The Evergreen Fundamentals Of Marketing

Introduction

Learning the fundamentals of marketing is very important in our life. Marketing is all about selling and buying a product or service from the market. It further includes promotion, advertisement, delivery, and media exposure given to the product or service.

The catchy slogans, endorsements, infographics, and design are also an inevitable part of marketing. 

The boom of digital marketing has compelled people to look into the concepts and fundamentals of marketing. Digital marketing is a part of the fundamentals of marketing. 

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Digital is just one of the mediums used to promote a product. Moreover, fundamentals of marketing are applicable in digital marketing as well.

Marketing is the same everywhere. The way we do things digital or through other mediums may change, but the fundamentals of marketing remain the same everywhere.

Laws of marketing

When the fundamentals of marketing are clear in your head, selling or buying a product becomes effortless. According to my knowledge, there are various marketing laws, but I have highlighted only the important ones. 

1. Marketing is a science

Most people think marketing is about creativity, but it is more about science. Marketing is ⅔rd of human psychology and the market.

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Fundamentals of marketing say that marketing starts even before creating a product. It begins with understanding customer needs, so we’ll create a product that fits the customer. 

The definition of marketing concepts may change, but the essence and application of the fundamentals of marketing remain the same as in traditional settings. Hence, it is a science. 

Focus on:

Sending the right message to the right people at the right time and satisfying customer needs with highly efficient products.

If the product is good, then it will sell itself. You won’t need to market it. 

2. Marketing is never-ending

Marketing is a never-ending pursuit. It is a cycle that starts with manufacturing, promoting, selling, follow-ups, and everything in between. As a result, the process is aging continuously with a new product. 

The fundamentals of marketing say you don’t just keep selling. Instead, invest your time in making your existing customers happy and retaining them in the business. 

The cost of acquiring new customers fairly outweighs the cost of retaining them in the business.

Concentrate on building mass trust in your customers. Once you have developed trust, your product will be sold within no time. 

3. Game of perception

Do you remember who the first person to step on the moon was? Everyone knows this, but does anyone remember the 2nd person? Rarely anyone of you would remember.

The fundamentals of marketing say that marketing is all about perception; it is a game of perception. Marketing is a means to an end. 

People say marketing is manipulating people, which is correct to some extent. However, you view the product and its usefulness as essential while buying a product. 

If your aim is to create unique products that can satisfy the customer’s needs, you will not need marketing. The product will be enough to sell itself.

Example: Zara. It spends only 0.3% on advertisement still it has become one of the most famous brands in the world. 

4. Have a great product

Marketing is an instrument to meet the end, but it is not everything. The product should always be your reality and not marketing. 

Never let marketing take over your product. It may bring profit in the short term, but your product is everything for long-term prosperity. 

Concentrate on building a brand, capturing reputation, and positioning your products in people’s minds. Strong brands need less marketing. 

When you make great products, it will convert your existing customers into brand ambassadors. Word of mouth is the best publicity and channel of marketing your product can ever have. 

Advertisement, copywriting, and sales copy are all components of marketing. 

Example: Google has built such a brand and search engine for the people who go there to search for anything they want. Furthermore, the advertising and marketing cost of Google is very low.

Branding

Branding is all about creating a positive perception in the minds of our audience with the help of designs, logos, themes, missions, advertisements, and such.

It is an efficient way for a customer to quickly identify and recognize your business. 

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The five-element of branding are as follows:

Brand position

This element is all about knowing who is your target audience, its unique features, what the organization does, etc. 

Brand promise

The brand promise is the delivery that an organization, together with the employees, partners, and entrepreneur, agrees to deliver to the customer or market. 

Brand personality

Some unique traits and uses that an organization should illustrate inside and outside the organization. 

Brand story

A company’s history, credibility, value, and summary of products and services the company sells together to make the brand story. 

Brand association

The unique design of the product, logo, tag line, fonts, and colors that help customers associate with the brand is called brand association. 

How to build a strong branding

1. Be the only one or unique one

The fundamentals of marketing say you should not try to be number one but be the only one in the market. Choosing and becoming a leader in one category is vital for our branding. 

Everyone remembers India’s first prime minister. 

Only a few remember the 2nd one or 3rd one. But everyone remembers the only female Prime Minister of India. So if you can’t be a leader, be unique with a different perspective than others. 

2. Become a household name

Take your brand name and convert it into a verb by being a market leader. Example Xerox, Google, and Zoom have become universal verbs. No one says let’s go to the search engine, but everyone says let’s google it. This is the true potential of good branding.

If becoming a leader in a particular category is not feasible as there are many competitors, you can select a sub-category. Use marketing as a means to build a strong brand. 

3. Create sub-categories

Once you have created a strong brand, people will remember you. The cost of your marketing and acquisition will go down. With a strong brand presence, people will automatically come to you. 

4. Competitive market

New entrepreneurs are usually very wary of entering a competitive market. They want to start with a non-competitive market where it is easy to make profits. This is not a wise strategy. Instead, you should compete in a competitive market with many customers. 

More customers will lead to more profits. Have a unique angle and selling proposition to compete in such a market. 

Personal branding

Personal branding is making a conscious effort to create a positive public perception of a person and positioning them as authoritative figures. It also includes promoting oneself by telling people your story, experience, skills, and personality. A personal brand is an effective way to differentiate yourself in the market and among other people.  

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Some reasons why personal branding is important?

• Best known will always beat the best. Hence, it is necessary to increase the visibility of your personal brand for people to reach out to you. 
• People want to hear from the people, not the brand. It enhances their trust, communication, and understanding. 
• Personal brands can give birth to many brands with their influence. It acts as an influencer or brand ambassador for the companies. 
• Your personal brand will be more influential at the starting stage, but your company can become more significant with time than your personal brand. 
• In order to establish a solid personal brand, make it personal and profound. Connect more closely and interact regularly. 

Example: Mark Zuckerberg is a personal brand, while Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsaap, are all their sub-brands and companies. 

How to evolve your personal brand?

To evolve your personal brand, you have to follow 6 steps.

1. Learn

Learn a new skill, technique, or process. The 3 aspects of ultra learning include understanding the concepts, remembering the facts, and practicing the steps. To grow in this ever-changing marketing, you have to constantly develop yourself and learn new things.

Example: Learning digital marketing through a course. 

2. Work

Acquiring a new skill is not enough. You have to implement the skills and knowledge in a practical setting. The best way to develop this skill is by getting a job relating to that skill. It can be a hardcore job or small freelancing. Remember, tiny efforts put in every day contribute to something great tomorrow. 

Example: Taking a job or freelance project in the digital marketing field. 

3. Blog

Start writing about what you have learned and understood. Combine all your experiences and learning. Your expertise and understanding, combined with writing, will start molding your personal brand. Don’t worry if you are not good. Concentrate on being 1% better every day. Be consistent, and you will soon be a good writer. 

Example: Start a blog named DigitalGuru to share your thoughts, tips, and experiences about digital space. 

4. Consult

With all the accumulated information and experience, you can start giving consultation services to other businesses. Instead of working full-time for them, you can work part-time and guide them to do things.

Example: Becoming a part-time SEO consultant for a company. 

5. Mentor

Mentoring refers to teaching other people who are in the same field. Teaching something helps to scale your understanding of that topic to new levels. So teach someone something you know. You can even build your own channel on YouTube, where you teach a topic. 

Example: Starting a youtube channel that teaches people concepts of digital marketing. 

6. Startup

With the above-given steps, you would have developed a deep understanding and mastery of the topic. You can market and sell a product or service that can solve people’s problems with the available data and learnings. 

Example: Creating and selling a digital marketing course for people. 

Importance of marketing mastery today

The fundamentals of marketing suggest that though marketing may evolve in the future, its fundamental base will remain the same. The evolution of digital marketing has opened new doors for people, but the concepts of branding, selling, and advertisements still remain the same. 

The way we execute marketing may evolve in different ways, like Traditional ads vs. Facebook ads, but the core remains the same. 

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Some critical factors to consider about the fundamentals of marketing are:

• Marketing has a long shelf life because it is deep-rooted in the psychology of the human mind. Increase your understanding of the market to understand it properly. 
• No update or robot can replace marketing and sales activities. It is all about perceptions that are created by humans, not robots. 
• Marketing has been in our life for a long period. It had existed since the dawn of our civilization when the first market square evolved. Just the way we do it today has changed a lot. 
• We have to invest in fields like research and development, manufacturing, and packaging to make the product. No direct ROI is involved in these fields. Marketing is the most valuable field that gives immediate returns. 
• Outsourcing your marketing entirely is not beneficial. Marketing is the backbone of a company, and any entrepreneur should at least have some marketing knowledge. If outsourcing is inevitable, the entrepreneur should create the roadmap, and only the process should be outsourced. 
• You will have a safe future if you know marketing and sales because marketing is a never-ending field. The digital marketing era suggests you should have knowledge about traffic generation along with sales and marketing. 

Communication skills

Communication is a fundamental aspect of business in traditional or modern settings. The only difference being the traditional setting uses more verbal communication, while the modern environment uses written communication as a medium to share information. 

The fundamentals of marketing are dependent on good business communication skills. If your product is good and solves customer problems, you just have to communicate well, and the product will sell itself. No need for lengthy negotiations and discussions. 

People often complain that communication manipulates the crowd into buying the wrong product. This is sometimes true because people use communication as a tool to gain profits. But such communication is not fruitful for long-term success and associations. 

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How to enhance your communication skills

• Good communication is not about clean, sophisticated English. Nor is it about the perfect grammar and vocabulary. If you can transform your thoughts and make other people understand them, you are an efficient communicator. 
• Use simple language and words. Write like you are talking to them. Understand your target audience and tackle them with efficiency. 
• Join the conversation in people’s minds. Know what they are thinking and start communicating about it to have their undivided attention. 
• Example: Starting your conversation with questions like: Are you interested in knowing how SEO works? Is an excellent start to selling your digital marketing course. 
• Increase your interaction with your target audience to get more accurate information about customer needs and the fundamentals of marketing. Digital mediums have made interaction with customers hassle-free, fast and straightforward.
• The best way to improve your communication is by writing a lot. The more you write, the better you get at both verbal as well as written interaction. It slows your thought process by bringing clarity and creativity to your mind.

Direct response marketing

Direct response marketing is a process wherein an advertisement, website, videos, etc., are designed to encourage our viewers to take instant actions.

The fundamentals of marketing say that direct marketing is used to trigger immediate response and increase lead generation. 

Most people who run ads in newspapers or radios cannot analyze if the ad worked or not. Marketing executives who run branding campaigns are also unable to measure the results. 

Increased brand awareness is not a measure but is a crucial fundamental of marketing and success. 

Direct marketing helps increase brand awareness, promotes long-term engagement, direct selling, ROI, and decreases cost. 

Hence, direct marketing becomes essential. 

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Things you should know about direct marketing.

• Direct marketing is most valuable, especially in the starting stage of any business. With digital marketing, even a small startup can earn immensely with direct marketing. 
• It easily tracks and measures direct marketing ad responses along with leads generated per campaign. 
• Direct marketing helps establish a direct link of communication with the prospects using the opt-in forms. 
• It helps target only those who have shown interest in the brand or product. This saves a lot of the sales team’s time and efforts which were wasted on the cold leads. 
• Sign up, register, call, purchase, links to buy, share, subscribe, landing pages, and likes in exchange for some irresistible offers are examples of direct response marketing. 

Integrated digital marketing

An integrated marketing channel sends a unified, collaborative, and holistic message across all the channels your business or brand uses. Integrating all the marketing channels reduces the risk of sending mixed or confusing information about your brand, product, or company. 

Sending a unified and holistic message through all channels boosts awareness, favorability, uniformity, and familiarity, which in turn increases the buyer’s intent. 

Modern communication means are scattered over various platforms like Facebook, company forums, Instagram, Linkedin, company blogs, etc. It becomes essential that you send the right message across all the channels. Otherwise, you will lose your customers, reputation, and money. 

How to integrate your marketing channels?

• Before starting your business, decide the ultimate goal of your company. After that, keep the goal in mind and draw your marketing campaigns around that theme. This will reduce confusion and give you an anchor or theme for your company. 
• Choose the right marketing channel. Among the hoard of channels available in the market, you have to choose the best channels for your business. 
• For a small startup, it is better to start with fewer channels. As your business grows, you can add channels to your business. You need to be constantly active on your channels producing content every day, which takes time. Small startups have a lot of work to do, and hence fewer channels are perfect for them. 
• Align all your marketing channels to work like a machine. A single platform will not sell your products, be aggressive in creating content and interact with the audience daily. 
• If the workload is too much, use integrated marketing tools like Crowdfire, Buffer, Social pilot, etc., to manage your social media channels and various marketing campaigns. 

Search engine optimization also ranks websites and articles that have executed their content in various unified formats.

Conclusion

The highlight of this article is that marketing traditionally or with modern tools may sometimes differ practically. But the core aspects and fundamentals of marketing were, are, and will always remain identical. Studying various aspects and laws of marketing helps us to better understand our customers, sell our products and make profits. 

Soul potion

Wealth = n^CATT

This is the simple formula for creating wealth in the digital marketing sector. This formula is formulated by Digital Deepak Sir, who has studied the fundamentals of marketing in detail.

1. n or niche

Your wealth and success of your website, store, content, etc., depends on the niche you select. Your niche should be broad enough to win audiences and narrow enough for you to quickly become a leader. Don’t do everything because you will end up with nothing. Riches are in the niches. 

2. Create

You should create amazing, unique, and valuable content for the users. It can be blog posts, videos, infographics, webinars, etc. Your content is your greatest asset to attracting potential clients. 

3. Attention

Next, you should drive more traffic and audience to your content. Use SEO, social media, paid advertisements, and referrals to increase engagement for your content. 

4. Trust

The fundamentals of marketing are built on trust and communication. Don’t go on selling things to everyone. First, you have to build trust in your target audience. Use marketing automation and retargeting for deep marketing. 

5. Transaction

After building trust, you can easily convert leads into customers. These leads show the way to target more natural sales. You don’t have to push customers to buy your product in natural sales with the right target market. They will come to you to buy your product.