DM Internship - Class 2

DM Internship Program - Class 2

Finally!, the much awaited 2nd session of DM Internship Program has started and we as the audience are on the edge of our seats, eager to devour the wealth of knowledge from Deepak.

The Session starts with an announcement that the first assignment completion rate is very high (87% to be precise); but this was due to Carrots i.e., due to the lure of incentive the students have completed the assignments within the stipulated time frame.

Importance of Good Communication

  Communicating to customers is at the heart of Digital marketing. We learnt how we need to communicate and with whom we need to communicate. As human beings, we have different personas at different settings (ex: with our relatives, with friends, at social settings, etc), therefore, it is important to be authentic and to be open about our opinion even if the outcome is not to our advantage. Marketing is about coming up with an angle of communicating with people in an attractive manner. People with more life experience are better marketers due to more experience that they have accumulated over a longer period of time. It is also important to break out of the comfort zone and try new things like solo traveling, adventure seeking, rock climbing, learning new languages and other activities so that helps to develop new reference points for communicating with people.

How to define your Target Customer

This is the most important thing in marketing before starting anything. When we want to communicate better with audience, we need to hone in on Audience demographics and psycho-graphics. Demographics is about age, location etc and psycho-graphics is about interest level, their likes, dislikes. Once it is clear about these concepts, it will be easier to communicate better to our audience. Essentially, we need to boil down the entire audience to one single target customer and all our content and marketing is directing to this single customer, who in turn represents the entire audience.

Once we define our target customer, we can now understand what kind of life they are leading, what is the problems they are facing, and what are the conversations they are having in their mind. After this, there is no need to start new conversations when we can join the conversations they are already having in their mind.

Once we develop our ideal customer avatar, we need to focus on the center. There will be other people on the periphery, but we need to craft our communication to our ideal customer avatar. People who are outside the ideal customer avatar might find our content interesting, but they are never the primary audience for our communication. Deepak then shared with us the Customer Avatar Survey which took 5-10 minutes. It was really amazing to see the results of the survey instantaneously. Then he asked us to summarize the data and create a customer avatar.

Niche Selected - Health Insurance

Click here for Survey Link

Here is the result of the customer avatar survey after brainstorming with a couple of colleagues;

-Suraj is a 32-year-old private company employee working in Chennai, India.

-He makes 11 to 15 lacs per annum and has a credit card.

-He is married and has a spouse and one son who are dependent on him for a living.

-His current employer pays for his health insurance, and he is reliant only on his employer for his insurance and he does not have any private health insurance coverage for his family.

After completing this exercise, I can see I can communicate to my entire audience just by communicating to Suraj alone who is my target audience. Now I can drill down my target customer and understand his problems, thought patterns, behavior, decision making process. Armed with this information, I can target him much better while marketing. This approach will make marketing much more effective and will achieve the desired results in terms of sales and revenue achievement.

This concludes another session on digital marketing. I am looking forward to attend the next class with Deepak.