How Marketing easily sold Newton for an Apple!

Every one of us is talented in our own unique way. It is all about letting know the world about it. When you do, it brings success the way you define it. For some, it is monetary, for some its love and for some, it is only a sense of personal satisfaction. Its all about how you are marketing yourself!

So when you decide to let the world know about your uniqueness, Marketing comes handy. Today, Let us discuss in brief, how it works.

The Renaissance Man

“Mortals rejoice, that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race!”

Newton, who lived a polymath all his life, has these words written on his tombstone. The Renaissance man was a master of Chemistry, Astronomy, Mathematics, Theology and Physics. But we always remember him as the lazy boy, who slept under an Apple Tree.

With plenty of achievements, inventions and discoveries to his name, he is still known for his Apple Story, which is still debated a myth. But marketing with the backstory makes it easy for every common man to know him, understand his brilliance and celebrate him.

Marketing is Beyond Communicating

Thus marketing any idea, product or even a service needs a backstory, an interesting one. You could have all your creativity juices flowing, but if you don’t acknowledge the science behind marketing, then you cannot be successful with it.

Before creating a product, understanding the need of it in the market is more important. Nobody else better than your target audience or your customer would be the right judge for it. Tailor-make a product that fits their need.

Subsequent to this is the series of communication that sends the right message to the right person at the right time. But everybody mistakes the role of marketing as only that. To remain in the minds of your customer, you need marketing to be from the Eureka moment. This will help them create a story to build a brand and position them rightly in the minds of customers. When you do that you are already building a great product, and it sells by itself.

Marketing’s job, post that, will only be about streamlining the components of it like Advertising, Copywriting and Sales. Nike and Apple are legends for a reason.

Build a Brand, not a Product

Once you have built a strong brand, you will lead the market in your product category. The brand name will become product identity. We have seen the history of Xerox, till up to the Zoom calls, the new office meetings.

Only with a great understanding of the market, you can design such a product in any category. You could even be a leader of the sub-category if you want to. This way you will not just be No.1 in your industry, but the ONLY ONE.

Unlike other wings of the organization, like Production, Manufacturing, HR, Accounting, Administration, investing in Marketing assures Return on Investment. This is why it takes the Founder of the company to be a marketing guy than outsourcing the responsibility to the agency. Any leader who knows to market and sell, is successful.

The Art of Communicating

Every successful marketing campaign depends on the simplicity of the information conveyed by the brand to its audience. It is all about effectively transferring the thoughts, the way it is, rightly to the audience. the Eloquence, Vocabulary and Grammar of the sentence does not matter.

Whenever a brand is communicating, it should be like initiating a conversation in the minds of your consumer, specifically the target audience.

Once you are able to invent a style for yourselves that answers all the questions of the consumers, then you have already addressed most of their concerns in accepting your product. Constantly keep them updated about the progress and innovations in your product. This would create loyalty and customers for lifetime.

Understand the Global Economics

Every purchase of a product or service is impacted by the purchasing capacity of your target audience, which in turn is impacted by the economy of their country. So you should make your decisions based on the economics of the country of your target audience.

Primarily focus on the developed countries where the spending population is high and could easily afford to their wants and their needs. Even recession in such countries is only a test to weed out the weak leaving the strong companies, stand.

Books Suggestions: Economics101 by Alfred Mill, Currency Wars by James Rickards and Capital by Thomas Pickety.

Evolution of Marketing

Ever since the concept of marketing came in to the world, it has evolved along with the seller and buyer perceptions. Even to day, the type of marketing required for the product or service ranges from Traditional to Digital Marketing.

There are still consumers who could only be reached vide a traditional marketing way. Print, Television & Radio Ads still sell like hot cakes. They in fact have now compartmentalized themselves for greater reach in terms of circulation or show timings.

Digital marketing on the other hand, is instant and has a larger young database of global consumers. These are times of Direct Response Marketing, where success of a marketing campaign is measurable instantly. They are even beautified colourfully with pie chart and bar graph analytics to brainstorm diverting the campaign midway to an alternate direction.

Book to Read: Scientific Marketing by Claude C Hopkins, Adweek Copywriting Hand Book by Joseph Sugarman and Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy.

Will content marketing help transact?

As per the CATT Marketing Funnel, it sure will. Let me brush up your dormant knowledge of equations to give an idea of generating wealth estimated through marketing, scientifically.

Wealth = n^CATT

(n – Niche; C – Content; A – Attention; T – Trust; T – Transaction)

Niche is basically the product that you are trying to sell, so like we had discussed earlier, it has to be created based on the need of consumers. However, if you are not educated enough about the product or even passionate about delivering the same, your business has no future.

As a Freelance Content Writer, you might be well versed with your language and can probably write about everything that is tossed your way. However if you want to be a blogger or a personal brand for a product or services, you need to passionate about and talented in it to make our mark in the industry

The rest of the acronyms in the equation can easily be explained with the integrated Digital Marketing Approach.

Content

• Attract Subscribers to your blog with great content
• Offer Free Value Added Service (E-Books & Newsletters are a catch)
• Create an email base with your subscribers

Attention

• Surprise them with more value added services (An updated E-Book or a preview to your new book)

Trust

• Make them your fans (a regular visitor, subscriber & responder are few)
• Initiate Email Marketing (sending out content on a regular basis, making them feel you are connected with them always)

Transact

• When they trust you for your service, you can lead them to Transact

Power of Personal Branding

The quote is used to begin this article struck hard on me.

“Best known will always beat the best”

This simply defines the success of marketing. If you are remembered for an idea, product or a service, you become the face of it. In the language of marketing, you are the brand ambassador.

A great product makes every consumer of it, a brand ambassador. And then there are also people who become a brand themselves. Thanks to the digital world and its throne social media, people are closely watching their heroes’ lives day in and day out. Every post of them becomes a life changing meme; every word of them becomes a trending quote. They are blinded to an extent that anything shared by these people, influence the buying crowd.

Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Mahendra Singh Dhoni are great examples. Why else do you think the whole country, India, even most part of the world is crying over Dhoni’s retirement, as I type this.

Let us look at the business model of the personal branding:

Learn – Make it a point to learn new skill through concepts, facts and procedures. Question the facts and look around for convincing answers.

Book Suggestion : Ultra Learning

Work – A good read is a great inspiration. However without any action, the activity is only a time killer. So put your new found skill to work

Blog – Writing about what you learned would help your understanding even better. I wouldn’t have believed it, if not for this exercise. As I move forward with the article, there has been several revelations and personal improvisations that I’m proud of.

Consult – When you are good at something, help others. It helps you become great at that something. You slowly strengthen your personal brand when your consult other businesses instead of working for them.

Mentor – You may have been a prodigy or learnt it the hard way. It is now your chance to guide your followers skip your mistakes. Enlighten them with your ways, to move forward. An added perk, it also scales up your level of understanding

Start Up – With a proper channel and the rightly designed workshop, you could start up your own training, product or service. Your skills would have by now hones itself with a greater understanding for solving all your business problem.

Conclusion

Newton has a number of miraculous works and discoveries to his credit. But he still is primarily recognised by the Apple incident. But remember, an apple from the tree falls everyday. It is his perception that mattered the most.

Boasting myself a multipotentialite, an amateur version of polymath or a renaissance man, I have to have some honest effort to promote myself a personal brand, if I wish to do. This article may have been an exercise to me, a lesson to you and a reminder to all of us, wanting to make a change to ourselves and the  world.

Marketing is an ocean with ideas swimming all over. Be calm and focused, you can hear the Whale sing to you.

Go ahead and make phew changes. When you click this, you will know, I have already begun. Good luck to you too.