The Micro-Level To Understanding Marketing
It’s not what you sell that matters as much as how you sell it!
— Brian Halligan, CEO & Co-Founder, HubSpot
Imagine I come to you and tell you that — “Hey! Did you know there’s a great coffee shop that sells goli soda for ₹100!” Or if I said, “Hey! I went to this great coffee shop that sells mind-blowing filter coffee for ₹20 and definitely worth a try!”
Which one would you choose? Well, the choice is definitely yours, but what relates the most is a coffee shop selling mind-blowing coffee that you can afford — catches your attention and sooner or later you want to have it.
Oh well, yes! You need to be a coffee lover first! Come on, I am sure you are one!
So, here comes the cherry on the cake part: A very essential law of marketing is to convey the right message to the right audience at the right time. Rather than leaving your customer confused and lost, it is always a better approach to give them direction.
Marketing is like our GPS, we need to direct our customer from unaware to aware to consideration to intent, evaluate, and purchase. This journey would take a brand a couple of months or years or could be done in a couple of hours. It depends on the value of the product. Like if it is a ₹20 filter coffee, you might just hop on to the next stop being that place. But if it was a product like a car/bike or mobile/laptop it needs thorough checks at each stop (Aware | Consider | Intent | Evaluate | Buy).
So, the next time you plan your marketing, it is always a good idea to segment your audience too. Because every set behaves differently and we cannot cater to each segment with one message. That one message is your brand’s positioning statement which comes over time.
If you had to work on a positioning statement for this coffee shop how would you do it? Like coffee is so generic. It is like the basics of everyone’s routine and people consume cups of coffee/tea without knowing. Share your ideas with me in the comments and let’s have a fun brainstorming exercise on this.
The best positioning statement of a coffee shop is of Cafe Coffee Day — “A lot can happen over a cup of coffee!” I mean this one line says it all. “A lot” can be different perspectives, but the fact of “Can Happen” creates the thrill of some experience that would have. That experience could be a date, a job, a conversation with friends, and more! And clearly, they end the statement with their core product “Coffee”. It cannot be confused with anything else. Brand name and the way they market — Ta-da! Create the perfect match, isn’t it?
Digital Marketing VS Traditional Marketing:
Lately, everything seems so digital, right? It feels like who on earth reads a magazine or watches TV, or drives around the city observing billboards. But traditional marketing is traditional. It takes a longer route to catch you, but when once caught, you are an asset to the brand. Traditional marketing is an extensive approach brand take to convey a branding message, a positioning statement, a big announcement. Do you remember how Amul used traditional marketing approaches to create its presence? Their TV ads on “Taste of India” takes me back in time when as a kid I watched it and told my parents I want to have this and that. It talked to each segment with its right product. The advertisement just did not focus on branding, but also showing the variety. The trust factor was plugged in with the expressions of the cast who showed happiness after consuming, and also the oneness of the entire nation using the same brand. Every element was looked on and conveyed to the viewers. Hence, traditional marketing has pulled a great result for Amul. They advertised on ads. To be honest, until a couple of years back, I used to wait for the morning newspaper to see what the Amul section would showcase today.
Yes, now it is pretty easy to hop on to social media and see what they have to say. But, a lot of us keenly waited for their posts daily. Their billboards were also engaging and specific to current times.
Definitely, Digital Marketing is a great and proven way to market your business in recent times. With most of the world becoming tech-savvy and mobile-driven, it is the need of the hour to shift our focus to digital advertising too. Like traditional marketing, digital marketing also has different mediums and channels to advertise on. And the best part of digital advertising is you get data-driven insights and can reconnect with your audience to talk about your products and services. From strategy to costs, digital marketing might seem all expensive, but the budget is in our hands and so is the strategy. If we learn the hacks to optimize the outcome better — “Boom! We have nailed it!”
There is no winner as to whether one works better than the other, but the winner is how we approach the right message to the right audience at the right time! This is all that matters. So, know who your customers are, know where they spend their time most, build the right marketing message and start talking to them!
CATT Marketing Funnel:
The coffee shop, a basic product, but it still needs to market itself to get customers from across the city to stop by at their coffee shop.
Let’s name this coffee shop — Bean’s Coffee! What would be the CATT funnel to engage, re-engage, and retain their customers?
CATT’s formula to wealth is n^CATT. Where C=Content | A=Attention | T=Trust | T=Transaction.
Content is the way to get your end customer to transact with you. But before a transaction, we need to create a connection that catches the attention of our audience to trust and transact with us!
So, Bean’s Coffee starts with building its strategy. Their main goal is to get customers to their shop. Once they are at the shop, it is a win-win that they would definitely transact. So, the best approach would be to talk about experience building.
The content should be around, how they hosted a small gathering and served different coffees with yummilicious snacks! How their filter coffee is made from authentic ingredients. Share real images or reels of their customers enjoying the space and the coffee. And to top it all, you can give them a discount too that would woo them to just drop in.
The 2nd approach could be: An Inaugural Event → Call food influencers, and local customers to stop by and indulge in coffee tasting, learn about coffee and more from experts. Give them the opportunity to experience your brand to build a rapport that would reach 10 more people and that 10 would reach 100, and you have kickstarted to grow your brand rapidly.
The content would definitely catch the attention of your target audience to have some level of trust to visit you and transact with you. But, the cycle does not stop there. The cycle to re-engage and retain begins. So, keep inviting them, keep conversing with them with your content to keep bringing them back to you.
Have you noticed these “Nukad Chai Waala”? They are the best sales and marketing people we could connect with. They do not sell, they build a rapport. From giving that one cup of cutting chai to a dum to a biscuit carries no transactional effort but the emotional effort of feeling relieved of some stress, feeling calm in the chaos → the experiential value. This is what Bean’s Coffee has to build on.
Integrated Digital Marketing:
The Bean’s Coffee approach to Integrated Marketing would build shareable content. Content around coffee lovers, that connects with the audience and could be shared. Integrated Digital Marketing in general is a holistic approach to reaching your audience. You create one piece of content and share them across different channels to talk to your customers.
From Social Media to Emails to Ads to SEO → Each medium and their channel play a role in conveying the brand’s message to the customer at the right time! Not necessarily all the mediums work the best for you. So, identify which medium is highly used by your audience and focus on building content to reach your audience on that medium. Got it, right?
Personal Branding
Well, do you agree you are a brand and you have your own personality and you have personalised yourself for certain characteristics? We have always been doing our own marketing unknowingly. We talk about what we like/dislike, what we want, how we want, why we want, and every phase we outgrow and adapt.
Personal branding via social media channels has its good and bad sides. The good is you make a difference and you create a difference. You influence people with the best ways to build value through your posts and stories. You mentor them. You lay a path and show them the way forward. Your experiences create valuable output for your audience. Every personal brand is on a mission to convey a niche message to their audience, and build value.
The other side is one view and one critic can open ways to a lot of damage. It is very sensitive as people are on a lookout to banish people. Therefore it is very important to stay neutral politically, gender, culture related. It is very important to share curated content that doesn’t create any difference between you and your audience and amongst them.
So marketing is like a sun, it has many rays, but when you look at the holistic angle it definitely creates a brighter light! Plan, strategize, conceptualize and keep analysing every step to get to where you aim your brand to be!
