Marketing: Do you really need it? This will help you decide!

9 min readJul 1, 2021

What do your customers need? Do they trust your products? Will they buy from you again? When was the last time they gave you positive feedback?

The answers to all these questions lie in the concept termed ‘Marketing’. Marketing is a significant part of every business, especially in today’s hard-to-predict market. No matter the size of your business, marketing can build awareness for your customers. Without it, your business is likely to collapse due to a lack of sales.

In this article, we will dig deep into the world of marketing. We will see how marketing has evolved and is still evolving. So before starting, Let’s see what marketing is.

What is Marketing?

Oxford Dictionary defines marketing as “the activity of presenting, advertising and selling a company’s products in the best possible way”.

Even if you work in a marketing role, it’s still difficult to define marketing even though you see and use it every day. So what exactly is marketing? Marketing refers to any action a business takes to attract an audience to products or services through high-quality messages. Marketing pertains to all the aspects of a business, including research and development, distribution methods, sales, and promotions.

Now that we know what marketing is, let’s move ahead to learn about the Laws of Marketing. Yes, you’ve heard it right, there are laws of marketing which must be followed and perceived to get better results in marketing. Let’s see them one by one.

Laws of Marketing

Marketing is based on science, not on creativity. People often think marketing is all about creativity. But that’s not true at all. The process of marketing takes place even before creating a product. Who is your target audience? What do they want from your product or service? This leads to creating a product that fits the customer needs.
Reaching the right person with the right message at the right time has been the pot of gold for a long long time.
Marketing is not selling. However, people get confused between the two. Marketing lays the groundwork for sales. It is about keeping existing customers happy and satisfied by engaging with them so that they remain your lifetime customers. It’s about building trust in the customers.
Marketing is a means to an end. When a company or business capture a position in the minds of consumers, the product sells itself.
Marketing is a game of perception. Product is a game of reality. Without a great product, marketing is ineffective. The product should be the highest priority in a business.
Word-of-mouth is the best marketing tool you have. A great product can convert your customers into ambassadors.
Advertising, Copywriting and Sales are the components of marketing.

These are the laws you need to keep in mind to succeed in the field of marketing. We will now move forward to learn about building a strong brand.

Building a strong Brand

A brand is not just a name or logo. A brand is how people perceive wherever or whenever they interact with your business. Just like each person has his/her personality, businesses or companies have a personality of their own which distinguishes them in a crowded market.

Your brand is one of the most important factors in your business. Your brand can’t be everything to everyone at the beginning. You need to understand who your potential customers and competitors are. Choosing a category and becoming a leader in that category should be the highest priority. The market is huge, and therefore deciding where to compete is half success.

The Concept of Personal Branding

“You too are a brand. Whether you know it or not. Whether you like it or not.” — Marc Ecko

If you seek to mark your position in this world, creating a personal brand is the place, to begin. Your personal brand is how you promote yourself. It is how you tell your story and create an impression among people. People always want to hear from people, not from companies or brands. So how do you build a personal brand? Where to get started? Here is the MassTrust Blueprint that will help you to achieve.

MassTrust Blueprint

Learn: Learn a new skill through concepts, facts and procedures. Understand the concepts, remember the facts and practice the procedures.
Work: Put your newly-found skills to work. Go from practice to implementation. Implementing it in the real world will give you a better understanding. (Work=Job/Freelancing/Own Projects).
Blogs: Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, you understand it better, but you will also start building your personal brand.
Consult: Now that you have a personal brand through your blog, have work experience and have learned the fundamentals, start consulting other businesses instead of working for them.
Mentor: Mentor others who want to become like you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level.
Startup: Start your product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, the problem and your skills.

Why you should learn Marketing?

Marketing has existed since the dawn of civilization. Only the medium has changed, but the concept remains the same. Marketing education has a long shelf life because it is rooted in human psychology. It is the most valuable investment in a business because it gives you direct returns. It helps you to increase the size of your business. If you know how to market and sell, then you have a safe career.

Traditional vs Digital Marketing

The digital world has evolved drastically with time. The world is speedily moving from analogue to digital. People are consuming their time on the internet more and more daily on their digital devices. Marketing has moved to digital as well in the past few years. Good marketing is all about good communication.

As the medium of communication has improved, the means of marketing has improved as well. Digital marketing is a more direct way to connect with the target audience globally. It is the best medium to reach the affluent English speaking population in India. Though people are moving to digital platforms, there is still a very vast market for the traditional. The newspaper has a reach of 465 million people. Radio surprisingly has a reach of 65% of the Indian population. Television has an average reach of 800 million to 1 billion people. The reach of digital marketing is nowhere close to the reach of these mediums. And these statistics cannot be ignored by marketers.

Ultimately both types of marketing have their benefits, but the key is understanding your target audience.

The CATT Marketing Funnel

Before we jump on to CATT Funnel, let’s see what is a marketing funnel. A marketing funnel is a visualization for understanding the process of turning leads into buying customers. Your marketing funnel provides more value to your marketing strategy when you understand your customers well.

To have proper knowledge of the market for generating more leads and conversions you must follow the CATT Funnel. To know more about it, follow the formula given below:

Wealth=n^CATT

n=Niche

C=Content

A=Attention

T=Trust

T=Transaction

Niche(n): Niche is about finding the necessity of marketing and fulfiling that necessity with your skills and interests. Your success and wealth depend on the niche you choose.

Content(C): Content creation plays a vital role in attracting people to the product or service. Content can be in the form of images, videos, newsletters, emails, blogs, webinars. Create useful content that attracts people from your niche.

Attention(A): Grabbing attention helps you increase traffic to your website or any other social platform. Drive attention (traffic) to your content using SEO, social media paid ads and referrals.

Trust(T): Building trust takes time. The more you engage with your customers, offering them great value through your product regularly helps to build trust in them. The more they trust the more your brand will grow. Build trust with your audience with tripwires, marketing automation and retargeting.

Transaction(T): When the trust is built it becomes easy to convert the leads into customers through natural sales. After the trust is built, the customers become brand ambassadors and they promote and refer your product naturally to others.

Integrated Digital Marketing

Today, there are many types of platforms through which you can promote your products or services. All the platforms have a different set of audiences and therefore you can’t just rely on a single platform. Relying on a single platform is only going to slow down your company’s or business’ growth.

Therefore you must use an integrated method by utilizing all the major platforms and combining them to get the best out of all.

Some of the common digital marketing methods are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): In simple terms, Search Engine Optimization is a process of improving your website to increase its visibility when people search for the products or services related to your business in search engines like Google, Bing, etc. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the better chances customers will visit your website. SEO costs you nothing and gives you organic traffic.
Paid Advertising: Paid advertising is any kind of advertising that you have to pay for on social platforms. Paid ads are a powerful way to display your company’s name to a broad audience.
Email Marketing: There is no other platform better than Email when it comes to retarget your customers or leads. It is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business, whether your goal is to build your brand or sell more stuff.
Social Media Marketing: SMM is the use of social media platforms to engage with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, SMM is a great tool.
Content Marketing: You might have heard “ Content is the King”. And yes it is correct. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating valuable and relevant content consistently to attract and retain a defined audience. With effective content marketing, you can reach your target audience and increase conversions.

Implement these strategies for your marketing campaign, and you will surely going to get results.

Conclusion

It is hard to imagine the future of a business without marketing. If you are owning a business, you should equally focus on marketing. It is like giving the wings to your business to fly high and achieve great heights. But without a well-worked strategy, marketing will do nothing.

If you think this article added some value to your life, please leave a comment. I will be glad to read your thoughts on it.

Thank you for reading this article.

(This is part of the Digital Deepak Internship Program. If you are interested you can apply for Batch 14 from here: https://deepak.me/internapply )