never changes, whereas scalability and the product niche changes.

Now let us understand CATT Marketing Funnel

Wealth = n^CATT

n stands for niche you choose. Your success and wealth depend on the niche you choose.

C(Content): the main element of your product. A valuable content attracts customers to buy your product. It can be in the form of blog post, articles, website or books

A(Attention): Driving traffic to your content, you have to promote the content in various medium, thus the people know about your product or content. You can use SEO, Facebook, instagram, Google and any other paid ads, etc.

T(Trust): Build trust with your customer which is not easy. You should to satisfy your customer with your product.

T(Transaction): Once you have built trust with your customer about your product, the whole purpose of marketing is served and your customer makes transaction with you. But your work does not end here, you have to give better service and maintain constant relationship.

Niche selection is very crucial step in the process. For example, I’m an engineer by profession but my passion is teaching stock markets. I work as an engineer because I studied engineering, but stock market field is something very interesting to me and I’m passionate about it. Sometimes I may feel bored of doing work as an engineer but still I’m forced to work without any choice. However I select teaching stock market as the most interesting thing, because I love to do so without any restrictions. Hence I choose teaching stock market as my niche though I am equally good at my engineering skills.

Communication is not something new to discuss about, but communication in marketing is very important. Let me explain with an example, In today’s world, with a cutting edge technology, we can communicate to a robot through a software program and can replace hundreds of men at work with a single robot. Yes, we can’t resist from believing this fact. The communication in marketing should be as perfect as a printer prints a document from a word file which we have typed. Can there be a spelling mistake on a paper printed from a word file which we have typed it correctly, the answer is absolute no. In the marketing field, communication should be clear, simple, precise, easy to understand and transparent.

Personal branding

  • Everyone might have heard of “Love at first sight”, whether love happens at first sight or not but the first impression, first product and first selling matters a lot with your customer and a long lasting impact.
  • Authenticity rules the world. For example most of the great people have a hard to believe but true story behind their success and yes of course, people are impressed with it. So is your authenticity. Being who you are and what you are is your story. Narendra Modi is his personal brand, he was never ashamed to share his story as a tea seller. Modi is not because of BJP, BJP is because of Modi.
  • One should choose an appropriate category and become a master in that particular category.
  • Personal branding is how you project yourself to the world you’re worthy of their trust and relationship

Let us have a look at my financial goal to make Rs.1 Crore in the near term.

I have an online course worth Rs.10,000/-. To make Rs.1 Crore, I need to sell it to 1000 people. Is it simple? Yes it is as simple as multiplication. However, I may find it difficult to sell my course who has a spending capacity of Rs.10,000/-. What if I reduce my course price to just Rs.1,000/- and sell the same to 10,000 customers. Sounds practical right, yes the affordability of people for Rs.1,000/- for a course is far better than Rs.10,000/- course. Market research says affordability for Rs.1,000/- has many times more people than for Rs.10,000/- course.

Let me take you through my own marketing experience in the past few months.

As you know, I am into financial planning, portfolio management and financial services (Demat Account, Mutual Funds, Tax Planning etc..). Like in any other industry I have one time revenue products as well as recurring revenue generating products. Like most of the brokers and financial planners do, If I make my client frequent buying and selling of shares, I can make a decent revenue from it, but what matters the most, whether my client is earning profits from it or not. Hence, what I do is, I offer them free brokerage which implies that there are no brokerage charges for buying and selling of securities. So, how do I make revenue out of it, thinking? Didn’t find an answer. Here it goes, I concentrate on client’s profits and link my revenue directly to clients profits, which simply means, I get revenue only when my client earns profits. Does it sound good? Any customer can get attracted to this type of product or service. At most, a customer earns hardly 6% interest from his bank on Fixed Deposits. With some amount of risk, if I make my client earn 20% returns on his investment consistently, he would never mind to pay me a decent fee for my advisory service. This is value creation and value addition. Instead of focusing on sales on a daily basis, if I focus on wealth creation for my existing clients in parallel to sales, I might be a successful marketer than a great salesman.

In view of the above discussion, let me conclude by saying that though we could not discuss marketing in detail, we had a broad understanding of the basics of marketing, traditional vs digital marketing, CATT Marketing funnel, niche marketing, and the importance of communication in marketing. Please feel free to share your opinion on marketing and in particular about this article. This article/exercise is part of the Digital Deepak Internship Program. If you are interested to apply for the Digital Deepak Internship Program, click here.

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