All posts by Rashi Ray

Advertising, Blog

Ways to get maximum reach with minimum spend

Whether you’re a startup or a seasoned company,
getting the most out of your buck is everybody’s priority.
Listed below are surefire ways to reduce your marketing spend:
1. By getting to know your customer: Sometimes even before you market your product it is better to know your customers needs and requirements. Getting to know their target audience becomes a prerogative. When you know these hard facts wastage is cut to a minimal. Finding out customer problems and providing specific solutions reduces expenses.
2. Instead of appointing a PR manager become one yourself: Pitching to newspapers and bloggers by being the owner of a company would more likely get more attention than being PR rep. Start locally ,so your articles would be more likely to be picked up later by larger media houses.
3. Maintaining an Email list: and make the most of email campaigning. Write or make excellent email campaigns that call for eyeballing headlines. Make a subscribers list and add offers and discounts for people who sign up. Sign up on service provers like Mailchimp that let you send mails to over 12000 subscribers at one time.
4. Co sponsor events: Get together with like minded companies or those that share your interests and co sponsor events around your vicinity.
5. Zero in on target demographics: While running campaign on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn narrow down your target reach to specific audiences to make sure you make the most out of your ad spend and avoid pilferage.

Advertising, Blog

5 Tips for Marketing Startups

Current times make it challenging for startups to market their brand. But with a few strategic steps startups can successfully engage in marketing.

1. Pay attention to your target audience: Initial marketing strategies call for target of everyone at a given time. Instead pay attention to a targeted audience, that will be keen on promoting your business.
2.List yourself on business awards: If you’re completing an experimental piece of work for your own company or selling an innovative product, try and list yourself in awards of that genre. This gives an edge over media and press. And a little press goes a long way for businesses.
3.Make the most of Social Media: When you’re a startup it’s a given that you must use social media for marketing. It is one of the most economically viable means of marketing. While doing so, make sure that you’re not just promoting promotional content of your business but be sure to add relevant posts that are intriguing and shareable. Engage in social media by being social, not just posting regularly.
4. Invite people to share and like: Give incentives to people for talking about or hash tagging your product or service on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook. Offer gifts or discou nts to them for liking your page. This ensures more exposure to your company’s page.
5. Blog with original content: Come up with topics that are genuine and original. Come up with ideas and convey social research experiments and analysis’. Do surveys and generate content based on them.

Advertising, Blog

Bootstrapped marketing techniques

Cost effective marketing has to be carefully planned. You cannot carry it out in a haphazard manner. Here’s where Zero Budget Agency comes in . We work at minimal costs in the following ways. We call it Zero’ism. 1. We blog: A surefire way to driving traffic to your website is through quality content and blogging. Depending on the quality of your blog more people are likely to follow and interact with you, making your site and product more visible. 2. We take a disciplined approach to marketing: by planning, strategising key movements. 3. We make videos : We keep our viewers entertained and in the loop of things we are doing in the form of videos. These are in house videos shot by our in house film maker, with a strong idea. It doesn’t have to overspill budget. Videos are an easy cheap way to raise awareness by sharing them on social media sites. 4. We use social media to the hilt, strategically: We don’t just post stuff for the heck of it. We plan their releases and we make sure we are aggressive while doing it. 5. We use email marketing : We use mailing lists to send out emailers on various offers that we have at a given time. 6. We make use of analytics: We just don’t blindly do paid advertisements on social media sites. We carefully gage the analytics on how well they fare or not. 7. We do press releases: Paid press releases making sure they happen over a periods of time and not just in an all at once approach.

Blog, Branding

Is Product More Important or Brand?

Face it! A product has to exist in order
to create a brand.
There is no brand without a product.
Not meaning that the two are the same.
Although sometimes people associate
a brand with a product.
Both are important.
It is important to have an okay product at least,
but more important to have a fabulous brand.

According to Seth Godin,
“A brand is the set of expectations,
memories, stories and relationships
that taken together account for a
consumer’s decision to choose one
product or service over another.”

Brands help product development.
How? By evoking emotions.
By caring about the needs of a customer.
By identifying the cultural values of a
consumer base and using the information
to define a company’s direction.

“Product first is very retro, very 1980’s.
We have to put the idea first.”
Says Kevin Roberts global CEO of
Saatchi and Saatchi since 1997.
According to him finding out what
a consumer wants is better than
looking into a product and figuring out how
to make that product better.

According to Al Ries,
“It’s better to be different than it is to be better.”
Perception is what makes a brand.
Perceptions are difficult to change once they’ve been
formed and only continue to harden
in a consumers mind.
In the vast market with the emergence
of similar products ,brand identity plays
an important role.
A well crafted brand identity helps
to safeguard being drowned amongst a sea
of competitors.

J.K Rowling, who wrote
Harry Potter, and sold over 500 million copies
of it wrote a novel and had it
published under the name of Robert Galbraith.
It sold not more than 1000 copies.
After people came to know that it was
actually written by JK Rowling ,
sales jumped and it sold over 1.1 million copies.
Just goes to show what is more important.
The brand or the product.
Another case in point would be Apple’s Iphone.
In comparison to Android which has a better Operating
System, Iphone still performs better and sells
more phones than Samsung. Brands evoke emotions
and products with low emotional appeal are very easily
replaced.

Blog, Branding

What is Branding?

Branding initially started with the branding of animals such as cows. A symbol was marked on to the cow to convey a message. Typically, who the cow belonged to, what breed they were and quality. It helped to segregate the cow and to differentiate it from others. That’s what branding does. It differentiates a product from the other in a specific manner. It gives a product or service an identity. Branding creates a feeling or emotion, and is an idea of an image of a product. It creates a loyalty to a certain product or service. It expresses its value and communicates what a particular brand is. A brand unlike marketing doesn’t push a person to buy something. A person who understands a brand would just be pulled to buy it, due his faith in it. According to Jeff Bezoz “ Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room “. A brand is what people think about you, it gives you a feeling of your product.

Blog, Design

Communication is key: Graphic Design

Good communication lies at the heart of graphic design.
What is graphic design?
And what do graphic designers do?
Graphic design is a means of communication,
problem solving through the use of visuals and art,
typography, illustrations, symbols, colours,
amongst various others.
Almost everything that we see,
requires the work of a graphic designer.
Graphic designers are visual problem solvers.
They work in branding, advertising, packaging,
publishing and web development.
It’s always easy to overlook their importance,
but a graphic designers job is gravely important,
not just aesthetically but functionally as well.

Blog, Design

Self Publishing Success: How

Self publishing, becoming todays norm, has guided most
writers to design their books in a certain way. It’s easy,
and to self publish an e-book is even easier.
1. To design a great book focus on the cover of the book:
As the saying goes, don’t judge a book by its cover,
in the self publishing world we realize that people do
judge the book by the cover. A well finished cover tells
us that the author will honor our time spent with the
book as well. The cover basically establishes the books brand.
It leaves a lasting impression on a readers mind.
2. Another factor for a well designed self published
book are the pages of the book. They are like the architectural
foundations of the book.
3. Next is the marketing aspect of the book.
Marketing should be undertaken even before the book is
written or it falls at the risk of lying under a heaps
of thousands of other books that have not been marketed well enough.
4.Book reviews are another way a self published
book could find its way to success.

Advertising, Blog

Stay Independent or Sell Out?

The views of whether an ad agency should remain independent or sell out are variant and come with their own set of pros and cons. Independent agencies are mostly culturally driven. They do justice to a creative product. Although money is important it is not the centre of how a business is to be conducted. Staying independent has a host of advantages. They get to choose who their clients are according to similar ideologies, passions and interests. They can choose to give their 100 percent to those clients according to what they have chosen. They can make the right choices on what they think is the right way for their own agencies like where to reinvest profits etc. It allows for free change in strategic direction. These ad agencies can focus on their own clients and creative people. Independent agencies can take their own risks with their clients. According to Amber Williams, “It’s not so much that an agency is independent, its that all people working there have chosen an independent agency. These types are often more novel thinkers, thrive on risk and generally produce more transformative ideas.” An independent agency can make quick decisions. They are not slaves that have to meet quarterly numbers. On the other hand choosing to sell out has its advantages too. Belonging to networks bring in support. Belonging to a network ensures more expertise, better marketing, research, as well as technology. Mahesh Chauhan co-founder of Salt Brand Solutions, says, “ Most businesses cant be ‘IPO-ed’. But agencies cant. So how does an agency go public, raise money for growth and expand? If you are not IPO-able on your own the only way to move forward is to sell out to a global buyer.” Agencies can choose to sell out, even if they don’t really have a succession plan of their own and owners would want to ensure, their baby projects being well taken care of at the hands of bigger agencies and an agency could reach its full potential only after joining a larger network.

Blog, Design

Is Design a business yet?

We live in an interesting time of growth and progress.
Change is the only constant.
In India too, change has been felt in the design industry.
Design is the one of the only links between business and the society. “ It is a perfect response to bind people together and to elevate human life through harmonious synchronisation of needs and solution.”
Design caters to the special needs to all forms of society, be it impoverished or niche.
Design in India has come a long way, still relatively a smaller sector but its importance is being felt today. It has changed from being just a mere profession to being an instrument in the development of new business models. The focus of design in India has shifted from being a mere function of aesthetics to becoming a strategic process. The Indian design industry in maturing today, regardless of its small size, it has been seen to make an impact in the economy and various businesses.
In India it is easy to communicate to those who reside in urban cities as they are influenced both by the urban west and other developing countries. What is more important is to communicate to the impoverished village dwellers, and slowly the design industry in India has tried touching their lives in the villages as well.
According to the commerce and Industry Minister, Govt of India has a need for about 10,000 designers in India, and at present India has just about 1000 design graduates, meaning that we have only two designers for every millionth person in India as opposed to Finland with 120 and Japan at 90.
In this light the government of India has stressed that the design industry shift its focus to two and three tier cities to encourage the growth of designers and to have these cities be the driving force and backbone of design in India, and the future of Indian economy.
With more and more corporates in India, an ever-increasing economy and as the modern Indian becomes more affluent, consumers too look for well designed products and services, the scope for design in India has increased in two and three tier cities in India.
Indians today are well traveled, with an exposure to global design and minimalism has slowly crept into design. One of the most recognisable changes in design is the shift in focus to minimalistic designs. As Ashwini Deshpande, co-founder of Indian design and branding studio Elephant says, “There is so much being consumed in the form of words, pictures and sound, that there is a fatigue towards excess. We have also seen a significant change in path to purchase, as Indians are equally comfortable in buying from corner shops or modern retail or online. This, combined with the increased awareness of what’s really good for them, consumers prefer brands that cut to the chase and come across as honest and approachable.” This is because designers themselves over the past few years have decided to shift towards more simplistic avant-garde techniques.
While minimalism might be felt in product design, there is also a direct shift in design where it comes to focus towards women empowerment in design.

Advertising, Blog

Man’s world of advertising.

Advertisements are meant to to sell.
For long women have been crassly objectified in ads.
Their body parts showcased like pieces to sell.
The industry, however has evolved.
These days,the damsel in distress is the opposite of the strategies used by ad’s.
In India, too.
Here are some advertisements that are truly inspiring in their ideas and concepts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kFRr06pa8o – The Nirma Washing Soap ad: Four women do something that no one else dares to. They see an ambulance stuck on the road they take charge. Together they manage to get the ambulance out of the pothole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqorn7q3cz4 – Dove, Lets break the rules of Beauty: It is about changing the concept of beauty and realising that everyone is beautiful in their own way. There are no rules to beauty, it is about realising and accepting yourself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ef27m5ocK6Q –Myntra: It is about changing the society’s concept of acceptable love. Two girls, who choose an alternative lifestyle. They are Bold and Beautiful.