Is marketing worth playing a long shot?

If I ask you a question whether marketing can be replaced by automation (AI) what will be your answer? In this era of emerging technologies, we are seeing robotics and artificial intelligence replacing human efforts even in the medical field but is marketing as a skill facing that risk?

Well, the answer is No, it isn’t. Marketing is very much directly proportional to human psychology, it’s an art of understanding the customer needs and his emotions and building a perception of the brand around it. Its one of the career options which has longer shelf life , has immediate ROI and can keep your future secured.

The law of marketing suggests that its neither art nor science and it starts even at the ideation stage of a product since the entire concept revolves around who is your target audience and what do they need. If all the cards are played right in marketing selling becomes very natural and superfluous. The components of marketing includes sales, advertising and copywriting but the process doesn’t stop at selling, it’s a continuous chain where marketing even contributes to retention of the customers. The mantra of marketing is to throw right message at the right time to the right person and thereafter communication has to be strong enough to keep them as customer for life.

Marketing is the reflection of how strong you have built your brand value in the market as the entire marketing strategy is directed towards the same. For creating the right perception of your brand your brand message not only has to be loud and clear but it should also carry a USP which differentiates you from the other market players however niche it can be but when the customers think about a trait your product symbolizes with, the recall value of your brand should be in the top of their mind. For instance; Volvo represents safety and BMW represents luxury.

One of the most important factors of good marketing is good communication skills. It need not be perfect but it should be interpreted by your potential customers in the intended way. The comprehension of your brand message should be in sync with the thoughts running in your customer’s minds. Its all about hitting the right spot in the mind of your target audience, they should instantly connect with your product or service as if it was tailormade for them.

Understanding of global economics plays an important role in understanding your target audience. India as a country can be divided into 3 sections.. Firstly being the affluent side having access to all luxuries like laptop, good spending capacity, credit card, good command on English and living in top 10 cities of India. The idea of a business should always be to tap this section as the conversion ratio will be higher considering their purchasing power. But in the initial stage we need to start with the bottom section so as in to create a mass product as the obvious graph is mass to luxury. How can this decide our financial goal is as follows:

More no. of customers * Low price of product = x amount

But the same x amount can be achieved by

Less no. of customers * High price of product as well.

- The entire game is who is your target audience, how niche you want to go and on the basis of that you build your long term marketing strategy.

Now, we are living in the era of digital marketing but has traditional marketing become an obsolete concept? NO

For certain products and services traditional marketing will always be the best choice Example: Mass product since TV ads still cater to 800 million to 1 billion people which is far more that the numbers that digital marketing has achieved.

Radio and newspaper also has a wide reach.

The bottom line is that a lot depends on what kind of product or service you are selling and the medium of marketing is decided according.

For instance if your audience is mainly English speaking , community based, having good spending power, have credit card, and you need to target a specific set of audience then digital marketing is the best choice. Even its reach can be estimated to be 100 million users. The main disadvantage of traditional marketing is that it cannot be personalized while that accounts to be the strength of digital marketing as you can totally refine he people you want to target and choose your social media channel accordingly like age, city, gender etc

Direct Response marketing is a type of marketing which is designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging prospects to take a specific action — as quoted by marketing evolution.com. its main purpose is to be able to track the performance of your campaigns , measure success and then amend accordingly. A measurable result can add lots of value to your future campaigns and strategy.

Some examples can be:

Ad in newspaper havi9ng phone no. to call

Ads leading to a landing page with a lead form

Marketing can also be represented by the CATT framework according to which

Wealth = n^CATT

Where: n = Niche

C= Content

A= Attention

T= Trust

T= Transactions

It’s a cycle whereby useful content helps to attract your niche, drive them to your website and creates interest in your product or service. To drive traffic to your contact we need tools like social media, paid ads and referrals. The main goal is to win the trust of your audience where direct marketing plays a vital role as it ensures the communication is more personalized than general. All these efforts are planned in such a way that it triggers the customers to take an action and stay loyal to the brand.

Lastly, the digital marketing has to a set of integrated efforts where we use different methods all together like email marketing, paid advertising etc to draw attention of customers. In this era building a personal brand is equally important as the customer should relate to you and your product and service should be a direct reflection of you so that the trust is built and maintained in the most effective way.