Introduction
Both building and executing your strategies for digital marketing are vital in this day and age. Why do I need strategic marketing planning to serve my customer persona? And, what are the frameworks to execute my strategies for digital marketing? Over two decades of my experience running B2B and B2C in Software services and B2C in Physical products through e-commerce models such as FBA taught me the importance of having an effective channel to reach customers, intimate customer relationships, and consistently adapting to the technology that adds value. I had to digest the fact that these would be possible only through the right strategies for digital marketing.
Who is it for?
Digital promoters of any kind such as marketing executives, digital marketers, freelancers, entrepreneurs, startups, digital agencies, or online sellers such as Amazon FBA owners or even Marketing graduates.
Overview
Let’s constructively make a case for such a marketing strategy and market-proven frameworks to take action for absolute results. Here are the topics for our noted constructive sequence.
- Nuts and Bolts of Today’s Marketing
- Digital Marketing in the face of Traditional Marketing
- Self Reflection for Right Solutions
- 3 Principle Frameworks for Unconventional Digital Marketing
- Concluding Remarks
Nuts and Bolts of Today’s Marketing
The core truth of any marketing fable is to fulfill your customer needs. You do that by creating value for your customer with the right mix of 7 P’s of marketing as product, price, promotion, place, packaging, positioning, and people. That right mix is defined by your marketing strategy. The right marketing strategy that you define with your arduous effort paves a path for your success; anything less would be driving without a right map to inevitable failure.
Image by ar130405 from Pixabay
Inspiring consumers, as it turned out, is the only way to penetrate your target market in today’s competitive digitally integrated economy. You would tackle this challenge by “Hitting the Sweet Spot” of your customers with a marketing strategy that moves away from information to insight to inspiration as per Dr. Fortini-Campbell’s pragmatic research.
A marketing strategy that intimately understands and inspires your customer is a science that precedes way before your product to meet customer needs. It starts with connecting with your customers to hit their sweet spot with the right message to the right person at the right time. You execute it with effective communication with your leads and customers; communication that is true, consistent, and resonates with your customers in their own context to inspire them. Indeed, it is not limited by any language of choice but the way and care you choose to convey the message.
The right marketing strategy comes with the right promotion mix that enables you to communicate well and reach your potential customers. You will find what your customers are looking for and help them discover your product as they need it, build your brand over time, and eventually capture the market position. That makes marketing your means to an end.
A good product sells by itself and helps “customers experience the ongoing value of your product”. However, a good marketing strategy accelerates your product sales and makes your product a great product that sells by word of mouth. A good marketing communication strategy would include a mix of Advertising, Sales promotion, Copywriting, Personal selling, Public relations, and Direct marketing promotions.
To become a market leader or a market chaser in any competitive segment is almost always an upward hill battle. And trust me, you don’t want to be a market follower for a tiny market share that you would eventually risk losing to the top. So, what choice do you really have? Shoot for the Only One, not just the No.1, within your target segment!
How can you be the Only One? This is where the winning “Focused strategy” comes into play, especially in the digital economy. The strategy “focuses on a small niche market segment” by pursuing one of the three value disciplines named “Customer Intimacy” that “provides superior value by precisely tailoring its products to match the needs of their customers”.
Digital Marketing in the face of Traditional Marketing
Now, let’s narrow down your plan of action further by comparing Traditional Marketing against Digital Marketing.
In a nutshell, the medium that companies use, such as social media and websites in place of magazines and newspapers, to reach their audience separates digital from traditional marketing.
Which one to use? As both serve different purposes, neither is simply better than the other. It depends on your marketing strategy. How well do you want to understand and reach your customers to fulfill their needs? Would you prefer to sustain yourself by serving them well in the long run? Do a soul search and answer these questions first. Digital marketing fits well for most who target affluent consumers and whose priorities are to,
- reach more scattered audiences globally,
- find insights into customer preferences,
- personalized communication,
- inspire customers with deep marketing,
- influence customers for natural sales,
- reduce the overall cost of customer acquisition,
- better measure marketing performance
- execute and refine more quickly than traditional marketing.
Being a significant revenue driver, Digital marketing has become essential as it’s playing an important role. However, you must have a clear framework to execute your strategies for digital marketing.
Self Reflection for Right Solutions
The digital promotion of our software services business in Hyderabad relied on Google Ads, FB Ads, and Justdial avenues.
The digital promotion of our FBA physical products relied on Amazon India and its PPC.
Again, the digital promotion of our US-based Affiliate and Dropshipping services relied on Google Ads, Bing Ads, FB Ads, Instagram, and such.
Despite having good products that solve problems, the result was, let’s just say, not as one would expect!
What’s the issue? The issue is that each one of those methods independently tried to reach customers to sell without an effort to build trust. I don’t mean to point at those tools; I mean that we could have leveraged the same tools in a better way! What could have been a better way?
This is where my search for a proven yet simple framework started. I have stumbled across 3 Principle Frameworks that suit the marketing of just about any product or service in this day and age of the digital arena. The frameworks have been naturally evolved through trial and error pragmatic discovery over years of practice in digital marketing at DigitalDeepak, one of the top digital marketers in India. Let’s dive deep into the strategies for digital marketing with these frameworks.
3 Principle Frameworks for Unconventional Digital Marketing
- The Engine of Digital Marketing – “nCATT Marketing Funnel” framework
Our self-reflection has been our guide to choosing strategies for digital marketing with a solid framework to build our content assets around products and services and patiently but effectively follow the sequence of steps needed to reach, groom, inspire our leads, and then convert them to customers.
The principle at a glance: You would choose a focused market segment with enough demand that is either underserved or ignored, that you have talent in, and that you are passionate about. This is your Niche. Choosing your niche is critical for sustainable service to your segment of customers.
Here are 5 criteria to find your niche:
- Figure out your interests and what you are passionate about.
- List the problems you can solve – straight talk, forums, keywords.
- Find out how competitors are already serving your market – low quality, paid ads, no transparency.
- Identify whether there is enough demand. Is it profitable?
- Test your content to see whether you obtain attention, trust, and transaction.
You will use your strengths to create rich and inspiring Content that serves your niche segment through digital tools such as blog posts, videos, and live webinars.
Then you would gather Attention using digital marketing tools such as SEO, Social media, Paid Ads, and Referrals by driving traffic into your content that delivers value to your niche segment.
Now, you will start building Trust by educating and inspiring your focused segment of consumers using an effective digital marketing communication strategy over time.
Despite it being a long journey over weeks and months in a stretch, you will start building your tribe. That tribe of people will consume your content because you have established a trusting relationship with them. Once they start to build trust, the potential consumer will perform Transactions with ease and confidence at your sales portal. The customers are acquired. They will give you a chance to serve them more for years to come. Onward!
- The Dashboard of Digital Marketing – “Integrated Digital Marketing“
After our self-reflection, we have realized that no one or two channels to reach for customers would bring in reliable revenues. We must have an integrated system. Integrated strategies for digital marketing where each component is built with a purpose to feed on each other and ultimately achieve customer trust and transaction.
The principle at a glance: Content is your most important asset. A trustworthy relationship with your potential customer is your currency. Sales will, of course, happen in the end; but it depends on how well you integrate digital marketing tools to promote your content and build trust. The rule of thumb – is to not go for straight sales conversion unless you shoot for disappointment!
So here we go!
Your marketing strategy should obviously revolve around your best asset, which is your content. The content that is rich, insightful, inspiring, and useful fulfills your customer needs.
Now, integrate SEO, Social Media (FB, Instagram, YT, Twitter), Paid Ads (Google Ads, Bing Ads, FB Ads), and Email promotions with your content to get attention, traffic, and trust.
The “nCATT Marketing Funnel” framework is at play to execute this “Integrated Digital Marketing framework“.
- The Ride of Digital Marketing – Personal Branding
People trust people. People listen to people who they trust. People show confidence in people who they listen to and trust. People are influenced by people who help them make decisions after listening to them with confidence and trust.
Businesses too are people talking to people. Isn’t it obvious what people expect from businesses? Honesty, Reliability, Confidence, and Trust!
Then, How can we achieve these tenets as a business? The answer is through Personal Branding!
Personal branding is something that you build with genuine authority in your area of expertise. Your strategies for digital marketing must ensure you groom and empower people to show confidence in you and what you have to offer them. Solutions! The solutions to their problems. The solutions that they know will solve their problem and enhance their daily life. The solutions that they feel confident will work. People would know very well to their heart that you are honest, you are reliable, you don’t sacrifice quality, and they can count on you.
Do I hear you thinking that it’s a long flight of stairs to climb up and stay there living up to the expectation of your customers? Yes, indeed! But in the end, it’s all worth it!
Now the question is, how do I build such a personal brand? The answer is simplicity. Being close to your personality. It evolves through different phases.
Of course, we need a framework that knits the actions together. I found “MassTrust Blueprint” which is practiced by Digital Deepak that best suited for building such a personal brand.
It has been made up of 6 constructive components.
- Learn skills that are relevant to your focused segment, i.e., niche.
- Work as a freelancer or as an employee to start applying your learned skills.
- Blog your expertise in serving others to build your brand
- Consult to help people at businesses see results meeting their goals
- Mentor people hand in hand to empower people
- Startup to sell your products and serve people to succeed
Concluding Remarks
All businesses require digital marketing strategies to reach, relate, solve, and serve customers at the forefront. Digital marketing inevitably plays an important role to achieve customer satisfaction and enhance revenues. The three frameworks the “nCATT Marketing Funnel“, the “Integrated Digital Marketing” and the “MassTrust Blueprint” would invariably be the engine, body, and function of your digital marketing.
I hope you found this report useful and helps you develop an actionable strategy for your work ahead. I truly appreciate your drive and sticking to it reading till the end. Onward!
Please leave your comments below or email me to let me know your thoughts.
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