Running a marketing campaign with the nominal budget but with a goal to reach the maximum number of people is always a challenge. The marketing team of Pay1 committed themselves to the same, minimal budget but determined to tap the largest retail business in the world. Being a startup we have to find innovative ways of marketing and most of them being cost effective. Quirky taglines, utilising in-house acting talents and binging on Bollywood movies in our free time is how we came up with the tagline “Ab angootha chalega” and the campaign content that followed after.
Brainstorming sessions revolved around the team throwing retro Bollywood dialogues at each other to make the AePS marketing campaign relatable. Sometimes our imagination runs ahead of us, designing a campaign around dialogues contentwise is a challenge but the execution of the same proved to be cumbersome. The plan was simple using social media, blogger outreach and finally releasing the AePS advertisement online. Creating an advertisement with a meager budget is not easy and as with most of the problems the solution is mostly in our backyards, for us the statement was more literal than figurative. The actors in the ad were our colleagues, scriptwriter, the director, the cameraman were from the marketing team, being the jack of all the trades we had to delegate work amongst ourselves. The only cost inherited was during the day of the shoot, scrumptious idli’s and dosa’s at a South Indian restaurant and some hot filter coffee to flush the lunch down. The team learned quite a lot throughout the campaign and sometimes whilst looking back some profound statements of the “Answers to all your problems being right in front of you” stands true at any point in life, be it professional or our personal lives.
In the first week of AePS pre-order, we crossed more than 3000 bookings. Our campaign was not only able to accomplish organic (word of mouth) advertisement but also significant social media reach on primary social media platforms. Marketing people have the tendency of whine about budgets being not enough and through the AePS campaign, we realised that the content of the campaign matters and not the budget, even today we tend to forget that communication is the root to all the problems ironically communication is also the solution to the same. Keeping the campaign content simple and relatable to the target audience is what matters budget can be looked into later. As we say that “A good idea is always staring at us through a blank paper”.
