Marketing as a whole is a very broad concept which needs the execution of various kinds of process, strategies, and tactics. There are various marketing goals, on the basis of which you can develop your marketing strategies. In this article, we will study some basic things related to marketing.
Despite being complex, basically, marketing revolves around 4Ps: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. Strategies and approaches might change but these basic fundamentals never change. For every organization, these 4Ps are constant while the strategies and medium vary depending on the products or service.
Product
Product refers to goods or services you are going to provide to the customers to meet their specific needs. Based on the product, you can deduce your marketing strategies by asking questions like Why would people purchase your product? Which audience you would target? Will it solve the problems of the consumers? How is it better than your competitors? etc,.
Price
Price refers to the actual cost of the product for which the consumers are willing to pay to receive the products or services. Price also determines what special offers and discounts you can offer for that product. The price depends on factors like cost of production, revenue to be generated, cost of competitors’ product, marketing costs, and market value. If your product price is higher than the market value, then you need to make sure your product should have more features to satisfy the consumers.
Place
Place indicates the product circulation as to which places consumers will find your product. It could be a website, physical store, or any other online or offline channels where it would be more convenient to reach your consumers. So, proper planning of the placement and circulation of the product plays a crucial role in connecting the consumers with the business thereby you can look at how to manage your inventory.
Promotion
Promotion is the process where marketers are making consumers aware of their products or services. It involves communication strategies and techniques like advertising through TV and radio, online advertising, sales promotions, and public relations through which marketers can send messages to the consumers about their products or services. Depending on your products and services, you will need to select which channels would be the best for the promotion.
Marketing based on Audience
Marketing is the science of promoting and selling products or services to satisfy the needs of individual consumers or organizations. It involves advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.
If you are selling your products or services to individual consumers then it is referred to as B2C (Business to Consumer) Marketing while if you are selling it to other businesses or organizations then it is called B2B (Business to Business) Marketing. Let’s dive into each of them.
B2C Marketing
B2C Market focuses on marketing efforts that drive individual consumers to purchase the product directly. The decisions are taken by the consumers, in this case, purely based on the desires, needs, and interests.
Mostly, the Target audience is greater, so it’s also called the ‘Mass Market’ or Large Scale market’.
B2C marketers would focus more on delivering the message about the results and benefits that their product or service will bring to consumers. The more clearly consumers get this message, the more sales the marketers would get.
Branding plays a major role in B2C marketing as it involves the marketer to deliver the message precisely which connects emotionally with the customers thereby creating loyalty with them and motivate them to buy the products.
The buying process is shorter in B2C as it is made by one person, which he/she takes from the recommendations of friends and family, and takes a matter of minutes.
B2C marketing establishes a transactional relationship as the marketer’s spent less amount of time in getting to know the customer. Due to this, the transactional value is very less, and also customer lifetime value is not much good in this case.
B2B Marketing
B2B marketing tends to focus on marketing efforts that are aimed to make a purchase decision taken by a small group of professionals(multiple decision-makers and marketers) on behalf of their organizations. The decisions are taken more rational and practical, in this area.
Basically, the target audience is lesser in this case. So it’s also called “Niche Market” or“Speciality Market”.
B2B marketers concentrate more on features that the product offers and the logic behind it’s working. So, there’s a need to understand the behavior of the buyers i.e. evaluating the company or their employees’ needs and how they operate within the scope of the organization.
Return on Investment plays a major role in B2B Marketing as the buyers want to know the expertise of the service or efficiency of the product which will contribute to the bottom line of the company. Due to this fact, the B2B transaction takes more consideration and can be a bit more expensive.
The buying process in B2B is very long and can be more complex as it needs confirmation from various departments like Technical, Accounting, finance, procurement, etc. before the purchase is made.
B2B marketing deals with building and maintaining long term personal relationships which is crucial to driving long term business. So the customer lifetime value is better in this case.
Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing
For most businesses, taking the right marketing decision is not easy, even though it can make a huge difference in their results. So clarity should be there as to which marketing method would be suitable for them. Both Digital and Traditional Marketing methods are important, but still, it depends on which products or services they would suit. Let’s learn how both of these markets would be beneficial for the new-age marketers.
Traditional Marketing
It is a conventional or offline mode of marketing that has been around for a long time. Common marketing method includes TV commercials, radio commercials, Newspaper and Magazine Ads, Billboards, Banner Ads on hoardings, Telephone Calls, etc.
- You can easily reach your target local audience or consumers through traditional marketing. This works for businesses aiming to build larger local audiences.
- For brand awareness, traditional methods are more useful than actually nurturing leads to convert. It requires more effort and resources to build the whole marketing strategy.
- People are more familiar with traditional marketing as finding ads on Newspapers and magazines or reaching billboards still forms an integral part of their day-to-day life.
- Promoting ads on TV and radios capture still larger audiences as radio has a reach of 65% of the Indian population and TV has a reach of 800 million. So, playing ads multiple times on these channels reminds people of your business.
- Traditional marketing methods are quite expensive as the cost involved in printing, radio, and TV is much greater.
- With traditional methods, you cannot measure and analyze your ad performance as to how many people have reached, how many people got engaged in it, etc. Due to this fact, one may not measure the exact return on investment(ROI).
- Traditional marketing methods offer one-way communication. This way you won’t be able to collect feedback or reaction from your audience to your marketing efforts as there is no direct interaction.
Digital Marketing
It is an online mode of marketing where the products are promoted through online mediums such as paid social media ads, email marketing, and PPC advertising, etc. It has become widely popular due to the evolution of technology and digital mediums supporting it.
- You can reach global or scattered consumers from all over the world through digital marketing.
- Digital Marketing methods are flexible. Whether it is brand building, generating leads, generating sales, or encourage website visits, all the things can be done in a much easier way through it.
- Internet users now increasing day by day making up to 57% of the global population. An average no. of people spend 6 hours and 42 mins online on a daily basis. It also has been deduced that 73% of the e-commerce sales will come from mobile.
- With Digital marketing, you can reach 100 million users in India who are basically affluent English speaking having spending power.(Tier 1 cities and Tier 2 cities with good affluence).
- Digital marketing methods are less costly as promoting the ads online and on social media costs very less.
- With the use of online tools, you can track down the performance of every campaign like how many visitors click on it, how much of them are interested, how many are likely to get converted, etc. In this way, you can measure return on investment (ROI) for the given ads and plan your marketing strategy.
- Digital marketing promotes two-way communication where you can take the feedback if the products or service is good or bad and thereby improve your marketing strategies
Personal Branding and CATT Marketing Framework
Personal branding is a form of self-branding where you promote yourself and your career as brands. It is done to create a better uniform public image that shows your values, impression, and reputation.
Why Personal Branding is important?
- Differentiate you from Competitors: You might have more knowledge and expertise but if you won’t demonstrate it then it would be a waste. So personal branding definitely would help you stand out from the crowd.
- Encourage trust in your Audience: People want to listen and are more likely to buy from a common person who looks, talks, and acts like them, not from a brand. When you share your thoughts and values with your audience, you are building brand credibility which in turn will show your them why they should trust you.
- Leads to more opportunities: A powerful personal brand can attract many opportunities like partnerships, networking, promotions, speaking engagements, job interviews, etc.
- Generate more Brands under his/her influence: A personal brand can produce more brands under his/her influence, For eg., Elon Musk has a greater following than SpaceX and Tesla.
Evolution of Personal brand
This is about the entire journey which you will need to go through into building a Personal Brand. It is also referred to as Mass Trust Blueprint because it involves building trust with the audiences which in turn will give you profits in the long run.
- The first step in building a personal brand is learning a skill. Whatever the brand you would build, it would revolve around this skill only. So you need to learn it through understanding concepts, remembering the facts, and practicing the procedures.
- The next step is to put your skills to work i.e. take a job, or do freelancing, or work on any project that is relevant to your skills. This will not only give you a better understanding but you will feel confident enough to take it to the next level.
- Now since you are working and you get an expert in your skills, you need to write. You can do this through a blog where you can write what you have learned and experienced through your work. It’s because if you don’t, no one would know that you know something even if you are an expert in it. For eg., you can write about how you have generated sales that have impacted your organization. Your content becomes very unique if you write about your experiences and can become a case study. This will help you to start building your personal brand because others will start looking at your experiences and also will start learning from you.
- Since you have learned, gained experience, and wrote a blog, you can now reach out to people or people who will reach out to you. You can start consulting instead of directly working for them. But you will get this authority or positioning only when you are going to write out as a blogger, as you will have a clear understanding of what works and what doesn’t. You will be able to get this consulting project where people will be paying you for your advice and a little bit of execution.
- Now you have reached that stage where you go through evolution and start teaching/mentoring a group of people. For this, you will need to create the best content which will provide a lot of value addition. This will take a lot of effort because now you’re not consulting just one person (Mentoring=Consulting*100). In this process, you will understand your subjects very well and gain a whole new level of clarity.
- Finally, you can now start your own business/startup where you can start selling your products and services with the necessary understanding that you have developed about the market over time, with the help of your own skills.
Most people learn and get on to teach directly which is why they fail in the long run. You need to go through the above steps so that people would look up to you as they want to be like you. That’s how you build trust among them and do the business. Therefore, the above procedure of evolution is also termed as Mass Trust Blueprint.
It’s a never-ending process, as you still need to learn, work, blog, consult, and mentor consistently to build a successful business.
CATT Framework
CATT framework is built keeping in mind the Mass Trust system. Now, what is the Mass Trust system? Mass trust is all about keeping your customers happy by communicating with them so that they can remain your customers for life.
CATT refers to Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction. This Framework has been used to build your Personal Brand that can generate income in the long run.
Let’s say, you want to make sales through digital marketing. You would sell your content like blogs, videos, do webinars, have word of mouth, do branding, etc. You will try to sell your content to 100s or 100s of customers. But people won’t trust you unless you build your personal brand and if people won’t trust you, they will hesitate to transact.
How to build Mass Trust?
Mass Trust can be built through CATT. (Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction). Let us learn about this in detail:
Content:
Content can be of various types like blog posts, videos, lead magnets, live webinars, etc. But for creating specific content, there should be a Niche around which your content would revolve.
Niche is a field or a subject that you need to choose based on expertise, passion, talent, and market opportunities. You also need to study the target audience who would consume your content.
Wealth=n^CATT
where n →niche
Once you have your content, try to publish it on various online platforms like social media channels, youtube, blogger, email, podcasts, webinar, etc.
Attention
Now as your content is published, the next step is to get the attention. How will you get in front of the audience who is searching for you?
You can do this through various marketing channels like SEO, Paid Ads, Viral Marketing, Social Media, or any other methods through which you can get the attention of the audience.
Don’t try to get attention directly to your products. At first, try to get attention to your content then you can shift that attention to your products after getting some engagement.
Trust
After getting attention, people will start liking your content. But people tend to forget about it as time goes. So there’s a need to remind them constantly about the products and services you offer. This in turn will make them trust you.
You can do this by
- Repetitive engagement
- Hook the audience by:
- subscribing them to an email list
- Retargeting Ads
- Asking them to subscribe to your Youtube Channel or follow Social Media handles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
This will lead to more engagement which would thereby lead them to trust on you.
Transaction
Without the trust factor, you won’t be able to create a transaction. In the areas of sales and business, trust only leads to a transaction. Once you build trust with people, they will buy from you.
Now you have the trust, but still, you need to pitch the consumers to make the transaction. You can do this by
- Matching offer with the niche to get the result(Offer +Niche(need)=Result)
- Persuading consumers through
- Reciprocating: giving something valuable content/ samples.
- Authority: influencer, Author, Mentor, Motivator, etc.
- Scarcity: limited options available so that people would jump in
- Social Proof: having a good amount of followers and asking them to do the favor)
- Fear: of Missing out leading to a negative outcome
- Commitment: to do something beneficial for them
- Liking
3. You can make them an offer on Sales Pages, Sales Videos, and Webinars.
Whatever the profits you get through these transactions, you can generate more content and try to get more people in the funnel.
In this fashion, you can build your Personal Brand and go through your own evolution, and sooner or later, you can build a business that can earn millions.