What does Marketing mean to you?
Marketing a generic term for most of the people. The well-known and famous word in entire globe, but the real meaning of the word marketing is hardly known to many.
The word marketing is often confused with sales. The problem is majority of people consider marketing as sales.
In this article we shall understand what marketing is, what sales is, what is difference between marketing and sales and what are similarities between both and the evolution of marketing trends.
SALES = MARKETING, is that TRUE?
And the answer to above is NO. For a majority of people, marketing is same as sales but marketing is much bigger than sales. Like Earth is a huge planet for us but it is just a small part of Galaxy, similarly Sales is a part of the Marketing galaxy and not the galaxy itself.
When I say marketing what comes to your mind, advertisement, Business, Sales…. What else… TV Ads, Newspaper…
YES, you are bit correct, all the above mentioned are part of marketing but not complete marketing. CONFUSED….??? Let me explain!
Marketing starts way before the product is actually born. Marketing starts with the idea generation and with the planning stage and goes up to customer services after the actual product is purchased. An idea stage is pretty vague state of mind and there is less clarity in thoughts but gradually with more and more information pouring into the idea generation phase the thoughts become clear and thus after a lot of addition and deletion to the ideas, thoughts, brainstorming and considering many if’s and but’s and deletion and selection of options a product is drafted.
Marketing has evolved and changed a lot through years but before moving to that lets us understand different components of Marketing.
The components of Marketing
The components of Marketing are the prime foundation and a right component is something that will help you accelerate your growth. The components are popularly known as “p’s” of Marketing
- Products / Services – This is the very first decision and a lot of brainstorming is required before finalizing it. There are 100’s of product offering but what you want to sell and suits your vision and passion is something you have to decide. Before finalizing the product, you do a lot of research, thinking, discussion to finalise on product / products. This would also include researching about the Demand – Supply equation, a product market Fit, and a bit of consumer expectation. Sometimes the expectations can misguide you but most of the time it would show you the right direction. If your product is something that would be coming up for the first time for example introducing a touch screen phone while the button phones are available in marketing, consumer insights won’t help you much since consumers have not experienced it however if you coming up with similar product which are already in market than consumer insights can help you draft the product and can show you direction.
- Price – Price of the product is the amount of money that the customer is willing to pay for purchasing your products/services. The price is the product’s real and perceived value, and is considered after a lot of add ups like Procurement of raw material, Processing cost, Packing Cost, Labour cost, transportation cost, Salaries, Advertisement cost, and all that anyone would spend to make the product/service available to the customer for consumption including the profit margins. The customer will compare the product quality and price with other similar products available in market and make a decision so the price of product should cover all your expenses and even your profit margin yet be at competitive rate. some cases, where business may raise the price to give the product the appearance of being a luxury. Alternatively, they may lower the price so more consumers can try the product. It would depend from product to product and market to market.
- Distribution also known as Place – Place in simple where your products / services are available. The definition of place has changed over the years with the penetration of internet and online shopping. The major boost has also come in the field of education products with the Corona pandemic hitting the world, all education has gone online and complete delivery of education products is done online. Isn’t this a disruption for education industry? Now the place of availability of products is not restricted to physical location, it can also be your online store. Place in simple language means where can a customer purchase your products and services.
- Promotion – As the word Suggest, to promote. In simple language it means that you have to push your product / service for customers to buy, make them aware that your product / service exists in this world. It includes everything from print advertisement, television advertisement, paper inserts, outdoor advertisement, offers and deals on your product, and also this includes the digital marketing too. Every promotion has a cost to it and in promotion we calculate how much increase in sales or customer addition is as a result of a particular promotion, some we are able to track some we are not able to track. In offline promotions it is difficult to track where the conversion of sales happens, but in digital platforms it is possible to track and it is evolving with various software’s and applications available and also evolving of technology.
Above 4 points are the base of marketing and product/service offering and above is told in a brief summary, each individual point has their own ways and methods and each topic is a big subject to understand in detail. We shall see each topic in detail in further articles but let us understand it in simple terms with below example
Now suppose you have selected and finalized on your product and your revenue target finalized is at 1 crore a 
month or year.
So if we see the pricing it can be Rs.100 which would mean it would be a common utility product for mass population as and how we move our price range from Rs. 100 to Rs. 1000 to Rs. 10000 to Rs. 100000 the customer whom we offer the wish to offer our product / service becomes defined and selective. Rs. 100000 Product / service not all would buy and even if many are willing to buy not many are able to afford the same.
What we are seeing here is the product we wish to sell helps us define the pricing and based on our pricing we define our customer and that would help us shortlist the distribution and take decision where should be our product/ service be available.
Hurray !! now first 3 things are in place so now the fourth thing to look into is the promotion part and pushing the product for customer to buy. After a certain period of time the product will become famous and well known, so the money spent on promotion would come down. It can never become zero as some awareness, product deals, brand building all is required continuously even after the product becomes famous, however the money spend and the ways to promote would change.
What is difference between traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing
What are part of Traditional Marketing
- TV Ads
- Radio
- Print and News paper Ads
- Hoarding and other outdoor advertisement
- Product deals
- And so on
India has TVs in 197 Million homes out of 298 Million homes. With the average of 4-5 members per household, TV has a reach of about 800 million to 1 Billion people. The reach of digital marketing is nowhere close to TV based on numbers alone.
TV ad helps to reach millions of customer at a go, although the TV ads are costly but when we check the reach and penetration, per customer reach cost is very minimal. For example if I pay 1 Crore on TV ad budget that will reach 2 Crore audience, my per person reach would come to only 50 ps. That’s the power of TV ad and it will not be correct to say that Digital Marketing is the future and TV ads will not work in future. They would definitely work and TV ads and digital marketing would go hand in hand and it will completely depend on your product and marketing budget to decide which platform and which channel to use to promote your product.
Digital Marketing helps to personalize and customize the segment of customers who should see your products rather than all people (relevant and irrelevant) people seeing your promotion which is not possible in traditional marketing. Fine tune in Digital Marketing is possible.
How does digital Marketing Promotions work?
The key aspect of the promotion is to create a CATT Marketing Funnel.
What is Niche?
Niche is the selection of your product and services.
The revenue or wealth that can be generated is Niche to the power of CATT and this is a continues process.
What is CATT?
- C – Content: Create useful Content that attracts people from your niche. Blog, posts, videos, webinars, etc.
- A – Attention: Drive attention to your content using SEO, websites, Social Media, Paid Ads, Referrals, etc
- T- Trust: Built trust with your audience with trip wires, marketing automation, retargeting etc.
- T – Transaction: Convert your leads into Customers with Natural Sales Method.
Once all the above is continuously happening, then comes sales where we actually give presentation to customers, do the sales pitch, convert the closure of purchase. So what we see is Sales is a gradual process and a part of marketing which is supported by many factors and teams. Like the CATT is a continuous process so is the sales and a combination of all would lead to growth.
Lets Look at the Min map of the components: https://mm.tt/1923441227?t=HhabkJ9oxk
Summary
So what we saw today was a very basic and start of marketing and sales,
- we saw the fundamentals of Marketing and how the myth of Sales = marketing is incorrect.
- How the marketing has evolved?
- Difference Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing
- A short introduction to how digital Marketing work with the help of CATT concept.
Would like to have your feedback on how did you find the topic and what more do you wish to hear.
What topic would you want me to cover in details and in-depth concepts.
Looking forward for your feedback.
Cheers
Sachin Kaushalya
19 May 2021