Digital marketing the buzz word of 2020? Secrets of a successful digital marketer!
When you hear Digital Marketing you might feel a bit overwhelmed, but trust me its fun and interesting. Once you master the art of Digital Marketing, you’ll be unstoppable! before we start talking more about Digital Marketing lets first know what is Digital Marketing? In layman terms, it’s a marketing activity done over digital platforms. I know now it sounds easy, but before we dive deep into Digital lets first know what is Marketing.
So What is Marketing?
According to American Marketing Association, Marketing is an activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchange offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Marketing in other words, is Identifying and meeting the needs of the customers, and fulfilling them at the right place & at the right time.
Marketers usually try to educate its target audience by making them aware about their products and services with help of various promotional activities which in turn helps to persuade the customers, which leads in the purchase of goods and services.
The Laws of marketing
- Marketing is based on Science, not creativity
- Marketing is a game of persuasion
- The purpose of marketing is to build a brand, trust and capture the position in the minds of the customers
- Marketing is not only about selling, it is about maintaining a life long relationship with existing customers so that they can remain customers for life.
- Word of mouth is the best marketing channel
“Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time.” — Ann Handley
Now I’m sure you got some overview of Marketing, now let us see why Communication skills are important in marketing
Is Communication Skills important in marketing?
Frankly speaking, my answer to this question would be Yes, Yes because you need to communicate essential information effectively. A good marketer is all about good communication and story telling.
- A marketer must ask himself that “Am I able to transfer my thoughts to my audience effectively?”.
- Good and effective communication skills open’s a window to build and maintain relationships.
- Good communication overcomes marketing barriers.
- Good communication establishes professionalism when marketing.
- Good communication helps to innovate and to convey effectively.
Now you see why good communication skills are so important.
Traditional Marketing VS Digital Marketing
Traditional Marketing:
Traditional Media Marketing is one of the oldest means of marketing medium and has a huge audience reach. Here the marketing activities are mostly offline and are in the form of television ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, billboard, walls etc. which leads to higher reach. These ads are usually used for educating the large audience and making them aware of the brand and its products and services.
Digital Marketing:
Digital Marketing is a marketing technique where a company uses digital media such as images, videos, gifs etc. to market online. This can take place in the form of paid Social Media Marketing (SMM), Blogs, Influencer marketing, Email marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Online video marketing, etc.
The power of digital marketing can be understood only when it is used to the fullest. A marketer can make sure that its ads are shown only to its targeted audience so that only product interested audiences see the advertisements. During the targeted advertisement process, if a certain group of an audience doesn’t make any conversion after viewing the ad, those group of audience can be specifically retargeted so that the same ad appears again and again till the conversion is made. Which makes digital marketing an effective way of marketing and also cost-effective.
- Social Media Marketing (SMM): The marketing activity that takes place on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat etc. Here the advertisements such as images and videos appear in between the feeds so that audience can engage with it as any other user-generated content. These types of ads are usually engaging in nature, cost-effective and have a high chance of conversions.
- Influencer Marketing: The marketing activities are done by the so-called influencers on social media platforms. Here the Brand directly works with the famous people over the internet within a niche to promote and demonstrate the products in front of the social audience. Easy to gain customers trust.
- Email marketing: The marketing over emails, Here customer relationship plays a vital role, if the emails have a personal touch then there is scope for conversions or else people tend to ignore or spam it.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): A company or a brand makes sure that their website, products or services appear over the search engines so that there is free traffic to the website. Better SEO means better website reach and better site ranking.
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): A company or a brand makes sure that their website, products or services appears first on the results page so that they have a competitive advantage over its peers. This is a paid form of advertising and is expensive.
Now that you got a detailed explanation on what is digital marketing different from traditional marketing and what are its channels. Lets now go ahead with CATT Marketing Funnel.
CATT Marketing Funnel
A marketing funnel is a journey of your targeted audience to your target customer. The journey starts from the top of the funnel, Where the whole target audience is blasted with the ads. and at the end of the funnel, only the potential customers are targeted and shown custom-curated ads which leads to the sale.
This Funnel is based on wealth, i.e.. Wealth = n^CATT.
where n = your niche.
in the above formula, your niche is your Wealth and is directly related to each other, so select it wisely.
C = Content: Your audience is your customers, Provide them with rich and quality content so that they remain your Followers forever.
A = Attention: In order to present something in front of your target audience getting their attention to view your content is required.
T = Trust: Trust is an essential factor when it comes to marketing and sales. Customer buys or views content from only sources they trust.
T = Transaction: Once Content, Attention and Trust are gained then there is no more marketing required. Customers themselves will purchase the product and also recommend it to others.
Integrated Digital Marketing
Integrated digital marketing as the name itself sounds, Its a combination of all the marketing strategies required to form a successful marketing campaign. It consists of Paid Ads, Content Marketing, Email Marketing and Social Media this all ultimately leads to Sells and conversion.
The idea behind integrated digital marketing can be best explained with help of an example. Brand ABC Makes a post on “Best Office Furniture” on their blog but gets only 10 views organically, so there share the same on social media with a link attached to the blog post. Now they are able to get more blog visitors. In the same way, if the brand uses all these marketing strategies the band is able to reach more potential audience than that of a blog alone.
As I said before More Reach = More Engagement = More Money!
Now that we understood the use of CATT funnel and Integrated marketing. Let’s hop into last & final and most important concept that is Personal Branding and Mass trust blueprint.
Personal Branding
“All of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.” – Tom Peters in Fast Company
When it comes to personal branding Elon Musk is a great example. Mr. Elon Musk has a lot of ventures/Brands, but his fans consider him to be a better brand ambassador to all his ventures. Musk sometimes share his Tesla ideas over his Twitter account and the post itself goes viral than that posted on Tesla’s business account. The same type of influence can be found with Kylie Jenner with her brand Kylie Cosmetics, People buy like crazy when she posts pictures of her products on her personal social media account. People love to hear from people, not brand. the relationship between people and people is Deep and personal. This is the power of personal branding.
Mass Trust Blueprint
Mass trust blueprint is that next step to Personal Branding. This Consist of 6 Steps;
- Learn: Learning new skills through research, understanding and by practicing it.
- Work: This is an implementing phase, where newly acquired skills can be put into action in real-world and can be learnt and mastered through trial and errors.
- Blog: Now that you have learnt and experimented the learnings you can share your experiences online via a blog post. When you write, you understand it better. eventually, through this blog you will be able to Market yourself better (Personal Branding).
- Consult: Once you mastered the skills and after successful self-branding, you can start putting knowledge to work and earn money through 1 on 1 consultation services.
- Mentor: Now You can mentor other people and help them grow like you. This can also lead to better Personal branding and also gain organic word of mouth recommendation to avail your Premium mentoring services.
- Start-up: Now it’s the right time to start your brand and enter into the business market with your pre-existing customer base and followers. Now that you have knowledge its time to start big of your own and impact millions.
Process of personal branding is a never-ending and it goes on forever!
“Focus on the core problem your business solves and put out lots of content and enthusiasm and ideas about how to solve that problem.” — Laura Fitton
I hope that you enjoyed reading this article. Please comment below your views and your key takeaways from this article. Don't just be a reader like other 99%, be an action taker and start implementing!
Thank you, Have a wonderful day!
Written by Shaun Chris Dsouza
