Marketing Basics: kickstart guide for Successful Marketing

Thinking of Starting marketing for any product or brand or as a career? This article will help you to clear your concepts and provide you a solid Marketing base to get started with your goal.

Before moving directly to marketing first we will look into its roots in our system.

History of Marketing

Marketing has been known to mankind for thousands of years, but the term “marketing” used to describe commercial activities buying and selling products or services have been recognized in the late nineteenth century.

What is Marketing?

According to Dictionary.com “The action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”

The purpose behind Marketing:

This mainly includes getting people interested in your product or service. This can be achieved through market research and analyzing your consumers which will eventually lead you to a buyer persona who answers the Where, when, and how does the consumer want to communicate with your business?

Marketing is a pillar aspect of a business, it is present throughout the product journey from product conceptualization, product development, distribution, sales, advertising to after-sales service.

To Understand Marketing in detail, we need to understand its basic building blocks or components — The 5 P’s of Marketing

Well thought out marketing strategies rely on these 5 P’s of marketing, also called Marketing Mix and those are Product, Price, Place, People, and Promotion. Marketing will only be successful if a useful and unique product is sold at the right price and at the right place, using the right promotion and to the right people.

People

The first P of Digital Marketing is People. As a brand or company, you are serving a specific group of people with specific needs that will be fulfilled by your product or service. Your customers are the main reason behind your existence. You can target your customers on the below criteria:

Demographic Factors: age, gender, race, education, career defines the demographic aspect of marketing.

Geographical Factors: towns, cities, regions, states, countries, and continents define the geographical aspect of marketing.

Behavioral Factors: It refers to how a customer identifies, responds, and uses a product or service of any brand, and how the customer behaves differently according to the situation and the frequency of usage and purpose.

Product

The second P of Digital Marketing is Product. A product can be in any form that fulfills the needs of customers. This can be information, a physical product, or a service. In today’s world, a product can be a file, access to another web page, or a service that can be obtained a few moments after an online transaction.

Price

The Third P Stands for Price. You have figured out the amount of money each customer is willing to spend for the value they get from your product or service. Price has to be carefully crafted because your customers have access to different other products online. It is easier for them to compare the benefits and prices of other brands and choose the right one.

Place

The fourth P of Digital Marketing is Place. The place is about the channel where your products or service are found. Your marketing success depends upon how accessible and visible your product or services are, the more significant chance that your target market will see and buy your product or services.

Below are some of the Marketing Channels from the Digital Age:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social Media Marketing
• E-Commerce
• Direct Marketing
• Paid Ads Marketing
• Email Marketing

Promotion

The Fifth P Stands for Promotion. Promotion includes a manner in which you inform your customers about your product or service and entice them to make the purchase. You can use various channels online, but it will not be successful if not paired with the appropriate promotional strategies.

Traditional marketing vs Digital marketing

Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing refers to the conventional methods of marketing that are used from the time of the evolution of the conception of advertisements or marketing. These are the following channels for Traditional Marketing:

• Newspaper
• Flyers
• Radio
• Television
• Billboard advertising along roads and highways
• Magazine Ads

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the new era of marketing as the internet has spread its applications and benefits in every aspect of our lives, so as marketing.

It has also managed to create awareness, promotions through digital channels since the internet have allowed them to create a wider customer base through the following ways:

• Business sites
• Search Engine Marketing
• Social media sites
• Email marketing
• Paid pop-up ads
• Blogs
• Content marketing

Niche Selection

To select a niche you need a perfect balance of Talent Market and passion

Your niche should be a mix of your talent or experience with passion and should also have a market to promote. Without these, there is a high possibility you might be exhausted or someone else might be better at it who would capture your market and your place.

Next, we are going to look into the marketing funnel called the CATT funnel.

CATT Marketing Funnel

Content

Content is the base of any digital marketing, when you have a great piece of content then you don’t have to struggle with marketing. It will bring you organic traffic automatically, depending on the quality of the content. Content can be anything whether it is a blog, YouTube Videos, Posters, landing pages, infographics, and more.

Attention

It is important to bring the attention of your target customer to your content after creating it. You have to spend time and money to bring attention to the content, however, it’s worth it depending upon the kind of Return on Investment (ROI).

Different ways to bring attention to your content are:

— Paid Ads like Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads

— SEO will help to bring organic traffic by improving the rankings of your page on Search Engines

— Viral marketing is a kind of marketing that creates excitement and awareness in your potential and existing customer base.

Trust

You need to build good relationships with your customers and should re-target them to hold their attention and provide them value-driven insights and emails.

Transaction

You have to offer something unique to your buyers, which is related to your product or service and then this might lead to transactions.

Other methods to get the transaction done are a sales page, webinars, a sales video, etc.

Integrated Digital Marketing

Integrated Marketing is an approach to creating a unified and seamless experience for consumers to interact with the brand/enterprise.

It encompasses all aspects of marketing communication such as advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, and social media, through their respective mix of strategies, methods, channels, and media so that all work together as a single powerful force and provide positive results.

Personal Branding: MassTrust Blueprint

First, we need to understand what is Personal Brand?

A personal brand is a widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions, and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace.

Personal brand building depends on the above-mentioned blueprint and below are the steps to follow:

1. Learn:

You have to learn new skills or topics through understanding the concepts, remembering the facts, and practicing the procedures.

2. Work

You have to practically implement your newly learned skills on the work floor. By implementing these newly learned skills in the real world would help you to master them step by step but not in one go.

3. Blog

You should always try to document all your positive and negative points regarding news learned skills and their implementation at work in the form of a blog. When you write, you understand it better, you memorize it better, you will avoid the previous mistakes and start building your personal brand.

4. Consult

You have become a personal brand by writing a blog or articles at some of the public domain sites which will help others to solve the issue they had and indirectly make you the go-to brand in your niche.

At the same time, you need to start consulting other people or businesses on a one-on-one basis instead of working for them.

5. Mentor

After successfully completing the above 4 steps, the next step is to mentor others who want to become like you. Mentoring others will increase your understanding of that topic to a new level since it is now a one-to-many aspect of a business

6. Start-up

Start your own company with a product or service with the understanding that you have developed from the above 5 steps about the market, about the niche, the problem, and your own skills and unique solution which is obviously your product or service.

Conclusion

Understanding marketing is different for each individual/business and it will remain that way since every business is different in some of the aspects and it is impossible to define fixed and specific marketing steps that will work for every business. However, the above article will help you to grasp the basics building blocks of marketing and create a broader picture of best practices to follow for a successful marketing career. This article is part of an internship program offered by Digital Deepak.

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