What Is The First Step To Become A Successful Digital Marketer?
Are you new to the field of digital marketing?
You aspire to be in the digital marketing field but don’t know where to start. You try to learn about the first step but the overwhelming amount of information thrown upon your face confuses you further. You have the passion and desire but you need someone to tell you where to start.
Does it sound familiar?
If yes, this article is for you. I am here to guide you to take the first step without confusing you further.
So take this blog as your first lesson towards becoming a digital marketer.
Suppose you want to buy a car. You go to a shop and tell the salesman that you want to buy a car. That guy tells you about this feature and that feature of different brands and models.
And you have no idea what he is talking about.
Would you still buy that car? Or would you come back home confused?
Only intention can’t help you make a decision right? You need to first learn about a thing to act in the right way.
And this is exactly what we are going to do here in this blog.
So, Let’s get started.
You need to first learn about Marketing to know Digital marketing.
Before learning what marketing is let’s first learn why do you need marketing?
Suppose you have a product or a service to sell, then how would you reach out to your potential customers? Yes, you are right. It’s is through marketing.
According to Oxford Dictionaries, marketing is the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
Even before you have a product to sell, marketing starts. How? By understanding the potential customers.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or service fits him and sells itself”- Peter F. Drucker, Management Consultant
Instead of pushing products and hoping someone will buy, craft your business around the unique needs and wants of your target audience.
For example, let’s take a look at Apple. Apple’s success has come from understanding and meeting consumers’ psychological needs to buy premium products. Apple continues to innovate by listening to what customers want and producing solutions, like the new iPad Pro with 3-D cameras.
Products and services that fit the unique needs of your target audience, develop trust and loyalty among the customers.
ग्राहक भगवान है ( Customer is God )
“The single most important thing is to make people happy. If you are making people happy, as a side effect, they will be happy to open up their wallets and pay you.”- Derek Sivers, Founder, CD Baby
Here are a few tips for you to better understand your customers:
· Learn what your target audience doesn’t like.
When you know what your customers don’t like, you can give them more of what they do like.
- Everyone is not your customer.
It is important to target a particular section to serve them better.
- Marketing should be personalized.
The characteristics of customers from one group to the next are quite different. You need to create your strategies to best suit a particular group.
Thus, you need to deliver your product to the right audience on the right channel at the right time to generate maximum ROI.
- Communicate with your customers.
Effective Communication Builds and Maintains Relationships. It makes your customers feel valued.
Good marketing is not about manipulating your customers but making emotional connections to build trust and confidence.
Bonus tip: “It’s not my job to market my products.”
Don’t fall into this trap. If you completely outsource your marketing to a marketing agency, it may lead to creating products that customers don’t need. Marketing your own products will give you insights into your customer base and, as a result, you can continue to innovate and build upon existing products to best satisfy their needs.
Why you need marketing?
- Be visible
You might be offering the best products or services. But without marketing. How will your potential customers get to know about it?
It will help you distinguish your personal brand from your competitors.
2. “Marketing is more like food than it is medicine.”
Marketing not only helps you to build a brand reputation but helps to maintain and sustain it.
It is like food. It’s the regular nourishment that your business needs to sustain its longevity.
3. Keep growing:
Marketing can help you reach your target audience and boost your customer base.
Thus you can constantly evaluate your target’s needs and change visuals and messages accordingly to keep them engaged and loyal towards your brand.
Who doesn’t need marketing?
Although each brand needs marketing to capture a position in the minds of the customers. But once you have created such a strong brand identity that fans naturally drive towards you, you can ditch marketing.
Take for example the brands Supreme and Tesla.
Now that you have understood the importance of marketing, you may ask me, “But why should I chose Digital Marketing over Traditional Marketing?”
Let me answer your question.
Although traditional marketing has a much wider range of audiences, digital marketing produces higher returns and converts potential customers into a business lead easily and efficiently.
For example- if you have a product that is made specifically for females between 25–30 years of age, you can easily do this with different tools of digital marketing.
But is it possible in the traditional mode of marketing? No, right?
Traditional modes of marketing such as TV, radio, newspaper ads are often expensive when compared to digital marketing.
Moreover, there is no scope for direct interaction with the consumer in traditional marketing. It is one-way communication. Digital marketing, on the other hand, promotes two-way communication and thus helps to satisfy the customer and make the customer feel that they are being listened to and served.
Traditional marketing channels are often more welcomed by the Gen X. However, digital marketing is a surprisingly suitable route for all ages, not just millennials and Gen Z.
Take my father for example, who spends hours scrolling through Facebook and online shopping platforms. (Does your father do the same? Answer in me in the comment.)
Digital marketing is mainly based on direct response marketing.
Well.. I know what you are going to ask now- “Sweta, what is Direct Response marketing?”
“Direct Response is a type of marketing designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take a specific action”- Marketingevolution.com
Does that sound difficult to digest?
Then let me make it simple for you.
Direct response are marketing strategies, where there is a strong call to action to encourage the potential customer to buy your product or service.
Take, for example, you have an online course to offer. You can now send an email to a dedicated email list with a link to purchase the course.
Direct Response is an effective way to generate immediate ROI. It is also a great way to track if the ad you are running is working for you or not.
What is the scope of digital marketing in Indian?
With the launch of Digital India in 2015 as an initiative to improve online infrastructure and digital empowerment, there has been a considerable rise of active internet users, mobile connections, social media traffic and more.
In 2020, India had nearly 700 million internet users across the country. This figure was projected to grow to over 974 million users by 2025.
Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, businesses are relying on digital marketing now more than ever.
According to GlobalData, the growth of the Indian e-commerce market is pushing to ₹7 trillion by 2023 due to the lockdowns.
Now that you have got some idea about the basics of digital marketing, it’s time to dive deeper into the concept.
Let’s start with the concept of CATT Funnel.
CATT funnel can be understood as a path along which a consumer moves to become a customer.
People first get to know about your brand, then they interact with your brand, then they subscribe to hear from you, then they trust you and then they buy from you.
Therefore, Wealth = n^CATT
Confused? Let me explain it to you.
Here, ’n’ stands for Niche. Niche for the CATT Funnel is as important as water is for the growth of a plant.
“Niche” are subsets of larger markets with their own unique preferences and needs. It involves a specific target audience with a specialized offering.
For instance, the Online Education sector is broad. But within that market, there are also online courses for digital marketing, courses for content marketing, courses for blogging and so on.
Your success and wealth highly depend on your niche. Therefore, always choose a niche with a hungry market.
But how can you choose the right niche?
As you can see in the above image, a niche is the area of the market where your passion and talent combine to make you unique from others.
CATT stands for Content, Attention, Trust and Transaction.
Content Such as blogs, videos, live webinars, etc. draws high-quality attention than ads. More traffic to your content using SEO, Social Media, Paid Ads and referrals will result in more Attention. More attention will help you build authenticity and Trust. And Trust can be leveraged to convert your leads into customers and do a Transaction.
But How can you create this funnel?
The answer is Integrated Digital Marketing.
Integrated Digital Marketing is the engine that drives the CATT funnel.
“It is more important to execute digital marketing in an integrated way, than build expertise in each digital marketing module.” Digital Deepak
Have you watched the movie Avengers? One of the lessons Avengers teaches us is that a team is always better than one person.
Integrated Digital Marketing does the same. It works like a team with content as the leader and the other digital marketing methods are like its team members.
Just like Avengers, in Integrated digital marketing, each digital marketing channel complements the other by playing its strengths rather than trying to reach the goal of increasing revenues on its own.
How to implement Integrated Digital Marketing in practice?
- Create content.
Content stands at the center of Integrated Digital Marketing. Content, without marketing, is like a pen without ink. That’s where all the other digital marketing methods come to rescue.
- Integrate social sharing buttons into the content
Social Media helps your content to get discovered and shared. In fact, those new visitors may become subscribers as well.
- Optimization of Search Engine
Search engines help your websites rank according to their quality and relevancy. And help you generate more leads.
- Generate Paid Ads
Paid Ads can speed up your entire integrated digital marketing process.
“Instead of using paid ads to directly jump to sales, the traffic from the ads can be channeled into content which will help build trust and educate the prospective customers and in turn increase social media activity, search traffic and email subscriber list.”
- Email marketing
With a permission-based email list, you can email your subscribers a link to your content.
- Sales and covert
A sale can happen directly by clicking on an email link or a link from the blog.
That’s how integrated digital marketing works. It’s almost like a chain.
If you are still here reading this blog, you must have come across the word “Personal Brand” a number of times.
So, What Is Personal Branding? How can you create a Personal Brand?
“Personal branding is the practice of marketing people and their careers as brands.”
In other words, it changes your potential customers from saying “Who are you?” To “I know you and I trust you”
Personal Branding is the combination of your skills, experience, and personality that you want your followers to see. It is an ongoing process of developing and maintaining a reputation and impression on people.
For example, Elon Musk has created a brand out of himself independent of his company Tesla.
Why Is Creating a Personal Brand Important?
- It can help build trust in you and your brand.
- It can help you stand out from everyone else.
- It can help you demonstrate your skills and knowledge about a particular field and establish authority.
Bonus Tip: To build a successful personal brand it’s important to provide value so that people can trust you.
Take, for example, Gary Vaynerchuk, also known as Gary Vee. No matter which social media channel you look him up on, you will see an overload of free content.
Here is a blueprint of the evolution of a Personal Brand.
Step 1: Learn:
Learn the facts, remember them
Step 2: Work:
Start practicing what you have learned.
Step 3: Start a blog:
Write about what you have learned and experienced. It will create authority and “Masstrust”.
Step 4: Counsel:
Now that you have learned, experience and authority, start consulting businesses instead of working for them
Step 5: Mentor:
Start mentoring others who want to become like you.
Step 6: Start-up:
Start your own product or service business.
And finally the most important question.
Who can become a digital marketer? Can you?
Of course, you can. It doesn’t require a specific degree to become a digital marketer. But the right skills in order to get the best opportunities.
You can self-teach yourself or get a mentor to guide you towards success.
My mentor Digital Deepak has guided me as a fresher. If you want to know more about Digital marketing and Kick start your digital marketing career Digital Deepak could be the best mentor for you.
Could I make Digital Marketing easy for you? Let me know in the comment section.
