Deep-dive into the ocean of digital marketing

Is Digital Marketing is the new ‘cool’?

(This article is a part of the Digital Deepak Internship program)

It is there, hiding in plain sight; you use it every day and yet many are oblivious to the vast outreaches of the written word or a powerful image or a video clip. If you are not using it, then you are a product. Welcome to the world of ‘Digital Marketing’. Everyone wants a piece of this lucrative pie, where your product or content can reach many people and you create a brand and cash on it. However, if one is new to digital marketing, it can be overwhelming to figure things out at first. Given the sheer number of tools that one can use in the digital space, it can be a bit confusing too. For many, including me, some of the hurdles in digital marketing include lack of guidance, motivation, a mentor, and the biggest of them all — procrastination.

Dipping your toes into Digital Marketing

I attended a couple of webinars by Mr. Deepak Kanakaraju of DigitalDeepak.com and the way he explained digital marketing in simple words was powerful. Also, various blogs in DigitalDeepak.com got me fired up and I enrolled myself in this internship, where you learn, do assignments, and get cash back for the money you paid. Before the earning part though, comes the learning part. Learning the fundamentals of marketing, methods of marketing, and creating your personal brand were some of the topics (among many) that Mr. DD taught the attendees online. This article (part of the internship program) is a brief account of my understanding of the same and is for entrepreneurs, bloggers, budding marketers, and anyone who wants to use the digital space and create wealth.

What is marketing?

Among the many definitions of marketing that you might have come across, some of them are, “marketing is developing trust with a lot of people at the same time”, “marketing is focused communication”, “marketing is getting the right message to the right person at the right time”. Now coming back to the fundamentals of marketing, the law is one but it can be told and perceived in different ways. Some people might believe that marketing is the last stage of the process but the fact is quite opposite. Marketing starts even before the product is made because it starts with understanding the customer and his/her needs, which leads to the creation of the product that fits the market.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” –Tom Fishburne, “marketoonist”

“Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it.” — Jay Baer, author & inspirational marketing speaker

“Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.” –Beth Comstock, Vice Chair of GE

Finding a gap in the market

Let me tell you a case study of an automotive media company that I used to work for earlier. Evo India is a car magazine with “The Thrill of Driving” as its tagline, as it focuses on putting the reader behind the wheels of the car(s)(figuratively speaking, of course) — but such is the depth of their stories. Unlike other magazines in the country, this magazine puts the limelight on performance-oriented cars and bikes, motorsport, and other automotive technical details. The editor of the magazine used to work in another renowned magazine for more than a decade and he saw that there was a void in the performance car magazine segment. He made use of the opportunity and introduced “evo India” magazine and found his target audience, which has grown stronger over the years. Having a background in rallying cars in motorsport made a big impact in starting this magazine, as the editor emphasizes multiple times. So, in essence, “marketing happens before you create a product and goes beyond the transaction”.

“Give them quality. That is the best kind of advertising.” –Milton Hershey, entrepreneur

“Advertising brings in customers, but word-of-mouth brings in the best customers.” –Jonah Berger, author & marketing professor

Lead generation and lead magnets

“A great product converts your customers into brand ambassadors” — this is true for many products and you can see numerous examples in your everyday life. In the case of evo India, the initial audience for a performance car magazine was less, but the content was unique and more people warmed up to the idea of India’s first enthusiast focused car magazine, and that added wind in the sails of the company. Slowly and steadily, with more focus on online content, improving print version by giving exclusive stories and features along with running contests and giving out prizes for the same just increased the footprint of the magazine in the country. This is an example of lead generation and generating lead magnets to get more subscribers for the magazine which has worked well in its favour because the magazine costs Rs 200 and the decision to buy is mostly emotional or impulsive.

How a personal brand helps your products get popularity

Allow me to take the example of evo India and Mr. Sirish Chandran again. An auto journalist since 2000, Mr. Sirish Chandran started evo India magazine in 2014. When he started evo India he was bigger than the magazine he started because he was a brand in himself, just like how Elon Musk has a bigger fan following than SpaceX or Tesla. As people came to know that he started a magazine on his own, his popularity rubbed off to the magazine. Slowly and steadily the number of subscribers kept growing and now, evo India magazine has gained a considerable fan following across the country and this drives home the point of mass trust.

“Branding demands commitment; commitment to continual re-invention; striking chords with people to stir their emotions; and commitment to imagination. It is easy to be cynical about such things, much harder to be successful” — Sir Richard Branson

At this stage, the product (evo India magazine) gains more popularity in word of mouth and the readers become brand ambassadors because of the content. Free car-related merchandise when people subscribe to the magazine also helps in getting in subscribers. All these things point out to the fact that advertising, sales, and great content are all components of marketing. Did you know that Nike, the world’s biggest show maker is actually a marketing company? At this point, you would have understood that marketing is not just about selling, but also building trust and keeping that trust factor alive and well by communicating consistently with your customers and retaining for life.

“If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you” — Zig Ziglar

Sustaining the personal brand

If you are a personal brand, it is easy for you to start a bunch of companies and let them grow steadily under your mentoring. The first step is learning. Learn new skills or any courses of your choice — an important thing to remember here is understanding the concepts, remembering the facts, and practicing the procedures. Next is implementing what you learned and by working/freelancing, which will give you a better understanding of the concepts in the real world. Next up is writing down your learning and experience in a blog. Writing helps build your personal brand. Consultation is the next step moving on, as you can diversify your experience by working for multiple clients instead of one. This also expands your wealth. Once you cross this stage, then you can help people who look up to you and help them grow as well. Starting your own company by helping many people is the highest rung on the ladder and this cycle will repeat itself as you can start many new companies as you generate ideas and mentor people. Summing it up, there are six stages in the evolution of a personal brand — learn, work, blog, consult, mentor, and then start up a new company. This cycle continues as you grow and your reach will increase. These stages form a mass trust blueprint.

Personal branding is the art of becoming knowable, likable, and trustable. — John Jantsch

A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another. — Seth Godin

Being the only one of many

The way you market a product not only helps people to discover a product but also builds a perception around it. Here is another example of just that. There are a few car magazines in the country but how does a magazine like evo India stand out? Apart from being a performance car-oriented magazine, they also have ‘evo India’ specific merchandise leaning towards the performance car side that attracts their subscribers. Some of these merchandises are available to subscribers only and this is a good strategy to get more subscribers who want cool automotive merchandise. I am not saying there was a lack of competition here — there were many magazines at the time (even now there are). Another key takeaway here is that profits are made in a competitive market and not in non-competitive markets.

Why digital marketing trumps traditional marketing in this case

In the case study that I have explained above, you can see that digital marketing has been used extensively to a great extent to add more subscribers, rather than traditional marketing. Because the cost is more and there is a niche audience for this product which may not appeal to everyone. Digital marketing targets the affluent English speaking folks in the country and are mostly from the top 10 cities in India, unlike the traditional marketing methods which are very generic and target millions of people in the country and even cost less. But a major disadvantage of traditional marketing is that you can’t personalize your communication and that aspect is critical if your product appeals to a certain niche.

Practice nCATT

This is where nCATT marketing funnel comes in. It stands for niche, Content, Attract, Trust, and Transaction. First, find out a niche where you can contribute and help people. Your content for that niche should be useful and attract an audience from the niche you have chosen. Content can be blog posts, videos, webinars, lead magnets, etc. You get attention or traffic for your posts by keyword research, SEO, paid ads, social media, and referrals. Promoting your blogs on social media in a catchy and interactive way can get more users to visit your website and read the content. You develop trust by consistently communicating with your target audience. One way of doing this is marketing automation tools for email marketing, including ConvertKit, MailChimp, GetResponse, and AWeber. Once you build trust with your customers then it becomes easy for you to sell your product and get the transaction done. Though I have briefed it here, it takes some time to build trust even if you have the content and attract enough traffic to your website.

Integrated digital marketing

How do you execute CATT? This is done by an integrated digital marketing framework, where the content is at the center. But first, what are the various digital marketing methods that you can use? You have SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, digital display marketing, and content marketing. While creating content, you can do ON-page SEO to make your content relevant and easy for the search engine crawlers to pick up your content.

“Social media creates communities, not markets.” –Don Schultz, marketing pioneer

“Social media is about the people. Not about your business. Provide for the people and the people will provide for you.” — Matt Goulart, digital marketing executive

Integrating sharing buttons on your article further strengthens this if the user finds the article interesting and shares it on different platforms. If the interaction with the users is high for the content, this is picked up by the search engine as well and this helps to rank your content high when someone searches for the same. This is called off-page SEO and depends on the users of the webpage. Keeping your customers always informed about your new content can be done via email marketing as it provides a personalized means of communication with each and every one of your customers. As mentioned before, consistent communication with your customers will turn cold leads into warm leads, and eventually, sales will happen. Paid ads that focus on the content will give you a wider reach, build trust, increase your subscriber list, and grow your community.

My experience in marketing

I worked at evo India for one and a half years, starting out as an intern and graduating to being a correspondent. I used to manage the websites, write stories for the website and for the magazines as well. For every story that is written on the website, we used to promote it on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with a catchy caption to get traffic to our website. Over the course of time, I learned that promoting the posts during a specific time of the day brought in more traffic — for example, a regular office-goer with a 9–5 job will check his/her social media account between 10–11 am, then 1–2 pm and evening after 6 pm. We also structured the posts to suit the different social media platforms — Facebook and Instagram have quite a lot in common, but Twitter, with its character limit, made us do posts that were crisp and catchy. Hashtags were used generously on Instagram. Videos and Photos did well on Facebook and Instagram while you could play with words on Twitter and add some images to go on with it. The response too depended on each platform. While Instagram got us a lot of traffic and followers, it took a while to get followers on Twitter.

“Content is fire. Social media is gasoline.” –Jay Baer, author & inspirational marketing speaker

“Content is king, but engagement is queen, and the lady rules the house!” –Mari Smith, social media master

We also followed potential people on Twitter who would then follow us back. This strategy was used to increase follower count. We held contests regularly and gave away contest goodies by asking simple questions and fixing a deadline. We also make ask the people on social media to follow us to make them eligible to win the contest. Some contests are such that the winner could go with evo India on a luxury road trip, which can be an awesome experience for anyone. We interact with our followers on social media and the best comments are featured in the magazine. This too contributed to more followers. Posting regular updates on all the social media platforms and engaging with our followers helped build the trust and tribe of our own.

Conclusion

I hope that this article was helpful to you to understand the basics of marketing, lead generation, lead magnets, personal branding, the power of social media, CATT, and integrated digital marketing to execute CATT. If you want to know more about marketing, here are some of the books: The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, Confessions of an Advertising Man, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, All Marketers Tell Stories, Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital, and more. All the best for your digital marketing journey! Do leave your comments below!