When should your marketing start?

Convincing the customer to use your product or service and making the customer form a long standing bond with it is the ultimate success point for a marketer. For this to happen your marketing should not start from the point when your product is ready. Your marketing should instead start even before you consider building a product.

For all we know, successful products or services are made to solve a customer problem. Once you have identified a problem and have felt a strong need for a solution, even before listening to your demanding sense of urgency and going ahead and building a product, you should initiate your marketing, i.e. the research.

Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor. Neither is opportunity the sole direction to your company or product.

The decision making of many entrepreneurs gets taken over by a strong urge to quickly make the product, sell it and make money. Instead of deeply analyzing the customer’s problem in all variations and judging to themselves if their solution is ‘the solution’ that meets customer’s needs, many companies simply get on with building the product and dump it on their sales team to somehow sell it. The above said behavior of companies is called ‘Marketing Myopia’, where short-sighted mindset and illusion of understanding the problem leads a way to business failure.

For easing out the problems of your future sales team and ensuring positive growth of your company, taking the plunge with complete understand of your market is the only way.

Below is a 7 Step research every entrepreneur should conduct before taking the plunge.

1.  Understand the problem (Problem Statement)
2. Who are facing the problem? (Know who are your customers)
3. How many of them are facing such a problem (Know the Market Size)
4. The solution required to solve the problem and its features (Define your Product/service)
5. Is there any pre-existent solution for the said problem already in the market (Market Scape)
6. If yes, how many such solutions are available? (Competitor Analysis)
7. How much cost would you incur in developing the solution for a customer and how will the customer pay? (Viability or Feasibility Study)

Is your business idea viable?

Viability of a business can simply be defined as the ability to survive financially in a longer run and have sustainable profits. Many ideas of products and services might seem to deliver a great end consumer value and also be interesting to implement. However along with the delivery of a great consumer value, the profitability of the company in a longer run is ‘the important factor’ that keeps the show running. As an entrepreneur, before taking the plunge, it is highly recommended to perform the below viability checks to know for yourself if your idea is going to make you money or not.

Define your product/service 

• Define to yourself clearly what you are delivering. 
• Is it a product or a service? 
• What would be the features of the product or the package of services 

Define your ideal customer and market. 

• Know who your customers are 
• Know what they really want 
• Know how many such customers are there in the market (market size) 
• Is there any competition in the market? 
• If YES, how many competitors are there? Who are the big players? How is the market shared among the competitors? 
• If NO, try to see why hasn't anyone started such a business that you’re coming up with. Know what would have stopped anyone from starting up? 
• How are your competitors offering their products and services? 
• At what price are they offering them? 
• What can you do to penetrate and counter competition? 
• At what price should you be selling your product or service to counter competition and be able to sustain? 

Demand Analysis 

• Why should you do this? 
• So that you don’t end up setting up a company that sells a product or service that no one wants or very less people want. 
• Demand analysis is a very crucial activity. You should know if there is any demand for your product/service. If yes how much? 
• Reach out to a sample size of your target customers and conduct a primary research about the customers’ interest on your offering. 
• Try to know how much they would be willing to pay for such an offering. 
• Factor your findings from the sample size audience to the whole market and know the real demand. 
• Once you know the real demand, you must be able to comprehend what kind of a demand your product has. 
• Below are the various kinds of demands. 
• Full demand – A positive sign to you, where the customers are happy about your product and they want to buy from you.
• Overfull demand – Your offering has huge demand, many customers want to buy it and you won’t able to supply as much.
• Declining Demand – There is demand at the moment for your offering but the same might go down slowly.
• Negative Demand – Your product might be beneficial to the customer but her still doesn't want to buy it. E.g. Insurance
• Unwholesome Demand – This kind of demand is when your product is not useful/beneficial for the customer but still wants it. E.g. Cigarettes
• Irregular demand – Your product might be useful only at a given point of time in a period. In other words the requirement is seasonal. E.g. Umbrellas.
• Latent demand – The customer might not understand the usage and importance of your product while making the buying decision, but might feel the importance after he has purchased a different product/service. E.g. Normal mobile vs Smartphone. 

Once you have done all the above activities, you would have a clear answer to the question “Is your idea viable?” and you would able to make a conscious decision in moving forward with your idea.

How to write a great Blog Post? - Best practices of Blogging

Why to BLOG?

1. A chance to speak in detail to your audience/peers/customers/target group.
2. To establish a knowledge strong hold in your personal circle/community/industry/business
3. Contribute back to the knowledge ecosystem, in your area of interest/industry
4. Use it as a key tool in building your personal brand.

What kind of content SELLS or goes VIRAL?

1. Short and to the point (...most 'read' blogs are written in 300 – 500 words).
2. Properly proof read ‘data sets’ to substantiate your assertions/points.
3. Usage of imagery would paint your points even better
4. Plain and neat language – (…it’s good to refrain from using the Shakespearean vocabulary)
5. Use good and qualitative media – Info-graphics and a video blog once in a while

**Use your blog’s analytics to figure out which blogs have done well, try to understand the elements of that blog that brought in the good readership, build further upon those elements.


**Never be in a hurry to hit the “Publish” button. Always save your content and read your blog after a while, assuming yourself to be the reader. You might find things you want to omit or add.


**Great & Sharable content always strikes an emotional chord with its target group. The emotions that have been the most compelling across digital media are as below


Positive emotions: Amusing, Inspiring, Cute, Illuminating. Negative emotions: Shocking, Fearful, Anger, Controversial

How to write an ENGAGING blog post?

1. Try to tell a story
2. Use a catchy title – HOOK #1
3. The first paragraph should glue the reader – HOOK#2
4. Use a casual tone -  Make it sound like a conversation
5. Allow it to sound personal – As your own opinion
6. Ask questions, invite comments & start discussions
7. Take care of the bare minimums – grammar, punctuation & language tone

How to GAIN/RETAIN readership?

1. The readers should have a take away in every post, through which he/she should be able to positively take a decision or make/change their perspectives.
2. Do not Direct-Market yourself or your product/service. The reader should never sense any marketing flavour in the content. Such content will not bring back the reader.
3. Break a bigger topic into smaller topics and write posts as a series. 
4. Place links to your other blogs in a post, where ever possible.
5. Reach out to other blog posts on similar topics – post your opinions and leave links to your blog.
6. Leverage your blog posts on your company’s social channels – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora, etc.
7. Reach out to the communities and forum discussion boards in your industry – engage yourself in the discussions and leave mentions of your blog post & links.