Forget your marketing woes. Start here!
In this article I am going to talk about Marketing and what it actually is when thought through first principles. This will help us understand the basics of marketing and leverage it effectively across any channel be it Social Media, Emails, SEO etc.
We will learn about:
- Fundamentals of Marketing
- How to build a brand
- Ways of Building a Brand: Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing
- Getting started with Digital Marketing and creating your own marketing funnel
- How to avoid getting confused about different ways to market and instead create an integrated marketing approach which can be scaled easily
- How to gain #MassTrust for your products/services?
Let’s get started!
So what exactly are first principles you might ask?
“A first principle is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot deduce first principles from any other proposition or assumption.”[1]
Elon Musk used this to build his first rocket at SpaceX.
So he asked himself, “What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And … what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”
He figured that the only reason getting a rocket into space is so expensive is that people are stuck in a mindset that doesn’t hold up to first principles. With that, Musk decided to create SpaceX and see if he could build rockets himself from the ground up.
So fundamentally speaking, marketing is understanding the customer and his/her needs so well that it leads to creating a product that fits.
It starts before creating the product.
If you follow this process, then the product sells itself.
Against popular opinion, marketing is not about creativity. It’s not about making campaigns, running ads for a product that already exists.
“Marketing is based on science of understanding your customer so well that the product you create fits them perfectly and then it sells itself”
Marketing is about sending the right message to the right person at the right time. Such that the person feels that you are talking to them directly.
Hence, marketing is more of Science and less of an art.
It exists at all levels of the customer journey, before he/she buys from you, while they are buying from you and post they have bought from you so that they buy from you in the future as well. #MassTrust
It’s a means to end such that you reach a level where your brand does not need to market anymore. Think about it, does Google have to market itself?
Having said this, never let marketing become more important than the product. A bad product with great marketing would only accelerate the death of your company.
Word of mouth marketing is the best channel of marketing.
Now that we have learnt about the fundamentals of marketing, the next step would be to understand how to build a brand.
To build a brand, first decide where you want to compete. Deciding where to compete is half your success. Choose a category and become the leader in that category.
Think Xerox, Google, Zoom, Apple, Amazon, Netflix!
If not a leader in a category, become a leader in a sub-category. Ex: BMW- Sheer riding pleasure, Volvo is focused on safety. Mercedes is designed for executives, for comfort.
Google is the leading search engine. Zomato is the leading search engine for restaurants. Practo is leader for searching doctors.
Within marketing there can be several niches: SEO, Affiliate Marketing etc.
Ways of building a brand: Traditional Marketing VS Digital Marketing
TV ads is a classic example of traditional marketing. You can reach millions of people at a low cost.
In India, we have TV’s in 198 million households. That’s a massive reach of around 800 million-1 billion people.
Newspapers reach around 465 million people.
However, in these avenues you would be running a generic advertisement so that a percentage of people convert and buy your product.
While Digital Marketing comes nowhere close to the reach of traditional methods such as TV, Radio and Newspaper, you can run agile targeted campaigns which elicit an instant response from the buyer.
As an entrepreneur, you need to bring your product to the people who will be the early adopters. Earn some profits from them and then target, the next segment of customers. Similarly, you move to the next level.
Start with targeted Digital Marketing and move towards Traditional Marketing to effectively reach the masses.
How to get started with Digital Marketing and create an effective funnel?
Wealth=n^CATT
n=The niche you choose
CATT:
C= Content (Blog Posts, Videos, Webinars etc)
A=Attention (SEO, Social Media, Paid Ads etc)
T=Trust (Trip wires, Marketing Automation and Retargeting)
T=Transaction (Convert leads into customers with natural sales methods)
So basically:
1. You start by creating great content about your product/service.
2. Then you run ads that bring attention to your content. In this process you capture the contact details of your lead (Email/Phone number)
3. Then build trust through email marketing
4. Finally the lead buys from you
This is also known as running Integrated Digital Marketing.
Remember, the best known products and services will always beat the best product and services. The caveat is that best known should also be a good product or service.
To build #MassTrust with your audience, follow this simple blueprint:
To summarize, I would like to say that marketing is an amazing field to work in (I consider Sales to be a part of marketing), since it is rooted in understanding the human psychology. It delivers results in the form of revenue which keeps the business going.
It is highly critical to understand the point that marketing is more of a Science, where in you try to understand your customer/market and then take necessary steps to build your brand.
A brand can be built effectively, by targeted digital marketing and then reaching the masses via Traditional marketing.
To get started with Digital Marketing, CATT is an important framework that will help you run integrated digital marketing campaigns and gain #MassTrust.
I hope you liked the article. Please leave your thoughts in the comments to help improve/encourage.
Until next time :-)
