If you are curious to know why your marketing campaigns not yielding desired results, you are in the right place. 

In this article, I will talk about various aspects of marketing and how they are linked with each other to drive a successful marketing campaign. I would also explain what Personal Branding is. I am writing this article concerning Digital Marketing but broadly it applies to every niche or vertical. This is a must-read for all aspiring digital marketers, bloggers, freelancers, mentors, or entrepreneurs to be successful in their marketing campaigns. 

Fundamentals of Marketing

Like a good recipe is made out of many ingredients used in proportion, marketing is also a mix of many activities used in the right combination.

Marketing is a game of perception. You should start your marketing before creating a product. You should understand what market you are targeting and who are going to be your customers. Product with right marketing only will bring success. If a product is great and marketing is poor it will be a failure similarly if marketing is great and the product is poor, it would also be a failure. Never let marketing bigger than the product.

Many times people get confused marketing with advertisement or sales. Marketing is much bigger and sales. Sales are just one process in marketing. You will learn the difference ahead in this article. 

Traditional v/s Digital Marketing

 

Let’s look at marketing more closely. Two types of marketing are based on the medium through which a customer interacts with a business.

• Traditional marketing
• Digital marketing

Traditional marketing is an old method where billboards, print, TV, radio, etc. are the medium for marketing. Digital marketing is marketing where the internet is used as a medium through any electronic equipment like PC, Tablet, and Mobile. As we are moving in the era of 5G digital marketing is growing quite fast. Both Traditional and Digital marketing have their pros and cons.

The right marketing is generally a mix of both marketing methods. Reaching up to rural customers (who do not have internet access) and for conveying brand message traditional marketing is the only method. Personal communication is difficult in traditional marketing. So, if you want better customer engagement, personal communication and better ROI digital marketing are the best. Direct response is possible only in digital marketing whereas we can measure the results. 

CATT Marketing Funnel & Framework

Let us understand the phases any customer goes through before buying a product. Awareness is a phase, where a customer gets aware about your product. Consideration is a phase where he does some research and finally considers buying your product. Transact is a phase when he completes the purchase either online or going to the store.

Though the sales are over, marketing continues even after that. The customer feels happy and moves in the phase of advocacy, where he starts referring it to others.

Hope now it is clear how marketing is different than sales. 

Effective marketing is where you get sales happening naturally without making much effort. CATT Marketing Funnel & Framework is an excellent marketing method for the same. Let us understand it deeply

Wealth = n^CATT

[n] Niche 

[C] Content

[A] Attention

[T] Trust

[T] Transaction

Niche: Niche selection is the most important task. You should select a niche that complements Market, Passion, and Talent equally. Lack of anyone would not make it successful. For example, if you have talent and passion but the market is not there you will not be successful similarly if a good market is there and you have skill but you do not have a passion for it, you will get bored very soon which will lead to failure.

 

Your goal should be to be number one in your niche. Hence, the right process in selecting a niche is to identify your talent & passion and then select the niche. If your niche is broad, you should look at the sub-niche and select one which suits your goal. Like if someone is good at cooking his niche would be cooking. Now cooking is too broad a niche where completion is quite high. You need to narrow it down like cooking vegetarian or non-vegetarian dishes. It can be further narrowed down based on cuisine – continental or intercontinental.

Content: There is an old saying “Content is the king”. Good content attracts people. Content could be in the form of blog post, webinar, lead magnets, videos are various contents

Attention: Once the content is created, we have to attract the customer towards it. Attention is drawn by way of SEO, SMM, paid ads, or referrals.  

Trust: Once a customer notices you or your products, you have to build trust in them. Personal communication is the best way to build trust. Deepak Kanakraju of Digitaldeepak.com calls it Deep Marketing where he takes the help of AI to communicate with customers on a personal level to build trust in them. He calls it DeepMarketing.

Transaction: Once the customer builds trust, he is ready to transact. You need to have a nice sales page or store where customers can go and completes the transaction. 

Good marketing makes the complete process so seamless that the sales happen naturally. One thing to notice here is that you are communicating with customers at every stage Awareness stage to the transaction stage. Hence a very strong communication is required for executing it successfully. An effective communication is nothing but content marketing.  

Integrated Marketing

Digital marketing has many modules and each module is quite vast. Most of the marketers focus on one area and ignore others and precisely this is the reason why they fail. The best way to execute digital marketing is to do it in an integrated way. Content Marketing remains in the center. SEO and SMM drive traffic to the content and email marketing generates trust and transaction takes place effortlessly. Paid advertisements speed up things and generate more traffic in less time.

Personal Branding

Now, let’s understand what Personal Branding is. Effective marketing continues even after the customer completes the purchase. He is happy after using the product and also he is happy that you are still communicating with him. This makes him feel good and he becomes your advocate. He starts referring your products to others without any expectation in return. 

 

This stage of marketing is called branding. Once we reach this stage then more marketing is not required. Sales would continue to happen naturally. You are moving towards becoming a brand. Large companies put fewer efforts into sales and put more effort into branding. The meaning of a brand means that you become a verb from a noun. Example – Xerox, Google, or Zoom they are some of the biggest brands. If you are good at something but people do not know about it, nobody is going to hire you. If you are good at something, it is important to let people know about it. A personal brand is important because it helps to create influence and attract customers easier. This is a continuous process as learning happens every day. More you create trust with people, the bigger brand you will become.

Conclusion

We can summarize that below are the ingredients of marketing

• Take utmost care in selecting your niche.
• Use Integrated marketing with a focus on content marketing. Only good content will be read, liked, and shared to increase traffic to your site. Other methods will work in tandem to strengthen the whole process.
• Optimize Digital and Traditional marketing based on your customers and market.
• Do personal branding to increase trust with the customer.

With this, I am sure that your marketing efforts will give you the maximum results. I will discuss on Personal Branding in my next article. Approaching a Digital Marketing Agency will give a strategic approach to your personal branding. You may read an article How to develop your Brand with Advertising Campaign for some more insight.