If you want to start a business and do not know which business works well. Here are the basics which help you to start your business
Sell yourself before your products/services
Niche selection
First and foremost, starting a business is finding the right niche that generates profits without spending too much on marketing. We have to consider the following three things to find the
- Your Passion (You find interest to work on it)
- Your Talent (Easy for you)
- Market need (Customer interest)
You have to derive your niche from the intersection of these three things as shown in the picture
CATT Marketing Funnel and Framework
- Once you are ready with your niche, you need to learn more about our niche and once you have some knowledge and experience, you need to start writing useful content around your niche.
- Grab attention by posting the content in the blogs and sending emails and social media posts to read your content.
- Generate trust in the readers, which can be achieved by more useful information written in your blogs. Art readers to provide comments and get positive reviews
- If all the above things work well, that will lead to a transaction.
Personal Branding
Being an expert in something not enough, people should be aware of it. You have to create this awareness by branding yourself. You have to market yourself. People want to hear from people not from brands.
The personal brand becomes an influencer and a brand ambassador for the companies that you run.
Evolution of a Personal Brand
Learn: Learn the skill in which you are interested. Understand the concepts, facts and procedures and practise them
Work: leverage your learning into your work. Practice more and implement in real-world which gives you a better understanding
Blog: Write what you have learnt and experienced through your implementation. Your writing can improve your understanding and develops your personal branding
Consult: your blogs can get you the customers and seek your consultation in your skill. Consult other businesses instead of working for them.
Mentor: Train others to get yourself improved within the skill. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to the next level.
Start-up: with all the above steps, you will become the master in that particular skill and ability to start your business without fear.
Building Mass Trust:
As the personal brand cannot be invested, and it cannot be sold, create a financial goal and plan to achieve it by building Mass Trust.
Start with the low-priced product and attract more customers. When you have a customer base who trust in you, you can start selling other premium products/services. All the customers may not buy these premium things from you. However, your earnings can grow with these premium products. One-tenth of your customer base may buy your product ten times pricier than your previous product, which helps balance your revenue with less marketing efforts.
Marketing Fundamentals
Marketing starts much before creating a product. Marketing is not creativity but a science that is rooted in human psychology to understand the market. Marketing is a game of perception. Marketing is giving the right message to the right person at the right time.
If you understand the customer needs and develop a product that helps them, that product sells by itself
Marketing does not stop there, and you have to keep your customer happy and retain as your customers for life.
Adding Digital to your Marketing
Traditional vs Digital marketing
There is no digital marketing without traditional marketing. Digital marketing is the marketing leveraging digital options that we have through the internet.
Traditional Marketing is performing marketing in person or through phone calls or TV/Radio/newspaper advertisements, whereas digital marketing is doing the same thing using Internet media. Nowadays, people are online and spending more time on the internet and social media. This situation created automation in marketing by doing the marketing online
Digital marketing is more efficient when compared to traditional marketing. We can send our marketing material through email to multiple people at a time, and our social media posts can be reached to numerous followers within seconds. Email responses and further follow up can be automated through email automation.
The advantages of digital marketing are, we can personalize the communication and able to do Niche marketing
Direct Response Marketing
Branding campaigns do not give specific, measurable results unless
Direct response is a type of marketing designed to elicit an instant response by encouraging projects to take a specific action
Examples of direct response marketing are
1. A newspaper ad with a phone number to call
2. An ad leading to a landing page with a lead form
3. A sales page with a product with a link to purchase the product
Integrated Digital Marketing Framework
A lot of people will do digital marketing components in silos. If we integrate them rightly, we can improve our marketing with the addition of very minimal efforts. For example, advertise your free content to sell and convert. Give the link to your blogs in your advertising to get the conversion happens.
When people read your blogs, they can subscribe to your newsletter from where we can generate leads using email addresses. Your content can get listed on the search engine.
If you share your content on social media, you can route your followers to your content
The CATT funnel we learnt was the linear. When all this works together, and total momentum is boosting, you can engage traffic in all stages of the CATT funnel we discussed earlier, and the resultant traffic will be many folds.
Given below is the integrated framework to drive the CATT funnel
Conclusion
Understand your niche and develop your personal brand. Marketing starts much before creating a product. Try to be the only one in the market to be number one in the market. Add digital to your marketing but never let marketing becomes more important than your product/services. The great product sells itself
