Understanding Fundamentals and Key Success Factors required for Personal Branding in Digital Marketing

Are you someone who is passionate to make a career in digital marketing but is not aware of the basic principles to be followed regarding the same? Do you want to understand the fundamentals and roadmap needed for becoming a successful digital marketer? Are you also looking for some freelancing option and want to build your own personal brand but do not exactly know the process for the same?

If your answer to any of the questions is ‘yes’, then you have come at the right place and we are going to discuss everything in this article starting from the Fundamentals of Marketing, Difference between Traditional and Digital Marketing, Niche selection, CATT Marketing Funnel & Framework, Integrated Digital Marketing and Power of Personal Branding.

(Note: This article is a part of the second assignment for the DigitalDeepak Internship Program)

Fundamentals of Marketing

Before getting into the details of ‘Digital Marketing’, let us first understand the basic principles of Marketing. To start with, you must appreciate that marketing is based on science and not creativity. It is all about sending the right message to the right person at the right time which requires articulating and communicating your thoughts effectively to your target audience.

While most people often mix up marketing and sales together, it is important to understand that the process of marketing starts much before creating the product by understanding customer’s needs. Marketing is a game of perceptions that involves building trust with your target audience with a purpose to build brand and capture a position in the minds of customers where product is rooted in reality. You never let marketing become more important than the product as a great product sells for itself. For instance, a majority of customers perceive products being manufactured by Apple such as iPhone, iPad etc. to be of great quality.

Moreover, the role of marketing does not end after sales as it involves keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them so that they continue to remain loyal customers in the long term as well.

What is the solution to successful marketing?

In the words of Peter Drucker -

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him or her and sells itself.”

“The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.”

Thus, marketing involves a much deeper understanding of customers and their needs based on which products and services could be developed to fit into their requirements and solve their problems.

Moreover, a great product can convert your Customers into Brand Ambassadors through ‘Word of Mouth’ communication which eventually is the best channel of marketing ever. The major components of marketing include Advertising, Copywriting and Sales.

Why has Digital Marketing become important?

In today’s times where almost all the businesses have been globally impacted due to COVID-19 pandemic, the world of digitalization has assumed significant importance. With the advent of digital media, everything has gone digital from ordering foods and vegetables to booking cabs to leasing furniture to people becoming viral influencers.

According to a recent survey, India has been one of the largest growing digital markets globally and the scope for digital marketers will only get brighter that opens a plethora of opportunities in terms of career options, freelancing as well as personal branding for businesses and entrepreneurial start-ups.

Digital Marketing basically refers to the marketing of products or services with the help of digital medium or internet (through use of social media like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, E-mail marketing, search engine platforms) to reach consumers.

Which Medium to choose — Traditional v/s Digital Marketing?

Before launching any marketing campaign, it is important to decide the medium that you would choose for the same. For this, let’s understand the differences between Traditional and Digital media with some data.

· In India, TV has a reach of about 800 million to 1 billion people

· Radio has a reach of 65% Indian population (Source: Financial Express)

· Newspaper and Print media has a reach of 465 million people. (Source: Business Standard)

· Digital Marketing has an outreach to about 100 million users accessible to mainly affluent English speaking population in India

The above data indicates that outreach of Digital Marketing is relatively much smaller than that of Traditional Marketing (TV, Radio, Newspaper & Print media) in India owing to the fact that traditional marketing is more suited for mass marketing which is a lot cheaper as compared to digital marketing that has a more personalized audience requiring a higher level of engagement and interaction.

Pros and Cons of marketing channels

Both digital and traditional marketing channels have their pros and cons and in order to make an appropriate choice with regard to same, you need to analyze both your product and your target audience.

For instance, if you have a generic product like grocery, you may go for traditional marketing. While, if you have any niche-specific product (like e-learning course) requiring a more personalized approach, you may plan a strategy for digital marketing.

How to do Niche selection?

In today’s competitive market where almost everyone is at the top in every huge niche, the chances of you getting alongside the bigger players are tough until you are able to provide a more valuable product or service offering and people have more trust in you as compared to those bigger players.

So, while deciding the niche, you can have 2 options: -

a) Go with the huge niche option but provide something so unique that people will be made to think of giving a try to your product/service.

b) Go deeply specific in a micro-niche and try being the first one as the competition drastically reduces once the niche becomes narrower. For instance, while Google has a well-established market in the generic ‘Search Engine’ category, brands like Zomato and Practo have positioned themselves in the micro-niche of search engines for ‘Food Restaurant’ and ‘Doctors’ respectively.

But for these options to execute, you need to do a thorough research so that you shouldn’t get stuck in the future. So, while you do not need to be No.1 in a particular niche, you may choose your micro-niche in such a way that you occupy the position of market leadership in that smaller category and then later on try expanding your outreach across to other niches / micro-niches.

For Niche selection, you need to follow the following three steps:-

1. Identify your passion: While choosing a niche, you should have an interest in your topic as it plays an important role to survive in the market.

2. Identify your talent in a particular niche: You should have a good knowledge and skills about the particular niche so that you can help solve the problems of your target audience comfortably.

3. Identify customer needs and demand in the market: Market plays a huge role in niche selection. So, it is important to select a niche that should have some demand in the market by identifying customer needs for the same. Otherwise, without having any market demand, your niche will end up generating no leads and sales.

Based on the above three steps, you can select your niche that will be a combination of Talent, Passion and Market Demand as diagrammatically depicted below in the blue shaded portion.

CATT Marketing Funnel & Framework

This framework is defined by following equation: Wealth=n^CATT

Here, [n]=Niche, [C]=Content, [A]=Attention, [T]=Trust, [T]=Transaction. Each of these terms have been explained below: -

1. Niche — Choose a niche of your expertise because your success depends on it. Choose the field where you can show your excellence.
2. Content — Create a useful content as it’s the only way to get your audience to generate interest in knowing more about your product through which you can solve their problems and satisfy their needs. For example, your content can be anything ranging from videos, live webinars, Q&A and blog posts like this.
3. Attention — Drive attention (traffic) from various sources like using SEO, SEM, Social Media, Paid Ads such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Referrals and affiliated marketing.
4. Trust — Build trust from the audience with your knowledge of marketing automation and retargeting to get them back.
5. Transaction — After building trust among prospects by efficient marketing, it becomes much easier to do sales provided that your product is solving the customers’ needs. So, this is the stage where you convert your leads into potential customers using natural sales methods.

Integrated Digital Marketing: Engine for driving CATT Funnel

As it sounds, this is an integrated and cohesive framework comprising of running multiple marketing strategies online that drive various stages of the CATT funnel of your business. Here you basically engage customers with your company or brand that combines all parts of marketing communications that work collectively together to assist customers in their journey of awareness to loyalty and advocacy.

Let us understand with the help of an example. For instance, let us say you have developed some content such as online course and you want to approach your target audience for the same. You will first of all want to drive their attention by offering them free products using medium such as: paid advertisements, search engine, social media etc. and in turn capture their basic information with regard to their contact details such as name and e-mail. This basic information is nothing but potential leads. Once you have generated the leads, you go ahead by building trust with them using e-mail marketing through automation process to instil confidence in them with regard to your product and service offerings. After developing trust, you go ahead to transact with them for purpose of sales. This entire process is Integrated Digital Marketing that drives CATT Funnel in your business.

Importance of Personal Branding

In today’s economy, personal branding has assumed significant importance because you are the most important selling point of your service/product. People trust people, they are looking for someone they can proudly recommend and advocate for. It can help you reach any number of goals, both personal and professional.

Following are some of the steps/process on how you can build your personal brand.

1. Learn: Always try to learn a new skill as learning is never-ending until we leave on the earth. To build more strength into our personal brand, learn the skills by understanding the basic concepts, remembering the facts and practicing the procedures.
2. Work: Always put your new-found skills to work by going from practice to implementation through your work. By implementing your skills in the real world, you can gain more experience and a better understanding. It may be any work (job/freelancing/own projects)
3. Blog: Blogging will help you to build your personal brand identity, brand awareness online, and trust from the people that you can do better things for them to build their businesses. Start with creating content that is of interest to your audience.
4. Consult: Now after having your personal brand through your blogs, you will have learned the fundamentals and gained the work experience. Once you are capable of doing things on your own, you can start consulting other businesses instead of working for them.
5. Mentor: Mentor others who want to learn from you and want to become like you. It will help you scale up your skills, knowledge, understating will also take you to a whole new level.
6. Startup: Once you have built a good value and know the market better by understanding people’s needs and how you can fulfil them, you now get ready to start your own products or services.

These steps have been depicted in the form of a MassTrust Blue Print diagram as given below:

Conclusion

In the above article, we understood the fundamentals of marketing, importance of digital marketing, the difference between traditional and digital marketing, process for niche selection, importance of CATT Marketing Funnel and how to build your Personal Brand. One of the key takeaways is that we should learn, research if required, understand, implement all together, and build own’s brand awareness and trust from customers to reach our target niche.

Hope that you enjoyed reading my article till to the end. This article is a part of the second assignment for the DigitalDeepak Internship Program. If you want to be a part of this internship program and become an expert in digital marketing, Apply here.