India's Real Customer Base: 50 Million

If there is one thing that can divide the target market into two, it's the customers who read and the customers who don't.

Having done digital marketing for more than a decade now, I see a lot of people running towards volumes on social media. But the audience on social media has very low attention spans.

If you are reading this right now, it is because you have patience and the attention span to read.

The volumes coming from social media may be good for D2C brands and certain apps whose value is based on the daily active users, but if you are in the knowledge economy selling content, courses, training, consulting, or services, you will NOT get your best customers through Instagram reels.

In fact, you will get the wrong customers if you are focusing on social media channels for customer acquisition.

Where do the right customers come from?

The right customers come from:

• People who read blogs
• People who read newsletters
• People who read books

As I have put more content out there on the web, I see more quality customers enter my funnel.

That's one of the reasons why I am not very active on YouTube, Instagram on Facebook. I don't want to attract customers who are impulsive. People who scroll through TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels for hours are impulsive.

Even if they buy my training, they might not have the patience to even consume all the content that I deliver to them.

The most sophisticated customers:

• Access the internet via laptop/desktop (approx. 100m people in India. The rest of the people access the internet via mobiles).
• 80% of them are from Tier 1 cities
• They have a good command of the English language. They use English to communicate more than 50% of the time.
• They have credit cards and access to credit. (Around 40m people in India).

All my marketing activities will be geared towards these customers to start with. Eventually, I might expand my target market to students and the next generation in the anticipation of building a long-term branding funnel.

Let's forget that India is 1.4 billion people.

The buyer market that we are targeting is at a max of 50 million. That's just about around the population of South Korea.

If you want to do content marketing to attract customers into your funnel you need to write blogs, write newsletters and write books. Writing is the best way to think clearly and communicate the value proposition of your offers in a clear and concise manner.

Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju