Marketing for Beginners: No Bull$#!T Guide

Marketing for beginners could be challenging. This is because marketing changes its way every year.

The chaos, the trends, the platform – Everything changes. But one thing that remains the same is consistency & creativity. This guide to marketing for beginners will help you through ambiguity.

To understand how digital marketing works, I will divide this guide into 3 parts:

1. Technical Aspect
2. Creative Aspect
3. Management Aspect

1. Marketing for Beginners: Technical Aspect

To start with, learn how marketing works, which platforms you can use, and how to optimize to make sure your work reaches the right audience at the right time.

Technical marketing deals with everything that goes behind the curtain.

Basic Understanding of Technical Marketing

Technical marketing is the skill of leveraging your technical knowledge and expertise to market a product or service. It includes creating data-driven strategies to reach the right audience creatively.

To start with marketing a product, you need to understand:

1. The technical aspects of that product
2. The importance of that product, and
3. Who is the right audience?

Importance of Technical Marketing

As a part of the marketing for beginners guide, let’s first discuss the importance of technical marketing.

1. Easily communicating complex concepts

You must have heard the phrase “Explain to me like I’m 5 years old”.

Imagine if Tim Cook said “We use voice queries and a natural-language Processing based on statistical models to generate answers for your use” rather than demonstrating “Hey Siri, What’s the Weather like?” What do you think the audience would understand?

Great marketers understand the technical complexities of a product. They break them down into simpler yet effective messages that resonates with their target audience, thus, establishing the company as a brand.

2. Credibility and Trust

By delving deeper into the product or a service, marketers establish trust, credibility, and long-term relationships with their audience.

3. Optimizing ROI

Technical marketing majorly depends on data-driven insights and analytics to understand and measure the success of marketing campaigns, tweak performance, and readjust goals accordingly. They increase their marketing ROI by using tactics like A/B testing, marketing automation, conversion tracking, addressing marketing funnel leaks, etc.

4. Adapting to the tech shifts

After the introduction of AI, the digital environment is evolving every minute. From consumer behaviours to technology trends, marketers need to stay ahead of the curve to ensure their marketing efforts are effective.

5 Pillars of Technical Marketing

Apart from the basic knowledge of the product & its prospective customers, you need to know:

• Technical Writing: You need to have a deep understanding of the product or service being marketed. This includes its technical features, functionalities, competitors, and value proposition. To connect with the tech-savvy audience, marketers need to write eBooks, White Papers, Knowledge base, technical blogs, and brochures.
• Technical SEO: To improve your website’s SEO and visibility, you should know technical SEO. This includes XML sitemap, robots.txt, URL structures, Website architecture, website security, mobile optimization, and much more.
• SEM/Paid Ads: Running ads on Google and social media platforms to reach the target audience. Once, you have the data, optimize the budget and target to reach desired goals.
• Analytics: Data is everything in marketing. Technical marketers are responsible for analyzing the data to understand what drives customer loyalties and identifying potential marketing funnel leaks. This helps them improve the marketing campaigns and ROI.
• Basic understanding of Coding: Languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or Python can help with managing the CMS. In fact, by applying coding knowledge, marketers can set up accurate tracking systems for UI/UX and campaign performance.

Best 20 Tools for Technical Marketing

For Website Performance:

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics

For SEO & Content Performance:

• Ahrefs
• Google Analytics
• SEMrush
• HubSpot

For Advertising:

• Facebook Ads Manager
• LinkedIn Campaign Manager
• Google AdWords

For understanding user-behaviour:

• Hotjar
• Optimizely
• CrazyEgg
• Google Tag Manager

For Email Campaigns:

• Mailchimp
• MailerLite

For Content Scheduling:

• BuzzSumo
• Hootsuite
• Buffer

For Designing:

• Canva
• Adobe Creative Suite

2. Marketing for Beginners: Creative Marketing

You may be seeing hundreds and thousands of Ads, content, and promotion reels, but there’s only a few that’s stuck with you, right?

What works for one brand, may not work for another.

Creative marketing involves “out-of-the box” strategies and creative thinking to promote a product or service. In today’s world, where we’re swamped by content, it’s crucial to create content that engages with your customers on an emotional level, evokes actions and sparks curiosity.

Basic Understanding of Creativity in Marketing

Here are 5 pillars that help you pave your way into creative marketing:

1. Understanding Your Customers

You should be able to answer what matters to your audience, their pain points, their needs, and preferences. To start with, you should conduct market research, develop insights, run ads, and gather data to further narrow down your ideal customer.

2. Story writing

To make your stories compelling, evoke emotions and establish a long-lasting connection with your audience, you need to be a storyteller. Here’s an example of Burger King’s and McDonald’s playful rivalry that took advantage of their humour and made an impact on their audience

3. Continuous innovation

I can’t emphasize enough on the importance of staying ahead of the curve. Experiment with technology, formats, and ideas to capture the attention of your audience. Once you know what works for your audience, keep on improving that.

4. Stay Authentic

For creative marketers, the first challenge is product proposition and keeping it authentic. Stay true to your brand’s values, establish credibility, and operate transparently. Authentic brands are adaptable and responsive to changes and feedback.

5. Social Responsibility

A creative brand establishes a commitment to environment. Their genuine drive to do good, source ethically, establish sustainable work practices, and encourage community engagement makes them distinguished.

7 Best Strategies for Creative Marketing

Marketing for beginners encompasses various aspects; one of the most crucial the creative one.

1. Content Marketing: Once you have done market research, you need to create strategies for content marketing. Based on the data, create engaging and shareable content like blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, and interactive experiences – that inspires, entertains, and educates your readers.

2. Influencer Marketing: Start by shortlisting the influencers in your niche. Collaborate with who aligns with your brand values and voice, and appeals to your audience. Leverage their reach and credibility to amplify your message.

3. User Generated Content (UGC): One of the most crucial aspect in marketing is engaging and encouraging your audience. With UGC, you encourage your customers to create and share content featuring your products or services. This helps build a rapport and amplify your brand reach as well as authenticity.

4. Interactive Marketing: Create quizzes, games, polls, or giveaways to engage your customers and establish a two-way communication.

5. Experiential Marketing: Experience marketing known as engagement marketing. It is divided into 5 dimensions: emotional, thinking, sensory, action, and associative experience. Companies use experiential marketing to humanize their products in an interactive way. This helps the customers understand the products and its relation to their own lives.

6. Cause Marketing: When you’re running a business, it becomes an inherent responsibility to give back to the society. Therefore, you need to align your brand with environmental or social causes that resonate with your audience’s core values. This creates an everlasting positive impact on the people.

7. Guerrilla Marketing: Create attention-grabbing marketing campaigns and stunts in an unexpected locations. With so much noise in marketing, it is crucial to think out of the box and generate buzz amongst audience.

3. Marketing for Beginners: Marketing Management

Management marketing is seeing the bigger picture for the company. You need to start questioning yourself “What are the company’s goals for the next 6 months?”, “What is ideal customer?”, “What Makes our customers stay with us?” etc.

Marketing management is a strategic approach that combines planning, organizing, directing and controlling the company’s marketing efforts. It blends analytical and leadership skills to drive marketing success. The ultimate goal is to increase profits whilst creating a positive image and nurturing its customers.

This section will cover essential elements and tactics used to excel in managing marketing.

7 Pillars of Management Marketing

Here are 7 pillars of marketing management you should know:

1. Market Research

Conducting research to understand your ideal customer. This includes diving deep into market trends, needs, competition, and future prospects. The more specific your customer segmentation is, the better will be the results.

2. Strategic Planning

Start by developing SMART goals. This should include both short-term and long-term goals with a well laid out roadmap to achieve them.

3. Resource Allocation

Once you’ve done your research and set goals, it’s time to allocate resources for different marketing efforts. For example, setting a budget of $2,000 for influencer marketing, $1,000 for Google Ads, and likewise.

4. Brand Management

Continuous efforts are required to build and maintain a strong brand reputation and identity.

5. Nurturing Customers

Strategize how do you want to create value for your customers. Prioritize their needs and get regular feedbacks that will enable you to perform better.

6. Consistency

Ensure your efforts are consistent throughout all the marketing channels. This helps in creating a unified image for the company.

7. Relationship Building

Without transparency and relationship with the company, you cannot build a brand. Since customers are the foundation of a company, it is important to keep them as a priority when taking decisions.

Tools for Marketing Management

1. Marketing Automation: HubSpot, MailChimp, Salesforce, Zapier.
2. Analytics: Google Analytics, Ahrefs, HotJar, SEMrush, Zoho.
3. Internal Communication: Gmail, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Skype.
4. Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, Wix, Shopify, etc.
5. Social Media Management: Canva, Zoho Social, HootSuite, Buffer, CoSchedule, Sendible.
6. CRM Marketing: Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho Corporates, Freshsales, Zendesk, Pipedrive.

How to Create a Marketing Plan?

Creating a marketing plan involves multiple steps and tons of research. A comprehensive marketing plan involves market research, setting goals, creating strategies to achieve those goals in an efficient and effective manner.

Don’t worry, I’ve broken down each and every step for you. Here are 7 simple steps you can follow:

1. Market Research & Analysis

Using SWOT Analysis, identify your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Along with that, dig deeper into the competition and market trends to understand the bigger picture. This will enable you to position yourself in the market and create a vision.

2. Setting SMART Goals

A thumb of rule is to set clear, measurable, and achieve marketing goals. Once the goals are set, align your marketing objectives with the overall organization’s goals.

3. Determining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are individual metrics that help measure the performance of marketing campaigns. The most popular KPIs are cost per acquisition, conversion rate, and social engagement.

4. Set a Budget

Make sure your budget is realistic and aligns well with the overall marketing objectives. Consider all the expenses from advertising to hiring and allocate accordingly.

5. Plan Implementation

This is one of the most crucial parts of the marketing planning. Here you will give detailed tasks, actions to be done, people responsible along with a timeline.

Components

• Specific Actions: List of short-term and long-term tasks required to achieve a certain goal.
• Responsibilities: Assign tasks to team members and departments to ensure accountability.
• Timeline: Give them a deadline to complete the tasks.
• Setting Goals: Goals can be divided into short-term goals for a sense of motivation and achievement.

This section will also include marketing tools needed to ensure success of tasks. For example, for communication, specify what mediums you’d prefer like Slack, Teams, Gmail etc. For assigning the tasks, it could be Trello, Asana, or Google Sheets.

6. Analysis & Improvisation

Set up a system to track, analyze, and improve the performance of your marketing efforts. For example, using Google Analytics to monitor the mediums for traffic or which country is your highest traffic from.

All these reports and data will help in narrowing down your marketing efforts for the best results.

Pro-Tip

Successful marketing requires an integrated efforts. Without planning and aligning the goals across the departments, you never achieve the desired results. In fact, a good marketing efforts is always experimenting different strategies and sticking with the one that resonates with its target audience.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to take your customers’ feedback and improve based on their reviews.

In this marketing for beginners guide, I’ve covered most important aspects to begin your journey. If you have any questions, feel free to reach [email protected].