Marketing Truths They Don’t Teach You in Business School
Ground Rule and the Law of Marketing:
Marketing is a fluid discipline. It always keeps moving and changing.
In accounting, 2+2 is always 4. Engineering follows the laws of Science. Medicine works on measured outcomes.
But marketing is, well, less constant!!!!
Therefore, what’s taught, and what is learned, changes and is bound to be so.
There are many unmeasurable factors in marketing. It’s the hunch, the gut feel. Malcom Gladwell would suggest a marketer achieves a high state of ability at somewhere around 10,000 hours of experience.
Hunches, gut feel, marketing and promotional intuition are hard to teach, which is why they don’t usually end up in marketing textbooks. And the textbooks get even more outdated. But it doesn’t mean they are any less important.
By this I don’t mean to malign any of our alma mater — our college years did impart a few nuggets of knowledge worth remembering — but there are some key marketing truths that those seemingly endless hours spent in lecture halls failed to convey.
Here are the Fundamental things that can be learned over time that no one textbooks ever taught us:
1) “Not Marketing” is NEVER a good long term strategy: Marketing means a lot of different strategies and tactics because marketing is a science, but not promoting is never good.
If you have a great product, then there should be a great marketing plan for it as well.
It is also said that start marketing your product before actually translating it physically, as this will very well help you understand your customers and based on that formulate and modify your product beforehand.
Not doing research on what is driving your customers to you is never a good tactic.
“We don’t do marketing, clients and customers come to us.” Work in marketing for a short time and you begin to hear this. It’s something that maybe once was true, but not anymore. Business moves too fast. Customers have too much buying power, information, and voice.
Back in 2010, digging out of the great recession, an executive said, “We never gave marketing much thought. Business came to us. But never again will I make that mistake. Thank goodness our line of credit got us through this drought of business. From here on out, we will actively market.”
Sure, there are times to pull back. There are times to regroup, re-strategize, and reorganize. But just like falling off a bicycle, you need to get back on and start pedalling. Don’t mistake momentary pause with lack of effort.
Hammer the iron when it is hot;
Know the need of your customers and shout out about your products that’s going to solve their crises without letting any of your penny laden seconds go.
The best example to follow is Jio’s marketing strategy, when the internet prices were advancing steeply, it launched a product affordable for all classes of our society.
In spite this it used great marketing tactics collaborating with renowned faces of like actors etc.
A wise man once said in business, “If you’re not going forward, you are going backward.”
2) Customers have wants and needs. Wants are almost always more powerful than needs: Natural marketers learn this early.
Needs are about necessity, specification, and features. Wants are about desires, emotion, and benefits.
यार प्रेस्टीज की बात है, लेना तो पड़ेगा ही !!!
Advertising and marketing communications that appeal to emotion is almost always more powerful (and successful) than appealing to needs. Appeals at the right time delivers sales. Makes the cash register ring.
Kids in school need tennis shoes for gym class. They WANT $200 Nikes. Women need a purse, but they might want the $1100 Louis Vuitton. Men might need a car, but many of them want a big truck, a BMW, or a Porsche.
Thus the saying well goes that marketing is not just selling, but also keeping customer happy and building a relationship with them, so that they become your sales persons to further do the promotions, like Digital Deepak’s products are getting promoted…………….
3) Marketers are storytellers:
This is one of the most essential marketing truths that is rarely emphasized in the halls of academia. Copy writing, story writing for your product is the deep hidden tip for stealing the market.
In many institutions, the core curriculum for marketing majors requires several Statistics courses yet categorizes Creative Writing and Web Design as mere electives.
While metrics are vitally important to marketing, all that data is meaningless unless you can use it to craft a message that’s capable of hitting your target audience right in the heart.
Does Dove really care about promoting a positive body image in women? Who knows. But the latest instalment of their ongoing “Campaign for Real Beauty” carries a message that resonates with women around the world. And it works. Since the “Campaign for Real Beauty” was launched in 2005, Dove’s sales have increased from $2.5 billion to $4 billion.
Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing: Can the two go together??
Let’s consider the comparative aspects first. Both the marketing methods have their own pros and cons. They compare differently in essential matters.
In the present day scenario, it may seem like digital marketing is the winner in terms of cost, reach, engagements, return of investments, optimisation, quantification of the results etc. still traditional marketing has its own charm and weight.
The trust and the bond that offline or traditional marketing can develop with its customer base, is hard to get in the digital space, where number of frauds are popping up like water bubbles.
Though digital space helps or is worth to go for when you are in a start-up mode, but once grown sufficiently adding traditional marketing methods will not only enhance the sale but will also impact a wider age range and sect of our society.
For example, the advertising billboards and the hoardings, they allow increased frequency of consumer exposure, make a strong visual effect that makes it easy to register the information in once mind.
CATT Marketing Funnels:
Till now we have read different marketing terms and methods, but while hunting for where to start or take off the plane, comes into consideration the marketing funnels.
As the name indicates, funnel is nothing but narrowing down from a broader perspective of generating the awareness to a filtered clear result of having a registered customer who has already purchased your product. Niche specific funnels help to generate more sales, customer interaction and building trust within your target market.
In the CATT funnel concept by Digital Deepak:
Where,
“n” stands for niche
“C” stands for content
“A” stands for attention
“T” stands for trust
“T” stands for transaction
Niche(n): Niche is nothing but the right skill set or the product that satisfies the wants and needs of a particular group of people, as can be understood from the figure below:
Here the targeted area should comply with the following three conditions:
1. You must be passionate for it.
2. You must own that talent or product.
3. And there should be market requirements for your passion and skill.
Content(C):
Great content creates space for people to pause and reflect, and that space is where transformation happens. — Jolie Miller.
Content can be in the form of videos, images, emails, blogs, webinars. Like the videos, the emails and the blogs by Deepak created awareness in us about the right way of learning and doing the digital marketing.
Attention(A):
Great contents act like a hero grabbing attention of the traffic. Like after going through few of the blogs by Digital Deepak, I was so much hooked to it that I enrolled for his free courses.
Trust(T):
Building trust is the important factor for building brands, and it takes time. is a valuable intangible asset determined by the customer’s expectations of how the brand’s products or services can deliver on its promises.
Translation(T): Finally, when the trust is built it becomes easy to convert the leads into customers through natural sales. After building trust the customers become the marketers and they promote the product on their social platforms, thus boasting the leads.
Like I did, due to my trust for digital Deepak based on my previous experiences, I enrolled for this internship program and presently a candidate of his Batch 11.
I invite all the viewers reading this blog to take this great chance and enroll in his forth coming internship batch.
Having learned about the fundamentals of digital marketing, its pros and cons over traditional marketing and also the CATT funnel, let us explore the advantages that integrated digital marketing provide us.
Integrated Digital Marketing:
As is well said by Deepak, that integrated digital Marketing is the art and craft of using all the digital marketing methods available today in such a way that each digital marketing channel complements the other by playing its strengths rather than trying to reach the goal of increasing revenues and customer base on its own. It’s like investing in a machinery which will magically multiply the effectiveness of each component in it.
With the content at the heart of the entire process, integration and automation of various digital components like email, postings at Facebook, Instagram, youtube etc., paid promotions and many more stuffs, one can leverage the digital space to its zenith to reach customers in new ways and build individual journeys at scale that drive efficiencies and transform their business.
Apart from promoting products, making sales, there is one more thing that we need to look into and that is building our own Brand, to be the only one is the market space with a unique product.
Personal Branding: Mass Trust Blueprint
Personal branding is the practice of creating a brand around a person rather than a business entity.
Eg: Elon Musk or Steve jobs or rattan tata. These personalities are known more in the market then their organisation or product. So if these people (or the personal brands) start any project today, they will easily get collaborators.
That is the power of personal brand.
Effective personal branding will differentiate you from the competition and allow you to build trust with prospective clients and employers.
Personal Brand of Deepak Kanakaraju and Sanjay Shenoy has created the trust for Indias leading digital marketing agency PixelTrack, that enabled them in getting clients such as Nikon, YourStory, Mercedes-Benz and many more.
Now to build the Personal brand comes the concept of mass trust blueprint:
Start by learning new skillsets through various sources like books, videos, courses etc.
Then work in the real world, which will increase practical understanding of the topic and develop confidence.
Further share your experience by writing Blogs. This will let others know what you are doing and also memorize what you did.
Blogging is a way of developing personal brand where people can know you, by this then you can provide your consultation and help others.
When you provide consultation, your understanding on a topic improves so that you can now act as a mentor and teach others, as what we are now being taught by Deepak the concepts of digital marketing.
Then take a launch of your own company, have a great startup.
Conclusion:
Glad to see you at the conclusion. I wish it was worth reading. Let’s summarize the things.
Marketing is a fluid discipline. It always keeps moving and changing. There are many things not taught in universities which we can learn only from an experienced person.
Making great product but not marketing will never work; you need to talk a loud about your product. Even Apple does so till date. The CATT funnel technique is a killer.
Integrating Digital and Traditional marketing methods is an intelligent choice, even integrating different digital methods to work simultaneously, will increase the efficiency of your marketing and thus its outcomes.
Finally building your personal brand with the concept of Mass trust is just mind blowing, highly efficient and shortest method to evolve up.
That’s for now, hope you gained a lot value from this article. Please do give your feedback in the comment section.
