Online ads: Big gains for small cos

Give Your Business A Boost With Local Classifieds On The Internet Starting your own venture has never been easy, especially if you are into a business that is limited by geography. Clients won’t exactly flock at your door on the first day, if you are starting off with, say, a beauty parlour or a real estate service. Advertising avenues such as yellow pages, magazines and fliers might work, but they will also cost you a pile of money. And as a new entrepreneur you probably don’t have the luxury of allocating funds for advertising. Plus you can’t exactly create targeted ads that go only to your local clients. But smart businesspeople have found a way out, a new avenue which can work wonders for their business and is for free — the internet! Namit Shah, for instance, has already started to make a good enough profit of Rs 40,000 within just a couple of months of starting his tiffin services in Mumbai. “With services like mine, where we supply food to the office going crowd, word-of-mouth publicity was the only option earlier,” says Shah. But with all of three clients that they had to begin with, his family was struggling to make ends meet — until he discovered the internet. Making local connections: Being familiar with computers, Shah stumbled upon local classified sites on the internet. He found the idea of creating localised adverts for a particular geographical area very interesting. “I put up an online advertising campaign on Kijiji (mumbai.kijiji.com) and Vivastreet (mumbai.vivastreet.co.in) for Mumbai and within just a few weeks I was on the roll,” says Shah. Local classified sites such as Kijiji (www.kijiji.com), Viviastreet (www.vivastreet.com), Olx (www.olx.com) and Sulekha (www.sulekh-a.com) have been gaining popularity among small business entrepreneurs rapidly. Indiatimes (www.indiatimes.com) too offers similar facilities. The best part about these sites is that they connect you with customers in your own area — and that too the ones interested in your business. Compared with traditional advertising the biggest advantage you get from using the internet is that it’s a highly interactive medium. Not only can you localise your advertisements for a particular area, you can also update business information and limited-time offers anytime. Then, of course, most of these services are free or charge a nominal fee, so all you need to do is to create an account and put up your advertisements, which stay live for a period of about 30-40 days. The sites even take care of driving traffic to your advertisements and connecting you to clients. Global reach for your local business: Targeted ads doesn’t mean you have to stick to a suburb, city or even a particular country. Pradeep Waghmare, for instance has a fleet of rent-a-cabs with customers from all over India. In fact, his clients have found him from other nations like Dubai, too! Waghmare started with a small tours and travel business in Mumbai some years back, but with plenty of competition and meager margins, the business wasn’t exactly thriving. He had tried to reach the public through typical means, such as ads in the telephone book or handing out cards at the airport and railway stations, but says Whagmare, “There were so few calls with those, I kept wondering if I should even bother.” But that’s when he tried local classifieds on the interent. “My brother Pankaj made me put up an online advertising campaign on Kijiji (mumbai.kijiji.com) and that did the trick,” says Waghmare. People started calling me from all over Mumbai. Encouraged by this success on Mumbai website, Waghmare listed his services in other cities. “I then started getting calls from all over the country — people visiting Mumbai from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Delhi and Bhopal wanted to know about my rates and book vehicles on telephone,”says he. And now the business is so good, that he has had to increase his fleet to keep up with the demand. Another good part about using these sites is that you can keep customising and updating your business information. Muthreja Suresh, a real estate agent, vouches for this. “As an agent dealing in the cutthroat business of real estate in Mumbai, it was always a challenge to reach out to potential customers. Especially with a business like mine where houses come and go, updating the listings is very important,” says Suresh. Unlike the traditional medium, where you pay for each update, these let you make as many changes to your postings as you like, without worrying about the costs. Using the localised internet sites is certainly working for Suresh. “In just one month, I received around 200 queries for my advertisements. Of these 20 queries turned into customers, giving me an earning of Rs 75,000 in a short span of time,” he says. And this is just the beginning, say analysts. As internet usage grows, more and more people will turn to the internet instead of phone books or yellow pages to find restaurants, office-supply vendors or any kind of service. And if you are particularly looking at localised advertising, the internet is fast becoming one of the best forms of accessing a large pool of clientele without investing too much.