Business Growth and increasing Market Fragmentation – it’s two ends of the same stick. How do we navigate the modern marketing puzzle?
Before the Internet, there were fewer mediums – Print, TV and Radio. All you have to choose is a medium that generally boils down based on your budget.
Today things are different. The Internet has made content marketing possible for any business and that too at scale – making legacy businesses stumble on the speed of content the new age Brands publish.
It won’t be surprising for some businesses to wonder – why these people are spending money crazily on things that are not directly contributing to business growth.
The short answer is they are not spending crazily.
If they are not spending crazily then what they are doing? Let me refer to Zerodha here.
Zerodha’s blog Z-connect is one of the oldest in finance. They must have published more than 1000 blog posts to date(This is not an exact count). Today, they have moved significantly towards videos and they publish videos right, left and centre through multiple channels.
Zerodha
Zerodha Varsity
Zero1 by Zerodha
Zero1 Hindi
Zero1 women
Markets by Zerodha
Markets by Zerodha Hindi
Rainmatter by Zerodha
The Other Side
The number of video channels they run is close to 10 and if you read the channel names one can easily guess there are more channels on the way(more regional languages)
Coming back to our discussion point – what they are doing is Brand Marketing. There was no idea of conversion – all Brand marketing. Occupy the target audience’s memory, planting the Brand name by publishing valuable content.
Eventually, when Zerodha’s Brand name is planted before the need arises, the first Brand that comes to the customer’s mind when he/she is ready, you can be certain that he/she is going to use Zerodha’s product.
Let’s assume a customer is ready in the market and looking for a financial product. There is Brand-B that heavily spends on performance marketing – let’s also assume the competitor for them is Zerodha. Guess who will get that customer. The answer is not difficult.
Customers choose the easiest option. Whoever is at the top of the mind is where they will go – Simple but very powerful.
On the other hand, the average Brand marketing and sales activation ratio is 60:40 but for the Finance sector it is somewhere between 80:20 to 90:10. What Zerodha does here is, lets remove all of this mathematics and go for 100% Brand marketing which is against conventional marketer’s approach but Zerodha is 100% right in what they are doing.
It would be very valid if you raised the point that not everybody is deep-pocketed like Zerodha – Agreed.
What is the solution then?
An average customer today is fragmented and spread across different mediums[Offline and multiple online platforms]. The ability to reach them through a narrow medium has become tricky. On the other hand, the ability to reach them through mass media marketing is costly.
Because your target audience is fragmented and present across you can take the traditional method – Spray and pray ie., Mass media advertising. Take TV, Print or radio and reach out to all your Total Addressable Market(TAM).
What Zerodha does is different, they talk to the whole market through Brand marketing organically and of course, their approach is not for everybody. It’s just an example of how different ways of marketing a business can choose.
Or segment your audience narrowly and reach out to them through appropriate mediums.
Segmentation
Market Segmentation is going beyond the common demographics stuff.
Market segmentation is a research work that determines how a business can divide its customers into smaller groups based on shared characteristics.
There are many ways to segment and target, but when you segment well, the messaging gets more powerful and relatable than what you do with the usual demographic groups.
A business can have multiple segments linked with its products. They can also launch products for segments.
