(Before I go any further, some context - After nearly a decade and a half abroad, I relocated back to India last year to work full time on my ideas (and on myself) so my posts and thoughts are usually from that perspective.)
In the spirit of “Sell before you build”, I have been testing the market for my idea.
If I were testing my ideas in more cohesive countries — where a majority of the population congregates in a small number of venues — this would not have been very difficult.
For example, if everyone went online nearly every day regardless of their demographic makeup, I could have simply focused on identifying the top 3–4 websites for my needs and driven engagement from there.
India, though, is not like that. Here are a few examples of marketing channels with sizable eyeballs.
Non-Targeted Channels
- Newspaper flyers and inserts
- Billboards (hoardings as they are called in India)
- Wall painting
- Loudhailers on backs of trucks, autos, and rickshaws
- FM radio
- Cinema ads
- Sides of buses and other public transport
Literally a Wall Paint ad
Semi- and Targeted Channels
- Roadside kiosks and booths (self selecting) — though this is changing, there aren’t enough malls in the country to make booths at malls viable as a marketing channel
- Print ads
- Newspaper classifieds
- Online classifieds
- WhatsApp groups
- SMS ads
- Behemoths like Facebook and YouTube
In a country of a billion, you will need to explore a lot of channels to discover which channels best yield your target market.
The flip side of this is that anyone who can create a single unified interface through which startups and businesses can hit even 3–5 channels in an effective manner stands to make a real difference in the field of marketing.
Originally published at ramachandr.in on March 15, 2018.