Why learn marketing being a business owner when you can outsource it? Important hacks for astounding results!

16 min readJan 18, 2021

As per the Startup India statistics, India has the 3rd largest startup ecosystem in the world. The total number of startups in India was about 50,000 in the year 2018. 1300 new tech startups were born in 2019 alone implying there are 2–3 tech startups born every day.

Are you an entrepreneur? Are you a business owner or a top-level stakeholder? Or, are you planning to start one? If you are planning to start-up, is everything set for the kick-off?

Can having a specialized marketing team alone give you the expected results? You are not just the owner but also the creator of your business. Your insights and knowledge in your niche is the key to drive your business. A lot of us here have a few misperceptions about marketing. We think marketing is all about manipulation and it’s needed only to drive your sales. We don’t realize how important it is to know about marketing as a business owner to survive in this competitive world.

Today, I will change your perception of marketing and will give you a new angle to look at it. At the end of this article, you will understand why knowing the basics of marketing is a must for business owners and entrepreneurs.

You will learn what marketing is, it’s fundamentals (in a way that is very easy to understand), how to use traditional and digital marketing techniques in an effective way, skills needed for marketing, how to select your niche and stand out from a crowd, how to build your funnel that increases the sale and finally an overview of integrated digital marketing.

What is Marketing?

One of the most common definitions of marketing is that it is the process of advertising your product or service to the audience through various channels. Though advertising is just a section of marketing, it has been incited in our brains that marketing is just about promotion and advertising the brands.

When someone asks you what marketing is, isn’t this the exact definition that comes to your mind? What if I tell you a totally different definition of marketing?

Marketing starts with understanding your own strengths first. It is understanding who your customers are, their current problems, and the solution that they are looking for. It is then using your strengths, knowledge, and skills to provide them a product or a service that best fits their needs. Such a product or a service will sell itself.

Marketing doesn’t end there. The true success of a business is retaining its customers and keeping them happy with your product or services. Customer retention is also a predominant aspect of marketing.

“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

Fundamentals of Marketing

Let’s get the fundamentals right to become an expert in marketing. The “4 P’s” form the building block for marketing.

Product — A product is not necessarily a physical or an online product. It could also be a service. So let me use the term “offering” as a blanket term. You can first understand your customer base and their needs through various channels like market research, running polls and surveys on social media, etc. Based on the results, you can create an offering that best fits the market.
Price — Fixing a pricing model (one-time cost or subscription model) and the price for a product or a service is very important as this impacts your brand perception and conversions. Just imagine if you see an ad that tells you that they will sell you an android mobile with all the latest technology just for Rs. 2000? Would you not get questions in your mind suspecting the quality of the mobile? Price also showcases your quality. There is a popular saying that quality comes with the price. Contrarily if your product or service quality is top-notch, but the price you quote is considerably greater than what your competitors quote, you will still lose a lot of potential customers. Hence, it is very important to determine a price considering the factors like — product/service quality, expected margins, and the buying potential of consumers for this market.
Promotion — Now that you have the product/service in place and pricing all set, how will you take it to your audience? This section includes choosing your target audience, selecting the right channel or promotion, and communicating the right message at the right time. If your offering is a digital marketing training course along with placement assistance, then your target audience can be job seekers in digital marketing and working professionals or freelancers who want to upgrade their skills in this domain. The right channel will depend on your audience selection. If you have to reach job seekers, you can target running ads on job portals. The most important thing to note is the right time. Imagine if a person is looking for a digital marketing job actively now and gets a job after a month. What do you think would be the right time here to reach them? While they are searching for jobs or after they got the job? If you have chosen the first option, then you have already got what marketing exactly is.
Place — The term here represents the distribution strategy. Once you have a customer who needs your offering and is happy with your pricing, how will you deliver your offering? Do you plan to have any physical stores for the purchase, or is it going to be a completely online purchase? If it’s going to be an online store, are you planning to have any physical offices for support related issues? Find answers for these questions based on the operating cost involved and the demand of a physical store.

Traditional Vs Digital Marketing

Now that we know what marketing is and its basic principles, let’s look at the types of channels through which we can reach our audience and communicate our message.

Traditional marketing

When the medium used to reach the audience is “offline” or without internet usage, it is traditional marketing in layman’s terms. Traditional marketing channels are broadly categorized as given below:-

Print (Newspaper ads, magazine, etc)
Broadcast (TV, Radio, etc)
Telephone (Telemarketing, message marketing, etc)
Outdoor (Fliers, Billboards, etc)
Direct Mail (Pamphlets, catalogues, postcards, etc)
Events (Conferences, Tradeshows, etc)

Are you confused about why Direct Mail falls under traditional marketing?

Well, the terms direct mail and mail are different. Direct mail is an advertising methodology where we print the marketing message in forms like brochures, pamphlets, etc. We then send these printed materials to the target audiences via courier or postal services. I hope you are clear now.

Digital marketing

In digital marketing, the medium used to reach the audience is “online” or with the usage of the internet and digital technologies.

Digital marketing channels include:-

Website
Social Media Marketing (FB, Instagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, etc)
Content Marketing (Blogs, Videos, etc)
Email Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (Google Adwords, Bing Ads, etc)
Affiliate Marketing
Mobile Marketing

Pros and Cons of Each Marketing Type

Once you understand the benefits and challenges of each one of them, you will be able to figure out where to use traditional marketing and where to use digital marketing.

Benefits of Traditional Marketing:-

Greater reach — The reach or number of views is comparatively higher with traditional marketing channels like TV
Impactful and memorable — If you see a TV ad more than 2–3 times a day while switching channels, it is natural that it gets stored in your memory. Assume that you see a full-page BMW X5 M ad in a magazine, and contrarily you see an ad while surfing an automobile website. Which one sits deeper on your mind? This also applies to freebies like a pen with the imprinted brand name, etc. that we give during trade shows.

Challenges in Traditional Marketing:-

One-way approach — Unlike digital marketing, there is very less or zero interaction with the audience. It is a one-way approach to conveying a message to the audience.
Lower scope for feedback — Since the approach is one-way, there are very few chances of getting feedback from the audience.
Measuring ROI is difficult — Can you think of any possible ways to measure the impact of your TV ad unless we have a direct response approach where we display the contact number in our ad? In general, the biggest drawback of this marketing approach is the lack of measurability. How will you know if your ad performed well or not if you don’t have any metrics or data to track it?
Expensive — Local TV stations charge from Rs. 1 lakh to 10 lakh for creating a 30-second commercial. The cost is comparatively way too higher than the digital marketing techniques.
Can’t be personalized — We all like it when someone notices us in a crowd. This is something that we can’t effectively achieve using traditional marketing. The messages sent over this medium are more generic in nature. There is no provision of communicating concurrent messages to different categories of the audience in a personalized way.

Benefits of Digital Marketing:-

Interactive in nature — There are many ways in which digital marketing can be effective 2-way communication. For example, call-to-action widgets like “Contact Now” in your social media ads, landing pages on your website that captures data about the visitor, etc.
Feedback — With the use of digital media, it is possible to understand the acceptance level of the ads, message, and even your marketing efforts. The number of likes, comments, and shares can help you track how effective your ad is.
Cost-effective — It is a cost-effective channel. With a minimum budget of Rs 40, you can start Facebook ads.
Measurable — Unlike its counterpart, digital marketing efforts and results are measurable. There are many digital tools to help you track your campaign’s performance, which is crucial to improve your next marketing strategy. You should know what is not working out to create a plan B.
Narrowed target — The best example of this would be email marketing. You can group the leads into various categories. For example, you can group the fresh leads who visit your website for the first time into Category A. Similarly, group your existing customers into Category B. You can now shoot out customized emails to each of these categories with a message specific to them.
Global reach — Since there are internet users all over the world, the message to be conveyed can reach across various geographies. For example, if I post an ad on Twitter, people can view it irrespective of their geographic location, and the possibility of tapping a new market will be high.

Challenges in Digital Marketing

Can be skipped through — Despite running a highly targeted social media ad, there are still chances that a few people might skip the ad.
Ever-Changing Technology — Unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing is a fast-growing field. It is thereby very important to stay updated with the emerging techniques. All your SEO efforts will go in vain if google’s search engine algorithms change overnight and if you fail to crack the new algorithm.
Negative reviews — A few things are like a double-edged sword. Since the channel is interactive and open for 2-way communication, there might be chances of getting a few negative reviews or comments about your product that can hamper the existing brand name.
Security & privacy issues — Since digital marketing is data-driven, there are a number of legal considerations around collecting and using customer data for digital marketing purposes. As long as you use the data in an ethical way, only for analyzing your campaign performance without disclosing the data to anyone else, you are safe.
Potentially Annoying — Too much of anything gets annoying. Superfluous ads can lead to a bad user experience and can create a negative impact on your brand in their mind.

How to choose between Traditional and Digital Marketing?

Now that we know the pros and cons of traditional and digital marketing, it will be easy to figure out where to apply each one of them.

Where can Traditional Marketing be effective?

Older demographics — According to GlobeNewswire, audiences of age 50+ spend almost twice as much time reading the newspaper and watching TV as compared to those ages 21–34. Hence, if your target is older people, then consider running ads on TV, newspaper, magazines, etc.
Generic content — Traditional marketing is a good choice when the message or content is generic and doesn’t vary category wise.
Larger business — Larger businesses with sufficient budgets can run TV ads to get a good reach within local geography.

Where can Digital Marketing be effective?

Active technology users — As of 2019, the reported internet users in India were 34.4% of the total population. If your target is internet users, then this must be the right choice of marketing.
Deep marketing — When the product or message is not generic and has a different target base, deep marketing works the best.
Small business -Since a few traditional marketing channels are very costly, it’s a wise option to choose digital marketing for small businesses where the budget is a constraint. Attempting to run a TV ad if you have just started your business can leave a dent in your marketing budget without giving much ROI.

These are a few suggestions on where traditional marketing & digital marketing would be a good choice based on their pros and cons. The best way to choose the right marketing type is to deeply understand your target audience and then decide what suits them.

Skills to be a good marketer

I hope by now you have some idea of what marketing is and why it is important for you as a business owner to understand the basics of marketing. Let’s take the next step. The following are the skills that you can develop to become a good marketer:-

Understanding your customer and their needs — Ability to put yourself in customer shoes to find out what their problems are and what solution they are looking for
Market research and niche selection — Once you diagnosed the problem, decide how you can use your knowledge or talents to provide a solution to their problem. Do market research to find out your existing competitors and choose a unique niche for your business.
Communication skills — The moment we see the term communication skills, we relate it to sophisticated English, grammar, etc. Effective communication is to convey your thoughts to others in a simple way that is easy to understand. Read more and write more to speak effectively.
Challenging attitude — Don’t hesitate to change to Plan B if Plan A doesn’t work. Marketing is a continuous learning process where we learn from our mistakes.
Being up-to-date — In addition to being updated with the latest tools and technologies, it is equally important to remain updated in your business domain or niche to plan marketing strategies accordingly.

Personal branding & Mass Trust Blueprint

To understand personal branding, let’s first understand what “Branding” is. It’s creating a unique, positive, and everlasting impression of a company, its products, or services in the customer’s mind. You can achieve it by using elements like logo, brand name, product caption, etc. You can use them consistently throughout all your marketing communications to create a powerful impact.

So, what could personal branding be? It’s creating a strong perception about who you are, your talents, and everything about you that you want to be rooted deeply in people’s minds. It’s simply promoting yourself in the way you want others to perceive you.

Personal branding is very important as people like to transact with humans more than the company, brand name, or any lifeless elements. Hence, gaining trust is easier with personal branding.

Another important aspect to look at is that personal branding leaves a persistent impression in people’s minds. The best example is Elon Musk’s personal branding. When we think of electric cars, we remember Elon Musk more than Tesla itself. The reason behind this is the impact of his personal branding.

There are many ways to do personal branding like:-

Have a mission statement that is constant and gives value to society
Be genuine and authentic — Millennial influencer and head of marketing at Popular Demand, Monica Lin, says “People can see right through a disingenuous act.”
Tell your story — let the world know your story so that they can relate to you
Consistently interact with your customers or followers in a meaningful way
Grow a community around your brand — Have a community of like-minded people and share your mission with them. As they start to spread your mission with others, your personal branding will grow.

Mass Trust Blueprint

With evolving technology, there is no end to learning if you want to remain consistent in your business or performance. Mass Trust Blueprint will help you understand the cycle in which the evolution of personal brand happens. To make it clear, let me take an example of a digital marketing freelancer named Robert and explain to you how this cycle works.

Learn — Every journey must start somewhere. We all need skills to survive in this competitive world. Robert learns a new skill based on what his passion is.
Work — What’s the use of learning a new skill if we don’t apply it? We need to practice to remember what we learned. Robert joins an IT firm as a digital marketer and applies all his knowledge for the growth of the company, which in turn enhances his own domain knowledge.
Content — We forget things we study, but we don’t forget things we understand. Concepts that we understand deeply remain rooted in our minds. The best way to understand a concept deeply is to learn, practice, and teach it to others. Robert now starts creating content around what he has learned from his learning & work experience. The form of content could be anything like videos, blogs, webinars, etc. This not only helps him understand digital marketing extensively but also helps in building his personal brand, as he is giving value to society.
Consult — We often don’t realize our own potential unless someone highlights it to us. People start getting benefits from Robert’s content, and his personal brand is intensified. Now his audience perceives him as an authority in the digital marketing field. As a result, he gets requests from other companies to consult them on digital marketing.
Mentor — Guidance is very important, a lack of which becomes a barrier to success. Robert now decides that he wants to mentor other students and passionate digital marketers in his niche and help them achieve similar results.
Startup — Robert now starts a small digital marketing agency with a small group of like-minded digital marketers to extend his service.

The term “evolution” is ceaseless, so is every growth cycle. Your absence in a race is an easy win for your competitors. All your efforts that you put into building your personal brand will go in vain if you are not repeating this cycle. In this case, Robert will continue upgrading his knowledge, practicing it, teaching it to others, consulting the companies, mentoring students, and running his startup to be a consistent authority in his niche.

You can apply this cycle for any niche that you have chosen to become authoritative.

CATT Funnel & Sales

A journey without a destination is meaningless. The destination of any business journey is making revenue to sustain in the industry. Without revenue, you can not expand your business. Without expansion, your business will drown someday. Having understood how important sales are, let’s talk about achieving it.

The concept of the funnel has been the foundation of sales over the years. The key concepts of digital marketing applied in a meaningful sequence will give you the CATT funnel.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the CATT funnel, let me show you a simple equation or strategy for making wealth.

Wealth (or) Success = N^CATT

N is the niche that you have chosen based on 3 factors — your passion, your talent, and the market (whether or not your niche will have demand in the market). An ideal niche should be an intersection of these 3 elements as depicted below:-

Now, let’s see what CATT represents by taking the same old example of Robert. Let’s see how he makes revenue using the CATT funnel.

Content — Creating content that gives value is the foremost thing to do in digital marketing. The various forms of content are blogs, videos, webinars, lead magnets, etc. Robert creates a website for his personal branding. He chooses his niche as digital marketing. He then starts writing blogs on various topics of digital marketing. He also creates video content to be uploaded to his youtube channel.

Attraction — Now that the content is ready, how to attract the audience to consume the information? Robert uses digital marketing tools like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Social Media Marketing, Google Ads, and using backlinks to his website. This will drive traffic to his content.

Trust — As humans, we only transact with a person or a company when we trust them. This is one of the very important reasons why every e-commercial platform has feedback or a rating system for each of its vendors and products. Robert gains the trust of his leads (who consumed his content) by doing email marketing. He uses marketing automation and email marketing to send personalized messages to his leads to create a healthy relationship with them. He ensures that he is not overloading the leads with sales pitch emails but sends them emails in a ratio of 3:2. Out of the 5 emails he sends, 3 are informative, and 2 are the sales pitch emails.

Transaction — Once you gain their trust, the leads (potential customers) are ready to transact with you. Robert starts making revenue because of his good lead to customer conversions. His online courses on various digital marketing topics start getting traction and increased sales.

As already said, marketing doesn’t end here. It is equally important to retain a customer by offering them a good user experience. You can use email marketing to get customer feedback and introduce new products. This strengthens the relationship with your customers.

Integrated Digital Marketing

I hope that you have realized the true potential of digital marketing and how it contributes to a business’s success and growth. We saw an overview of the key digital marketing methods and how they help in conversions. The CATT funnel makes it clear that a perfect mix of all these methods can give you the desired results.

If you focus only on one or two specific methods like SEO or Social Media Marketing, you will miss out on the potential results. Each of the digital marketing methods supports each other to yield good conversions.

The above-given flowchart depicts how each of these methods goes hand-in-hand.

Though a pretty lengthy one, I hope you found this article helpful and realized how important it is for you (as a business owner or as any top-level stakeholder of a business) to learn the basics of marketing and adopt digital marketing strategies to achieve the desired results.

Do let me know what you feel about this article in the comments. Also, let me know if you plan to execute these strategies in your business.

(Note: This is a part of the Digital Deepak Internship Program.)