What is Marketing, Branding? And Why Should You Care?
The Big Question: Where and How do I start????
In this article I am going to talk about
· Why Marketing?
· Components of marketing
· When and how to start Marketing
· Difference between Marketing and Branding
· CATT Funnel
· Integrated Digital Marketing
· How to build Personal Brand
GOOD MARKETING IDEAS MAKES THE COMPANY LOOK SMART.GREAT MARKETING IDEAS MAKES THE CUSTOMER FEEL SMART-Joebhai Chernov.
Marketing is all about building relationship and trust on your product in the mind set of your customers.
Why Marketing?
It’s simple if you understand
Let start our journey. Are you ready?
In simple words Understanding Marketing is Understanding the Business.
It’s a game of perceptions.
It gives direct returns.
Marketing is a never-ending process. Efforts on retaining existing customers and getting new ones should be a regular process.
But how?
We need to build trust in the minds of customers this can be done by Brand Positioning.
If one can exactly study the mind, behavior, attitude and other parameters of a customer then your product will sell by itself.
The Marketing communication in early years was through traditional marketing. It includes Business cards, Notices, TV, Radio, Newspapers, Magazines etc. As the years passed and technology advanced around 1990’s the digital marketing has come into the picture for promoting the products/services. This includes websites, social media, online videos etc.
I think till now you understood little about why marketing.
When and how to start Marketing
Marketing should start even before you make the product.
Yes, you heard it right.
Consumer insights are to be captured like who is the target group for the product, their geographies, their willingness to pay for the product, and the advantage the product is going to give them.
You may have a doubt is Marketing and Branding are the same?
It’s a clear NO but both of them are interrelated or you can say Interdependent
Let me make you understand about it in simple words.
Strong Branding makes your Marketing easier.
Branding cannot stand alone. Branding without marketing will not build your business.
Branding & Marketing are two different things used for different purposes. Branding is used to make, communicate & deliver a promise made by the brand and is a long-term commitment. While marketing is used to communicate and connect with prospective customers who will have interest & benefit from the promise made by the brand. Marketing helps you to make a sale whereas a brand enhances the customers to buy the product because of the brand’s promise & reliability.
To create a brand you should know where to compete. You need to become NO 1 in the category. If you cannot be a leader in category at least be a leader in sub-category because many people remember the first position or max. 2nd position.
For Example: Who is the first one to step on to the moon you know it or you may know even the 2nd one who stepped on to the moon right. If I ask you can you say who is the 3rd person you or many of them may not know the answer because people remember max, 1st and 2nd positions only.
This can be achieved through Branding. And a founder should be a marketer to become no.1 in category and should create road map properly.
And for any company the backbone is Marketing which cannot be ignored.
I will be discussing about Personal Branding at the end of the article
Here are the few points which I want to put forward for you in simple words for better understanding the major differences between Branding and Marketing
Major Differences
.Where branding brings reputation, marketing increases sales.
. Marketing is a set of activities done to bridge the gap between the customer & the company, while branding is a practice to naming a product in such a way that consumers connect to it and can recognize it every time they hear or see it.
. You make a brand for the customers, but you do marketing for the company.
. Marketing adds customers, while branding builds trust & customer loyalty.
. Marketing promotes the value of the product, while branding creates the value.
. Marketing targets potential customers, branding targets emotions.
So, with this clarity about the difference between Branding and marketing let’s move on.
Once new product is developed the journey of a customer can be planned through CATT marketing funnel.
Create useful and engaging content. See that your content generates attention among the audience. Personalize your communication to build trust and convert the generated leads to customers.
As this is a Digital world business owner’s need to adopt the effective digital marketing strategies to position and succeed their brand and portfolios. This can be done through Integrated Digital Marketing.
Your business has a great website.
The question is what’s next?
Integrated marketing would be the right solution for positioning your brands in an effective way.
SEO and SEM could be adopted to increase the search rankings.
Social media to develop and increase the audience engagement.
Email marketing is for engaging the current and past audience.
Content marketing like sheets, blogs, white papers and other data .
So effective content marketing will not only generate awareness in the audience but also turns into interest and action.
Before arriving, a digital Marketing strategy there are few action points which you need to keep in mind and follow.
Firstly, your objective has to be very clear. Means it should be a long-term objective i.e., my business has to reach 100 cores in the next two years.
What is the market share you want to capture and how many customers you want to grab during this tenure?
. Along with long-term objectives you also need to long SMART goals to your marketing objective.
SMART means (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound).
If your long-term objective is to 5 times increase the size of customers, short term objective can be generating 10,000 followers for Facebook in 6 months.
Secondly fixing Target audience is very important in execution of the Marketing strategy. Most of the people think that they know their Target audience very well and they don’t require any Market research to be conducted.
But?
To build an effective Marketing strategy you have to first conduct a thorough Market research, most of the people think that this is an expense. But actually, this is an investment.
One simple question to all. Can we face or afford the loss of a product failure and it is not accepted by the customers post launch?
The answer is NO
So, if a Market Research is conducted initially you can actually know your customers pulse and there by you can actually plan and execute the winning marketing techniques to get the customer in your product/sales boundary. At the same time research your competitors as well. Know about their customers, their likes, dislikes, why they are using the competitor’s product. Post research you can actually prepare and execute the effective customer conversion strategy. Listen to the happiest and also pain points of the customers during research. This is where the service differentiation comes into picture. If you are able to satisfy your customers actual requirement the probability of the turnout for your product is more. You need to have a clear understanding and information of buyer personas. Buyer personas include location, language, age, gender, interest, income, pain points etc.
Thirdly as the buyer’s journey starts from Awareness you need to have an effective Marketing communication strategy. While executing this you also need to understand the competitors moves.
Finally, once your target audience are fixed you need to now fix the Marketing channels. SEO, SMM, Content, emailer, influencer etc…
How and why to build Your Personal Brand
Building a personal brand will boost the sales in numbers for sure. Personal branding is a team member (could be the company founder). If the customer trusts them then they are likely to trust the company as well.
Personal branding tactics could be through blogging, social media, email marketing and public relations and can also be an integration of all to get better result. Leads generated by the employees from social media are more likely to convert. 90% of people trust on the recommendations from the people. Personal branding offers competitive edge to the business. When a senior executive of the company is active in social media the customers are also more likely to show the interest on the communication and also on the brand. By identifying the buyer social media habits and build the followers through effective content marking and the success would be like a magic.
Conclusion
In this article you came to know many things related to Marketing and also few points which should not be taken on a lighter note. By implementing all the things one can create their Personal Brand and at the same time create Market for their product or service.
So, start creating a mind map and start working on it.
To know in depth about the Digital Marketing you can join the Batch 9 Internship program through the following link https://deepak.me/internapply
If you have any doubts ask me in the comment section.
