Founders Should Learn how to Market and Sell Great Product

7 min readApr 5, 2021

The biggest challenges founders face is that they have great confidence in their ability to develop great products but fail to market them.

It’s a big problem, because marketing is the most valuable investment and gives you direct returns on your spends.

To put it simply, Founders should know how to market and sell and should be a great marketer.

Let us understand various laws of marketing and grow our product.

The Fundamentals of Marketing

The number one misconception behind marketing is that people think the best creative people turns out to be great marketers, but it is not.

Marketing is based on Science, and not on creativity.

Marketing starts way before creating a product. It helps with understanding the customer, what problems they face or what their needs are and then creating a product or service which satisfies their problems or needs.

Sell the Right Products to the Right Person.

You need to identify your ideal customers and their problems and then create a product that can solve their problem. Marketing helps you to send the right message to the right person, at the right time.

Building a Strong Brand

Do not be the №1 , be the ONLY ONE

Let us consider the below example:-

What comes to your mind when you want to eat burger?

Yes, You guessed it right. It is **McDonald’s.**

This is the power of branding. You do not even give a second thought of choosing another brand if you wish to eat burgers.

Another example is Google search engine. Whenever you wish to search anything, you just hop onto google website.

Don't you think, these brands have positioned themselves as leaders in their respective categories? Yes they did, and this is what needs to be done if you want to sustain and build a strong brand.

If you cannot be a leader in a category, then try be a leader in a sub-category.

Traditional Marketing vs Digital Marketing

Let’s have a look at a quick difference between Traditional Marketing and Digital Marketing.

If a product is generic like Soap or movies then the traditional method advertisements works as a better option. One of the traditional advertisement is Television ads, which can reach more audiences at a very low cost, and has a reach of 800 to 1 billion audience which is far above and way beyond the reach of digital marketing audience.

But, Traditional ads cannot be measured. We can only show our ads but cannot figure out who is buying out product.

On the other hand, by Digital marketing, we can measure our ads and campaigns. We can do deep marketing.

Also re-targeting, where we can specifically show the advertisement to the people who is interested in our product or for some reason customer did not bought our product.

CATT Marketing Funnel

In the above formula, prescribed by Digital Deepak,

n refers to niche .

CATT termed as CONTENT, ATTENTION, TRUST and TRANSACTION.

Most of the people directly jump into transaction and people don’t trust them and as a result, they fail to generate sales and finally shut down.

Having a strong funnel is much important to scale a business. Let’s discuss how this funnel works.

Niche

For any business choosing a right niche is very important. Selecting a wrong niche can kill a business.

A niche should have the combination of your passion, suits to your talent and a perfect fit for the market.

Content

Content is heart of digital marketing. It determines the growth of a business.

You can create useful content that attracts people from your niche.

Attention

We need to drive traffic to our content through search engines optimizations, search engine marketing, paid ads, referrals, etc., to generate more attention.

Trust

You also need to make sure your content is making people trust you or your business. We need to build a trust using methods of trip wire, automations, retargeting, and deep marketing.

Transaction

Finally, we can conduct transactions by converting leads into customer with natural sales method.

Integrated Digital Marketing

Integrated digital marketing means channelize your content through different ways of marketing.

Each module such as Content Marketing, SEO, Email Marketing and Social Media Marketing should be combined and should complement each other.

Interconnecting all these mediums will yield great results in the long run.

Let us understand the above chart, which shows the Integrated Digital Marketing process:-

Content Marketing: Content is the heart of digital marketing. Quality content should be created to educate users about your brand, product or service.
Email Marketing: Helps send out information about new content and follow up with the prospects to remind them about the product or service they want to buy.
Social Media: People tend to spend more time on social media now, so a brand must have a presence on social media and regularly post new content in forms of images, videos and also build a direct communication with their customers.
SEO: A brand should also work on SEO, which helps them bring organic traffic to their content from search engines.
Paid Advertising: Paid advertisements works best when the integrated system is in place, as it speed up's the process of getting targeted audiences and can increase Return on Investments.

Personal Branding: Mass Trust Blueprint

It is a psychological fact that people want to hear from other people, and not from brands. No one likes to have a conversation with a Logo.

This makes important to create a Personal Brand. As there is a saying,

The best known will always beat the best.

The most appropriate example is Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX.

He is the perfect example which shows that personal brand can give rise to many brands.

Another example in digital marketing, is Gary Vaynerchuk(Gary Vee). People do not know him by his company name, but with his personal brand, social presence. People tend to trust him as a person.

Mass Trust Blueprint

The process of creating a personal brand, is termed as MassTrust framework. Let us understand its steps:-

Learn:- One should start with learning a new skill. Understanding the concepts and then going through the facts and procedures.
Work:- Put your newly learned skills to work. This helps you to go from practice to implementation.
Blog:- Start a blog, and write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you write, you understand it better.
Consult:- Start consulting other people, brand and business. Here you do not need to work for them, but consulting them the process of implementation.
Mentor:- After you gain enough experience you can teach and mentor other people in your field. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level.
Startup:- As you gain enough exposure, you can have your own product startup.

The above framework is never ending learning system, where you can keep learning and upgrading yourself.

The Final words

So now the founders have a clear understanding of the steps involved in marketing a great product. Let us summaries important points again:-

Marketing starts before the product. It begins by understanding the needs of a customer and creating a product accordingly.
Depending on your product niche(generic or specific), decide on the way of marketing medium like traditional or digital.
Using integrated digital marketing is the best method to yield high results, which helps combining all different ways of digital marketing.
Create Personal brand to build trust amount your target audience, which will help you to stand as a authority in your particular niche.

Let me know in the comment section:- Do you agree with me that Founders should be good marketers.