This Marketing Strategy Will Boost The Effectiveness Of Your Digital Ads
In American hypermarkets, it’s not uncommon to see people handing out free samples. These small bites are meant to entice customers into buying a new product they otherwise wouldn’t purchase.
Similarly, static persuasive advertisements on digital platforms (such as an image or video repeatedly shown on social media) are built to convince people to try a new offering.
If you have been to a hypermarket or used social media enough, you can understand this form of marketing. That free sample will be there later, and it only makes sense to take a bite if you’re looking for, or want, food like that (that’s not to say some of us wouldn’t take a free bite anyway!).
But, what if you’ve never been to a hypermarket, and you’ve never heard of free samples? What if this is your first time in America after a childhood in rural India, and someone is offering you free food with no strings attached?
Are you going to assume that the free sample will always be there? Are you going to think that you should pay to buy this sampler’s food, when there is another guy giving more free food in the next aisle?
Digital marketing to regional India is a very similar prospect. With the advent of the Internet, people suddenly have all these possibilities at their fingerprints.
Everyone is showing them an advertisement to try a new mobile app or product. They’re more than happy to try all of them, but why should they stick to just one? Why should they organically remember your app and come back?
Stories Are The Most Effective Advertisements
Did you know that 3000+ word articles get more traffic that sub-300 word articles? In our age of Twitter and InShorts, how do 15-minute articles get more attention than 15-second articles?
It is because people don’t remember updates or offers. They remember stories that they can re-tell. Whether you are selling a religion, a war, a government, a business, or even just Surf Excel, people remember stories they can share.
It’s why refugee numbers into the millions were unable to stir interest in action against human traffickers, but a single image portraying the story of a Syrian child who died coming to Europe was able to galvanise public opinion.
Stories help build emotional connections with audiences. Whether to individual characters, a relatable storyline, or just an understandable action, any content that can help people relate to your storyline will work.
Take the best and worst advertisements of the lockdown as an example. Dettol’s homemade video on why soap works to rub away dirt and germs tells a story that is relatable to every mother and child in India today.
Conversely, Vodafone’s video with the famous pug does not strike a chord, despite the clear indication to the lockdown with the dog entering his kennel. That’s because there is no story, just a cute dog and a vague correlation to the lockdown.
If Hutch had not spent so much time building stories around this pug before Vodafone bought them out, this video would not ever register among audiences.
Offline Branding & Digital Persuasion
As readers of my email newsletter will know, offers don’t work in regional India. If their local vendor can’t match the offer, it must be fake news. By definition, any online offer that can be matched by a local vendor will never be good enough.
People, especially those not used to the Internet, will choose to work with and believe an offline authority rather than an online advertisement.
Unfortunately, prevailing marketing strategies towards regional India don’t look at the data. It is very clear; people will take up offers and discounts they see on TV or in a newspaper because they trust the medium. However, the average print or cable ad is far more expensive than the average digital ad.
What should be the obvious solution here? You have an expensive medium which has the complete trust of the audience, but limited reach and data capture. You also have a cheap medium that has the ability to repeatedly and more frequently reach audiences, but only has their limited trust.
It makes more sense to take advantage of each medium’s strengths when building a marketing strategy. Weave stories and build your brand image with frequent advertisements on the cheap medium, and then — once your brand value has been established — provide persuasive offers through trusted mediums.
And yet, too many companies base their marketing strategy on a combination of traditionalism and mitigating disadvantages. It is not easy to track the quality and effectiveness of a print ad, so branding advertisements (where results are not directly trackable anyway) should be used. After all, that’s how it has always been done.
Similarly, digital branding has a great ability to track direct responses to an ad, and persuasive ads traditionally are much easier to track. Therefore, it makes sense to use this new medium to drive sales directly. We can see who is buying immediately!
Get Ahead Of The Curve
The traditional marketing strategy is failing to take advantage of each medium’s benefits. Persuasive ads need trust to be effective, and a smart persuasive ad can be tracked regardless of medium. You don’t need digital tracking methods.
On the other hand, stories don’t need trust in the medium. In fact, they help build trust for the brand, regardless of the medium. However, stories need to be repeated to convince audiences of brand value. Common sense dictates the cheapest medium should be used to repeat stories to a wide variety of trackable users.
In fact, being able to learn which types of users in which regions are more accepting of your brand is a great form of sales-driven user research before putting out persuasive ads. That’s impossible to do via print and TV, and extremely simple via digital mediums.
Today, the conventional strategy for marketing is to brand offline and persuade online. Any company that is willing to reverse this trend — to brand online and persuade offline — has a huge opportunity to rapidly scale their audience base in regional India.
To return to our initial analogy, providing free samples at a hypermarket is the equivalent of providing a persuasive ad repeatedly without context. Which is why, most of these companies only use free samples as an expensive persuasive advertisement.
Their branding has already been completed outside the store. When you walk in, you have heard of the food, and you want to try it. The free sample is the final step. Prove that your product is good, after you have already spent time creating demand for it.
Too many marketing departments targetting regional Indian audiences are focussed on giving away samples, without branding before people enter the hypermarket. Seeing a persuasive ad online to buy an offering or download a mobile application only works if the audience have already heard of your brand.
Otherwise, you are just offering people a quick snack, not a reason to buy the food!
Are you unsure of how to build your brand to optimise the performance of your persuasive advertisements? You can contact me at tarutr@getlokalapp.com, or at malhotratarutr@gmail.com.
You can also DM me on my LinkedIn page or my Twitter profile. I would love to talk to each and every one of you personally!
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