Have you ever thought about how companies or brands would be like if the fundamentals of marketing didn’t exist?
Do you know to have a better marketing strategy in place? you must understand the fundamentals of marketing.
In this article, I am going to talk about how the fundamentals of marketing could help you define an outstanding marketing strategy and make you a better digital marketer. This article will be useful for business owners, professionals, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and others interested in building their careers in Digital Marketing Field.
Many of you do not know exactly what marketing is, and when asked, the most common perception they have about marketing is all about promoting and selling.
Let’s face it, to many business people, marketing is simply selling at a larger scale that equals promotion.
But, the reality is that marketing sits at the intersection of a business and its customers. Marketing is all about the psychological understanding of what the customer needs.
Basics & Fundamental of Marketing
Many of the digital marketers end up focusing too much on the digital part of marketing. But, in digital marketing, understanding the basics of marketing and getting it right is the key. In fact, digital marketing is more about marketing than about digital.
Once you understand what is fundamentals of marketing very well, then digital marketing will become very easy for you to market the product or services and reach out to your targeted audience.
Digital Marketing is a very dynamic field, the techniques and the ways to reach out to the audience in the market keep changing. But, MARKETING is not going to change because it’s embedded inside the human psychology.
“Business has only two functions – marketing and innovation.”
~ Milan Kundera
Put your complete focus on the Marketing and Fundamentals of Marketing to get success with your brand and business.
Keep reading, we will talk about the various things listed below that will help you understand the fundamentals of marketing that can increase your productivity.
- The Law of marketing
- Personal Branding and Mass Trust
- Building a Strong Brand
- Why Learn and Master Marketing?
- Why it is important to understand Global Economics for Marketing?
- Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing
- The CATT Marketing Funnel
- Integrated Digital Marketing
- Bonus Tips
The Law of Marketing
Many digital marketers out there think that marketing is all about being creative and coming up with some very fancy advertising slogans and creative products to sell in the market.
Wait!
What if I told you that marketing is certainly not about creativity? Marketing is truly based on Science. Well, you definitely wouldn’t believe me and think I have gone all crazy.
Let’s find out why Marketing is based on Science.
A lot of people think that marketing is just about marketing a product or service that already exists.
Well, Well, Well, This is not true.
Marketing starts right at the beginning of your business journey before your brand even takes a form.
Marketing is all about Conversation.
Great conversations lead to understanding the customers and the needs of customers. Great insights like this lead to the amazing products delivered through engaging the customer experiences, which fits and will sell itself.
THIS is marketing!!!
Marketing is not just about selling or promoting the products and services, it is also about keeping your customer happy. Keeping the customer happy should be your end goal. This helps to personalize the customers’ journey, which encourages them to buy more products from you and share them among their community.
Marketing is all about sending the right message, to the right people, at the right time. Personalization can be achieved by setting up marketing automation based on your customer’s behavior and the marketing funnel. Hence, it becomes very much important that you create a Marketing Funnel and communicate accordingly.
Mass Trust
Marketing is the trust that you build with your audience. This is very important aspect to learn in introduction to fundamentals of marketing. Doing marketing is always about building the brand and capturing a position in people’s minds, so they don’t need a reminder to come back to your products or services.
When you take that position in the market and build momentum about your product and services, then the marketing requirement goes down.
Hence, I believe that Marketing is a game of perception and the product is the game of reality. Never let marketing become more important than your product or services. So, if you have a high-quality product, then marketing is not needed at all.
But, if your product is not good, then your complete marketing efforts will go to waste.
A great product will sell itself.
Marketing and Good Marketing will always accelerate the growth of your business. So, focus on your product and services that can benefit the customers and keep them happy.
A great product will convert your customers into brand ambassadors. Word of Mouth is the biggest Marketing Asset that brands and organizations should always have. It’s the best marketing channel that every brand can use to sell its products.
Building a Strong Personal Brand
People always want to hear from the people and from brands. Try to become No.1 in any category that you identify for yourself. Getting market leadership in a particular category is very much important.
“Do not be the No.1. Be the Only One.”
– Digital Deepak
A personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador
When you decide where you want to compete among others will help you get success. So, when it comes to leadership, people who want to build strong brands must choose a category and become a leader in that category.
However, if you think you cannot be the leader for any main category, then you can also choose a sub-category and take the market leadership.
For Example – You want to become the No.1 SEO Expert in India. But, there are many well-established SEO Experts already in the market. So, in this case, you can choose the sub-category like No.1 SEO Analyst for e-commerce, No.1 SEO Analyst for Local Businesses, and so on.
Once you have a strong brand, then you don’t have to do the sales pitch, your product will sell itself.
Important: Picking up the categories which are competitive in the market and trying to become No.1 in that category might be a little challenging. But, if you enter a competitive market then you must have a unique angle in your product or service. You must be able to differentiate yourself at some level so that your customers will perceive and use your product.
Why Learn and Master Fundamentals of Marketing?
In today’s world, marketing education has a long shelf life than any other knowledge. Marketing is rooted in human phycology and in understanding the market. It becomes very difficult to give a perception about a product as a high-quality product without marketing. Marketing not only helps people to discover the products, but it also creates a good perception of the product.
For a lot of products in the market, marketing is going to be the backbone. It’s the most valuable investment that gives direct returns (ROI) in business.
Marketing is something that encapsulates everything around and hence you need to learn and master marketing.
How Global Economics is Connected to Fundamentals of Marketing?
Every entrepreneur who is thinking about their own startup or running a business should learn about Global economics. It will help you make decisions in your business based on Global economics. As per industry experts, the economy of a country goes up when the average age of the country goes up. This is possible because the spending of that country goes up.
As long as people are young and they are spending, the country’s economy will keep growing.
So, when you are planning to build a new business, it’s good to focus on a developing country than a developed country. This is because people will not spend if there is no need to spend.
Also, you must know that Debt creates money. When everyone is in debt, then we have a proper cash flow in the economy. But, if everyone will start repaying then the money supply will shrink back. So, by understanding this basic principle of marketing, you get to know where you can market the products.
Digital Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing
Digital marketing has opened up a new world of possibilities when it comes to understanding the customers better and building relationships with them. Every digital marketer is focusing on Digital Marketing.
Why are they doing so???
This is because people are increasingly spending more time online and digital marketing offers various advantages in terms of speed, efficiency, and ROI.
Though Digital is the future, but it is not the only way to market your product/services.
Consider that your product or service is very generic and you want to reach out to a wide target audience like the entire country.
Now what? Well, in this case, to reach out to the mass consumers, you must be doing Traditional Marketing.
Traditional Marketing includes your TV ads, Hoardings, Radio, Newspaper where you can reach out to a wider set of audience.
Where Traditional marketing will help in mass reach, digital marketing is the best medium to reach out to the affluent English-speaking population with spending power.
While using traditional marketing, you cannot personalize communication and do deep marketing. It is a little difficult to do natural sales.
But when you have a product of low-end consumer rate, then use traditional marketing for the best outcomes.
CATT Marketing Funnel and Framework
Wealth = n^CATT
Here,
[n] Niche: Your success & wealth depends on the niche you choose. So, you need to select a niche where the people have problems and need a product or service that can solve them. While choosing a niche for yourself, you need to go narrow. Stick to your niche and try to focus on it.
[C] Content: Content will be your asset that will attract your niche. Once you have selected the Niche, then must start creating useful content. There are different forms of content like videos, blog posts, lead magnets, live webinars, and more which can help you reach out to your audience.
[A] Attention: You need to drive attention to your content. Generate traffic to your content using various means like Social Media, SEO, Paid Advertisement, and Referrals.
[T] Trust: Once your drive traffic to your content, then you need to build trust with your targeted audience. Without having trust from your consumers, it’s very difficult to encourage them to buy your product. You can build trust with your audience by using, marketing automation, tripwires, and retargeting. Consider doing deep marketing where you send personalized communications and try to connect with them.
[T] Transaction: Once the trust is built among your audience, then comes the most important thing in your funnel, i.e. converting the leads into customers. Follow the natural sales method to convert the leads into customers. Don’t just call the leads and try to convert them, instead you build trust with them by selecting the right niche, the right product, and attracting them with the right message. You must also consider doing various other activities like sales calls, webinars, sales pages, and sales newsletters. Without sales, you will not be able to convert your leads into customers.
Once you have saturated the niche, then you can go ahead and use that profits to try new niches.
Here, we have used the n power of CATT because the effectiveness of your content, attention, trust, transaction funnel will determine how much wealth you will create.
It’s the power-law used in Fundamentals of marketing. You choose a good niche and then you can multiply the entire effectiveness using the CATT funnel.
Wealth = n^CATT, the Success Formula to learn in Fundamentals of Marketing.
Integrated Digital Marketing
A lot of digital marketers approach digital marketing in a way where they try to get results for all the channels like email marketing, content marketing, SEO, social media, PPC, etc. separately. When you try to get sales from all the channels separately
Digital marketers should try to integrate all the digital marketing components in a way that it works like a machine. Instead of using paid advertisements to try and sell your product directly, use should perform advertisement to your content where you can get the people into your email list.
So, you must 1st drive attention to your content rather than getting transactions directly.
Paid Advertising is boosting the entire momentum of all the digital marketing components and hence people start having trust in your brand.
Thus, you follow CATT Funnel the success formula in the Fundaments of Marketing that every digital marketer should know. CATT funnel is very linear and it works in flow with your Integrated Digital Marketing.
CATT is the framework of how an individual user goes through the different stages and Integrated Digital Marketing Framework is how you execute it. You will have people at all the stages of the funnel all the time because some of them will be building trust while some of them will be purchasing your products.
Bonus Tips to understand Fundamentals of Marketing
Bonus Tip 1: Learn. Do. Teach
Bonus Tip 2: Set a Financial Goal and Create a Plan to Achieve It.
Bonus Tip 3: Importance of Communication Skills in Marketing – Good marketing is all about good communication. Good communication doesn’t care about the vocabulary or grammar, it’s about how effectively you are able to transfer all your thoughts. Understand your target audience very well and join a conversation in the people’s mind like the person is next to you. If your communication is well, then the product will sell itself. The most important thing about communication is
- “Write as you Talk”, never go for complex sentences.
- “Think in English”, you will be able to put the words together better if you start thinking in English.
So, improving communication skills is important in marketing.
Marketing is about Communication, Connection, understanding the market, economics, and phycology. It starts with understanding your customer and building the product that will fit their needs and will sell itself. Marketing is right from the beginning of conceptualizing the product to the feedback of customers. You must always have a strong personal brand to evolve in the market and follow CATT Funnel and Integrated Digital Marketing to get wealth in your niche.
Fundamentals of Marketing will always rule the world of business and brands and change your perception in creating marketing strategies to reach out to the targeted audience.
I hope you now have all the fundamentals of marketing answers with a clear understanding of Basic principle of marketing.
This brief introduction on fundamentals of marketing will also help you understand the fundamentals of digital marketing.
Do comment and let me know what you feel about this article on the fundamentals of marketing .
