How Marketing is Making the World a Better Place

As we all know, everything is marketing and marketing is everything. Let’s embark on a journey to learn marketing and get insights into the various parts of Digital Marketing. To keep learning simple, I am going to divide my sections into scenes. Enjoy the scenes …:)

Scene 1: Classroom

Being a backbencher, I was sitting in the last row with my friend Shagun. We both were playing “Cross zero” in our notebook and teacher was teaching about digital marketing in the class. As usual we both had no idea about what was going on in the classroom. And suddenly, we got to know that teacher announced a class test on Friday and it was already Tuesday on that day. We were not at all prepared for our test and moreover, we did not even listen in a serious manner while sitting in the classroom about marketing. In short, we did not know anything about it.I and my friend (Shagun) made an idea to just search about the important topics that is going to come in the test. We searched and then selected a few topics to learn about Digital Marketing and we had just noted down the few topics and few important questions that the teacher could ask in the exam and these were as follows:

The fundamentals of marketing

How integrated digital marketing is covering the entire globe.

Difference between Digital marketing and traditional marketing

Why personal branding is important along with marketing.

Understanding a few topics like MASSTRUST, CATT Marketing Funnel

These were the only few topics in our mind but at that time we only remembered this much and decided to meet in the college canteen to discuss how to execute and understand all the concept in the remaining days.

Scene 2: Canteen

In a hurry, we reached to canteen and ordered coffee and some chips .After having them,we then both took our time to decide how to execute our planning. We then came up with an idea of marketing of handmade notes of what we would research and if required, we will share our notes with other students.

At the same moment, we forgot to prepare for our class test and start thinking about the idea of making handmade notes of important topics and sharing it with the people who require it.

Marketing of handmade notes, that was the idea in just a minute without even having experience in the same field, although, we had never thought it before.

So, Marketing is in easier words is the process of promoting and selling products or services to the customers. Moreover, marketing starts before creating the product. It starts with understanding the customer and customers’ need that leads to creating a product that fits. Okay!!Let’s not divert your mind and just come back to our story. I diverted you guys to make you realize that understanding a few topics can have strong impact on our vision.

Scene 3: Hostel Room

After all over tiring day, without doing nothing, we came back to our rooms. After taking some rest, my friend Shagun came into my room to make some notes for our test. It was already Tuesday evening, we first started with learning the basic fundamentals of marketing. Let’s get this topic:

Basic Fundamentals of Marketing:

As I already gave the definition of Marketing, there are 4 P’s involved to identify and marketing the strategy:

· Product

· Price

· Place

· Promotion

Product: Marketers should be familiar with the features and specifications of the product they are selling .We can take the example of notes, me and my friend decided to sell to the student who need it. So, product is something that could define the market uniquely.

Price: To determine how much your product should cost, you will need to do some research. For instance, we (me and my friend) decided a specific price for your notes to sell it to the students.

Place: It is important because we have to target only those areas where there is higher need of products. In case of marketing of our hand-made notes, institutions are the best areas for selling notes.

Promotion: It is utmost important thing in marketing because without promotion there would be no brand presence in the market and no one will discover.

There are 3 more P’s added to the list which was

Physical Evidence, People, Process, as these are also important factors to consider in the marketplace.

Just like you are feeling bit bored, we also felt the same and took a break for an hour. We then had a cup of coffee and decided to continue to the next topic that was:

What is Integrated Digital Marketing?

Integrated Digital Marketing, as it sounds, the integration of multiple marketing strategies to form a cohesive online approach for your business. Here, what it is typically entails:

Web Development and Design

Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

Content Marketing

Social Media Marketing

E-mail Marketing

Paid advertising (pay-per-click advertising) campaigns

So, to understand these concepts, let’s convert the notes which we created into digital E-books, which are available online. To market these notes, we need to have a website where all items are available (it comes under website development) and through which anyone can order online, and there must be a payment gateway. Search engine marketing will help in reaching those customers who need to buy the product, and Search engine optimization helps in increasing the rank of our website in the search engine to make it visible in the early pages. We need to have another source of marketing too such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter to promote our product which covers social media marketing. There is need to focus on relevant, valuable and consistent content of digital e-books to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action and this shows content marketing. Email marketing comes into act when we have to create subscribers list and to create leads using call to action emails. The number of clicks the user clicks on our online ads of digital E-books, we will get paid which comes under Paid advertising.

As it’s already Tuesday night, we have covered maximum part of it. But it’s already 11:30 pm and my friend had to go to her room to sleep. But, we haven’t had our dinner yet, so, we decided to make some Maggie with hot chocolate shake. We have decided to further continue our study in the Wednesday evening after our classes.

Scene 4: Library

At hostel we were studying so casually, still understood everything. But the climate of the library was different, we had to behave like studious girls who came to study. So, I started searching some marketing books and wanted to find one topic in it. So, finally I got one good book, and started studying:

Difference between Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing:

So, what really comes into our mind, when you think about Traditional Marketing?

For us, it was simply the marketing that used to happen before the world went digital. Traditional Marketing refers to any kind of marketing that is not online. It used all kinds of mediums like newspapers, telephone, fliers, etc. It was and still would be the best form of marketing, but it has some drawbacks like we can’t take feedback from our customers, conversion ratio, and ROI is a bit less. However, the cost of implementing the traditional marketing strategy is quite high.

So, to overcome these drawbacks, Digital Marketing came into the picture and since then it is ruling the marketing world. Everyone uses mobile and various other devices to support internet connectivity, digital marketing just needs these two things to connect to the whole world without spending on anything physical. Everything can be handled on the go.

Digital Marketing has a lot of components integrated into it and sometimes all the components when combined together is called Integrated Digital Marketing.

Okay, guys, I think this was enough for the evening. We had to take some refreshments like tea and coffee. We both took some refreshments, and again started with another topic. But But!! we could not continue here studying. So we decided to move out of the library and decided to start with the new topic in the hostel reading room.

Scene 5: Hostel Reading Room

At library we somehow felt very bored, however, hostel reading room was the best place to study in a group. We were having our own laptops to study along with some books which we issued from the library. Then we started searching some few topics such as:

CATT Funnel

Niche Selection

Personal Branding

MASSTRUST

Communication Skills

CATT refers to Content, Attention, Trust, and Transaction

Niche is a particular area where we can hone up our skills and master it to reach the level where we can solve the issue of the customers.

CATT and Niche are related in a way that

Wealth=n ^ CATT (where n is a niche)

Let us understand CATT for now because you have a brief picture of niche in your mind.

CATT is mainly referring to the product, how we create the content on it, how to create attention among people, how to make believe in you, and finally be your permanent customer and make transactions in exchange for a quality product.

On the other hand, niche is too important because on the top of it lies your whole product. You need to have talent, passion and the product should also find a good place in the market.

After all, we completed with this topic and decided to have our dinner. After having our meal, we started learning last topic of the day, which was,

Personal Branding (MASSTRUST)

Personal Branding is how you promote yourself in a particular field. It is a unique combinations of skills, expertise, experience and personality that you want the world to see you.

Let’s take an example of a brand whose CEO is more famous personality than the CEO of the other brand who is less famous. The brand is more popular who is having famous CEO than the latter one because of Personal branding matters from a broader perspective.

Yeah, now we both got to know what is meant by personal branding by searching on the internet but how we can do personal branding is important and a broader term. We needed to know this. We then researched about it and got things answered which was:

Let’s talk about the evolution of personal branding using MassTrust Blueprint. There are six steps in the evolution process:

Learn: We need to learn a new skill through understanding the concept, remembering the facts, and practicing the procedure.

Work: You have to implement your new skills at work. By implementing these new skills into the real world would help you to master them.

Blog: You should always try to put all your work and experience in the form of a blog. When you write, you understand it better, you can start building your own brand.

Consult: After writing a blog, there is always a need to consult people or businesses instead of working on it.

Mentor: Now, you can mentor others who wants to become like you. Mentoring always increases your understanding of that topic to a new level.

Start-up: It’s time to start your own product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, the problem and your own skills.

Even when you have a start-up, you still can learn and follow this cycle to build another brand. The evolution of personal brand is an ongoing process. It never ends.

In brief, Marketing is a very powerful thing in today’s world. I would say that marketing is not just about selling the products but it’s about fulfilling the needs of customers and also maintaining a healthy relationship with them.

I hope you guys enjoyed reading this article…:)

Then, we were done with all these topics and it was already 11:45 pm (Wednesday night).We both had to go to sleep and we only left with one day, that is, Thursday. We have decided to give a quick revision of all these topics on Thursday. Then, we gave our best on the test day.When the results came on the next day, we got to know that we both were ranked in the top ten in our class. Glad!!We enjoyed while learning this amazing thing. But our seats never changed because backbenchers always remain backbenchers…:)

Hope you also understood the concepts in an easy way.

Disclaimer: This article is a part of Digital Deepak Internship Program.