The Class:2 of the Digital Marketing Internship focuses on the basic funda of learning + executing, a good way to market better is to communicate efficiently and the importance of researching about your niche to know your target audience
After a victorious response from the first class, (87% assignment completion rate!) the second class of our internship got started right on time. I read some very informative and creative articles of my fellow-batch mates and I would say that I’m only delighted to be a part of this great initiative. Many of us have written a blog for the first time and the pressure and eagerness to perform better and complete the task was commendable. There’s a healthy sense of competition and everyone is only positive and helpful on social media to motivate and compliment others on their writings.
A pinch of philosophy to market better
Deepak began this class by reiterating that in present times how important is our attention span. With so much going around every second: it only takes a buzz of the notification to distract us from the thing which we’d been focusing for the past half-an-hour (sometimes more)! Since this method of studying is new and digital, our focus is bound to get challenged but we must develop the will power to adhere to our present task and execute that properly.
The best way to do that is to follow the Golden Triangle formula:
Learn ⇆ Do ⇆ Teach
I’d been following this technique for a long time, which was introduced to me by my mother and I do the same with my students and when I study. It’s a very quick way to acquire knowledge in the long run because only when we learn properly are we able to communicate clearly to others. Also, this way is very productive because we are learning and executing rather than just learning to keep everything inside our hypothalamus and die with it! When we communicate with others through any medium, we understand our strong and weak points, we don’t need anyone to point that out to us- we are our best friend and best critics. We hereby Learn our mistakes. When we communicate with others, like the way I’m doing right now, I’m able to understand my strengths and weaknesses. I’ve learned the technique and I’m executing it. This way I’m Doing it. If you’re able to understand anything which I’ve communicated, I’ve performed my role as a teacher and I’ve Taught you. Hence I have implemented the golden triangle method.
In the last class, as Deepak suggested ways to improve our communication skills; by reading, writing, speaking and watching more content of the language which we want to improve, the Golden Triangle method only acts as an add-on to nurture our hidden talents.
In case you are new to my blog, this blogpost, as well as the coming ones, will form a series of my perspective and learnings from the assignment that we get from the Digital Marketing Internship, which is an initiative by Deepak Kanakraju of Digital Deepak. My first assignment, which I wrote on the Extensive program on digital marketing, which laid an overview about me trying my hands on something so educational and exciting. I really loved the concept of this internship, because it is so practical- we get to learn and execute simultaneously about what we are learning so in case we face any problem, we can get it sorted, without making excuses to delay it.
Also, I feel that this is a very good way to communicate our knowledge to others and in turn, is helping us to understand the diaspora of digital marketing better and better.
Get real virtually
A good marketer, irrespective of digital or offline, is to able to get started with a good conversation. They don’t necessarily have to have knowledge about everything but they should know the technique of engaging their audience. And one can do that only if they are authentic. If one is not authentic and fakes in the short run, it gets difficult for them to sustain in the long run.
A temporary success might lead you to Kangchenjunga but it cannot lead you to Mount Everest.
Get experience to market better
In order to excel at anything, we need to have good and bad experiences. Good experiences form a fond memory and bad experiences form a learning opportunity. How do you form experiences? Try your hands into something you’ve never done. Try to get to know what is the thing which you’ve always kept postponing? Learn a new language, enrol into some interactive class. Learn a new musical instrument or even just start blogging! See, new experiences are always awkward, you will not succeed at the beginning. But only when you get out of your comfort zone, you will be able to conquer your true goals. Right now I’m trying onto a couple of new experiences as well: I’m taking a few aptitudes exams, I’ve enrolled in this internship and I plan on oxygenating my blog.
Interact with people
As I write this, I understand my major drawback in blogging is that I don’t engage much. Firstly because I did not know who was my target audience. I began blogging just because writing provides me sanity and I’m happier when I write. But after this class, one of the key insight I took was that it’s very important to have an audience, not necessarily with same likes and dislikes but at least few common areas or a problem that needs to be addressed. Lately, a topic has been stuck on my mind and that is our mental health. With so many depressing incidents of suicide, mental breakdown, anxiety issues, family problems, the national and international issues, relationship issues and many other things which seems insignificant but is very important to be addressed, I got hooked into the topic. So, I took a survey about mental health and well being and the response I got was fantastic- with 26 respondents as of noon of 28 December 2019. I want to thank everyone who contributed to the survey with their inputs.
Customer is God
In India, we say, “Grahak hi Bhagwan Hai,” meaning, “Customer is the only God,” and without these “Gods” we cannot do any business successfully. Whether you sell pakodas or even shoes, even a customer is as important as hundreds and thousands of them. Do you recall the news about how one customer sued Bata shoes only because they wrongly charged their customer for a Rs 3 paper bag?
Well, that’s the power of one customer! So, now we know that it is very important to know (and please) the customer, right? That’s the topic of our this week’s assignment – Know your customer.
“There is only one boss. The customer―and he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”―Sam Walton
And because this theory is universal, it is very important that we spend adequate time to research and know our customers. I was fortunate that I got a tremendous response to my survey about mental health.
As much excited I was about the survey, the response I got was very draining personally because it did prove my hypothesis that majority of the respondents were depressed. Out of the 26 respondents, 17 people have been depressed. 
Understanding my target customer, analysing their avatar:
The concept of customer avatar is very easy. In order to pitch your products/services smartly and effectively, it is very important to know your customer. The foundation of any business is to first define their target customer. Our offers should be such that it solves the problems of the market and not create additional problems for the customers. And thus it goes without saying that in order to understand the market or the niche that we’re working, we should put ourselves into their shoes and make their life a little less difficult. We need to understand their demographics and psychological motives so as to better serve them.
The niche that I choose is mental health.
I interviewed one of my friends, Seema Kumari (name changed), and I took her as my target audience and designated her as my customer avatar and here are a few of the major findings of the survey:
Female, age 25-34
She has completed her masters
She is from tier 2 city
She has been depressed for a couple of years
She watches and read motivational/inspirational videos/articles regularly to cope up with it
She is very active on social media and posts occasionally
She knows someone who has been depressed
She meditates regularly because she likes it
She prefers meeting in person than talking virtually
So, I now know her better. I understand her problems and needs. She is finding ways to deal with depression-like many of the respondents. The niche for mental health is vast so working on it would be very extensive.
So, that’s about it with this post. Hopefully, I’ll try to come up with an article with the insights I’ve got from this survey. In case you want to contribute, please fill this questionnaire here and I hope in the upcoming articles I explore this topic further and somehow help you. 🙂
Stay tuned to this space for more about digital marketing insights and other articles!
