It’s not digital marketing it’s marketing in a digital world.

11 min readNov 13, 2020

This article is all about my exposure to marketing in today’s digital world and what are the things I have learned so far.

2020 had made the world incline more towards digital and digital marketing is on boom like never before. There can be no better time than now to learn and master digital marketing.

More and more people are fascinated to learn digital marketing and yes there is a huge scope of it and will be for a long time to go but the biggest problem is that they directly jump into learning the tools completely ignoring the most important, beautiful, and highly influencing term

marketing.

Everyone wants to master digital marketing without even understanding the fundamentals of marketing.

This article will help you understand the fundamentals and basics of marketing in digital world.

But before everything else let’s first set a goal.

A goal?

Why a goal?

every marketing should start by creating a goal.

you reached this article to learn. and you want to learn ’cause you want to earn. so you set a goal that will boost you and speed up the process of learning and reach you to the point of earning. business is nothing different to that. you set a goal and work hard to achieve that.

A goal gives a business a clear idea

For me: I am a copywriter and learning digital marketing to sell copywriting programs/courses.

So my goal is to sell copywriting programs worth 1000 to 10,000 customers and earn 1 crore by the end of April.

Don’t get startled with 1 crore. ’cause it isn’t a massive amount in business and right marketing and right product will bring you countless amount into your pocket.

And now what’s your business goal. Write it down.

By writing I don’t mean typing on your keyboard. It’s not an effective way to do . because typing doesn’t register an idea into your head effectively.

instead, write with a pen and paper. You feel you’re more connected to your goals.

Remember your goals should always be specific, relevant and accomplishable.

If you’re done setting a relevant goal. Let’s get our feet wet in understanding the fundamentals and why it is so important to learn marketing in the first place.

Let’s divide this article into 3 parts and to make it a bit fun let’s call three stops.

(A)FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING.

(a). what is marketing.

Marketing is a process to sell the product or service to the customer.

A more relevant definition is marketing is a strategy made by marketers to sell the right product to the right person at the right time.

A great product without marketing fails.

A flop product with great marketing fails.

marketing and product moves hand on hand. if any of two goes wrong they can burn a hole in your pocket.

The biggest myth about marketing is most people misunderstand marketing is nothing but advertisement. but it isn’t true. marketing is a broader term and advertisement is just a part of marketing.

marketing is an important part in all the fields.

(b). Why should one learn marketing?

Marketing is an evergreen subject. It never fades away but improves with the time.

Good marketing educates customers so that, they can find the product they want, make better choices about the product and extract the most value from them.

Marketing mutually benefits both the seller and the customer.

Marketing is for everyone. Be it an ordinary person who wants to start business. or be it a CEO of a huge company who wants to expand his business. Marketing never upset anyone. good marketing will always fill one’s pocket.

A growing no. of CEOs are from a marketing background.

So marketing is a very important part of the business and learning marketing is never a waste of time.

And this brings me to my next point.

(c) law of marketing.

Some marketers call it as law and for some it is laws but both of them convey the same.

As every other industry has its laws. marketing is no different.

Just as there are laws of nature, like gravity and physics, there are also laws that govern marketing that never change and will always deliver pain to anyone who violates them.

Let’s discuss some important points in law of marketing and let me connect it to my business idea.

*being first is better than being better.

In a marketplace with enormous competition it’s tough to stand first with the product which is already captured by big marketing giants. you can’t survive and you can’t stay in the prospect’s mind.

So what’s the solution?

Create a category and be first in it.

creating a category will help you reach your ideal customers fast and helps you save a tons of money and time.

My business example — if I place myself as a no. one copywriter, I can’t stay long in the market and in the minds of customers.

But if say I am the no. one freelance financial copywriter in India. I can survive in the market and the minds of prospects as financial copywriting is not a saturated field.

like wise if I sell my courses with right marketing by categorizing then right and healthy traffic will reach out to me in less time, energy and money.

categorizing brings value on to your table.

Now write down what is your category in your business.

Trying to find a category is called as niche and we will go into it in the coming part.

*marketing is the game of perception.

“All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of customers or prospects”.
-jack trout and AI ries

Marketing is a game of perception.

product is the game of reality.

Marketing should never become more important than the product.

My business ex: if I spend tons of money and create a brilliant marketing strategy for my course which is full of junk and valueless. then I will be thrown out from the market in a matter of sec.

Now write it down what runs in the prospect mind and create a solution according to it which at last becomes a product.

*You have to give up something to get something.

“You must keep giving up to stay up.”

If you want to win the market and pull down huge money then sacrifice the whole market and only focus on who is important.

Now, what does that mean? Lets understand it broadly

The law of sacrifice urges brands to sacrifice a product/feature line to be in the mind of the customer or own a word. let’s take the example of Emery Vs Federal Express. Emery, unheard in some geographical regions, delivered all kinds of packages from small to big. What did FedEx do? It narrowed down to delivering small packages overnight. ‘Overnight’ was the keyword. Come to present, FedEx is a company several times bigger than Emery. In fact, ‘FedEx’ has become a verb!

For my business: here I can be more specific with my course. To capture the right audience my marketing strategy should be different.it can be like

Completed graduation? learn copywriting skill and get a job in just 4 months .

Here my main focus is college graduates who are desperate to get a job.

Now write down which part you need to sacrifice and to whom to target.

All these laws melt down to a single thing -customer doesn’t need your product. he/she just wants to solve their problem and your product should solve that problem in the first place.

ok! What have we learnt so far?

We learnt

What is marketing

Why it’s important to learn

Law of marketing

And we have also set our business goal.

With that we ended the fundamentals part. We crossed the first stop.

Now we are moving to next stop and that is

(B)where to do marketing

Traditional way or choose the digital medium.

There are those who say traditional marketing is dead. correct?

wrong!

it’s not dead. It’s just declining slowly.

Digital marketing is a boom in tier 1 cities which has a phone, laptop and internet connection.

Tier 1 is also called as India 1 and the population in India 1 is just 110 million out of 1.3 billion population. It’s astonishing. isn’t it?

a large sum lives in India 2 and India 3 with less than 3 lakhs per annum. but these people still buy stuff and marketers are still marketing their products to them.

How

Traditional marketing. So traditional marketing is nowhere dead especially in India. why we listen digital marketing all the time then?

Digital marketing is the best option for new businesses who want to capture the India 1 market.

The situation may not be the same 20 years down the line. life standards of public will change and the internet will be everywhere in India. usage of digital tools will increase and digital marketing will increases accordingly.

My business: if I work as a freelancer then most of the work comes from India 1 and to start a business digital medium will be my priority

What do you think? Where are your customers placed? do you need to focus only digital if yes then why?

good news!

we crossed A and B stops.

Now you and I are super clear that we want to do digital marketing as we can target only those customers who are in need of our products. but how to do digital marketing. don’t fret. that’s what we are going to cover now in the final stop and that is.

(C) HOW TO DO MARKETING

This part covers the question of “how”

Digital marketers simplified it by creating a funnel. It’s called CATT marketing funnel.

What is a funnel now?

In plain, a funnel is a journey that a seller wants the buyer to travel with an ultimate goal of selling his or her product.

And the marketing funnel looks like this.

Wealth = n^CATT

Lets learn one by one by one

and first comes

*niche

a niche is a specialized segment of the market defined by products and services that appeal to a unique and specific audience.

We already know that it’s better to be first than to be better. This can be accomplished by narrowing down our business idea.

every single brand or business needs to serve a clearly defined niche because single product can’t serve all the people all the time. The more narrow the niche is the higher the success rate.

For example

Financial education for women under 30.

this statement hits only those who are women and under 30.and ultematly attract sales from them.

I am a short form financial copywriter. My niche is finance and sub-niche is short form. here I am trying to be more specific with my service and this message reach to only those who want that service.

now it’s your turn. Write down what’s your niche and try to find its sub-niche.

this brings me to my next point.

*C- create content.

content-it’s the information and experiences that are directed toward and end user. content is something that is to be expressed thorough some medium, speech, writing or any of various arts.

Content is everywhere and more and more content is coming out rapidly so my point here is creating content will not help you sail to success in digital world but creating the right content will.

“Content is not the king” but

“Right content is the king”

*T- trust

Where there is no trust there is nothing.

Trust is what helps humanity alive. and when included in marketing prospects become lifetime customers.

“People don’t want to be sold. people love to buy”
-jeffrey gitomer.

Build trust and they will love buying from you. how to build trust? by being genuine to them. because GININUE IS RARE. and rare is always valued. right?

ok now next one.

*T-transaction

At the end of the day all the marketing strategy boils down to one thing

To make the transition. More bluntly speaking to make money.

if you don’t convert leads into customers. then all your hard work will turn into ashes in no time.

So convert leads into customers with natural sales methods and bring profits into your business.

Now how will I approach CATT funnel for my business?

First I will share basic yet valuable copywriting tips as content on blog posts, lead magnets, white papers, live webinars, YouTube videos.

Then try to bring traffic to the content by SEO, social media(sharing content on social platforms),referrals, paid ads.

Building trust with a more personalized approach using marketing automation and retargeting(90%of the website visitors never return back to the site again).

Now they convert into customers without any further struggle.

And I get the money.

Yes this is what digital marketing is. this is what you will be doing in your business too.

and 1 more important concept to learn is

INTEGRATED DIGITAL AMRKETING

an integrated digital marketing as it sounds, the integration of multiple marketing strategies to form a cohesive online approach for your business.

some business only focusses on social media or email marketing or SEO and neglects the rest.

but integrated marketing helps to reach every platform and acquire traffic. this helps no stone left unturned in digital marketing. and doing it so reduces your costs

build trust with audience

put you top of mind

eliminates confusion

and last but not the least it builds internal morale.

And that’s it.

you crossed all the three stops and now you are good to go mastering digital marketing.

Key takeaway:

Just go and implement

Implementation is the vehicle to success. When you implement you succeed or you fail.

If you succeed it’s great .But If you fail it becomes hard for you to digest the fact.so, just to win again you will try again. you will try to learn more about it, you will ask about it, you will improve and again you implement.

And if you fail now the cycle continues until you get to the point where you want to be.

With repeat implementation success will approach you before you know it.