THREAD - Understanding marketing, improving reach and building trust

Any act of communication between a business and the outside world is marketing.

- Our landing page
- Our social media post
- Our offers
- Our product

Everything is marketing.

Goal of marketing?

In words of marketing guru Peter Drucker - "Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy."

To get a customer to buy, there are two crucial steps that marketing should do -

1. Improve reach

Improve discoverability and awareness about the business to increase reach.

2. Build trust

Build trust so that the potential customers feel comfortable buying the product

Marketing activities that can improve reach and discoverability.

- Content Marketing
- Ads
- Events
- PR
- Influencer marketing
- Affiliates, offers and promotions etc.

Content marketing is the most reliable marketing activity.

It works because at the core of the internet is content. Whether you search, scroll social media feeds or watch videos on youtube, or even looking for a utility product, people are engaging with content all the time

People are looking for content that does atleast one of these two things -

1. Educate them - They want to be educated on the problems that they are trying to solve

2. Entertain them - They are bored, have small attention spans. Give them something to feel.

In marketing, when they say **provide value** to attract customers, they mean either educate or entertain them.

Teach people something they didn't know in order to solve their problem or make them laugh.

When people relevant to our domain look for the solution to their problems, we have to be present there with our content. This makes our business inbound discoverable.

Content marketing is the most valuable, meaningful and long term result yielding form of marketing.

Content marketing has few deterrents -

- You have to really know what your customers are looking for and where.

- It's a long game. takes about 6-9 months for this effort to start producing results.

- Producing good content consistently without seeing immediate success is hard

Content marketing also has multifold advantages -

1. The more content you produce, the larger the compounding effect is. Over a period of time it results in better SEO, small gains accumulate and result in massive traffic.

2. The act of producing content and seeing which one performs well give us insight into our customers, which is extremely valuable to base our business and product strategies on.

3. When we educate, it builds trust with potential customers

I have given action steps for getting started with content marketing here in the actual article - https://ramenpotential.com/understanding-marketing

Ads -

Publishing ads on various platforms can result in quick, short-term discoverability. It's good to try it out and see the results.

It does its job of making your business discoverable but it doesn't really build any trust.

If you want to run ads for your business then

- Find out which platforms does our customers hangout on
- Play around with running ads, analyze results and iterate

Events -

There is a range of events from product launches to webinars that help in improving visibility.

A product launch, done right, puts us in front of the customers. It's not a sustainable stream of traffic but is good to get the word out.

Webinars are a great opportunity to educate people. It results in content that we can use over and over. Gives face time with customers and can be immensely valuable to them.

Marketing activities on their impact on reach and trust they generate with customers.

This thread is part of an article that I wrote about understanding the marketing game, improving reach and building trust, you can read the article here - https://ramenpotential.com/understanding-marketing

Building Trust with marketing -

People buy stuff from the businesses that they trust. Trust is built by being honest, caring, listening, being vulnerable, showing proof/reviews/endorsements from others, being helpful and even seeking help.

Once potential customers discover our product, they are seeking reasons on how it solves their problem and why they should trust us.

On the internet, following are the ways to build trust -

1. Landing page communication
2. Email marketing
3. Taking a stand
4. Showing proof

Landing page -

Landing page is your opportunity to show that you understand their problem and have a solution. Show how the product solves their problems and how it has worked for others.

Potential customers want to feel resonance. Your landing page copy should make them say - "Aha! this is exactly what I have been looking for."

It's as if you were listening to their problem one-to-one. Make them feel listened.

Email marketing -

Once a potential customer discovers you, they might like what they see but might not buy your product right away. At this point, you must offer them some value in exchange of their email. For e.g. an ebook, access to webinar etc.

We can use this email list to consistently educate, entertain, update and engage them.

It's all about providing value here. A good way to think about value here again is simply - educate or entertain them through emails.

Take a stand -

A good way of building trust is to take a stand.

It shows that you care for something larger than business, that you are fighting a status quo. It makes people passionate about what you are doing.

They identify with the brand more.