Introduction to Digital Marketing for Budding Entrepreneurs

Do you want to have your own startup?

In this competitive world, an entrepreneur should have some basic skills and knowledge before venturing for a startup. The founder should be a marketer and should know few laws of marketing. Of course, there are many tools available in the world to enhance one’s marketing skills. I am listing some of the basic skills and knowledge like fundamentals of marketing, branding, integrated marketing, traditional versus digital marketing such as paid ads, email marketing, social media, content marketing; direct response marketing, marketing funnel and personal branding required for a budding entrepreneurs to be successful in marketing their products and services online. This article is aimed at those entrepreneurs who have a goal in creating wealth using digital marketing techniques.

Why should an entrepreneur learn marketing?

Marketing is rooted in human psychology. Even as children, we try to win over friends by promoting our talents and communicating effectively. It is not only a talent we are born with but also can be learnt. Marketing is the process of understanding our customers, building and maintaining relationships with them. It is a deliberate communication of value, intended to influence decisions of people interested in your product or service. All the actions for promoting and selling business products or services are collectively called marketing. Once you learn the art and science of marketing, you will have a safe career.

Marketing starts even before you start investing in a product. First you should do a market survey to find out if the product you are going to bring out has any value in the market and will people like it. You should do market research to know your customers and users. If your product is good, it sells for itself. Your customers will sell it through word of mouth which is one of the strongest marketing channels. Once you are confident with your product and have earned the trust of your customers, then you can build a strong brand which is very essential for marketing. Success depends on selling the right message to the right person at the right time. You should bear in mind that marketing should not be more important than the product. Your customers become brand ambassadors for your product. You should choose a category and become the number one of that category. If you cannot choose an existing category, choose a sub category or setup a new category to become number 1 because people always remember number one. It is better to capture the minds of clients being number one in the category than to convince them about your product.

It is very essential for a founder to be a marketer and know the laws of marketing. Then professionals can be hired for executing and implementing marketing. Good communication skill is equally important for an entrepreneur to transfer the company’s vision and mission to the employees effectively, to interact with the customers, users and also vendors for maintaining good relations for the growth of the company. It is also helpful for retaining existing customers for a long time.

Traditional versus Digital Marketing

Since decades we have been seeing advertisements on TV channels, radio, magazines and newspapers etc. Now a days, these traditional marketing may or may not attract our attention although it was result oriented for a long time. We rely more on internet for purchasing while Google search help us to determine the cost of any product, review the quality of product and get sufficient information. TV commercials have become more targeted because streaming services can keep an account of what we watch, advertisers can show us more specific ones. Earlier, the effectiveness of advertisements was based on increase in sales and advertisers did not have trackable data while digital marketing can give us data regarding number of calls made or website visits or even purchases made through advertisements.

In India, according to Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) in 2018, 197 million households — or 66 per cent of the households own a TV set. All India Radio is one of the largest radio broadcasters in the world. Including 18 FM channels, it has 99% population coverage. In April 2020, as per a survey by AZ Research PPL, commissioned by the Association of Radio Operators for India (AORI) Radio listenership in India touched a peak of 51 million. The Newspaper circulation in India is about 165 million. Big businesses still use traditional advertising such as TV, radio and News print because of the reach and awareness it provides to the masses. Thus traditional marketing is still a key component. In digital marketing, advertisers are able to easily and narrowly define their audience. Digital marketing offers an effective way to reach out to audience that matches with ideal customer.

Direct Response Marketing

Usually, people who run ads do not know the efficacy of advertisements. People running campaigns do not give specific measurable results. Direct response marketing is a way to reach your prospect with a time-bound offer and also track the results. It is a good tool to generate a good return on investment (ROI). For example newspaper ads with a phone number, Call and Order, infomercial Order Right Now or some digital channels paid ads, email marketing, social media, content marketing etc. allows you to create an offer to which your prospect must respond within a specific time to take advantage of the offers advertised. You can run different marketing campaigns but direct a prospect to a specific landing page on your website for a specific campaign. You can use that tactic to find out which sales came from which infomercial.

Creating Wealth

Wealth creation is one of the goals of every entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs should know the formula for wealth creation. It is:

W = nCATT Wealth is equal to ’n’ raised to the power of CATT

Where W is wealth

’n’ is niche

CATT stands for Content, Attraction, Trust and Transaction which is explained below.

Niche: Is a market segment for a particular kind of product or service. It also denotes products, services, or interests that appeal to a specialized section of people. You should select a niche which is marketable and learn the right audience interested in the niche. You should have good combination of passion, talent and market for selecting a particular niche. You will be a struggler if you have only passion and talent and there might not be any market for your niche. Nobody will buy your product. If there is market and you are passionate about the niche but if you don’t have talent and required experience, then also you won’t be able to sell. If you have only talent and there is market but no passion then you will go a little far but you will become tired selling things and a more passionate person in the same field will easily overpower you.

Content: Once Niche is selected, create content to attract prospects. Create content which is the central asset to build your tribe and attract customers to buy your products. Give it a great exposure and let it reach out to the wide audience. You can create content in the form of blogs published on internet, videos, posts, youtube, social networks, infographics, infomovies, ebooks, kindle books, MEMEs, application notes, product details provided by manufacturer, forums, webniars, etc. which help people get more information and decide to buy your product. (You picture this: As a buyer, when you decide to buy any product, you do a product research and collect some information regarding it. Reviews, others experience on usage and durability are few such information helps the buyer decide to purchase the product. )

Attention: Drive attention or traffic to your content using SEO, Social media, paid ads, referrals, lead generation, etc.

Trust: Using the content you have created and drawing attention, try to build trust so that members of your tribe will buy your products. You can send personalized emails, use tools like tripwire, etc. to build trust.

Transaction: Once you have built trust, you will have your leads who are interested in buying your products. Through natural sales activities like sales calls, sales pitch, video sales, webinars, etc. convert your leads into your customers.

The effectiveness CATT which is the power of niche, determines the wealth you are going to create. CATT marketing funnel is implemented through Integrated Digital Marketing as explained below.

Integrated Digital Marketing

Digital marketing consists of 5 to 6 channels or strategies or techniques or tools such as:

Email marketing: You should have a list of subscribers and their valid email ids which you can collect through various tools. A list of email ids is good for traffic and exposure. This helps build your relationship with your prospects and showcase your business. It is a good tool to convey the information about your product and services and marketing message for a prospect. You can also put the information in a blog and publish. You can share the link in the email and also on the social media.

Paid ads: To attract customers in digital world we use paid ads. Digital display ads, Google ads, social network ads, PPC ads on search engines etc come under paid ads.

Social Media Marketing: It encompasses many channels of communication such as forums, blogs, social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, just to name a few. It is a very good platform for advertising products or services or to share contents.

Content Marketing: The very foundation of digital marketing strategy is the content. It educates your prospects to make purchasing decisions. If you incorporate SEO into content, it will help you to attract more leads through search engines.

SEO: SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is a process to increase your site/page`s visibility for relevant searches. If your page has good visibility in search results then you get attention and can connect with those prospects who are already looking for doing business with you.

Research has shown that when these strategies are implemented individually, the result i.e. sales conversion is not very impressive. So a strategy that blends about 5 to 6 marketing channels was developed. According to a LinkedIn report “When a customer clicks through an e-mail and lands on your home page, or receives an offer in the mail and calls customer service to inquire further, he/she expects a seamless experience….Integrated marketing requires a unified approach to marketing and sales. Marketing needs sales and sales needs marketing. Marketing can help identify the company’s most valuable customers, develop targeted campaigns, which can enable sales to closes deals.”

Integrated digital marketing encompasses the idea of creating huge impact for online presence of your business by the conjugation of various individual strategies. How Integrated Digital Marketing is implemented is explained below.

1. Run paid Ads to advertise the content which will help build trust and educate the prospective customers and in turn increase social media activity and search traffic.

2. People get emails and get attention through content which is in the form of blog, YouTube, etc. When people read blog, they subscribe for site or newsletter and when you bring out a new content it is sent to the whole email list from where they come back to the content. So there is a signal flow from content to email list and back.

3. Get the content listed on the search engines. People will start visiting the site. At the same time, content which has keywords will start sending signals to search engines to attract people to read the content and search engines will start ranking the site. So there is a signal flow from content to email list and back.

4. When the links of content is shared on the social media, people will come to the content and read and some people might share the content on other social media or to their friends same media. Again there is a flow of signal between content and social media.

5. Finally CATT is helping in converting prospects to sales.

Content is the foundation of integrated digital marketing. It is essential to focus on creating useful, powerful, interactive content. Whenever you publish new content to a channel like your blog, add an update in the social network. Here content is interacting with paid advertisements, SEO, Emails, Social media and finally sales conversion happens.

Paid Advertisement is running the whole scenario, email marketing, content marketing, Search Engines and social media. Powerful Content is Attracting prospects and building Trust which in turn helps in Transaction (CATT) to happen.

The CATT will be happening simultaneously and at various stages through different segments. The way CATT funnel is implemented through digital marketing is depicted here.

The benefits Integrated Digital Marketing are Brand awareness, good Return on Investment, Sales conversion.

Personal branding

According to Forbes.com “A personal brand is the unique combination of skills and experiences that make you who you are. It is how you present yourself to the world. Effective personal branding will differentiate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers”. Branding is what you stand for, who you are, the values you posses and the way in which you express those values. Your personal brand should emphasize your strengths, establish a reputation, build trust, and communicate all your qualities that have brought you to the current position. Developing a personal brand might be challenging, but here are some tips to build an authentic personal brand.

· Define your audience.

· Be prepared for formal informational interviews.

· Prepare an elevator pitch of not more than 120 seconds about who you are what you do and what your goal in your career is.

· Network regularly and grow your professional circle. Connect with peers and influential personalities by going to formal and informal networking events.

· Building a brand requires consistent effort by posting contents regularly because most social networking algorithm rewards people who consistently post high quality content.

· An effective ways to define your personal brand is having people in your network endorse you. Try to cultivate your own reviews in the form of recommendations. LinkedIn is a great place to ask for endorsements

· Focus on key industry skills. Share your expertise in your field by creating your own unique content.

· Connect on a personal level, but keep it professional.

· People relate to other people, not to brands and logos. So open up a bit and share some of your personal life.

· Posts with photos that include faces tend to get more engagement, and real photographs fair better than stock photos.

· Respond to posts of your connections on network.

· Create engaging content when you receive comments on your post you will reach out to more people.

This is an assignment under Digital Deepak Internship Program. Whatever I have learnt during the second week, I have summarized as if to teach budding entrepreneurs whose aim is to create wealth, be successful in marketing their products using digital marketing techniques and personal branding.

I thank Digital Deepak team to have guided me to develop this content.

You are most welcome to give your comments which will surely help me to improve my writing skills.
If you want to read about how to promote and market an instrument click here