Did you ever felt, “I know digital marketing why should I care about the basics of marketing anyway”?
Are you one of those people who learned digital marketing and did not implement it or did not get any better results? do you know why there are no results?
Everybody can learn digital marketing, but only a few people excel in it. Do you know why?
This article will answer all the questions above.
we are gonna see some very important secrets most digital marketers fail to know.
1. Marketing Fundamentals
Do you know there is a law of marketing?
Yes, there are, actually many laws.
Sadly, most digital marketers don't know this. They don't even know there is “The Law of Marketing”.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer- so your product fits them and sells itself... the ultimate aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous — Peter Drucker.
Do you know when the actual marketing process starts? If you say “after the product/service launch”.
No, it is not, it starts way before creating a product, it starts when you understand your customer’s need, produce that product/service, and fulfilling his need with your product/service.
Marketing is all about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. Many people think that marketing means just selling the product, but deep down, it is how you make your customers happy by solving their problems and retaining them for your next product/service.
This can be achieved only by constant value addition to the customer, and by building trust, then, they will start to transact with you. sales done.
So, focus more on your product than your marketing strategy, more on the value your product delivers, and less on the effort you needed for marketing.
let us take the Google search engine as an example. It solves almost any problem, it provides so many values that's why we can't see any ads for the google search engine. It doesn't need any marketing till they stop providing value.
The next secret may be controversial. A fight between Digital vs traditional marketing.
2. Is Traditional Marketing still alive?
I always felt that traditional marketing has lost its shine? but still, we can see TV ads, banners, radio ads so on right? That means it is still alive, right?
It is still doing a great job for some of the products.
If you are choosing a product with a generic wide targeting audience like Apple iPhone, you can use TV ads because its cost-per-reach ratio is low.
let's do the quick math, the total number of TVs in India is = 197 million out of 298 million households.
Total people watching TV (4–5 persons per household) = 800–1000 million
Just imagine the amount you should spend on digital marketing to have this 800 million reach. It will be a Nightmare, right?
So Traditional marketing is still there and important, you can reach 65% of the Indian population with Radio and have 450+ million reaches with the newspaper.
Still, Digital marketing has its advantages like more engagement, high ROI, measurable insights, etc. And as a digital marketer, you may know a lot more about digital marketing.
But traditional marketing also has its strength with its respective audience.
Simply saying, you can use traditional marketing for generic products and low-end B2C products, and you can use digital marketing for high-end B2C and complex products.
Whether you are doing digital or traditional marketing, for both marketing communication is very important, let me tell you why?
3. Importance of communication
According to studies, 85% of your success is attributed to communication skills, and 15% to mastery of your work skills.
A good marketing is all about good communication — Digital Deepak
Communication is not about your grammar skills, your English, or your vocabulary, instead, communication is all about how effectively you deliver your thoughts into the message.
There are some techniques to improve your communication skills:
- Join the conversation that already running in people’s minds. For example, you might have wondered about digital marketing secrets that most people hide, what I did was I just joined that conversation running in your mind about revealing the secrets.
- Start thinking in English than your mother tongue.
- watch English series or standup comedies like Friends, The Office, etc. I am watching them till now to develop my communication.
- For blogging- Write at least 500 words a day, don’t worry about the structure and all now, just keep that flow going, and edit it later. this is what I learned from my mentor Divya Kothari, it has changed my writing skills way better.
Having said that, are you a fan of economics and number? if you are not, at least try to understand these facts below. Because it is very crucial.
4. Understanding of Global Economics in Marketing
Don't panic!! when you hear this term.
The economy in layman's terms means money circulation among the people. More the money circulation in your country, the stronger the economy of your country.
That's why developed countries have a high standard of living, and developing countries have relatively less standards, due to more money circulation in the former than in the latter.
Every entrepreneur should learn about some basics of global economics, and make decisions accordingly — digital deepak
Do you know that if the average age of the country increases, the economy of the country will also increase? it is.
Because people will start spending more. for example, take India, the average age in India is 26.8 years now, and it will reach up to 38.1 years in 2020. And we know that India is a developing country with constant growth in economics. So you can focus on developing countries.
Just look at this table above. 88% of the workforce is from India 3. Our economy will grow by shifting people from India 3 to India 2 and then to India 1.
If you are reading this article with a laptop and with a wifi connection, you are definitely under the India 1 section. with that, you can relate to who all are in India 2 and 3.
Most entrepreneurs start their businesses by providing their products/services to people in the first section and they will gain some revenue from them. with that income, they serve section 2 people and go on with section 3.
So, you can start serving people from India 1, and then continue to India 2, and India 3.
for example, Tesla started producing high-end model Tesla Roadster a sports car for section 1 people, then Model S for next-class people, and then Model 3 for average citizens.
So, understanding the basics of economics will help your business. Even when you want to choose a niche, you should know about the market trends. You will see how the market influences niche selection.
5. How to choose your Niche
Deciding where to compete is half success.
Many people think selecting a niche is just selecting a topic, but is way more than that.
Selecting a niche is not only the topic you chose but also how you going to deliver it and engage with it.
For selecting a niche you should consider these things:
- Passion: whether you will be interested in this topic for at least 10 years?
- Market: know, where your niche will be in the market in the next 5 years. (apply all you learned in the economics section above)
- Talent: you should have skills related to this niche, if not yet, no problem start learning today.
Note: I recommend you always start with the micro-niche first and then expand it over some time.
Don't stick with a single niche, you have the freedom to change or expand your niche. let's take Deepak Kanakaraju, he started blogging about motorcycles first, then he changed his niche into digital marketing.
And remember you should shine in your niche, you should be the number 1, and for that, you have to spend some time and effort building a personal brand in your niche. but how?
6. Brand building and Power of personal brand
Your brand is what other people say about you when you are not in the room — Jeff Bezos
Building a brand is the number one objective for most organizations.
People always remember only number 1.
If you can’t able to become number 1 in your Niche, be the only one in your micro-niche.
For example, take Volvo, it may not be the number 1 brand in the automobile section, but it is a number 1 brand like Safest Automobiles.
Develop a personal brand that is so strong that it can give rise to many new brands of your own. And once your brand is popular, you will be an influencer or a brand ambassador. for example, Elon Musk is a personal brand, and he uses his brand to influence the market of Dogecoin market.
But you can’t develop your brand overnight, it will take some time and effort to have a strong personal brand, it includes a framework too- the MassTrust blueprint. It consists 6 stages of brand-building:
- Learn- learning is always important, you can't excel unless you learn, but learning is not just reading or memorizing. It includes 3 types
- Remembering the facts,
- Understanding the concept,
- Practice the procedure.
2. Work- once you learned, start implementing what you have learned in the real world. Only if you put what you learned into action, you will remember it better. Gain experience from your work.
3. Blog- start writing about what you have learned and experienced from work. You can understand better once you start writing about your niche and your experience in it. It is the first stage of Trust Building.
4. Consult- after blogging itself, you would have gained some authority among the audience in your niche. It is time to stop working, and start consulting. Listening to their problems and needs can make you guide them for better steps in the future.
5. Mentor- teach what you have learned and experienced to the people who want to become like you. Teaching will make you an expert in your niche.
6. Startup- after mentoring, it is the time to build your startup. Apply all knowledge you gained from the above steps to build a startup. And the cycle repeats.
After you have done all these 6 steps. you will have a strong personal brand in your hand. yeah! Brand in a hand.
And remember this “The best known will always beat the best”.
And it is time for sales now, as a digital marketer you might have known marketing funnels, but the upcoming one is way better.
7. CATT Marketing Funnel
Imagine What happens when you ask your audience for a sale in their first interaction itself? Do you think they will purchase from you, most probably they will avoid you.
They don’t know who you are, what you offer, or why they should care about you.
For a sale to occur, they should know you and trust you to transact with you. For that, we need this CATT funnel.
A marketing funnel is a process of converting those recent audience members who visited your website or social media, into customers by making them purchase your products.
You might hear about the AIDA(Attention-Interest-Desire-Action) funnel in your digital marketing course. But this CATT funnel is somewhat different, effective, and unique.
Lead generation formulan from Digital Deepak:
Wealth = n^CATT
-where ‘n’ stand for Niche,
-’CATT’ stand for Content > Attention > Trust > Transact.
CATT funnel involves 4 stages, and each stage is very important, any mistake in any stage you might miss a sale. But a perfectly prepared CATT funnel will drive more sales than your expectation. The four stages are:
- Content: It can be your blog post, your social media post, your podcast, or your video to capture your audience's attention. It can be your lead magnet also. (like free ebooks, webinars, etc. to get their email id or phone number). the main purpose of the content is to provide value.
- Attention: After the lead magnet, you need to get their attention, and you need to drive your audience's attention to your lead magnet. You can do this in many ways including organic search traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic, etc.
- Trust: It is the most important phase in your funnel. You can build trust through email sequences by providing value-filled content to them. And remember, once the trust breaks, it is hard to fix that.
- Transact: Understand whether your leads have reached the stage where they are ready to transact. You can do it with lead profiling and lead scoring. These methods can tell you the right time to make the right offer for the right audience.
And the sale happens.
This framework is not known by many digital marketers out there, that's why it is like a secret, you should know this and implement this in your business. we will see CATT funnel in depth in upcoming articles.
And finally,
8. Integrated Digital Marketing
Integrated digital marketing is the trending, and most effective marketing method now.
You might have used digital marketing modules like content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, paid ads, etc. But you might have used them separately. But, have you ever tried to integrate them?
The result of integrating them will be a snowball effect, you can’t imagine how effective it is.
Every module in digital marketing has its advantage let's say content marketing, it is the heart piece of the marketing, no other module can build as much trust as it does, but it can’t be effective without the help of other marketing modules. Similarly, other modules will be more effective in conjunction with other modules.
let me explain each connection here:
Integrated Digital Marketing is content marketing on steroids- Digital Deepak
- Content + Social Media: Say you have written an article and published it in the blog. The article will be in peace. Is that what you want? we want traffic, right? This will be done by social media sharing. It is advantageous for both of you (you and your audience).
- Your good quality content is getting shared,
- Those who are sharing your high-value content will get good karma points
That's why people call this integrated digital marketing process content marketing 2.0.
- Content + Social Media + SEO: if your content is filled with high value, it will get its maximum share on social media(off-page SEO). If people share your content on social media it will get a lot of quality backlinks. which is a good signal for search engines. It makes search engines happy, which in turn will help your content to rank higher in SERP.
- Email + content: instead of writing content in email, you can publish it to your blog and email them your blog link. The number of people visiting your blog via email will be higher than any other media, if your subscribers like your content they will share it on social media, this, in turn, signals search engines to rank your content well, and the result, you will attract new people and you can also convert them into subscribers.
- Paid ads: instead of using ads for sales, you can promote your content through paid ads, so, people after consuming your content will gain trust, and they will share it on social media, which increases the activity of social shares, search engines, email subscribers list (as I said above). Paid ads and social-search-content trio, when combined, your results going to boom
- Sales: Nobody will buy from you at the first instant itself. Studies say that it takes at least 7 contact points with your prospects to make a sale. Your blog content and automated email sequence are the best way to follow up with your leads and gain their trust to transact.
Did you see how powerful is your marketing when you integrate all these different modules? but most marketers are not aware of these, that's why it is a secret.
Conclusion
I hope you understood all the 8 secrets that I’ve told you about Marketing and Economics, etc. which most of the digital marketers out there don't know.
Make use of all these in your digital marketing journey, once you start implementing all these in your marketing journey, you will see yourself way ahead of the other digital marketers out there.
If you want to know more about each secret in-depth, let me know in the comments below. I will read all the comments.
because I have employed this thing for my client BMS technical services LLC in Dubai, and it worked well.
If you wanna buy a new laptop to kick start your career, check out this article.
Thanks,
Sasi10x from The Creatives 360
