The marketing landscape has changed from traditional marketing to digital marketing. Are you a business owner looking for ways to improve your marketing efforts to attract the right customers? Do you want to learn the best method to attract the right audience, gain trust with your audience that naturally leads to sales or transactions? People think that there are two types of marketing – the old traditional way of marketing (TV, Radio, Newspaper, and Magazines) …and then there is the new way of digital marketing (Display Ads, Search Ads, Social Media, YouTube, and so on). Since consumers have started using personal digital devices like laptops, mobiles, and tablets, brands are forced to adapt their marketing activities to digital marketing. But, are these the only two types of marketing? Kind of yes… if you take into consideration the medium on which it is served. But as a marketer, you should not be concerned about the medium. See, the medium can be anything. First, it was print. Then it was radio. Then it was TV. Then it was the internet. Then it was the apps. Tomorrow something else might be the medium. So I believe that as marketers, we should not be concerned about the medium in which the message is served. We should be concerned about what is served, to whom it is served… Not where it is served. When people differentiate marketing only by “Where” and “How” it is served, I believe we are limiting ourselves. The medium doesn’t matter at all. What matters is: Who am I communicating with? (The target audience) What I am communicating? (The message) Why am I communicating? (The purpose) Not where (medium) or how (the type of media) I am communicating. So now based on these new questions, there are two ways to do marketing? Type 1: Surface Marketing The other one (a more powerful one) is… Deep Marketing Surface marketing is what you see everywhere around you. Surface marketing tries to get your attention through interruption. When you are watching an IPL match on TV, you are being interrupted with an ad. When you are watching YouTube, you are interrupted by an ad. When you are reading a newspaper or magazine, you are interrupted by an ad. When you are listening to the radio, you are interrupted by an ad. When you are browsing websites online, you are interrupted by an ad. When you are driving on the road, you are interrupted by a hoarding. This is an interruption. Forced attention. You don’t pay attention because you want to. You pay attention because it is difficult to ignore it. It’s like one old school friend, that you do not really like who comes and talks to you at a party and you cannot ignore him. You tolerate it for a while. Low-quality attention. Such is the low-quality attention that surface marketing achieves. No one wants to give forced attention. And no one should want such type of attention on themselves. All the interruptions that you see above, are surface-level marketing. The medium doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it is a digital medium or a traditional medium. Surface level marketing has a lot of problems. With surface marketing… Trust is not built using ads. People cannot recall a brand through ads because now there are too many brands trying to get people to recall. If 100s of brands keep running ads right in front of your face, you will ignore all of them. Won’t remember any of them. Everyone is screaming for attention. Surface level marketing communicates “What” is the product. It doesn’t communicate “Why” the customer needs the product. Why you made the product in the first place. You cannot educate a customer using interruption ads. The attention that surface marketing gets from people is of poor quality. People are not really looking forward to paying quality attention to these ads. So if surface marketing has so many problems, what is the other method? The better method? The other type of marketing is “Deep Marketing”. Type 2: Deep Marketing What I am doing right now, is Deep Marketing. If you have read this article until this point, I got your undivided high-quality attention for almost 5-10 minutes so far, and you are not complaining. You are paying attention because you want to. And I believe you will probably give me your attention for another 10 minutes so that I can tell you about Deep Marketing – the better way to do marketing in today’s age. Deep marketing is different from surface marketing in many ways. With Deep Marketing you can… Connect with your customers on a deeper level Get high-quality attention using high-quality content (like I am doing right now) Trust is built from the attention. Because this attention is with consent. The trust can be leveraged into convincing customers to do a transaction. Deep marketing is done from a personal brand. So where we do marketing has changed from traditional medium to digital medium. But that’s not as important as people think. What’s important is – whether we are able to move to Deep marketing, from surface marketing. Because in this day and age, it is impossible to build a brand with surface marketing. No matter how much ad budget you have, you cannot build a brand by throwing your brand name, logo, and slogan in every surface medium possible. People are just going to ignore you. The only way to build trust and generate revenue through transactions is to do deep marketing. How can you do Deep Marketing? Step 1: You are going to get people’s attention using high-quality content. Content marketing is the key here. Without good quality content, people are not going to pay attention to you. And the content has to be created by a human, personal brand. Not from a logo. Step 2: You understand the requirements of your audience and create content – to help them, without expecting anything in return. With a genuine interest in
