Marketing Basics and its Fundamentals: What, Why and How
By: Tapan Kalita
Tags: Digital Marketing, Personal Branding, Marketing Strategies, SEO

Are you interested in Entrepreneurship or preparing to set up your own business module?

Most likely Yes, as who doesn’t want to create wealth and be your own Boss. As in today’s era, each one of us needs financial freedom to set our own goal.

Since in a Business, Marketing starts even before launching a product or service in order to reach out to the consumers. In order to do business you have to understand marketing. This is because the primary goal is to make them aware of the product and its benefits. Depending on the requirement or demand of the consumer, the product or services is created that fits and after that the whole process completely relies on marketing and its strategies. Moreover, marketing is rooted with Human Psychology and is directly linked with the growth of any Business. If you know marketing and selling, it would be easy in building your business. The selling of your products/services would become easy. Moreover your career will be quite safe and secured.

To have an in-depth information on it let’s move on to the basics of Marketing.

What is Marketing?

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Marketing is a continual process of getting potential customers or clients for your products or services. Continual in the sense, unless the consumer becomes your customer and once it does it is about keeping them happy by constant communication with them so that they remain customers for life. Process is used in the context as it requires a lot of market research depending on the needs or requirements of the consumer.

The 4 P’s of Marketing

According to E.J McCarthy, there are 4 P’s of Marketing for identifying different elements and how to work on it before creating a suitable marketing strategy.

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Product: Having a specific product is to have a lock and marketing is a key to it. A product could be a tangible(goods) or intangible(services, ideas, experiences, etc.). A product may be created depending on the demand of the consumer after analysing the market or it could be the other way around.

Place: Locations can be anything from an online store(ecommerce) to a physical store across different cities. The primary goal of the distribution strategy is to provide consumers smooth access of the products/services all around as well as have a good product experience throughout the process.

Price: For any business entity be it a company or an individual, this segment is extremely significant within the marketing strategy. What and How much price should be set for the products/services as this factor could affect other factors as well.

The maximum or minimum profit margin.

The purchasing power/capacity of the consumers.

If we want to enter a luxury market or mass market.

The quality of the product. Either cheap quality and low in price or expensive and high in quality.

The competitors price range and what could be its substitutes.

Promotion: This refers to all the marketing communications and strategy in order to reach the target audience with appropriate balance of advertising, PR, Direct marketing and Sales promotion. This includes

Message strategy- What information to be communicated with the audience.

Channel/Media strategy- How to reach out with the target audience.

Message Frequency- How often to communicate with the audience.

Why do we need Marketing?

Success of any business lies in its marketing. It is like a heart of any business. You need marketing because without it, your business may offer the best products or services in the market, but without marketing none of your potential customers would come to know about it. Good marketing helps the customer understand why your product is better than the competition, helps you reach your target audience, increase your customer base and ultimately boost your business bottom line. Here are the reasons why any business needs marketing.

On a simple term, marketing educates the customer. Knowing your product is great is not enough if your customer doesn’t know and understand. In order to buy something ,the customer needs to have a clear idea about what you are selling and how it works. Marketing is the most effective way of communicating with customers.

Marketing is not just meant to promote and sell your products/services. In order to sustain for a longer run you have to build a relationship with the customers. It’s something that businesses need to invest in, cultivate and work for it everyday so that businesses are sustained and have longevity. To flourish and grow your business, consumer-seller relationship is must and good marketing helps in minimising that gap.

Marketing is about building a brand and then nurturing a customer relationship with it by gaining trust. Once it becomes a brand and acquires all the trust, the requirement or need of marketing decreases, as the product or service automatically gets sold by word of mouth. Without proper marketing a company or individual can’t reach their goals.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous”- Peter Drucker

Thus, marketing is for all business entities. Whether you are a small, medium or even large business, in order to grow and flourish you need marketing. While maintaining and caring for current customers, marketing also ensures reaching new customers. People are unlikely to come and buy your products if they don’t know the what and why of your business.

Importance of Good Communication Skill

Marketing also depends on your communication skill. Good communication is very much important during marketing. Now good communication doesn’t mean that you should be able to speak sophisticated english with high vocabulary. Whatever language you speak you should be able to convey the actual motive of the message to the consumer effectively. You must communicate properly what your product and services is all about and how it is going to benefit them.

Global Economics

As an Entrepreneur apart from marketing, you need to have some idea on economics. How the global economy works and what is its difference with Indian economy. Understanding the economy will help you make decision, where to invest. Is there any potential for business growth if you invest in any of the economic markets? Here demographics play a vital role in the growth of the economy. Below are the key takeaways-

Economic growth of any nation is related to the average working-age population of that nation.

Decrease in birth-rate combined with the increase in aging population declines economic growth.

However, this declination can be halted by increasing productivity through advanced technology and automation.

Hence it is very much profitable to invest in developing countries like India, China etc. In India, the current average age of the working population is around 27 years, and there isn’t any possibility of drastic change of this working age population in the next 10–15 years.

Marketing Strategies

Marketing is not limited upto one single strategy, rather a combination of different techniques and tactics. Nowadays there are various mediums through which marketing plans can be executed. One such medium is Digital Marketing.

Digital Marketing

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Digital Marketing is a medium through which the discipline of marketing strategy is executed entirely within a digital environment. Though for time being, this methodology is limited to attract only those potential customers who use digital platforms or are digital users. But, most likely it will be increasing in near future where marketing continues to grow. And with new world events, like the covid-19 crisis of 2020, millions of people are forced to stay indoor, creating a huge rise in the user list of digital environments.

Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing

Though in the past few years, we can see that the trend of digital marketing is everywhere. But, there are still a few limitations that can never replace traditional marketing.

Traditional marketing is quite cost effective and easier to target a wide range of customers.

India has TVs in around 197 million homes with an average of 4–5 members per household. Thus it has a reach of 800 million to 1 billion people. On the other hand there are only 5 million users of digital platforms in India. Hence digital marketing is nowhere close to traditional marketing in terms of users.

Digital marketing is the best medium for selling your products/services to sophisticated people with higher spending power.

So if you are planning to earn 1 crore in 3–5 yrs through digital marketing, either your targeted potential customer should be high with low product price or your products should be high in price with less customer base.

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CATT Marketing Framework

One of the most important aspects in Digital Marketing is CATT Marketing Framework. The success and wealth of your business completely depends on this. This framework can be applied for brand building, affiliate marketing, mentoring, course creators, products and services, and almost every business you can think of. It can also be called the four pillars of digital marketing. Thus, we can say

Wealth=n^CATT, where

n(Niche): Before starting an online business, at first you have to choose your niche. Either you become the number one in a category, or you can be the only one in the sub category. Your success depends on the niche you select.

C(Content): It is the centre of your marketing, and also the first stage of the framework. To capture the attention of your target audience, you need content. It adds value to your business. Good content helps in attracting more people.

A(Attention): Driving attention of the audience(traffic) through various marketing tools(lead magnets) is necessary. When this happens only after that you will be able to know their name, email id etc. Thus, from an unknown entity to becoming your customer(lead) is a kind of tactic or magic in simple terms.

T(Trust): Once you are able to drive traffic the next step is to build trust with the audience. Trust is the most crucial part of the entire sales process. You need to gain the trust at first, only then they will start considering doing business with you.

T(Transaction): And this is the final stage where the transaction actually happens and brings revenue to your business. Once trust is built, your leads will now purchase your product or services depending on their needs.

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Integrated Digital Marketing

If we look around, everywhere there is competition for customers’ attention. Be it traditional or digital marketing. So, in order to get better results by driving customers’ attention and converting it into sales one should implement the CATT marketing funnel through Integrated Digital Marketing Framework.

It is the methodology or strategy of combining all the tools, tactics, and marketing components like SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Paid Advertising etc. In short, it is a well structured marketing plan. The tactics should be such that all the efforts should point to one particular topic and express the same to the mind of the audience.

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Here, the execution is in such a way that the main focus is on the content. Paid advertising is utilized to showcase your content through different social media and email marketing. Moreover, organic search is also obtained through your own website or blog via SEO. Once you develop all the channels to drive traffic, your marketing works as a whole and makes more sense. Thus, you will be able to generate potential leads and will smoothly convert into your customer.

Personal Branding(Mass Trust Blueprint)

One of the important aspects of Digital Marketing is developing a personal brand.

Personal branding is the continual effort to market yourself as a brand. It is a practice of marketing yourself so that people know who you are. Knowing that you are good at something is not enough. You have to market yourself so that your work is recognised and people start building trust with you. People don’t do business with companies, they do with the people they like and trust.Once a relationship is developed, people want to hear from you. You have to convey your message in a very personalized way, so that it captures people's emotion. It can also be generalised as a Mass trust blueprint.

Image source: Stock Image(DigitalDeepak)

Learn: Firstly, you find your passion and master your talent with various skills through concepts, facts and procedures.

Work: Whatever you learn without executing practically, it won’t help you. This will develop better understanding and can also rectify the limitations.

Blog: Writing helps you remember the works and gain experience through it. Eventually you will end up developing your own personal brand.

Consult: Once you develop your own brand through your blog/website, you have an on field experience, rather than simply having it on paper. This will highlight your skills in the real world. After that you can consult others and can generate revenue for them and help their business grow.

Mentor: Mentoring is also about consulting but not one to one, rather one to many individuals. This will ascend your findings and contents to a whole different level and at the same time will influence others to be like you.

Startup: Finally, you can build your own startup and start selling your products/services. Throughout this process, you will again learn and develop new skills. Thus, the complete cycle repeats that links to one another.

Conclusion

In the coming future majority of business entities will enroll in the digital field and it’s high time to learn, understand and master digital marketing and its elements in order to sustain and compete with others. Moreover, it helps you to know your insight and accordingly build your personal brand to target potential customers.

Reference links:

Marketing basics

Digital Marketing

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Manbiz

Dreamstime

This article is an overview of the acquisition of knowledge during the week two of an internship program on digital marketing under digitaldeepak. Anybody interested in joining this internship program can click this link and register for the program.