Digital Marketing For Dummies

 

DIGITAL MARKETING FOR DUMMIES

 Do you want to know how Digital Marketing Works?

 Do you have a doubt that Digital Marketing & Traditional Marketing are different concepts?

Are you tired of searching exact core of Digital Marketing?

Here, I have the answer to all your questions on Digital Marketing & How the core of Digital Marketing is Marketing only & how they both differ from each other. You will surely get a lot of facts about Digital Marketing. This is the complete picture of Digital Marketing step by step for Dummies.

• Law of Marketing:

You know, marketing basically is a process or an activity of explaining, communicating, delivering, and exchanging products and services to the customers, clients, and society at large.

It involves various activities that are performed by organizations in order to sell their goods & services to the customers.

Marketing is a lifelong process. It doesn't end with sales. You have to constantly interact with your existing customers and have to build a relationship of trust with them.

Biggest myth in marketing is that "Marketing starts after creating the product". A big 'NO'... Marketing starts before creating the product. Understanding customer's & customer's needs are also part of marketing. It helps to create a suitable product.

Marketing is not only building trust in the mind of people who knows your product, But also in the best understanding of strangers through your marketing tactic.

What I understand about marketing is, Marketing is a game of perceptions and Product is a game of reality. Good marketing spreads through the mouth to mouth automatically, No extra efforts required.

One of the reason why the first brand tends to maintain its leadership is that the name often becomes generic. If you can't be first in a category, set up a new category in which you can be first.

Being first in the market in a particular niche gives you a very big advantage over the competition but it doesn't guarantee success. It doesn't matter that you are first to market if no-one needs your product or if your product is very bad.

Failure is to be expected & accepted.

For example, First Spreadsheet isn't the dominant spreadsheet, First Word Processor isn't the dominant word processor.

• Strong Brand Building:

We have designed the product which suits the customer's needs. But do you think that customers will purchase the product which is not so popular in the market?.....

Here comes the branding of the product in the picture. Human psychology is to go for the well known & best brand which attracts them.

Branding is much more than just a cool logo or a well-placed advertisement. Deciding where to compete is half your success.

Brand building doesn't happen overnight. Brand building is to generate awareness about your business using strategies and campaigns with the goal of creating a unique and long-lasting image in the market place.

POSITIVE IMAGE + STANDING OUT = BRAND SUCCESS.

Building a brand is definitely a process and requires a strategy. However, the ongoing efforts will result in establishing long- term relationships with your customers.

The goal of Strong Brand Building is to differentiate from the competition, convince a customer to purchase from you over others.

• Learn and Master Marketing:

Marketing is an ongoing concept. Every time you need to get updated with new marketing tools & tactics.

Marketing is the root of any business & it is the concept to read the human psychology & marketing tactics. It directly deals with the human brain.

Marketing is the concept of having a direct relationship with return on investment. Do not focus on a specific medium or tool, focus on a marketing concept. Tools may become outdated with time but marketing will be alive for thousands of years. Marketing will not get outdated.

"Marketing strategies create marketing ideas."

What the market requires is the first thought responsible for any new product to develop. So, we can say a founder will first think about the market & then the product.

To have a safe career in this marketing industry one should be well- versed in marketing skills.

Now, Fundamentals of marketing are almost clear... Right? Let's understand one of the important Digital Marketing technique, that is Direct Response Marketing.

• Direct Response Marketing:

Direct response marketing is a marketing tactic that demands a quick response from consumers who are exposed to it.

 

The goal of direct response marketing is to convince consumers to call a number, visit a website URL, drag to the landing page & take some other desired actions.

  

The infomercial allows entrepreneurs access to consumers who might want to buy their products through direct response marketing.

During an Infomercial like a webinar, the person who is pitching the product mentions the call to action several times over the course of the program. A web address or link to connect appears on screen at all times & viewers know exactly what they need to do to buy the product.

In Direct response marketing few points plays a vital role. Like,

Make responding to the offer simple:

Today's consumers prefer simplicity over everything else. They don't want to jump through hoops even if it's to get the desired product.

 

1. Adding a time to the offer:
Time bound offers work particularly well in direct response marketing. People respond well to urgency, because of the fear of missing out.

2. Email Marketing:
It is an extremely inexpensive way to reach your audience no matter how big it becomes. It is also an ideal channel for direct response marketing.

3. Make a specific offer:
A direct response marketing campaign only works if you make a specific offer. It is not asking people to buy one of your products, You are asking them to buy a specific product.

4. Having an opportunity to follow up with multiple touchpoints:
The best direct response marketing Campaigns gives you opportunities to follow up with people who convert. You capture their email addresses & other contact information so you can connect with them and provide them with excellent customer service.

Now, let's have a more clear idea with the direct comparison of Traditional & Digital Marketing.

• The CATT Marketing funnel & Framework:

Wealth = n^CATT

Where,

n= Niche

C= Content

A= Attention

T= Trust

T= Transaction

1. Niche (n):

Choose a niche from the market which is most in demand. Don't try to be everything to everyone, otherwise, you will be nobody to everyone. Try to focus on one particular hungry niche, which will give the steady growth from the efforts taken. Tools like keyword research, Audience research helps better to select the niche.

2. Content (C):

After selecting Niche is important to frame or create useful content. Blog post, Videos, Lead magnets, Live webinars, etc are a form of content which is your asset to drag people to your tribe.

3. Attention (A):

SEO, Social media, Paid ads & referrals are useful to drive traffic to your content. Viral Marketing is a kind of marketing for attention at different platforms, that is best in dragging huge amount of traffic.

4. Trust (T):

After driving attention from the content, it is important to build trust through deep marketing. Which involves communicating directly with our customers using other modes of communication. Repetitive engagements by regular content on different digital channels helps to build trust.

5. Transaction (T):

Getting Transaction done is one of the important parts of the entire framework. At this stage you have selected the niche right, have the targeted audience with you, making the best suitable content to drag the customer's attention & trust. Then automatically sales will take place. Sales are important to convert your leads into customers. This is the final step to complete the entire funnel.

After being saturated at one niche, you can go to new niches with the profit earned.

Let's move forward to the structure of digital marketing & how it is an interrelated process.

• Integrated Digital Marketing:

Integrated Digital Marketing must be a new concept for you. Let me clear this, Integrated Digital Marketing is the chain in which all the digital marketing mediums are interconnected. 

When you initially go for Digital marketing instead of using paid advertising, go for organic advertising. Approach the potential customer directly with free content to draw the attention, collect email ids & other details. Then content will send signals to search engines & ranks it to visit the website. ie. Content signals to search engine & search engine drag traffic back to the website. 

If the content is shared on social media, then social media will drag people to the content & if people like it, it again gets shared on social media. 

Integrated digital marketing is like a team with content as the leader and the various other digital marketing methods are like its team members. Then drive attention through paid advertisements, SEO & social media by taking content in the center. 

Through this process after making trust using email marketing & then transact using sell & conversion. Quality content is the heart of integrated digital marketing which drives the entire process.

• Personal Branding:

In Personal Branding it is important the world knows about you, who you are & how good you are at your work. It is like marketing your own self.

 People will not like to hear from a logo or a company instead, people will get more attracted if a person is a medium to pass the message of marketing & that is how personal branding comes into the picture. 

It is a better way to convince people. People find it interesting & more trustworthy if they get to know about your past experiences, your work & experiences. It makes them rely on you, build more trust in you & also, it is more convincing. It builds a strong image in the minds of people.

Personal branding has a loophole that it can not be sold & can not be invested in. But I find this loophole to be the power of personal branding as it leads to influence many brands.

 If one has a strong personal brand then people have trust & can rely on & then they also trust the many other brands generated by them & also influence the people to invest in that brands too. Here, Personal branding works as a brand ambassador for their other brands & the companies they run.

Again Personal brand solely can't get that height. But many other brands & companies ran by them with the influence of personal brand creates the magic.

• Mass Trust Blueprint (By Deepak Kanakraju):

1. Learn:

Mass Trust blueprint on Personal branding stress on the Understanding the concepts first, Remember the facts behind that concepts & continuously practice the procedure. It is suitable that "Practice makes a man perfect."

2. Work:

Self assessment plays a vital role. One should implement the learning for better understandings of the concepts learned. Your skills get polished with regular practice & implementation in the real world.

3. Blog:

Blogging is always experiencing. Blogging gives birth to Unique ideas. Blogging also helps to build a personal brand. Blogging gives more understanding of the work through the experience.

4. Consult:

When a person learns fundamentals & for more understanding works on that & polish the same by blogging. Then comes the stage of consulting, because now you have your personal brand. Now you can start consulting other businesses instead of working as an employee for them.

5. Mentor:

Evolution leads to the next stage when a person learns, writes, teaches & understands. Mentoring is like consulting to a bunch of interested people. Mentoring is a whole new level of clarity.

6. Start up:

After having all the understanding, practicing, polishing, mentoring is the final step to start with your own unique ideas. New start-up of the personal brand you have created.

Mass Trust Blueprint does not end here, It is a circular movement, One should continuously repeat the same.

• Traditional Marketing v/s Digital Marketing:

Now that we understand what these two forms of marketing are, let’s take a deeper dive into what makes them different, aside from the fact that one is digital and one is not.

1. Target audience :

 With traditional marketing, it’s fairly easy to reach people in certain locations and of certain demographics. However, digital marketing allows for global reach while narrowing the target towards interests and other specific attributes.

2. Audience engagement :

With digital marketing, people can reply to and comment on many different types of digital media and campaigns. With traditional marketing, it is a one-sided conversation.

3. Cost efficiency :

Traditional advertising tends to cost more and be harder to scale. The physical nature of the campaigns simply ads costs. Digital marketing provides a better range of options for affordability and resource requirements. (For example, organic content marketing has labor costs but not placement costs.)

4. Speed of results

 With traditional marketing, it can take longer to know the efficiency of a campaign. A digital ad gives an immediate click-through rate, but with traditional marketing, you’re waiting for the phone to ring or someone to come into the shop.

5. Attribution and decision making:

It can be much harder to attribute the success of new sales to a traditional campaign than to digital media. This is why traditional marketing is often used for brand building versus direct sales.

6. Audience feedback loop:

With more of an open line of communication with digital marketing, it’s easier to know how customers are responding to a campaign. With traditional marketing, brand managers are often just waiting and hoping they don’t get negative feedback in the form of a tweet that goes viral. This is why more money and energy is poured into focus groups and market research previous to launching a big traditional campaign. By the time a traditional campaign actually reaches its target audience, it’s typically too late to fix flub.

After all the important details of Marketing & Digital marketing let's understand the concept of Global Economics & Marketing.

• Debt creates money:

Sounds strange right?

But now I understood this concept very well. I can explain it in detail.

Learning about global economics for making the business, decisions are a must.

As we see the Indian economy is going up & it will go up more in the coming years. The static behind this is the average young age of the country is going up day by day. We are having more people of the young age group, whose spending power is more, which directly & positively helps to grow the economy.

It is like, If we are having more people to take loan/ debt, the more cash flows in the economy. And as people pay back the debt amount, there is a shrink in the money supply.

In time of recession only strong companies can survive & weak companies exit the market.

Conclusion:

This is how Marketing & Digital Marketing works. The fundamentals, Laws of marketing, the difference between the traditional & digital marketing gives a clear understanding of the marketing world. The CATT funnel, Integrated Digital marketing framework & Personal Branding gives more understanding of the Digital space & its work process.

Kindly drop a message for any query. It would be great to hear from you.