In this article, I will be sharing my thoughts on Marketing, its fundamentals, the CATT framework, Integrated Digital Marketing & more. We will also talk about how Personal Branding can be a gamechanger. This article will be useful for bloggers, professionals, freelancers, and anybody interested in Marketing.
Link to another article I recently wrote — https://ravinagu.com/find-out-how-covid-19-affects-your-ecommerce-business/
Let us imagine you just graduated from your hotel management institute and you being the entrepreneurial kind, instead of doing a regular job you want to work on your own. You loved working in the kitchen department and have a knack for making desserts. So you decide upon opening your own bakery shop and turn your sweet passion into a profession. You worked hard, opened your bakery, hired a few workers, and now are ready to start producing the products. But where are the customers? Apart from the few nearby locals who will buy what you’ve made? Of course, you might keep getting a few customers on & off in your local area but unless your products are top-notch in the larger section of the city, people won’t know about your shop through word-of-mouth, and here’s where your business will hit a plateau. You did all your due-diligence for setting up your business but forgot the most crucial and integral aspect which is MARKETING. Unless you market your products, your brand, people won’t know about it, and if they don’t how will they buy?
Marketing is not about getting some pamphlets printed, sliding them in newspapers to be delivered at homes nor dropping them in people’s homes one by one; that would be advertising. Neither is it going door-to-door providing samples and maybe sell some, that plainly would be sales. Both of these, advertising and sales are but individual components of Marketing. This brings us to the topic of Traditional Marketing. In this information age, opting for traditional marketing and worse being solely dependent on it alone would be choosing the path of sure-shot obsolescence. Those who think Digital Marketing is just a fad and traditional marketing is the way to do business or are scared of exploring this new-age phenomenon will sooner than later be convinced that digital marketing is here to stay and the better way to do business or they’ll just die down into irrelevance.
To get to know Digital Marketing, we first need to understand the concept of Marketing itself. Marketing in its most rudimentary sense is communication. Understanding your target customer’s requirements and communicating about your product or service to them. To know his needs and creating an offering that fits those or make improvements to the already existing offerings. Educating the consumer about your niche, why they should care about what you have to offer and how you can help them with your offering, to enhance their life in any way possible, providing them a solution to their problem or to add on their skillsets or help them upgrade their life in your own unique way. All of the above, when done collectively can be termed as Marketing.
“Marketing is a means to an end. The purpose of marketing is to build a brand and capture a position in the minds of the consumers. It’s not just about selling but also keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they can become a customer for life. Marketing is about sending the right message to the right customer at the right time.” -Deepak Kanakaraju
Digital Marketing is not something fundamentally different from the concept of marketing. The only difference is of the medium. Since technology has advanced leaps and bounds in the last decade or so & almost all businesses and industries have transferred into the online mode, it wouldn’t be fair to leave the marketing to the age-old ways itself.
CATT
Now let’s understand the CATT framework. This framework provides a methodical approach & structure to achieve one’s professional goals step-by-step, irrespective of one’s industry or area of expertise. But to fully utilize the approach, one first needs to have their niche or specific sub-segment of the market selected. When one decides upon their niche, based upon what’s one passionate about and has decent knowledge — they create quality content on it. Content that is useful to one’s target customer segment and adds value to their life. Starting with blogging is a good idea.
Next comes Attention. You can drive traffic to your blog or video content through Social Media, SEO, or Paid ads. Once you’ve got the reader’s/viewer’s attention, here comes the most important part- Trust building. Without trust, you cannot hold someone’s attention for too long, let alone making them transact with you. Through your content, you can build trust with your subscriber base. Certain tools like marketing automation, trip-wire, etc can be used for this. Only after you’ve religiously followed the first three steps of creating quality content, garnering attention, and building trust with your fanbase, comes the last and the most important phase of the entire framework, i.e. Transaction which if not achieved will lead to the downfall of this entire mechanism itself. At this stage, you can offer your customers the premium products and services you’ve designed.
Integrated Digital Marketing
There are several components in Digital Marketing such as Content Marketing, SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, Paid ads, Social Media Marketing, etc. All these are ocean-like wide fields in themselves so people usually pick one or two and dive deep into them. Though the best & most holistic approach would be to work around all or most of these components to get the best results wherein each module can fill in for the shortcoming of the other and in general, it increases the chances of success of the campaign. Basically, the best of all worlds. And when you do that, it would be termed as Integrated Digital Marketing.
Personal Branding
Suppose you want to buy DTH. One XYZ brand has no specific recognition whereas the other brand is promoted by SRK(Shahrukh Khan). Which one would you be more confident about? Probably, more than 95% Indians would choose the latter one. Why? Simply because SRK is a brand himself, people know him well, can connect with & trust him easily than any other person who’s not so known. This is the importance of a Personal Brand. The trust that is developed by personal branding cannot be replicated by any other advertising or publicity gimmick.
Every person in today’s world must build their own personal brand. In the field of Digital Marketing, you can work towards building yours through a framework called the MassTrust Blueprint. To start with, you have to have your niche. If you don’t have it already, learn what you’re interested in and good at and dive deep into it. Next, you’ve got to test what you’ve learned. Put your skills to test in the real world. Work at a job or any opportunity you get. You need to then blog about it, your learnings through working and this will start building your personal brand. After having the above three, now you’ve got experience enough to start consulting people who need your services. From one-on-one consulting, you slowly transition into mentoring a group of people who want to become like you or want to learn from you. When you’ve done enough mentoring, you can formalize everything into a structure by starting-up and transition into a business where you provide your products & services.
One can study the case of Baba ka Dhaba which recently got viral after their story(plight due to pandemic) was shown by a Youtuber. Lots of help from all corners of the country came down pouring for the couple. And how could the companies be left behind? As a gesture of support, brands from unrelated verticals such as Pepsi, PayTm, Zomato came forward helping them in their own way such as Pepsi provided some logistical support such as beverage cooler and ration, PayTM ensured their monetary transactions become hassle-free and Zomato listed the dhaba on their app.
While all this seems very courteous on the part of these corporations which it is, no doubt but, of course, they have something in it for themselves too, such as Pepsi has also put banners with ‘Baba ka Dhaba’ branding on their shop which of course has the branding of Pepsi too. When one has to pay for the order, they do it through PayTM. Since Baba ka Dhaba is the rage as of now, Zomato knows people will be interested so it listed them on their app. These are some good and latest examples of marketing. Even Tinder recommends Baba ka Dhaba for your next date!
To sum it up all, we talked about the fundamentals of Marketing, Traditional & Digital Marketing, their pros & cons; the CATT framework, Integrated Digital Marketing, and most importantly, the importance of Personal Branding. Do share your thoughts about this article in the comments. If you’d like to know more about the subject, you might find the below articles of value.
