Digital Marketing : Here’s What You Need To Know

Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes

the customer feel smart.

– Joe Chernov

We all agree to this, right?

Well, to be honest, marketing is an undeniably tricky business. For new brands just beginning to walk the long road of customer retention and corporate identity, the entire industry can feel overrun with insider concepts and head-spinning jargon. Sometimes, however, in the process of learning how to handle ROI and CPC, the most important fundamentals get overlooked.

With the rise of the sun, the era of marketing welcomes new technologies, strategies, innovations, opportunities, and pitfalls each day.

That said, people who are new to the online marketing world can face a lot of challenges and feel overwhelming. This generally happens due to the myths and apprehensions that surround marketing.

But before we jump into some other important topics covered in this article, let’s start with the basics and find out what nobody tells you about marketing in this digital world.

Marketing Fundamentals: The crucial differentiator in the digital age!

Time and again I hear from entrepreneurs and professionals whose marketing just isn’t working. They lament that either the social media platforms do nothing for them or the ads don’t bring in enough business for the money it costs.

Why? they ask.

The most likely cause is they’re not following fundamental marketing principles. While new channels, platforms, and tools continue to emerge, the recipients of this marketing (a.k.a. your customers) really haven’t changed all that much.

Whether they’re millennials or boomers, the same buying concepts still apply as much as they did during the Mad Men years. What has changed, however, is that today’s customer has the entire world at their fingertips.

The 4 P’s plus more. . .

In marketing, the concept of the 4 P’s has been around forever. They are:

1. Product: What you sell. Could be a physical good, services, consulting, etc.

2. Price: How much do you charge and how does that impact how your customers view your brand?

3. Place: Where do you promote your product or service? Where do your ideal customers go to find information about your industry?

4. Promotion: How do your customers find out about you? What strategies do you use, and are they effective?

What these 4 P’s represent are the key things that customers need to understand about any product or service to make a purchase decision. They can be presented to customers in a myriad of ways, but these important fundamentals never change and entrepreneurs must never lose sight of them.

But now the real question arises!

Are the traditional 4 P’s of marketing still relevant today?

Do you present your customers with, and encourage them to learn more about, your 4 P’s? Really think about that for a minute.

“We have the BEST customer service just for YOU!”

I hear this one a lot and guess what?

Your competition says the same thing.

“Check out our latest high-quality product, only $19.99.” That’s great, now I know the price and that it’s high quality, according to you.

In the 1960s, consumers were no less intelligent than they are today, but they were much more likely to take your word that you had great customer service or a high-quality product. Today, few people will believe your messages or even take notice of them unless you can grab and keep their attention.

Blind promotion vs. targeted selling

Every entrepreneur needs to begin with the basics to market their business effectively. You need to be able to answer the following questions:

1. What problems do our products/services solve and what value do they bring to our customers? (product)

2. Do we have customer segments that have different needs or wants from our products/services? (product)

3. Is our pricing attractive to our customers relative to the perceived value we provide? (price)

4. Do we need a discounting or promotion strategy to increase new customer interest? (price)

5. What are the key messages that will attract target customers to our brand? (promotion)

6. Which channels/platforms/media/tactics can we use to reach our target customers in adequate numbers at a price we can afford? (promotion)

7. Will customer characteristics have an impact on the effectiveness of our sales campaigns (age, gender, income level, location, more)? (place)

8. Can our target customers easily access our product/service from their locations (i.e. direct sales, retailers, distributors, e-Commerce, other)? (place)

Good marketing sets up a business for increased sales. It leads to customer awareness and opens the door for sales conversations. But the devil is most definitely in the details.

Compelling messages or just more noise?

Below are actually the questions that every consumer asks and expects every marketer to give importance to and examine before doing campaigns in today’s digital world:

Are you providing me with compelling information?

Do you have an entertaining way to interact with me as your customer?

Are you giving me critical information (based on the 4 P’s) as I begin making my buying decision?

Are you able to distribute that content, whatever it is, on the right channels to get the audience you want? (BTW — this is a big one!)

Simply telling me how great you are or how much money you can save me is noisy. Everybody and I do mean EVERYBODY, is doing that.

So. Much. Noise.

If you help solve my problem or provide me with valuable information or actually converse with me in the places where I spend my time it might help convince me that you’re better than the rest.

It’s easy to complain about lackluster results when you keep posting pictures of your products in the hands of super happy people or pay for a commercial that shows your building, logo, and phone number. These are messages that don’t break through the clutter and the noise. They are phone-it-in marketing.

The art and the science

Marketing is both an art and a science. The science is price, product, promotion, and place. You need these foundational pieces entirely mapped out. Those that understand this have a much better chance at winning. The art, however, is actually taking the time to understand who your customers are; figure out what they really need to know about you; determine how someone comes to purchase your product or service, and then being so charming that they can’t resist you.

Get the fundamentals nailed down and then learn how to be attractive to your target customers. That will become your recipe for success.

Now let’s try to get a clear understanding of the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing

Between the tried and true strategies of traditional marketing and the new and innovative strategies of digital marketing, there are many ways for businesses to capture the attention of their audiences.

But which strategy works best? Which one should businesses focus on?

That’s the main question!

But before we find out which one is better, let’s try to understand the two separately and their pros and cons respectively.

What is Traditional Marketing?

Traditional marketing encompasses the marketing methods that can be used without the internet. These are the methods that have been around for decades and are typically used less often now. However, they’re not without their strengths.

Common traditional market methods include:

1. Directly mailed postcards, coupons, and informational packets
2. Television or radio commercials
3. Newspaper or magazine ads
4. Billboards and fliers
5. Telephone calls and text notifications

We see and hear many of these ads every day just by listening to the radio on the way to work or even looking out the window at the billboards as we go by. They’ve become a part of daily life.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing strategies evolve quickly because of trends and new technology. These strategies include those that require the use of the internet or smartphones. They haven’t been around as long as traditional methods, but they certainly pack a punch.

Common digital marketing methods include:

1. Website content
2. Email campaigns
3. Content marketing
4. Social media posts
5. Clickable ads
6. Affiliate marketing
7. Search engine optimization (SEO)

These strategies are very popular today because of consumers’ frequent usage of the internet and mobile devices. According to Statista, there are 4.54 billion active internet users in the world and 3.8 billion active social media users. With numbers that high, marketing online and through social media makes a lot of sense.

Pros and Cons of Traditional Marketing

When comparing traditional marketing vs. digital marketing, traditional methods are often viewed as outdated or irrelevant. However, many of these tactics are still useful and effective today.

Depending on the business and target audience, traditional marketing methods may be the better choice. To help discern if traditional marketing is right for your business, here are some pros and cons.

Pros

1. If you want to reach an older demographic, traditional marketing can be very effective. According to GlobeNewswire, audiences ages 50+ spend almost twice as much time reading the newspaper and watching TV as compared to those ages 21–34.
2. This type of marketing strategy usually works best for businesses looking to build a larger local audience. A small business would be better off competing for attention through billboards, flyers, and events rather than trying to compete for digital space against larger businesses.
3. TV or radio commercials will play multiple times and remind the audience of the business, whereas digital marketing items may be skipped through or blocked (e.g., clicking “I don’t want to see this” on social media ads, or skipping through ads before YouTube videos).

Cons

1. Printing postcards to send out even to just a local audience can be expensive, and there is no guarantee that the recipient is interested in your business or the product/service you offer.
2. Traditional marketing methods can take weeks or months to yield results and data. You can’t tell when someone has read your newspaper ad unless they decide to follow-up. Even then, without a survey, you won’t know if the ad was the reason for the follow-up.

Pros and Cons of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing strategies are always evolving with new technology and trends like voice search and social media usage. These strategies include the most modern and latest tactics. But, as with traditional marketing, there are some areas where digital marketing thrives and others where it doesn’t.

Pros

1. Data and audience involvement can be tracked instantly. When someone clicks on a link to your site, reads an email, or follows you on social media, you have that information immediately. You can draw numerous insights from this data, including which type of content works best for a specific audience, which mediums are the most effective, and even what time of day receives the best engagement.
2. Digital marketing strategies incur a much lower cost. Sending out an email campaign can save a lot of money compared to printing individual postcards and paying for postage on each.
3. It works well for more global or scattered audiences because of the broad scope of digital marketing.

Cons

1. Some internet users have ad blockers, so they’ll never see pop-ups or banner ads. Other times, ads can be skipped or removed if a user pays for premium services (e.g., Spotify, Hulu, Twitch).
2. Because new technology and trends emerge so frequently, digital marketing tactics need to be evaluated and re-evaluated for effectiveness continually what works well one day may be irrelevant the next. However, this can be combatted with a strong foundation in digital marketing basics.

Which One is Better?

So, which strategy wins when comparing traditional marketing vs. digital marketing?

The short answer:

It depends.

The long answer:

Digital marketing is probably the best option for most. If you want to reach a particular group of people, wherever they may be, while keeping costs low, go with digital marketing. Doing so will also allow you to collect valuable information on your audience immediately so that you can create even more effective marketing campaigns.

However, there is still a place for traditional marketing. If you want to reach an older audience or a local audience, traditional marketing methods may be more productive and stand out better than digital marketing methods. Though these methods may seem “old,” the reality is that they’ve stuck around for a reason. They work!

When considering which marketing strategy is best for your business, consider your audience, where they get their information from, and use that to make your decision. When deciding between traditional marketing vs. digital marketing, it’s not necessarily true that one is simply better than the other as they serve different purposes. The bottom line is that you need to fully understand your business and your audience to pick the strategy that’s better for you.

So, now let’s talk about the CATT Marketing Funnel and what CATT Framework is and this is something which I would like to go deep into when we talk about lead generation and content.

CATT Marketing Funnel

We can represent the CATT Marketing funnel by Simple Formula

Wealth=n ^ CATT

where,

[n]-Niche

C-Content

A– Attention

T– Trust

A– Transaction

and ^ denotes power. Where your niche (n) will be successful and powerful with the CATT that you will apply.

When you have good quality content which helps in solving user’s problems, then you get more attention from users and they will allow us to build trust. This trust will convince you to make a transaction with me. When I sell something, you will pay attention to me because you trust me.

CATT Marketing funnel is the technique/approach we can use to achieve our goals.

It is the secret to boost and market in our niche by applying the CATT marketing funnel to create wealth.

Why do we need CATT Funnel for Marketing?

What about if you want to build mass trust for your business?

To Build mass trust, you can use the CATT Marketing funnel. It is a framework containing components that you can see in the image below.

This type of funnel proved to be efficient and profitable for every business.

If you want the CATT funnel to work for your business, you have to publish content on blogs, Social media, eBooks, YouTube based on a particular niche.

Niche selection is most important because the overall success of the CATT funnel is based on it.

How will you select a niche for your content?

The three pillars of niche selection are talent, Expertise, and market needs. The entire Marketing strategy is based on niche selection. You can’t achieve success if any of the pillars is missing. For example, if you are passionate about health and fitness and you have the market in that niche but do not have the expertise, Niche selection will not give you success.

Content is an Asset for your business

Content is an asset for your business because it attracts and retains customers from your niche. It forms the base of Personal Branding.

Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust.

Trust drives revenue.

– Andrew Davis

How to create Attention for your content?

You can create attention for your content published on different platforms by

1. SEO
2. Paid Ads
3. Viral Marketing

You can also have a brand story to create attention. As a result, the neural activity increases five-folds when we hear the story that why we can retain content for a long time.

How to Hook your Audience?

After attention, it might be possible that the audience will forget about your content after reading. So, you have to hook your audience by providing valuable content consistently and social proof.

Trust and Transaction

You can build trust by Deep Marketing by sending personalized emails to your leads.

This is the most important part of CATT Marketing Funnel because here you convert leads into customers with natural sales methods like webinars, video sales letters but without cold calling. There are more chances that your audience will do transactions because now they know your brand better and trust you.

What is Integrated Digital Marketing?

Integrated Digital Marketing is just like setting an automatic machine for your business in which all the channels work together in a seamless way that each channel complements the other channel.

What are the channels of Digital Marketing?

1. Search Engine Marketing(PPC)
2. Search Engine Optimization(Organic Traffic)
3. Email Marketing
4. Social Media Marketing
5. Content Marketing

It is not compulsory to use all the channels at once in Integrated Digital Marketing and you can use two or three channels based on your marketing strategy.

The most important part of Integrated Digital Marketing is that you can identify your ideal customers and the channels they use. The idea behind this research is to provide a unified experience to the customers on a different channel.

To understand the above image, consider a situation where you saw a Facebook Ad having a call-to-action button that will direct the prospects to the landing page having an offer or discount and a lead form.

In exchange for the offer, you will provide your email or phone number. Now, you will serve as lead for their business. After that, you start receiving personalized emails from them which is known as lead nurturing and is required to build trust. When they find that you are ready to make a transaction then they offer you their unique product.

The overall success of the campaign will depend only on the quality of the content provided to the lead.

Why do we need Integrated Digital Marketing for our business?

If you use only one channel like a PPC ad for the promotion of your product then it might be possible that customers will not buy or not grab your offer. Most of them look for the features, pros, and cons of the product because the customers are getting smarter and technology savvy. They always look for feedback and try to find the best alternative for your product.

What is the best approach to do Integrated Digital Marketing?

Nobody can tell the exact approach for using Integrated Digital Marketing because it may vary from business to business. So, you have to make your unique marketing plan that works for your company. Whatever is your marketing plan, always take care of the quality content as the overall success of your marketing strategy is based on the content.

Personal Branding — A powerful tool to build Mass Trust

Why do we need Personal Branding?

1. Personal branding makes the brand visibility means help the people to discover you in the crowd.
2. You can make your product or services stand out by establishing yourself as a brand.
3. You can show case your ability, connections and interests.
4. Help in building Mass Trust as people feel more connected to personal brand.

What is Personal Branding?

In simple terms, Personal Branding is, “Being recognized as an expert.”

Personal Branding is about building authority that gets people to pay attention to your message and want to share it and recommend it to others.

– Mark Traphagen

This is just like telling the people everything about it and make a positive impact on them.

Who you are?

What do you do?

What is the unique thing about you?

At which thing you are good at?

For Personal Branding, you should have a product or service that distinguishes you from others.

Evolution of Personal Brand

In personal branding, you can build your brand story so that people will have a strong understanding of your brand. Brand Story is about your life journey from where you start. You can tell people about your struggles, experiences, achievements, success, and current position.

This is a continuous, evolving process with six stages. To establish yourself as a personal brand you have to go through these six stages.

At each stage of Personal Branding, you will find yourself one step up in connection to expertise. You can reap the benefits of Personal Branding only when you go through all stages one after another. You will not get success if you skip any stage like after start mentoring after learning a skill.

Follow the sequence to see the magic of Personal Branding.

Stages of Personal Branding

1. Learn — You can learn new skill through understanding concepts, facts and procedures.
2. Work — This stage is about implementing the thing you learnt in previous stage by working on real life project. For example, you can develop the software in Programming Language you learnt in first stage of personal branding.
3. Write — You can publish epic articles on your blog about your struggles, experiences, achievements to connect with people and showcasing your abilities.
4. Consult — If you are good at marketing yourself then you can get offers like one on one consultation. In this you give advice to people or company having problems.
5. Mentor — Through mentoring, you can teach a lot of people. Mentoring will take you to another level of expertise because for teaching masses then you should have structured thought process with clear understanding of concepts.
6. Startup — It is the right time to launch your product or start a startup because now you have enough skill, market and expertise.

We can understand personal branding well with the help of an effective example of a person named Alice Thorpe who describes herself on her YouTube channel as a “freelance graphic designer stumbling through life one pixel at a time.”

She produces a lot of content for designers on YouTube and her own website. She’s the kind of expert that never talks down to her audience. Her brand is casual and funny. This, combined with her skills makes for entertaining and informative content.

An important part of a brand’s identity is voice — think Apple, Progressive, and McDonald’s. How they speak to their target audience gives us a sense of their personality. Your brand voice should be authentic and Alice does a great job of consistently communicating her personality through all her fantastic content.

Final Words

Marketing Landscape is expanding minute by minute. That’s because businesses have identified that the best platform to advertise/ distribute their product/ service is online. So, if you don’t already have a robust online presence, get started on embarking on this journey and gain an edge over your competition.

I hope this post acted as a weapon of knowledge you needed to build your army.

Always remember — “Education is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”

I would love to hear stories from entrepreneurs who have evolved their sales and marketing messages to attract their best customers.

Have you used these fundamental marketing approaches discussed above?

Did it pay off?

Comment down and tell me what you think.