Have something to sell? Check these basics before you start!

            

 

What is it you want to sell? A product? A service? A skill? Or anything else? Let want you want to sell be anything. If you’ve built something, you must have decided your target base as well, right? If yes, you’ve already started marketing it.

How? You’ll have a greater clarity upon reading further. If you’re ready to showcase your product to the world, this article is for you.

What is marketing?

Is it those advertisements you see?

Is it those free samples you get when you buy something?

Is it those campaigns you hear about or hashtags?

Well, marketing is a mix of all these things and is a wide umbrella which has product designing to post-sales service under it. And every marketing strategy has a target, most of them being directly or indirectly monetary. If you want to make some amount from selling your product or service, you can do it in multiple ways as below:

1. Low cost + large base of customers: When you have a product that you want to sell at a lower cost, your target group should always be high in number, in order to achieve the target you want.

2. High cost + low customer base: When you have a product that you want to sell at a higher cost, your target base would be definitely low, since there are not many people in the market willing to spend a premium. So, you need to identify the small set of customers for your high priced product, and thereby you’ll achieve your target by selling to them.

This above logic is best portrayed by the image below:

How does Marketing work?

First things first, marketing is more about using logic than about being creative, i.e, marketing is based on science rather than creativity. How? Well, if you look at the Google app on your mobile (not Chrome), you see news / articles about things that you seem to be interested in. This doesn’t mean you’re seeing what you want to see, but what Google wants you to see. This will help in Google getting more traffic and in turn generate more revenue from ads. This is the background of how marketing strategies are planned. Proper plan gives you desired results. And proper planning is a result of strong logic you use to decide your marketing activities. So, marketing is a science primarily.

Before you make your product, you must’ve researched about your product and your target customers. Is it also marketing? Yes, because you’re now aware of the insights from your customers and their likes and dislikes and you can position your product accordingly. So, when you’ve started making your product, you’re already involved in the process of marketing.

Right time, Right place and Right communication!

The word “Right” matters the most here because that decides the fate of your product. Look at a few sentences mentioned below:

1. I’d like to sell sand in the desert.

2. Please buy this water before it evaporates.

3. 50% off on petrol for your bicycle.

4. 100% off on rotten vegetables

What did you observe? Did you feel the above statements were absurd and made no sense? That’s exactly why right communication, place and time always matters.

You must have clear insights on What, When and How you must say things in order to build your brand image. 

What about Brand?

Branding is the most important thing in marketing. Let’s say your product is purchased by a person and he/she likes it very much. When they come back to the market to purchase again, how do they get back to your product? It all depends on branding / brand. You might think packaging is what they can identify, but packaging is also a part of branding. 

So, when you want to retain your existing customers as well as get new customers, branding plays a key role. Branding includes your tag lines, the vision you stand for, the association of your company to various things etc..

When it comes to branding, there’s another important dimension. One can brand their products / even themselves. Isn’t the latter weird? Well, let’s look at it in detail.

Personal Branding

Let’s look at these pictures first:

                                            

                                            

                                                 

Can you identify the persons in the above images? Such a silly question right!

Well, this is called personal branding. You market your skills so well in the market that you / your name becomes known for the things that you do and that’s called Personal Branding in common.

So, unlike a company, personal branding is more concerned with the person and keeps moving with the person whatever he / she ventures into. When you do a personal branding for yourself, you’re trusted by a lot of people in the market. This is called Mass trust. And this mass trust helps you gain customers, when you start a new product / service etc.

With a few myths about marketing busted, let’s now check what marketing channel you must choose: Traditional or Digital.

Traditional vs Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing, as the word says, is marketing your products in a traditional manner, like television and radio ads, print advertisements, direct sales to customers etc. On the other hand, Digital Marketing is a recent (since about 2 decades) evolution and this channel helps to market in a non-traditional way, i.e., using technology to reach your customers directly and mostly by detailed targeting. This includes social media ads, email marketing, SMS etc.. The main difference between these channels arises when you want to measure the performance. Most traditional marketing activities are for awareness creation and any sale cannot be directly attributed to them. In Digital Marketing however, there’s the feasibility to monitor the reach to customers, actions done by customers by looking at the ads etc..

How to choose what marketing channel to use?

That’s fairly simple. If you have a low cost product and your customer base is large, go for traditional marketing since the main purpose of your marketing would be to gain large sales volumes through awareness. If you have a more modern product, with a higher cost and your customers are not so huge in number, go for digital marketing, where you can monitor, attribute and analyse your customers’ behaviour, analysis and expectations through your campaigns.

Let’s see how you can make better use of Digital Marketing.

Integrated Digital Marketing 

Now, what’s this!? Well, this is just a strategy for you to use Digital Marketing channel efficiently. There are various things in Digital Marketing like Search engine marketing, Email marketing etc..(You can read about them here: https://digitaldeepak.com/integrated-digital-marketing). All these things are equally efficient to get more customers to see your product, but none of them is alone sufficient to make a customer buy your product. You can use a combination of multiple things to make sure you retain your customers as well as get new ones. Here’s a simple sequence of things you can do:

1. Use Search Engine marketing to get new customers

2. Use Digital display marketing to show them features about your product

3. Use Email marketing to engage these customers

4. Use Social media marketing to remind them about your company / product

This is just one way to use these means, and you can arrive at the optimal strategy based on your targets and requirements.

n^CATT

Mathematics / Physics? No! It’s another marketing strategy.

Let’s go through them one by one:

n: Niche selection is the key that determines your success. You need to choose the correct segment and the demand you want to fulfil.

Content: You must engage your customers with content - blogs, FAQs, news, trends etc. that’ll add value to them as well as create a goodwill for your brand. Any content you have should not feel like just another piece of information, but it should give the feeling that it shouldn’t be missed.

Attention: Once you give your customers useful content, you already start getting attention from them. You must keep this attention intact by showing them videos, ads etc.

Trust: Building trust is the most important of this strategy. Getting customers’ trust takes time, but the time will be worth it. The trust your brand gains will also help you achieve the best marketing in the world, word-of-mouth marketing.

Translation: Once you’ve done all the above steps, your customers will buy your products without much convincing to be done. And this would be a result of your correct niche selection, giving proper and useful content, gaining their attention and trust. 

Here’s what we’ve learnt so far:

• How marketing works

• What is branding & personal branding

• What is Digital marketing

• What is traditional marketing

• What marketing should you choose for your product

• Integrated digital marketing benefits

• n^CATT marketing strategy

Here’s a quote on how important marketing is:

“Agree or not, you’re marketing in almost all aspects of your life, with just a variation in the skill / product being marketed”