Must-Know Principles for Success in Marketing

Are you the owner of a product or an idea that you desire to take to the masses? Are you looking for ways and means to understand how best you can display your product or idea and also yourself to a large number of potential end-users? After all, making other peoples’ lives better is a noble cause, and being able to contribute in an impactful way adds tremendous satisfaction and meaning to one’s own life.

Marketing is an indispensable requirement of any product or idea before it fulfills its purpose of reaching the people and finding its utility. It’s an essential connecting link between a product and a prospective end-user. Dear friend, if you have embarked on a journey of such nature, aspiring to be a blogger, professional, freelancer, mentor, or entrepreneur…then this article will help you in obtaining a bird’s eye view of the essential principles involved in your endeavor. Come, let us share the journey together and make it easier..!!

I am glad to share with you what I have learned in week 2 of the Digital Deepak internship program on Digital Marketing. I found it quite useful and hope you will find it useful too. If interested, you can enroll in the course too.. https://deepak.me/internapply.

There are several aspects to marketing effectively. Friend, I feel understanding the fundamentals of how marketing works, key differences between the traditional and the digital formats of marketing, the importance of choosing the right niche, and integrating various methods of marketing are pivotal of all. Having good and positive personal branding is a cherry on the cake. Let us understand these together in the next 10 minutes or so. I am sure you would feel it worthwhile!!

From ‘the Herculean’ to ‘here it is’

Many of us are a bit apprehensive about marketing. I had my quota of skewed impression too, derived from personal experiences with insurance agents and sellers of chain-businesses in the past. Now I am convinced that it is only ‘the fear of unknown’. After all, marketing is a very practical and feasible task if we understand it well!.

Just look at the infographic below. It illustrates the various possibilities of earning one crore by marketing a product.

If one can plan for earning a profit of Rs 100 from a product, he needs to sell it to 1,00,000 customers. When the product is priced economically, it can be expected that many people will accept it. If the profit by selling the product is Rs 1,000 then 10,000 customers are enough to make one crore happen! As the profit margin rises, the number of customers keeps decreasing. Is it not convincing how earning of one crore appears impossible when considered in isolation and appears perfectly doable after the above analysis? That is the beauty of analysis and understanding of the basics.

The pillars of marketing

Marketing is both a science and an art. In a way, marketing starts before the product gets ready. Product is more important than marketing itself. Hence, one needs to do proper research, and analyze the needs of the prospective customer base and decide the product carefully to suit the existing needs of the chosen customer bae.

Once the marketing process begins, the aim is to cover as large a customer base as possible. Along with reaching out to new prospective customers, it is vital to keep an existing customer satisfied with continued and reliable maintenance service. I hope you can relate to it, for example, while deciding on buying a car we tend to look for the brand image as well as the after-sales services.

Marketing is a type of mind-game. It is a scientific and creative way to win a customer’s heart and keep him positively connected for a long time to the product and the brand. It is creating a permanent relation with customers and maintaining a positive image in their minds. Finally, it is a win-win situation for both. Once that is done, customers themselves act as brand ambassadors. Effective marketing involves judicious use of tools such as advertising, copywriting, sales, etc

Reach out….loud!

Good marketing is all about good communications. To simply put, marketing is sending right message to the right person at the right time. It is important to reach out to a customer in need, at the time of need, so that our product finds the best utility and provides maximum value. That ‘value’ motivates the customer to spend on the product and gives him a feeling of ‘worthiness’. That should be a marketer’s motto. Concentrating on marketing alone without a good product is bound to fail some time later.

One can use various modes of communication. The written mode has maximum advantages. Once created, it is almost permanent, has a wider reach, does its job on itself, highly economical, can include infographics that are engaging and convincing, and saves a lot of effort to the marketer. It can be in the form of blogs, emails, pamphlets, articles in popular print media, etc. Direct interaction with prospective customers' needs has its own challenges. It needs good presentation skills along with robust content. Though it is time-consuming, resource-intensive, if done well has the highest impact. It gives an opportunity to the customer to interact and clear all doubts, gives more credibility to the product, and helps the marketer to understand the customer’s mindset clearly. Podcasts, webinars are good ideas to interact when one cannot be there physically.

Dear friend, you might be wondering how good my language should be when I communicate. To reach a larger base English is best; depending upon the customer being targeted one may effectively use a native language too. The message is more important than the language itself. It need not be very sophisticated, grammatically flawless, and flowery. The whole idea is to send the message across in a clear unambiguous way using simple meaningful sentences. That is all that matters!

Traditional versus Digital

Old is gold. Word of mouth marketing through satisfied customers is the best way even today. Since more people are accessing electronic media, the internet, and the situation due to Covid19, which has compelled more people to use digital format, the opportunities to explore digital marketing are increasing exponentially. To begin with, digital marketing may appear challenging and technically demanding, once learned it has plenty of advantages. Whatever medium we use, a good and relevant product should back it.

The CATT marketing funnel and framework

Understanding the basics of economics helps. Know your customer base well to capitalize on it and streamline your marketing strategies. If there are ten varieties of the same product and I wish to sell the eleventh one it will definitely have very tough competition. Similarly, if I try to sell something that is rarely used by people, naturally, it will have fewer takers, and marketing efforts may not be cost-effective.

As Digital-Deepak puts it, “CATT strategy” is very useful in marketing, as illustrated below.

It begins with the identification of a proper niche for the product. The ideal would be something at which we are already good at and has good demand in the market.

Once a niche is identified, content/product has to be developed. Then marketing efforts begin and the initial concentration will be to grab the attention of the prospective customer to convince him to buy the product. Once the product starts selling it is vital to provide continued support, continue to maintain and if possible improve the quality of the product. This leads to good transactions and wealth creation.

A name to remember!

It takes considerable time to build a name and a fraction of a second to ruin it. Many times, we are drawn to a product just because it is from a reputed name or brand, for example, Apple gadgets or BMW cars. However great the product and the brand is, people always want to hear from the person behind it. It is like, people appreciate the movie and want to meet the actors.

Deepak Kanagaraju, well known as “Digital Deepak” describes the Evolution of a personal brand in the following steps beautifully represented in the diagram below.

Creating a brand image involves learning skills, working to create something important, letting the world know about its worth (e.g, by blogging), consulting and advising people, mentoring people to develop skills, and opening a start-up. It is shown as a circle as the steps never end since learning is a continuous process. I would rather suggest that it should be a spiral indicating improvement and elevation to a higher level after each cycle

The Holistic Balance

So far we have learned about various aspects of marketing. It is crucial to apply as many tools and means to achieve success as possible in a holistic and harmonious way. One should strive to maintain a balance in the approach followed. It is necessary to be alert to changing needs and adapt to the requirements as quickly as possible without losing focus on the quality and reliability

The Take-home

Dear friend, I have tried to provide an insight into the principles of marketing and its influencing factors in this article. I would like to emphasize again that marketing is essential and practically feasible for the successful selling of any product. One needs to develop a scientific and creative approach to make the best use of marketing strategies to create win-win situations for all the stakeholders.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” — Tom Fishburne.

It should be spontaneous and never forced.

Hope you liked reading this article. Please let me know how you felt? Love to catch up with you again. All the best for your marketing endeavors!!