How to Guide – Marketing for Small Scale Business

"If Peoples Don't Know You are in Business then you are Not in Business", this is the what author Bryan Thayer mentioned in his book "One Minute Networker".  This is true for any business. So marketing is the art any business owner must learn, whether he is in Small scale business or large scale. Although I will focus primarily on small scale or local business here but some of the techniques are applied by many large scale businesses too.

If you want to do marketing of your business it’s totally depends on how much budget you have for the marketing purpose and how far you want to extend your reach. It's like sky is the limit. 

Marketing is a kind of probability which is different for different businesses cases. Which means if you market your product to 1000 peoples then probably 10 will show up for queries and 2-3 may actually buy the product from you. This is just an example and may not hold true for your business.  My point here is increase your reach as farthest you can and don’t ever get discourage if you are not receiving immediate results or very low results of your publicity or marketing.

Mentioned below are some of the ways you can do the publicity of your business. The ways defined here are limited to my ways of marketing only, so do let me know if you find there are some ways to be added to this list for any small scale or local businesses. If you own a business based on franchise of any popular national or international brand then your product owner may do most of the publicity for you by applying some or all of the ways mentioned below. You may not need to worry much in terms of doing your own marketing. To help people understand these marketing strategy, I have taken an example of a small local business where business owner is selling printers, cartridges and do refills. Here printers and cartridges are products and refilling cartridges are services for that business so whenever marketing strategy needs an example I used this below. These marketing strategies are generic enough to be applied to any businesses.

      1) Via Mouth Publicity – First try to get the help of publicity from your existing network. This network may be of your family, friends, neighbors, email friends, Facebook friends, twitter followers or someone you just say hello during Morning walk, fellow commuters in a public transports etc. So anyone you know by face and they know your face, approach them and tell them about your business, give the visiting card or pamphlet of your business. Ask them to help spreading the word about your business. You never know some may not have direct contact to help grow your business but may have something indirectly. If possible give them some motivation to spread the message, e.g. Create a point based system where each customer they bring in will be worth 500 points or a gift voucher etc. anything that does not reduce your profit margin much. If I want to elaborate this with the printing business then define points like each refill will be worth 100 points and each customer anyone brings will be 900 points, and after 1000 points the customer will get two free refilling or useful goodies. You may not have to create the whole card system like Hotels or Airlines. You can print or stamp the points on the receipt itself and when customer bring back the receipt you can add the points manually or in your custom system to recognize the freebie. This is just an example which you can follow not only in mouth publicity but also in any other kind of marketing for your product. Remember, if somehow the Mouth publicity hit the right note it will work like fire in the jungle to spread your business and no other marketing strategies mentioned here can match that up.

      2) Pamphlets, Placards, Banners, Hoardings or Posters - They all are different things and used for different purposes, but I clubbed it into one because they all fall under same category of marketing. The cost for each of them will vary as per your location, so it will totally depend on what budget you have to choose one or all from Pamphlets, Placards, Banners, Hoardings or Posters.

If you have the budget to put a hoarding at the place near to your business, then I will suggest to place that advertisement at any Petrol/Gas Pumps. Petrol pumps are the place which are most visited locations for any location or city. If there are no facility of placing hoarding or advertisements to any Petrol or Gas pump then search the nearest location from that petrol pump where you can place that hoarding. If that’s also not possible then put it near to any crowded Market, shopping mall etc., just ensure no Tree or Lamp or Electric pole or any other hoardings are distracting the view of your hoarding. Same will be applicable for Banners or Posters too.

If pamphlet is the only thing you can afford then I would suggest to distribute those pamphlets to people who came to fill petrol or gas at any petrol/gas pumps. If you can cover for more than one petrol pumps then you will find that in one single day you may have distributed some uncountable amount of pamphlets to unique peoples. This will definitely increase your probability to receive business. The busier the petrol/gas station is the better will be your marketing. You may need permission from the owner or concerned authority of that petrol pump to do this, which I assume should not be a big concern. Still if any pump owner said no, then simply just move to other pump. In absence of any kind of permissions, people try to distribute their pamphlets to people standing in traffic signals and waiting for their chance to cross that signal. Like petrol pump, the access to number of peoples are huge for this case too but most of them will have the attention more towards the signal rather than on your pamphlet. So I don’t recommend this way of distributing pamphlet but that also another way. I will rather ask you to use the common option of distributing pamphlets door to door than distributing them on traffic signals.

In place of pamphlets stickers are another way of marketing that falls under this category. You can place stickers to any new item sold, distribute stickers as free goodies to people for sticking that on to their vehicles, gadgets, dresses etc. Just ensure stickers are good and cool enough to attract peoples to actually put in their personal items. If you are in a business where placing stickers can distort the look of the items they bought then you can motivate customers by providing certain price discounts if they allow your business stickers on the product they just bought. This way of marketing may be cheaper than the hoardings but will be definitely be costlier than pamphlets.  In place of stickers you can use tattoo too but that totally depends, if providing tattoo is relevant to your business or not.

      3) Door To Door – In this case you or your marketing peoples will take the pain to visit different offices or homes to let peoples know about your products, services or business. This approach will give you lot of direct contacts and prospects which you can actually use in next step. If relevant to your business you can also offer your services door to door or provide competitive prices by communicating with them directly. Providing services door to door means if anyone order your services and you deliver those products or services direct to their home. If your business provide both heavy and light items then you can deliver light items free and heavy ones with some cost. Again as per the example business where printer and cartridges are sold then cartridge, ink refill etc. can be delivered free but printers can be delivered with some delivery cost. This strategic decision you have to take in such a way that it will show benefit for the customer to buy your product or services from your shop. Additionally you can restrict the radius of free deliveries too this even applicable for big items.

      4) Electronically – In this context we will use all electronic mediums of marketing along with phone. All the peoples know either thru any of the previous steps or thru any other marketing techniques will be called or emailed here. Spend at least an hour to do this every morning or at any fix time of the day although totally depend on how big your network is. While converse have the pitch of your business ready, keep the conversation short and sweet as the person at other side may not have all the time for you. Listen carefully whenever the person has to say something. Usually people love the person who listen a lot rather than talk. If they are not available now, try to find out when they will be available and schedule or follow-up with them accordingly. If they don’t show any interest to your business or the pitch you provided, then ask them at least to spread the word about your business. Similar to the one you did via mouth publicity.

Apart from Email you can do many other things to market your items electronically. You can create a Facebook page or twitter, LinkedIn or Quora account of your business and provide regular updates about your business. Use the promotion options for respective websites. Request your contacts to like or follow those pages while writing email or during conversations. You can also provide points, the one we discussed in point 1 if they follow your at twitter or like your pages at Facebook etc.

You can also create blog and provide expert comments about your product, services and business. In case of the example printer business blogs can be created about reviews of printer’s, cartridges, about how and when to service, anything and everything about that business. In all the cases you need to work hard to create your fan base and followers. You can start off with known peoples and gradually unknown people will join in. Idea here is to create considerable fan base of your business or product so that you can market it to larger audience, whenever needed. Remember the fan base of your business will not get create overnight and will take time, but no harm in starting it as this kind of marketing will be free of cost and will have widest reach beyond your locality of business.

In terms of marketing at social network or Facebook page some people tag all of their business related updates, pictures to all their contacts in Facebook. I will not recommend you doing this but this is also one of the way of marketing that exists electronically, where friends/contacts of your Facebook contacts will receive all the updates in their news feeds about the updates whom you have tagged, unless there account setting don’t allow this to do that.

If you are ready to spend some amount to this electronic marketing you can put up your advertisement to any popular global or local websites or yellow pages. If you have the resources create your own website, it’s an effective way to tell people in one line about your business by just providing the URL of your website. Inside website you have all details, FAQ etc., they want to know about your business.

Similarly you can do this for mobile too. In mobile you can advertise your business using push notifications or location based marketing like if any person with his mobile reach within 5 Miles or Km of your business they automatically receive your advertisements. These kind of marketing’s will not come up free of cost unless you own the App for notifications. In mobile world if you want to make your marketing effective then that App must be popular too, well at least to the location you want to do the business.

Marketing electronically will give you higher reach and better visibility to your business to the peoples you don’t even know or does not comes under your business location. You will never know from which way opportunity strikes for your business. In marketing world the more reach you have the better visibility of your business will be and doing marketing electronically will help you achieve exactly the same.

      5) Visual or Audio Media Marketing – This way of advertising your product or services are effective if you are planning to market it to bigger audience instantly. In case of local business marketing can be started at local or regional TV channels. This will also be one of the costliest marketing from this list. The costliest and most effective in this marketing category may be either advertise during popular show in your local FM channel or own a show in local FM radio itself. Where you will tell the audience everything about your business, help peoples in resolving issues related to your product. This is exactly like blogging but doing it live on an FM Radio or to a local TV channel.  You are actually letting peoples of your surrounding community know that you are in a business (Remembered my first line). If everything goes well this is the fastest way of creating fan base for your business, which you can channelize into various other marketing tools for your business.

If you are believer of silent marketing through media then select the newspaper to market your business. Usually advertisement at first or last page of the newspaper are costliest in comparison to inner pages. If looking for cheapest one in this category too, then go to any newspaper distribution agency and ask them to put your pamphlet in all the papers they are going to distribute on certain day/date or locality. Negotiate your price with the distributer accordingly. Same logic you can apply to any weekly, fortnightly or monthly magazines too. Usually cost of advertisements to a Magazine are low in comparison to newspapers, but it all depends on relevance, popularity and reach of particular Magazine or newspaper for your business.

In this marketing category, you can own your publishing too by owning a local newspaper or magazine about your business, if you don’t have much budget collaborate this with various business owners and fund to publish a daily, weekly or fortnightly magazine or newspaper focusing mostly about your and your collaborators businesses. Initially you may need to distribute these magazines/newspapers free to market then you can think about some cost if the magazine or newspaper is well accepted by the audience for your business. That’s why you need to find out all cost including printing to distributing before you selecting this approach. In terms of effectiveness it’s quite possible people will not read a one page pamphlet that’s got distributed freely but will definitely read a 4-6 page newspaper or magazine that got distributed to them freely. More the people go through your advertisements the more effective your marketing will be.

      6) Leadership Marketing –This is in continuation to last paragraph of the last point. Project yourself the leader in your business category. Leader not in terms of profit or money but in terms of knowledge. To showcase that talent you have conduct a seminar or event about the knowledge you have or the product you sell. Invite peoples who are your existing customers and also new customers too. If the cost of conducting whole seminar or event from yourself is quite costly for you then try to get a time slot or place slot of any bigger seminar or event or fair or form a group of business owners with similar ideologies and then create an event or fair or seminar with them. Try to organize or participate in these kind of events every year as people do remember regular products than the occasional ones.

      7) Sponsorship – This marketing strategy will definitely cost you most money but is tried tested and effective way to attract masses. Sponsor a program we discussed in point 5 or sponsor a seminar or fair or event that we discussed in point 6. Sponsor as per your marketing budget. Here you may not need to sponsor something related to your business, you can sponsor any popular event in your city or locality which are attended by major chunk of peoples. This strategy usually covers or may include points 1 to 6 that we discussed above.

Keep me posted about what are the marketing strategy you apply, or you feel there are some other ways to attract local customers too.

©Tapas Majumdar

20 Best Inspirational Movies for Children in Hindi

This is the second part of the series “20 Best Inspirational Movies for Children”. Unlike first part where plenty of films to choose form the released films list. This is not the case for Indian films made in Hindi language. Although, thanks to the changing trends in Hindi film industry (Bollywood) that now there are movies made for children’s too. Otherwise it would have been a challenging task to compile list of 10 movies itself, forget about a list of 20. Here 80% of the list are from the movies that been made in past 3-4 years only.

If Bollywood or Hindi Film Industry would have behaved same way that it was earlier then I must have to list some blockbusters which are highly recognized by masses but they may not have provided any learning for kids. E.g. Sholay, has lots of good entertainment and Morales we all adults or child can relate to but when I had watched that movie first time as a child I thought being Dacoit is a pretty cool profession. As a child wanted badly to become one. I assume no parent wants this kind of interpretation their child will make after watching any movie, that’s why excluding many of the popular Hindi movies from this list. Here is the list of Hindi (Bollywood) movies suitable for children of age 5 or 6+ years, again in no particular order.

S.No	Movie	Details
1.	Chillar Party	It’s a story about group of kids from a society trying to help out a street dog when order came out to clean up all street dogs from the city. It teaches the morale that if Kids want they can achieve anything
2.	Anjali	The story is about a two-year-old girl Anjali who is mentally challenged and terminally ill. Her father, hides her from the mother letting his wife believe that the child died at birth. This movie portrayed kids as they are in day-to-day life – naughty, adventurous, mischievous, singing and playing and indulging in little gang wars. To find the amazing performance of Anjali itself, makes this movie worth a watch.
3.	Hawaa Hawaai	This is the movie recently released. Here the child protagonist want to win the skating competition but quite skeptical about doing so. His overcoming struggle was presented in really nice manner.
4.	Tare Zameen Par	The main protagonist Ishaan Awasthi is a dyslexic child in this film but the film is not entirely a sob story. The subject and the child's experiences have been showcased gently and deftly and Ishaan Awasthi’s superlative performance makes this a must watch for any child movie list.
5.	Stainley Ka Dabba	Like last two movies in this list, this too was also written by Amol Gupte. In this movie he acted as the teacher. It’s a story of school-teacher, who forces children to share their food with him, forbids one from entering the school until he brings his own Tiffin/Lunch-box.
6.	The Blue Umbrella	This is story about a little girl living in small place earned a blue umbrella. The neighboring shopkeeper tried to steal that umbrella and changed the color to Red, so that he did not get caught. This Vishal Bharadwaj movie teaches about controlling greed, envy and jealousy etc.
7.	Halo	This is Santosh Sivan's cute film about a motherless child who loses her dog Halo and her journey to find and release that dog.
8.	I Am Kalam	An impoverished boy forms an unlikely and unstable friendship with the lonely son of a nobleman.
9.	BumBumBole	This is the Hindi adaptation of movie Children of Heaven. Either of the movies are watchable for kids of that age. When the brother loses his sister's shoes, they both decide to share their shoes while going to school to avoid getting in trouble from parents. A movie with great lessons on sharing, telling truth and taking care of younger sibling.
10.	Hanuman	This is the story of the super hero from our own Mythology, The Hanuman. This story has lots of antidotes from various mythologies including Ramayan. So the movie comes up with the package of good messages from those mythologies.
11.	Ferrari Ki Sawaari	This is the movie from the makers of 3 Idiot. This movie teaches many morals along with the most important one – Honesty. It’s a story of a young boy and also about a Ferrari and how that Ferrari makes that boy's dreams of playing cricket at Lords a reality.
12.	ChakDe India	This is a sports film where Indian women hockey team won the world cup against all odds under the guidance of a coach who was already been labelled as traitor to the country. A true story of team spirit.
13.	3 Idiots	Story of three friends where two friends search for the third one with multiple backstories. It’s about friendship and dreams. It’s a good watch for your child if he sits through the whole movie. Most kids of his age may not. As mentioned earlier what movie is an adult’s favorite may or may not be enjoyed by all kids. Still every child is different and things can’t be generalized in this way.
14.	Bhootnath	Here a Kid met the Ghost of the house they moved in recently. He didn’t accept the existing of the Ghost and the fun begins. Even the next part Bhootnath Returns has also some good social messages.
15.	Lagaan	The peoples of a village in pre-independent India stake their future on a game of cricket against their ruthless British rulers. This movie help to learn leadership skills among other characteristics like importance of taking risk etc.
16.	Swades	A successful Indian scientist returns to his village to take his nanny to America with him and in the process rediscovers his roots. A story told in simple format to understand the complicacy.
17.	Hum Hai Rahi Pyar Ke	Character of Aamir Khan (Rahul) inherits his sister's three kids along with her business and house. He finds it difficult to adjust to his new life. To add to that, he had unknowingly given shelter to a runaway to-be bride. A hassled Rahul lands in further trouble when he refuses the advances of his boss' daughter. The spoilt kids and the runaway girl finally come around to help Rahul save his business, and the house.
18.	TaRaRumPum	A movie not so commercially successful but do teach children’s about living in scarcity. Being car racing and two kids as center of attraction of this movie will make kids a great watch.
19.	Krrish	The film had all the action, emotion and drama needed for success in theatres. Even its first part Koi Mil Gaya was also a good one. Although not including that movie in this list because I had already mentioned E.T. at Hollywood list. Krrish being the continuation of Koi Mil Gaya series is definitely a fun ride for any child.
20.	Mr. India	This is kind of India’s first super hero movie. Where protagonist after putting a watch go invisible. If needed for your kid do fast forward the “Kate Nahi Kat te Din Ye Raat….” Song, otherwise this movie is very much watchable by children’s of that age. Chances are they may like Mogambo more than Mr. India, but trust me, due to lots of child actors in that movie this will not be that addicted like Sholay’s Gabbar. They will definitely find someone else to imitate.

Bonus Five

I did not had to struggle much to find five more apart from already promised 20 movies. Mentioned below five movies with details mostly from IMDB, that will fit into this extended bonus list.

S.No	Movie	Details
1.	My Friend Ganesha	This is a series which children enjoy when an 8 year old boy and Lord Ganesha solved many problems.
2.	Anand	The classic story of a terminally ill man who wishes to live life to the full before the inevitable occurs, as told by his best friend.
3.	Gandhi	The lawyer who became the famed leader of the Indian revolts against the British rule through his philosophy of nonviolent protest.
4.	Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar	A rich brat and a poor chap try to woo a girl, with their rivalry culminating in the most prestigious college event - the marathon cycle race.
5.	Munna Bhai Series	A two part series where in first part Munna bhai sets out to fulfill his father's dream of becoming a doctor and in second part met Mahatma Gandhi.

Let me know if you agreed or not agreed to the list. The missed ones or the best ones in this list.

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©Tapas Majumdar