Why Your Digital Marketing & Personal Branding is Missing the Mark, And How You Can Fix It ?

In short, Digital Marketing and Personal branding are the marketing pillar of your company’s marketing strategy. It can be a difficult endeavor, but this article will share some of the very fundamentals you need to know and understand in order to find success in your marketing efforts.This article will be useful for bloggers, students, professionals, freelancers, mentors and entrepreneurs.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF MARKETING

Understanding your customer and customer’s needs which leads to creating a product is the first step towards marketing, that’s why marketing is based on not only creativity but science also.
Marketing is not all about selling products. You need to build trust with your customers by communicating with them after the sale is made and make them feel special so they stick with you for a lifetime.

Picture by mohamed mahmoud hassan from public domain pictures

The purpose of marketing should be building a brand and capturing a position in the mind of customers and the purpose of marketing should not be greater than your product/service. Because when your product is great after a few sales your customers become your brand ambassadors and your product starts to sell itself. This is known as “WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING” and is the best medium of marketing.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product/service fits him and sells itself…..The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” – Peter Drucker.

DIGITAL MARKETING VS. TRADITIONAL MARKETING

Digital marketing is done using mediums like websites, search engines, social media as tools to promote products/services. On the other hand, traditional marketing uses mediums like TV channels, radio, billboards, printed media like newspapers and magazines as tools.
Through digital marketing one can do personalized ad campaigns such as if you have a product for a specific age or gender audience you can show ads to your target audience, and it is easy to track ad campaigns. On the other side in traditional marketing you do campaigns through TV and newspaper where it is difficult to measure progress or show it to your targeted audience.
In Digital marketing google ads/ banners/promotional Emails can be ignored and more likely forgettable. Where in traditional marketing a huge billboard or a good TV ad can be impactful and memorable .
Traditional marketing can be more expensive than digital marketing but can reach millions of people at a time, and digital marketing costs less but can reach your target audience.

As you can see both types of marketing have their benefits and drawbacks, but the key is to understanding your marketing needs, budget, and your target audience.

FRAMEWORKS OF DIGITAL MARKETING

1.The “CATT” Marketing Funnel and Framework.

The “CATT” in this marketing funnel stands for :

Wealth / Success = η^CATT
[η] Niche = Your wealth or success depends on what niche you choose.
[C] Content = Create quality content from your niche to attract people. Content such as blog posts, videos, webinars, lead magnets.
[A] Attention = Drive traffic to your content using tools like SEO ,Social Media, Paid Ads, Referrals.
[T] Trust = Build trust with your audience using Interaction / Communication, Tripwires, Marketing Automation and Retargeting.
[T] Transaction = Convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods.

2. Integrated Digital Marketing Framework

You can say that in Integrated Digital Marketing Content is the “KING” or main element of this framework.Integrated Digital Marketing includes other elements like E-mail marketing, Social Media, Search Engine and Paid Ads. These elements helps your quality content to reach more and more audience and boosts sales and conversion, have a look at following diagram :

The above diagram describes Integrated Digital Marketing, and how each and every element is important in it.

Content : when you make good quality content – about your product or service it helps to engage your audience and help them to know about your product.
Email : Personalized emails can be very helpful to you if you do it right. It is more like one on one conversation which helps to build trust in you or your product/service.
Social Media : Engage with your audience on Social media platforms. Answer their queries, ask them for feedback, ask them What they want more.It helps to build your brand stronger & trustworthy.
Search Engines : With help from above points your brand or product got some recognition. That’s why your potential customer can find your product / Brand by directly searching for it.
Paid Ads : When running paid ads your potential customer can be attracted towards your banner on website they visit which makes Fasten the entire process.
Sales and Conversion : When anybody notices your product on social media or on email is not going to buy your product in the first place but they can visit your blog or website where it’s easy for buyers to understand where you want them to go.

In simple words, Integrated Digital Marketing is a strategy that blends all your marketing tactics. Then, each campaign and approach complement the other. But Integrated Digital Marketing also means having a well-structured and well-defined Marketing Plan. All those efforts should point in one direction only and express the same image to the mind of the users.

PERSONAL BRANDING

Importance of Personal Branding.

Creating a strong personal brand would drive your audience to go straight to your website or social media because they recognize your name and your product/service and It helps you stand out from the crowd.
So if you build your brand like a business, but still maintain a personal front, you’re guaranteed to inspire trust amongst your audience.

People remembers the brand better when the owner of brand becomes the face of the brand as it works as brand ambassador which helps you to rise above the competition.
Examples of people who built their strong personal brand –

Elon Musk
Steve Jobs.
Gary Vaynerchuk.
Tim fenis.
Kylie Jenner

The Evolution of Personal Brand.

The “MASS TRUST” Blueprint.

Learn – Learn a new skill through concepts. Facts, procedures, and practice.
Work – Put your new learned skill into practice with implementation which makes you feel confident about it.
Blog – Write about what you have learned through your work & experience. Writing what you experienced makes you understand it better which helps to build your personal brand.
Consult – After creating your personal brand through your blog and you have work experience and learned new principles and then you start consulting businesses instead working for them.
Mentor – Mentor others who want to become like you. Mentoring will teach you. how you can scale your learning to more deeper.
Startup – start your own product/Service with learning & experiences which you developed through above steps.

These are just a few steps to get you started. Hopefully, you’re able to see the value in developing a personal brand.

SUMMARY

In this article, we learned The fundamentals of marketing, Digital marketing vs. Traditional marketing., CATT Marketing Funnel, Integrated Digital Marketing, Personal Branding and Mass Trust Blueprint. Now you can apply these fundamentals to your Digital marketing campaign or to build your personal brand. I am sure you can improve your marketing skills by applying these steps.You can leave a comment what do you think of this article and let me know if you like it or not or have any suggestions. You can check out my another article “VISION YEAR 2027“.

Want to learn more about Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a growing vertical of marketing that holds immense scope. It has many aspects that one can explore. The career opportunities are vast and digital marketing is certainly the marketing of the future. If you want to dive deeper into it and build a career in it, you can learn more about digital marketing by applying DDIP. The program will enable you to master all the digital marketing fundamentals and land your dream job.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF DIGITAL MARKETING