How Marketing and Branding are the hidden ingredients of successful Start-up?

Introduction

Do you want to build your brand and impact people but have no idea about where to start? Are you an entrepreneur but struggling to market/sell your product and services? Are you fed up with Facebook and Google ads but not getting the desired result? Are you looking to evolve your brand into a new domain but having no clue where to start? Do you want to market your product/service but have no clue about which medium will be most suitable for you?

If your answer to any of these above questions is “Yes”, then this article is for you.  All these issues happen due to a lack of the foundation of brand building. And, the solution for these problems is marketing.

Before we go deep into it, let’s understand the basic definition of marketing. As per AMA (American Marketing Association) 2017 approval, marketing is defined as follow: –

Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partnerSs, and society at large.

In simpler terms, marketing helps to build an image/brand for you, or your organization among your customers, clients, and society. Thus, impact revenue generation for your organization.  

Fundamental of marketing

How marketing affect pricing your product to achieve a financial goal?

Suppose we need to generate a revenue of INR 1 crore by selling a product. Here two types of costs are involved-the cost of marketing and the cost of product manufacturing. The cost of marketing depends on the number of customers to acquire. The cost of product manufacturing depends on the quality of a product.

Suppose we manufacture a cheap product worth INR 100, then it is required to acquire 100000 customers to generate the revenue of INR 1 crore. In such a case, there is a probability that the cost of marketing will be too high to end up draining the entire profit margin. Such products do not fit  the market.

Suppose we price a quality product of INR 1 Lakh, then we need to acquire only 100 customers to generate a revenue of INR 1 crore. In this case, marketing costs may be low if the product is worth buying at INR 1 lakh. However, if customers are not capable of paying that price, it will not fit the market.

So, we need to manufacture a quality product with an optimum price that fits the market. Then, we do not need to invest much to acquire a large number of customers.

From this explanation, we conclude two things: –

1. It is easier to market a high-quality premium product.
2. The product to be priced optimally to fit the market.

 

The law of marketing

Marketing is a science, not creativity. It starts before product creation. It begins with understanding the customer needs, that lead to creating a product-market fit. Marketing is about sending the right message to the right people at, right time.

Marketing is not just about selling. It is also about keeping an existing customer happy by communicating with them to make them a customer for life. The purpose of marketing is to build a brand and capture a position in the mind of the consumers.

“ The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product or services fits him and sell itself. The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous” – Peter Drucker.

Marketing is a game of perceptions. The product is rooted. Never let marketing become more important than the product. A great product sells itself. Marketing of a low-quality product  accelerates the death of a company.

A great product converts your customers into brand ambassadors. Word of mouth marketing is the best channel of marketing ever.

Advertising, copywriting, and sales are some of the components of marketing.

You need a great product, but marketing not only to helps in discovering the product but also to build a good perception of the product.

Brand building

To build your brand value, you need to change your mindset.

The first thing to remember is that people know only number 1 or hardly number 2. So, every market ends up with 2 key players. So, don’t try to be number one in any competitive category but be the only one in a sub-category.

For example, there are two  key players in the e-commerce industry in India- Flipkart and Amazon. But, players like Myntra & Lenskart become the leader in the e-commerce sub-category of the fashionable clothing and spectacle industry respectively.

 So, the conclusion is that, enter in a competitive market but have a unique angle.

What is the importance of marketing?

• Marketing education has a long shelf life because it is rooted in human psychology ahead of understanding the market.
• Marketing is the most valuable investment in a business because it gives direct returns. Everything else like production, HR, accounting, the administration is an expense that doesn’t provide immediate ROI.
• You cannot outsource the marketing completely. The founder is the first brand ambassador of their product/services. So, every founder needs to have a basic understanding of marketing.

Importance of communication in marketing

 

Marketing is all about effective communication. Effective communication doesn’t mean sophisticated English. Also, it doesn’t care about vocabulary or grammar. It is more about how you can transfer your thoughts effectively.

For marketing, it is necessary to understand your target audience and have a conversation with them in their mind.  You can write as you talk. It is advisable to write a lot, as it helps slow down your thought process and provide clarity. The more you write, the better you can write and speak as well.

Traditional VS Digital Marketing

If a product is generic, traditional marketing will have a better reach than digital marketing.

However, in the case of any specific product targeted for a segment of the audience, digital marketing is a better option.

For example, any product usable by large masses of the audience (e.g.- Soap, iPhone, etc.), can be marketed from traditional marketing mediums like TV, radio, or newspaper ads. If we need to do marketing of a professional course product, digital marketing is a better option.

The reach of digital marketing is nowhere in comparison to TV, radio, and newspaper ads in India.

TV ads have a reach of around 298 million households with 4-5 members resulting in an 800 million – 1 billion population (Source- Wikipedia).

Radio has a reach of 65% of the Indian population (Source – Financial Express).

The newspaper has a reach of 465 million population of India. (Source- Business standard).

Digital marketing is the best medium to reach the affluent English-speaking population of India around 100 million, who has spending power.

What is direct response marketing?

Many times, when people run ads for marketing, they don’t know that whether it will work or not. Marketing executives (in ad agencies) run brand-building campaigns that do not give specific and measurable results. An increase in brand awareness is not measurable.

Direct response marketing is a type of marketing designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take a specific action.  

Few examples of direct response marketing are; newspaper ads with a phone number to call directly, late night infomercials with a phone number to call and order, ad leading to a landing page with a lead form & a sales page of a product with a link to purchase the product.

The CATT marketing funnel & framework

The CATT is an effective marketing strategy for generating wealth from scratch.

Wealth =  n^CATT

• [n]Niche: – Your success and wealth depend on the niche you choose.
• [C]Content: – Create useful content that attracts people from your niche. Blog posts, videos, lead magnets, the webinar etc.
• [A]Attention: – Drive attention(traffic) to your content using SEO, Social Media, paid tools, and referrals.
• [T]Trust: – Build trust with your audience with tripwires marketing, automation, and retargeting.
• [T]Transaction: – Convert your lead into customers with naturals sales and methods.

How to choose your right niche?

Your niche selection to be based on the following three factors: –

• Your Passion
• Your Talent
• Market opportunity of the domain

Integrated Digital marketing

Integrated digital marketing involves using different components of digital marketing in a systematic pattern for effective results.

• Content marketing: – Instead of advertising your product directly to social media, advertise your free content first on social media to get a lead land to your blog and subscribe to your newsletter. Run paid advertising to your free content.
• Email Marketing: – Get the people into your email list first. When you create some new content, send to all your email list.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): –Get your content listed on search engine from where people reach your blog/content site through search. Then content also starts sending a signal to search engines. The search engine will start ranking your content and send the traffic to your content.
• Social Media Marketing: – Share your content on social media from where new people will start landing on your content. They will share your content if they like it. It will further bring new people to your content.
• Paid Advertisement: – It is about boosting the entire momentum of email marketing, SEO & Social Media marketing.

Since momentum gets boosted entirely, people end up building trust with you and had transactions with you. This is what is called the CATT funnel & framework.

Content is in the center, paid advertising & Social media advertising create attention, and email marketing creates trust, and transactions happen with potential customers.

An Integrated marketing framework is about how you execute it.

 The Power of personal branding

What is the importance of personal branding?

The best known will always lead the best. No one is going to discover you until you brand yourself.

Personal branding is deeper than company branding. People want to hear from people than it from the brand. For example: – Elon Musk is a better brand than Tesla and SpaceX.

However, there are upside and downside both of personal branding: –

• Downside: – A personal brand is intangible and cannot be invested in and sold.
•  Upside: – A personal brand can give rise to many brands from his/her influence. A personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies that they run.

The evolution of a personal brand

The evolution of a personal brand happens in the following six steps: –

• Learn: – Learn a new skill through concepts, facts, and procedures. Understand the concepts, remember the facts, and practice procedures.
• Work: – Put your newfound skills to work. Go from practice to implementation. Implementing it in the real world will give you a better understanding. Working may be freelancing, job, or doing your project.
• Blog: – Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, you understand it better, but you will also start building your brand.
• Consult: – Now that you have a personal brand through your blog, have work experience, and have learned the fundamentals.  Start consulting other businesses instead of working for them.
• Mentor: – Mentoring others who want to be like you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level.
• Start-Up: – Start your product or service-based business based on the understanding that has developed about the market, the problem, and your own experience.  

Conclusion

The common myth about marketing is that products get created first, then marketing is done for branding and generating sales revenue.

But the fact is marketing came into the picture right from the idea of creating a product.

Every start-up starts with an idea. Every successful start-up markets their idea first to survey the potential of their ideas and then create a market-fit product.

 One such product gets launched in the market; people are already ready to buy it. The product sells itself.

Further marketing is used only for reaching out to more potential customers and build a good perception of the products.

If you find this article interesting, please drop a message in the comment section and share your valuable feedback about it. Please follow my blog for reading such articles in the future.

You can also check out my article on 4 best ways of investing in gold in India.

(Note: – This is a part of an assignment for the Digital Deepak Internship Program. If you want to be a part of the next batch, you can apply at https://deepak.me/internapply)