Nobility Doesn’t Put Food On The Table, Digital Marketing Does.
Doctors and Teachers. They save your lives, but face the backlash for asking your money.
My niece’s annual tuition fee is at least 2x my brother’s monthly salary, and she has only just started pre-school! There was a collective sharp intake of breath in the family dining room, but nobody voiced any objections. After all, the school has been around since the time even I was learning the alphabet. The institution, we could all agree, was a ‘good one’.
At the age of 85, my grandfather complained of chest pain and was taken to a hospital. After one angioplasty, two days, and three consecutive cardiac arrests, he passed away. The first thing that our extended family asked us was, “Did you take him to Dr. Vasudev?”- as you can imagine, Dr. Vasudev has been our trusted family physician for as long as anyone could remember, and we should have consulted him first… even if he was 85 himself.
In both cases, when I tried to offer my opinion, I was told- “What do you 20-somethings know?”
Being a 23 year old hasn’t stopped Kunal Goel from running First Guide Academy, a premium institute with state-of-the art facilities to train students in competitive academic examinations.
Being a millennial has offered him several privileges- a management degree from a reputed university, the ability to connect instantly with influential people, and quick research skills. After graduating university, when he expressed his desire to ‘do something impactful’, his mentor Mr. Ramoji Gowda pointed out to him that education has the most impact on society. After a brief period of intense research (first on the internet, then on the field), Kunal Goel knew what had to be done and how. This was the beginnings of First Guide Academy over a year ago.
One would imagine that any educational institute would begin with word-of-mouth encouragement and about half a dozen students sent by parents who were willing to trust them. But in a year, First Guide Academy had half a dozen branches and several hundred students all over Bangalore. It boasts of having faculty who have produced single digit rank holders in hard-to-crack examinations like IIT-JEE.
How did First Guide Academy find its students? They got themselves an easy-to-update, auto-SEO enabled website. Anybody who types in “best coaching centre in Bangalore” is likely to find them in their search results. Turns out, a lot of people did.
The biggest advantage was how they were able to drive traffic to their own website, because online listing services that would bring them people, had their competitors fighting for the attention of new students. Educational institutes and gadgets hardly work the same way- there is no ‘product compare’.
Building futures has not prevented Kunal Goel from building a profitable business. It was only natural that I asked him what his ‘expansion plans’ were, and he said-
“We are building an app through which we plan to distribute educational content, and we plan on taking education to smaller towns and villages. Whether it is online through the app, or in physical classrooms, we will take good quality education to places it is yet to reach.”
The smile refuses to leave his face.
Smiling is free, of course. But perfect smiles are a little expensive. First and foremost, it costs a person their confidence. Dr. Sampreeth Mathew would attest to that-
But first, here’s a bad joke to ease the tension- What’s the similarity between a 30-something doctor and a 20-something engineer? Both of them just finished college. While you’d be perfectly comfortable letting a mechanical engineer try his hand at coding, you would still think a thousand times before trusting a medical specialist in his own area of work.
There is no real metric to measure how much a doctor can be trusted. Doctors could receive glowing testimonies from former patients, and still, each new patient they meet is a fresh start for them. One small error and their reputation is ruined. It takes decades for doctors to build unquestionable faith in their practice.
Ten years ago, when Dr. Sampreeth Mathew started his practice, he banked on former patients to come back to him (with their friends and family), and he also had a website built for “digital marketing”. The website was informative for potential patients, but it didn’t draw a lot of traffic to itself.
‘Dentique: The Dental Studio’ is in Cochin, Kerala, where Dr. Sampreeth is able to offer Dental Tourism for patients from all over the world. He needed a solution where he was both visible to potential patients, and also be very subtle. Building a second website which was auto-SEO enabled turned out to be the right option for him. Now, if anyone looks for a dentist in Cochin, they will likely find him in their search results. Since Dr. Sampreeth has the freedom to make as many updates as he wants instantly, over a period of time, the number of updates he makes will take him higher up in search results.
Being ranked higher in search results does not only ensure visibility, but also brings a sense of trust and credibility to the doctor who owns the said website.
Now that Dr. Sampreeth has found an effective solution to his marketing challenge, you would ask him what has changed for him. Gaining more patients for himself could have prompted him to stay focused on his clinic in Cochin and work towards making it bigger, but Dr. Sampreeth still travels all over Kerala and Karnataka to consult externally, in places where experts like himself are needed. Like he did ten years ago, he continues to visit smaller cities and towns to spread smiles. Prosperity does not stop him from working hard.
Doctors and Teachers. Their selflessness and perseverance is insurmountable. At least their marketing strategy should be effortless.
