Some inexpensive and effective promotion techniques

Choosing the right promotion media now a days is the key to success. You can choose to invest any amount on this PR Building, but hitting the right target ensures we get the expected ROI. In our case we were given a seriously low budget to try with promotion activities.
The attention span of the consumers have reduced so heavily with numerous medias small and large vying to capture their attention. So it is of paramount importance for us to come up with a mixed plan of reaching people so that they remember the brand. In our research we came across some of the interesting promotion medias that might suit in an Indian market scenario.

• Small and Catchy Fliers - The biggest cost is printing. With volume like 10000 the printing cost could go up to Rs. 2 per copy for a decently designed flier and it might add up another 25 paise for distributing it. Assuming it
  
  • hits the right audience
  • and the amount of wastage is 75%
  • It reaches 2500 people
  • Even if it generates a 5% lead, you get 250 calls and 50 of them could be productive
  • Effectively it costs us Almost Rs. 450 per one end customer.
  • From here on, it is up to the organization to maintain and improve sales with the customer
• Local TV Media in popular areas - We came across this interesting media quite recently. People usually sit in Restaurants for at least for 30 minutes while having food and their attention will definitely set on these TVs for at least some time. Though this is not effective in producing more leads, it will definitely make it a memorable brand.
• Free Stickers - Distributing free stickers which are well designed, to your friends and relatives and ask them to stick these on their vehicles. This is a slow but effective advertisement as the sticker stays for a long time and the people you meet definitely remembers the brand or at least the logo.
• Stickers/banners on Local Public Transport Vehicles - This was one of the methods used by JustDial.com and quite an inexpensive one as well. JustDial became very popular with this technique and is a household name now.
• Organize A Contest - A contest with some prizes to be given by big dignitaries will definitely attract attention from public and newspapers. This will be a very very effective viral marketing strategy.

A well designed PR plan can turn the popularity ratings of a brand to an upward swing. Choosing the right mix of media to target the audience will go a long way in such a plan.

Brand Identity

A product is always just a product. Basically it is like a person without a name. A person has eyes, nose, mouth, hands, legs and so on to make him/her a person. A product in a similar way has a lot of attributes.

A man becomes known by his name and the amount of visibility he gets. The same logic applies for a product or a business. The product or business needs an identity and a visualization for people to relate and remember. The memory becomes strong with more visibility and popularity. In essence, a brand identity is one fundamental aspect of any business or brand and a company can have multiple businesses or products or brands as long as it has a clear identity defined for each one of them.

A brand identity is a name and/or image and/or colors and/or fonts associated with a product or business or brand to uniquely identify and differentiate it from other products. This gives a clear edge to product in the minds of the people for a distinct representation. A brand identity creation usually involves the following steps

• Create a unique name for the product
• Create a meaningful logo
• Apply for a trade mark registration. This is an essential step once you identify a unique name for the product.
• Create the necessary designs, flyers and brochures etc., It is very important that the brochures and other docs should be in the language for the target audience
• Create a website representing the product with its full description
• Optimize the website for Search engines in order to raise its visibility among search engines

The above are some of the macro level steps of creating a brand identity. These can be done by outsourcing this job to a consultant. The rates could range from $500 to $5000 depending on the quality and amount of work. If one prefers, these work can be done by themselves by using adobe photoshop or corel draw or Microsoft Publisher, but this needs some amount of technical knowledge and creativity. If one doesn't have enough experience in designing, it is better to spend some bucks on it to get a professional work done.

Just defining a brand and creating all the identity elements doesn't mean the product is going to succeed. This is just a first step of bringing in a brand and this needs to be followed by building a sales team, rigorous promotion activities and great after sales support.

Marketing challenge

Entrepreneurship is a big challenge if you ask anyone who has embarked on it. Be it investing your hard earned money, be it creating your product and hmm! being it marketing the product are always some of the hard challenges some one need to really face in order to understand the unpredictable nature of business. One small mistake will land you into a bad patch, demotivate and demoralize.

After deciding to enter into the world of entrepreneurship probably the biggest challenge one would face is marketing and selling. The very difference of prompt payment from a customer or his readiness to adhere to the specified Manufacturing Retail Price from the supplier depends on how efficiently one does the marketing and how strong the product is popular in the market.

How a product becomes a popular product in a market depends on several factors, like

• Creation of brand identity
• The attractiveness of the logo and captions
• How easily a customer can relate him with this identity
• How the company does cheaper and great advertisements and promotions in large numbers
• How prompt and strong is the technical or customer support is
• and such lots of factors...

This blog is just a place where I would like to vent my feelings on the techniques we try and experiment..