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First, begin at home
When I decided to get into the retail segment, the first decision I took was to make a mark in the housing colony I stay in. This is a large colony, with over 400 families. Since I live here, I am easily accessible to people in the colony, and in the initial days, when my brand is less known, I thought they will at least have the comfort of dealing with somebody from the same society. I started off with a series of branding exercises, to help people become aware of Vyana Wealth.
Get the sequence right
We made branded T-Shirts with our Vyana brand on them and gave them to all the society staff - security, housekeeping etc. The colony staff were happy to receive smart new uniforms, the society office was saved the expense of providing uniforms, and our branding on the uniforms gave us instant mileage in a low cost yet effective manner. As they went about their daily jobs, our brand was being promoted all along, and it aroused curiosity among all residents. What's Vyana was the question that came up in their minds. Then we put up banners and sent flyers to everyone. The flyers as a follow up to so many walking brand ambassadors helped residents understand what Vyana Wealth is. We then started sponsoring events within the colony - annual days, festivals and other events that are held in such large colonies. My mother and I jointly organized a quiz competition in our colony, which was quite a hit and was attended by over 300 members. Within this quiz, we also had 1 round on investments and 1 round on insurance. All the certificates and trophies had the Vyana Wealth branding. Once the connect was clearly established and reinforced through these efforts, we then began investor education seminars - because by then, Vyana Wealth was a name that was quite familiar to all residents. These seminars in turn translated into good leads and into business for us. Getting the sequence right, in my view, was critical to success of these initiatives.
Enhance brand visibility for your target audience
In our office, we paid for and put up a large signage in the ground floor as well as a large one on the 7th Floor of the building. Now, the 7th floor directly overlooks an important flyover in the city - one that connects Park Circus to Alipore. Alipore is one of the more affluent residential areas within Kolkata. Anybody driving on the flyover cannot miss the Vyana Wealth signage on the 7th floor of our building. That built a lot of brand awareness within Alipore for Vyana Wealth. Many people then looked up our website, saw us active on social media - and this helped promote Vyana Wealth among them. All our staff wear branded uniforms with the Vyana Wealth logo and name stitched on them. Wherever they go for work, our brand is being promoted all the time.
Announce yourself in a new city, innovatively
Similarly, when we launched our business in Jamshedpur, we inserted ads in local newspapers announcing Vyana Wealth. We tied up with prominent clubs in the city, had our standees and banners there, gave branded T-shirts for all club staff to wear. Club staff moving around with our brand certainly aroused curiosity among club members. We tied up with Rotary Club - for their events and competitions, we sponsored the gifts and certificates - all of which carried our brand. T-shirts, certificates, trophies, gifts - these don't cost too much money, but help enhance our brand visibility in a big way. We tied up with the local CA association - we paid around 10,000 rupees to get our branding at the venue of their workshop and set up a desk in the refreshments area. At break time, several of these CAs stopped by at our desk to understand what Vyana Wealth was and we collected leads from there. We then followed up on these leads and struck good referral relationships with some of these CAs.
Three important learnings on effective marketing
The important thing about all these activities is to understand that the activity in itself does not generate business. Activities build recall and generate leads. It is your follow up after these activities that generate business. If you don't follow up, all this branding activity is meaningless.
Another important thing is to understand that you may not be able to measure Return On Investment (ROI) on each activity you do. You need to take a few judgement calls and invest in creating your brand. I don't think I can say exactly how much ROI I get from my signage on the 7th floor of our office building. But I do understand that it enhances my brand's visibility among my target audience in a big way. Someone who drives past this signage everyday has an opportunity to remember my brand every day. When we follow this up with any communication - whether it's a flyer that reaches his house, or an event in his club, he is that much more positively inclined to hear us, perhaps because a curiosity was aroused by the large signage he passes by everyday. We have over 1300 retail clients at Vyana Wealth today. If I look at only mutual funds, that number is around 300. But when I include tax free bonds, IPOs, infra bonds, the number rises to 1300. The point is, when somebody is looking for a simple product like tax free bonds, and he walks into my office, it is obviously a combination of various branding, marketing and selling strategies that we employ which gets him to come to my office for this.
The third aspect I have understood about marketing is that you don't need to talk big money to get mileage. You need to have an attitude to invest, but not huge amounts of money that you can't really afford. The trick is to be innovative, to think differently and creatively. If you think creatively, you will be able to get affordable marketing strategies to work for you and help you drive your retail business forward.
All content in Marketing Wiz is created by Wealth Forum and should not be construed as views of Kotak MF.
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Abhenav has achieved considerable success at a young age, by thinking and acting differently. Wealth Forum has previously profiled his success story and some of his innovative thoughts and business approaches, which also saw him win the Wealth Forum Emerging Advisor Award in 2013.