Why Marketing Is The Key To Successful Blogging?

Why do the majority of blogs fail in their first year? What goes wrong with these blogs or online businesses. Is it content creation or marketing?

There can be many different reasons for a blog’s failure the most common reason that stands out is not treating the blog as a business.

Bloggers keep cranking content hoping more content will generate more traffic. But after months of effort, they find little or no traffic on their site. They are dejected and they decide to quit.

Want to stay put and fight, then you need to brush up on your business skills. Although there are many components that make up a business. But marketing will give you the most bang for your buck (read ROI).

In this article, we discuss the basics of marketing and how it relates to the digital marketing space. We will also cover why we need to learn marketing for long-term business success.

When you have a blog or a youtube channel or any other online platform you are operating in the digital marketing space.

The word digital marketing is made up of two words DIGITAL and MARKETING.

The digital part of DM deals with the use of digital tools and methods. This area is highly dynamic, new tools appear and old ones become obsolete. So have to keep learning new tools and technologies continuously.

In contrast, marketing has a long shelf life as it is rooted in human psychology. Human actions are guided by fear or pleasure. We want to avoid fear or pain and be attracted to pleasure or happiness.

So, let’s get our fundamental rights.

The Fundamentals Of Marketing

The basic idea behind marketing is to profit through customer satisfaction. Marketing starts even before creating a product. Keeping these facts in mind, let’s discuss the building blocks.

The building blocks of Marketing are:

• Target Market or the Niche
• Customer Need or pain points
• Integrated marketing – Methods to reach the target audience with a solution.
• Profitability – Earnings

The process of marketing starts before even the creation of the product. To create a self-selling product we need to understand the needs and wants of our target audience.

We need to gather, compile and study the market data in order to build a successful product around the need of our customers. Therefore it is more of a science than an art.

After the creation of the product. We need to reach out to the right customer with the right message and at the right time,

The main aim of connecting with your audience should be to build trust. Trust helps the business in generating new customers and keeping the existing customers happy.

Digital marketing is a tool to reach your target audience. To engage the audience you need to create a useful product and build your brand around it. Building a brand will help your audience in remembering you.

Better visibility of your brand creates more awareness of your products. In this process, you gain the trust of the masses. This trust factor helps the product is selling itself without any effort.

By creating a brand around your product you improve trust and able to create a good perception of your products or services. Marketing is a game of perception and your product is rooted in reality and must validate the perception created in the minds of the customers.

Always keep in mind that a good product is more important than marketing. A good product will require little to no marketing and will sell itself. The best products are able to convert the customers into a brand ambassador.

These brand ambassadors help sell the product with the word of mouth. Word Of Mouth is the best form of marketing channel ever created.

These are a few of the components of marketing:

• Advertising
• Copywriting
• Sales

In nutshell, other than the creation of the product. It also helps your target audience discover the product. It creates a good perception of your product/brand.

Why Learn Marketing?

Here are some of the reasons:

Marketing is deeply connected to human psychology and perception. By understanding marketing, you understand more about human behaviour, motivations and pain points. This will help you in understanding your target audience better.

• Marketing is an evergreen subject and seldom changes. So whatever you learn about will help you in the long run.
• Unlike other parts of the business like production, manufacturing, HR, Accounting and Administration. Marketing gives you an immediate return on investment (ROI).
• It helps in improving your communication skills. You interact with others and develop tactics and skills in dealing with different types of people.
• It helps you learn and cope up with your competitors.
• It helps you in improving your conversions and sales.
• If you acquire the marketing skills you have a safe career. As same skill sets are required to sell or market any type of product.

Important Note: Marketing is such an important component that it should never be outsourced. No outsourced company will put that much effort into it as the founder of the company. The founder of the company should be a marketer.

With the benefits of marketing out of the way, let us now compare traditional and digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing

Traditional marketing or offline marketing includes newspapers, tv, radio, direct mail, phone, outdoor advertising like billboards etc.

Digital marketing includes websites, social media, content marketing, google and Facebook ads and videos etc.

Some of the differences are given below:

Comparing and contrasting traditional and digital marketing. We came to the conclusion that although traditional marketing is the old form of marketing. But with new technologies coming up digital marketing is the way forward.

The Digital Marketing process starts with reaching out to a target audience and ends at the conversion or sale. This process flow is known as the “Funnel”.

To succeed in digital marketing you need to be an expert in creating funnels. The funnels are a roadmap you create for the customer from finding out the product to conversion.

There is a funnel for wealth creation too. This funnel will give you a roadmap to succeed and profit in digital marketing/blogging/youtube etc.

Let’s start our discussion with this funnel known as the CATT marketing funnel.

What Is A CATT Marketing Funnel?

CATT Marketing funnel provides you with a framework for creating wealth. This framework is applicable to both traditional and digital marketing. In short, it can be represented by the following equation:

Wealth = n^CATT

Let me expand the formula and explain it. This will help you to understand and implement it.

• n stands for Niche: The basis of all your wealth creation plan is selecting the right niche. If you get this step all else will fall in place and lead you to success.
• C stands for content: You need to create useful and engaging content for your niche. You can use a different type of content formats like a blog post, videos, audio, images etc
• A stands for Attention: In this step, you drive attention (traffic) to your content using a wide variety of methods like SEO, Social Media Paid Ads and Referrals
• T stand for Trust: Once you get the attention of your target audience. You should start building trust with your audience. You can use tripwires lead magnets to get their email and use automation and retargeting to build a rapport with them.
• T stands for Transaction: The final objective of marketing is conversion. Conversion takes place when the visitor makes a transaction. In this step convert your leads into customers by using natural sales methods.

What Is Integrated Digital Marketing?

Integrated Digital Marketing involves combining multiple strategies that work in sync as a machine for achieving our objective. In this approach, the content takes the center stage and other strategies form the supporting elements.

Here we use the strengths of all the marketing strategies. This helps us in translating it into a compounded effect, greater than the sum total of all the strategies taken together.

Let’s discuss how integrated digital marketing can help you. For example:

When you create engaging and useful content. It is picked up by the search engine and you start getting traffic to your site. Similarly, you share your content on social media and with your email subscribers.

Next, you drive paid traffic to your site using ads like Google or Facebooks ads.

All these will lead to a snowballing effect, signalling search engines that the content is valuable. In turn, search engines will start sending more and more traffic to your site.

This huge spike in traffic will improve your conversions and sales.

Marketing is not only about market research, sales and conversions. It helps help you in branding. Branding creates a positive perception of your products and services and positions you as an authority in your industry.

What Is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is an intentional act of creating a perception around an individual to differentiate yourself from your competitors. It presents you as an authority or thought leader in your industry.

The benefits of personal branding are:

• Connects you to your target audience.
• Differentiates from your competition.
• Improves your visibility.
• Helps to attract new opportunities.
• Improves your confidence.
• Builds your credibility.
• Helps sell products without much effort.
• Establishes you as an expert.

The power of personal branding lies in the fact that people want to hear from people not from brands. They can relate to a human than to an organisation. A personal brand can give rise to many other brands using his or her influence.

A personal brand is an influencer and a brand ambassador for his own companies.

However, there is a downside to building your personal brand. It is not possible to invest in a personal brand and you cannot sell a personal brand.

Next, we will briefly discuss the transformation of a personal brand.

The Evolution Of A Personal Brand

A personal brand evolution starts from being a learner. A learner goes through a series of transformation like a silk work and finally morphs into a startup founder. This evolution cycle is a continuous journey and repeats itself again and again.

Let’s discuss the different stages of the evolution of a personal brand. The first step is to learn as this is the main pillar that supports the whole cycle.

Learn: It is the first and the basic step of evolution. A learner needs to upgrade his knowledge and learn new skills to undertake this journey. Knowledge is a set of concepts, facts and procedures. We need to understand the concepts, remember the facts and practice the procedures

Work: The knowledge that we acquire will not serve any purpose. We need to put the newly acquired knowledge to work. As we go from learning to implementing the knowledge in the real world, we get a better understanding of the concepts. For acquiring practical experience, you can either start your own project, start freelancing or find a job.

Blog: During your work routine, you will solve your customer’s problems. There will a lot of new learning and experiences. You can start a blog and share your experiences with the people in your niche. The act of writing gives you a better understanding of your niche. This is where you start building your personal brand.

Consult: With your blog in place and a good personal brand, You have sufficient work experience and you have mastered the fundamentals. It is time to start consulting other business rather than working for them

Mentor: The consulting phase will further cement your knowledge and skills. As you have gained a wide range of skills in your industry. Now is the time to mentor others who want to follow into foot-steps. Mentoring will scale your understanding to a whole new level.

Startup: As you achieve the mentor status. With this level of expertise that you have gained. You can now create your own products or services by understanding the market and its problems better.

The mass trust blueprint infographic covers all the stages

Read: What does a blogger do?

Conclusion

In this article, we have covered the essentials of marketing that are a must for all digital marketers/bloggers.

Here are the topics that we covered:

• The fundamentals of marketing for digital marketers.
• Why do we need to learn marketing?
• Comparison of traditional and digital marketing
• The CATT marketing funnel.
• The integrated digital marketing and its use.
• What is personal branding?
• The evolution of personal branding and the mass trust blueprint.

Finallly, marketing form the base of digital marketing. A firm grounding in this area will help you in succeeding in digital marketing.

What do you think is the most important according to you?