Fundamentals of marketing

Every wondered the fundamentals of digital marketing, the basics things to think about.

Funnel

Table of Contents

Everything you do in marketing whether it is metrics or strategy or team allocation or tool buying or budget planning or anything you plan, think from funnel perspective. It is not because industry is following but because it shapes your thinking, planning and ideas. And that’s how the user are moving in their journey

When your thoughts are structured, it is easy to funnel that into the journey of the users.

Just to give a short background about these stages:

Example Situation: Deliveroo a food delivery brand want to expand its Market

Consider a brand like Deliveroo – a food delivery service which is going to expand the business in a different geography. Its major markets like SG and UK, the business is already matured. Australia and the Middle East, it’s emerging market. Malaysia could be assumed as a new market in example here we are going to see.

Stage	Online
Awareness	The user is not aware of the brand Deliveroo in malaysia and the service/product it has. They have not seen their advertisement or people mentioning about their brand. So deliveroo will be advertising or doing other way of marketing to increase the awareness of the brand.
Acquisition	People in Australia may already know what is Deliveroo and their service offering like food delivery when they have seen their advertisement or through any other channel. But may not be downloaded their app or opened an account on the website (Meaning users not acquired by Deliveroo)
Activation	People in the Middle East could are already aware of the brand, their service offering, downloaded their apps and website. but may not be engaging with their products or considering to buy their product and still continue to visit restaurants to have their food.However, Users who have not made any order with deliveroo so far
Retention	People in the UK and SG are aware of the brand deliveroo, visited their apps, order food via their app once in a while but may not be loyal enough to keep ordering frequently. Imagine you have a shop in your area, people come to only once which negatively impacts the retention of the service, higher revenue,.
Referral	People refer to others in the real world. How do you make sure all customers ordering on Deliveroo recommend to their friends as well? That way we save spending money on Advertising and other activity and get one user to recommend others. That’s a very important part of growth activity
Revenue	Revenue is not just selling, how to cross sell or up sell or keep getting the users frequently making purchase. This is the way we can increase the customer lifetime value (CLV) of the users.

Marketing Channels and Marketing Professions

Am going with a simple explanation just to give understanding for the beginners

Channel	What is this?	The job title comes like this	Further Actions
Email	You would have received email from your favorite online shop or a blog you have shared your email address to receive updates. This is called Email Marketing	CRM, Marketing Automation specialist,Lifecycle marketing specialist,	Hubspot University,
Organic Search / SEO	You go to google or bing and search for something to read, buy, solve, etc. You see a list of search results. Those list from different website done a job of Search Engine optimization(SEO) to reach that result page. This result is called organic search results	SEO specialist	Neilpatel.com
Paid Search / Search engine Marketing(SEM)	In the same result, you will see 3 -5 results with a word “Ad” in black label or orange color which is paid search ad where companies pay money to google to rank on those results without doing SEO	Search engine Marketer, Google ads specialist, Adwords expert, Performance Marketer, etc.	Adstage blog
Organic Social	Have you had facebook pages ? or you have been following Facebook(FB) pages or Instagram(IG) account or twitter(TW) handle from your favorite product or brand. The status updates you get from them is sort of social activity. All those activities reached out to you are organic social activity. There are a lot more than this	Social Media Marketer,Social Media Comm specialist, Social Community Manager,Social Engagement Manager, etc	bufferapp
Paid social	Some companies paid money to FB, IG and TW to reach you. This activity is called paid social. The objectivity of this activity varies based on business. Some want you to visit their restaurant, traffic to their website, contact details to provide their service, etc	Performance Marketer, Social Advertising expert, Paid social Specialist, Facebook Ad Specialist, etc	Read from here
Affiliate – Partnership	Have you seen bloggers who write about specific products? Or coupon sites where they promote other brand promotions? Or big media writing or showing a video of a company or product? Affiliate companies works on commission and different mode of pricing model Media companies work on partnership with the paid promotion or strategic partnership.	Affiliate marketer,Partnership Manager, bit of Public Relation Manager, etc	Nothing i can think of
Content Marketing	Content Marketing is something that comes into every channel activity. On every channel we speak about our brand, there is content strategy handled to increase the effectiveness of each channel. For example: Have you anytime seen content/images comes from Tom Jerry is with vulgar or violence? No. Mountain Dew is always adventurous? Similarly when we send out post in Social, our pages which rank on search results, All involves content strategy	Content Marketer, Content Strategist,	Sprout Social content marketing guide
There are more channels than this	I may not able to cover here
	Below is not a channel but an emerging thing
Marketing Technology Marketing Operation Data Engineering	All the above channels involve lot of tech work likeImplementing a tool and connecting the different data source to itInstalling the tracking pixels in website, apps, etcTransferring data from many systems to many systems. For this, Holistic experience in tech and as well marketing is needed to achieve better results. This is an emerging role as well.	Marketing technology specialist,Martech specialist,Adtech specialist

Cohort Analysis

This is one of the advanced any marketer and analyst should be expert at it. It’s like a swiss knife of analyst perspective, read more about it here on how you can use cohort analysis in 10+ ways