What are traditional businesses? An organization, which could be a store, a food outlet or an agency, operating out of a physical premise and providing its consumers a certain product or service, is termed as a traditional business.  Problems faced by them: In recent times, we have seen the decline of many traditional businesses. The biggest reason for downfall of traditional businesses is their incompetency to digitize or lack of interest and faith in digital marketing. Few other contributing factors are: High set up cost: The traditional businesses involve a physical space, at an impactful location, from where they carry out their trade. This combination of a suitable place and location usually comes at a high cost. Stocking of products: In a physical set up, the seller needs to stock a lot of products for user experience. This involves a lot of investment. High marketing cost: In traditional businesses, the modes of marketing are generally print and digital mediums, which come at a very high value and no guarantee of customer conversion. Downtime issues: In the traditional business set up. A single day of downtime, due to human limitations, can cost the business a lot.  Window shopper issues: Not everyone visiting the business space is a customer. A lot of time and logistics are wasted behind these leisurely browsers.         Why is digitization important for traditional businesses? Being present online is, being visible: Being online increases the market reach exponentially in contrast to the traditional ways. The younger generation explores everything online first and then decide to venture offline. Being known online can help in establishing a good customer base and hence increase the sales. Customer engagement: Digital marketing helps out in customer engagement and understanding the trends. For example, these days everyone prefers home delivery or services, catering to this requirement of the audience helps in business growth.   Direct marketing: Once you have marked your target audience and understood the market trends, the next step is marketing your product or service. Through various platforms, you can start direct marketing without involving any distributors or agencies.  Round the clock business: Digitization gives you the advantage of 24*7 business with or without your availability. Since your products or services are listed online, they are visible to the consumers and the trade can continue without your immediate involvement. Better customer service: Being present digitally can be helpful in providing better service to the customers. This in turn builds trust towards your business and helps it grow. Better product visibility: Through your digital handle, you can conveniently show off your product in a better manner and also without any extra investment. Product segregation into different categories as per customer requirement also becomes easy.   To sum up, digitization is not only a tool to enhance the business, rather it is the need of the hour and extremely important to sustain in the current market. Hence, along with physical presence, digital presence is also equally necessary.

With the ever growing e-commerce websites and social media and digital marketplaces, it has become extremely important for brands and businesses to be present online. In the pre-covid times, there was still some room for people to consider buying or investing into a company’s service or product through word of mouth or physical presence, but after the pandemic, online is the first place where people prefer buying from. This makes it all the more important for businesses to work on their online presence.  Ways to improve social media presence: Using appropriate platforms: Small businesses are literally spoiled for choice when it comes to choosing a platform for marketing, given so many options like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest etc. Targeting all of them in one go could be a bit overwhelming initially, instead a better approach could be starting with ones which have a larger and ideal audience for the business. You could gradually advance to other platforms once things get rolling. Find an ideal audience to engage: The foremost thing to acknowledge here is, everyone is not an audience. Most of the businesses are pretty clear right from the start which particular audience they are targeting. This clarity helps in figuring out many more aspects like platform, content, brand voice etc. Establish the goal: Be clear with what you really want to achieve with your online presence. For instance, the expected outcome for a product based business would be different than the one who provides service. The clarity of outcome will help you in creating a social media strategy. Research the trending content type: Understanding the current trends and connecting your brand with them will always make you stand out and increase the audience engagement. Finding the current trend largely depends upon your target audience. Something which people of age group 18-24 will connect with might not resonate with people of age group 35-40. Thus, the research needs to be consumer specific. Be consistent with the content: The saying ‘out of sight is out of mind’ holds great value when it comes to building social media presence. If your brand is constantly visible in the news feeds, posts, reels etc. your chances of consumer conversion are higher. To attain this, it is highly advisable to have a content calendar in place and adhering to it.  Go beyond advertising: These days’ people are looking for brands which add value to their lives. Beyond just selling, indulge with your audience. This could be done by offering them some freebies or some offers or educating them around your brand, though not explicitly. Buying your product or investing in your services should not be the only motto of the audience to visit your social media handle.  User analytics to monitor the engagement: Many online tools like google analytics can help you understand user engagement. The results from the analysis helps in deciding the further steps.

Digital marketing refers to promoting the product or service which a company provides using different digital platforms like website, search engines, social media, messengers, etc. The traditional marketing lacks the potential of reaching the target audience and is very non-specific, also it requires higher investment. Whereas, with digital marketing, businesses can target ideal audience and invest wisely. Digital marketing is a win-win for entrepreneurs since it works at a lower cost and gains better results.   Let us understand why Digital Marketing has gained popularity and is a preferred way of marketing nowadays, as compared to the traditional marketing methods. Low cost investment: After setting up a business, the next most important step is marketing. The traditional marketing involved (still does), lots of capital. The budding entrepreneurs, who usually work on a shoestring budget find it difficult to invest this amount. Here, the digital marketing comes to their rescue. With very minimum expenditure, one can have a great marketing strategy in place. Flexibility of making changes: In the traditional marketing, once you opt for a campaign, it is very difficult to alter it or make any changes in case you find it is not working up to your expectations. Even if you, it will add on to the expenses. This is not the case when it comes to digital marketing. The content can be altered as and how required, without add on charges. This is both cost efficient as well as convenient. Unceasing marketing: Your website and the social media handle/page that you create for your brand are always going to promote your business, irrespective of the time or day. The consumer can always have the access to the required information through these mediums, without having to interact with anyone in person. Whereas in traditional marketing, where manpower or other conventional means of publicity are involved for brand promoting, this is not possible.  Greater rate of conversion: There are multiple platforms available for digital marketing, which expands the reach of the business manifold. Here, with the help of various analytical tools and data, you can keep the track of consumer engagement. This helps in understanding the potential of the existing business model and also planning the next steps. Also, with the help of the strategy ‘Conversion Rate Optimization’, the rate of conversion can be increased. This strategy helps in improving or upgrading the components of the website, app, or page of the business, in order to attract more consumers. On the contrary, in traditional marketing it is impossible to get data about customer conversion or reach and engagement. Targeting potential audience: Reaching right people is the ultimate goal of marketing. With the help of digital marketing you can target the real consumers, who are genuinely interested in your product or service. Once the ideal audience is engaged, you can work more effectively in converting them.  Traditional marketing is very generic, given the limited resources it uses to promote, thus, reaching specific audience through this is practically not possible.   Mobile Audience: Today most of the purchases or business deals begin with a mobile phone. From being a luxury, smart phones have become a necessity today and almost everyone owns and operates a mobile. This therefore is the most potential medium for selling products and services, and digital marketing enables it, literally on the go. Conversely, traditional marketing is yet to explore this sphere and works with mostly tangible mediums.

There are many misbeliefs about the Hiring and Recruitment firms which prevail in the market. Let us understand some Myths about the Recruitment firms: Many companies these days outsource their recruitment and hiring process to various recruitment firms. Due to a lot of prejudice and some unpleasant experiences of a few candidates, people have a lot of misconceptions about these firms. Let us take a look at a few of them: Recruiters charge money from Job Seekers: This is the foremost myth and one of the most important reasons because of which job seekers refrain from approaching the recruiters. The truth is, for job seekers, recruiters are free. The job of a recruiter is to find a correct candidate for a job opening and the company pays them for this. They do not charge anything from the job seeker. Recruiters do not control the hiring process: Although the Recruiting firms do not carry out the entire process of hiring, they do help out the company in screening the candidates. Thus, they play an important part in the process.         We at RA Consulting, help out companies in shortlisting relevant profiles and appropriate candidates for job roles required by companies. Recruiters help in finding a job: Companies approach the recruitment firms to find the right candidates for certain job profiles. They are given a list of requirements for the particular position and recruitment firms source the candidate whose skill set matches the requirement list. So, in reality, the job of recruitment firms is quite the opposite of what is presumed. Recruiters can help in career counselling: Recruiters can guide you with the latest trends, market conditions and upcoming jobs, but they are different from career counsellors. Hence it is recommended to assess the help you are looking for and approach counsellors for the same.  Recruiters fees are deducted from the candidate’s salary: Recruitment firms are paid by the company for which they do the hiring, this does not have any impact on the candidate’s salary. The candidate’s salary is based on many factors including but not limited to the previous salary, the budget of the hiring organization and the skills and experience the candidate brings to the table. Recruiters care only about filling a job post: Finding the correct candidate for the job profile is the ultimate goal and responsibility of a recruiting firm. If the match goes wrong, it questions the firm’s skills of judgement and capabilities also. Hence, the recruiter is extremely careful in putting the right person in the right role.

Let us understand a few more misconceptions around the area of digital marketing.   Digital marketing gains instant results: Nothing yields results overnight and if it does they are usually not permanent. Same rule applies here. Once you decide to take off with digital marketing, there are several factors which decide the time span for the results to emerge, few of them are consistency, your competitors hold in the digital world, number of targeted platforms (more the number, more the reach) and so on.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Over the years, RA Consulting has helped many businesses attain exponential results using Digital Marketing.          2. Content Strategy is a one-time thing: To be at par with the ever changing world and growing competition, it is utmost important to stay updated with the content. Keeping content commensurate with the latest trends and market needs benefits the company. This activity is generally considered as a good practice across all industries.          3. Digital Marketing Can Only Be Successful with Very Large Website Traffic: Digital marketing is not only about the website, it works on all the digital platforms like search engines, social media, emailing and mobile applications. The sole purpose of digital Marketing  is to gain consumers and grab attention. Augmented website traffic is the end result of Digital Marketing and not the factor to be considered before investing into it.  The Digital Marketing solutions at RA Consulting have helped in surging the website traffic and also retaining it for many of our customers.          4. Creating a Website is enough for Digital Marketing: The website created by the company for its marketing purpose, itself needs to be marketed for the target audience to know it, in order to increase the traffic on it and in turn thriving the business. For people to know your business website, it needs to have been visible on the digital mediums and this is where digital marketing helps by using social media marketing, SEO, etc.          5. Quantity is better than quality: It is a myth that more words, more content, more blogs, more number of posts, even if irrelevant, help in gaining and retaining customers. Rather, the content which is comprehensible, intentional and specific with the company profile captures more. Inconsequential and diverse content often confuses the consumer, which is definitely not in the benefit of the company. At RA Consulting, we provide you with clear and utmost specific content solutions which suit your business.

Digital Marketing is a fairly new type of marketing which evolved with the advent of the internet. It  involves promoting brands through the various digital resources like search engines, websites, social medias and  mobile applications with the help of various tools like Search Engine Optimization, email marketing tools, Social Media Marketing tools and many more. RA Consulting has been working on this marketing strategy for a long time and has helped a lot of companies in growing their market reach using this. Myths about Digital Marketing & busting them: There are various misconceptions about digital marketing which need to be busted in order to get more clarity and make the most of this technology based marketing style. Digital Marketing is not for my business: Digital marketing works for all types of businesses, irrespective of their industry, scale and service/product offered. In today’s techno savvy world, when information is at fingertips, there is no better way to market your company than through digital medium. At RA Consulting, we help you to understand which type of digital marketing strategy best suits your business and assist with it. SEO is outdated: Google or any other search engine has answers to anything under the sky. With such a huge amount of information, SEO can never be outdated. As a company, SEO does the magic in boosting your visibility and making your content stand out.  Traditional marketing strategies always work: Change is the only thing which is constant. With the dawn of the internet, the traditional marketing strategies, which involved advertising through newspapers, magazines, televisions, radio etc. have taken a back seat. Also, with implementing only traditional marketing methods, the customer reach is also compromised, as a bigger consumer crowd is reachable by digital marketing. RA Consulting offers the perfect amalgamation of traditional and digital marketing techniques as per your business needs. Quantifying the acquired results is difficult: Measuring the results secured by adapting digital marketing techniques is not at all difficult. Programs like Google Analytics are available to take care of the analysis part. It helps in tracking the website activity such as session duration, pages per session, bounce rate and much more, along with the source. Going Digital would also invite negative comments: The trick to deal with this is, taking the negative comment as healthy criticism and responding to the problem in a polite manner. The negative comments are one of the sources of getting customer feedback and understanding their needs.  This approach not only pacifies the resentful customer, but grievance resolution also helps in building new customers and winning their loyalty.

People born between 1980 to early 2000’s are considered to be millennials or Generation Y. Now given the huge timeline, these are supposedly one of the biggest consumer groups and have strong purchasing power and hence a very important target for marketers. Challenges of reaching the Millennials: Chasing the Millennials is a bit difficult, given the set of challenges that come with this group of people, some of them being: Getting their attention: With numerous brands popping up and millennials having access to everything at their fingertips, it is very difficult to grab their attention to a specific brand and hold them onto it. Marketing Strategies: The traditional methods of marketing and relying solely upon SEO, digital campaigning, and media buying do not work with the Millennials. Millennials care and connect with the various social and ecological issues like environment, human and animal rights and much more. If a company does not support any such causes, then it is definitely missing on a huge consumer group. How to reach millennials through Digital marketing? Every challenge comes along with an opportunity to grow. On similar lines, the challenge to reach the millennials can be accomplished by several marketing strategies which would help in the growth of the company. Inbound Marketing: Millennials connect more with information like articles, blog posts, short videos and relevant content and are strongly connected to social media. Thus, reforming the marketing strategy to incorporate product or company details in the above mentioned formats and being actively present on Social media platforms is essential for reaching out millennials. Innovations: Creating a difference is what makes a company stand out and is definitely more appealing for millennials.  Examples for these are Zomato/Swiggy, which made online food ordering extremely easy and these companies keep on adding advanced features to keep their consumers intact. Building Trust: Millennials refrain from buying products by just looking at the brand, they refer to the reviews or consumer stories before investing. Therefore, as a good practice it is always beneficial to have reviews and/or real customer stories or testimonies in the website or social media page in order to be dependable and trustworthy. Value Bound: Millennials feel extremely responsible for the welfare of the planet and wellbeing of humans and animals. This virtue is one of the dominating factors when it comes to choosing a brand. If a brand portrays through its actions about its association with such causes, it instantly becomes popular with millennials. A very good example of this is a fairly new brand ‘Mama Earth’, which boasts to be plastic positive, cruelty free and fully organic and hence has gained a lot of popularity. Post Worthy: Clicking and sharing, definitely a millennial thing! If the product is alluring enough to be posted on different social media apps, it has won the brownie points. In a nutshell, the appearance or packaging of the product matters a lot. How does RA Consulting deals with this challenge? RA Consulting deals in and has proficiency at digital marketing and social media optimization. Based upon the campaign, service or product, we decide upon the target audience. Our marketing strategies are based upon the demographics, age, behavior and interests of the chosen consumer group. When the target audience embodies millennials, we choose to indulge more into Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and have an expertise in this. If your business requires you to specifically reach out to a certain audience, we are just a call away!  You may reach out to us at marketing@raconsulting.in and we will be happy to help.

The single line definitions for Coach and Mentor are; ‘A Coach is a person who teaches and trains.’, whereas, ‘A mentor is an experienced and trusted adviser.’ On a regular basis, especially in the business world, there is very little understanding about these two being different from each other and we many a times see the usage of these two terms interchangeably. And due to this apprehension more than often a mentor is expected to do a coaches’ job and vice versa. The key to decide whether to go for Coaching or Mentoring, is first understanding your goal. Once the organization is clear with its objective, it can go for either of the two. Let us understand more about coaching and mentoring and their differences.   Business Coach: Basically, the job of a Coach is to focus on particular skills whilst finding the areas of improvement.  They often adapt the task based approach in order to achieve specific goals in a given timeline. A business coach usually identifies and prioritizes goals and helps in choosing the right path to achieve them. The various aspects that a business coach may cover are Communication skills, leadership, team building etc. A coach openly challenges the current situation of the business, questions its choices and calls forth the organization to take a closer look at their approach, thus bringing in a fresh perspective to the business plan. He/she also guides the organization in making way for relevant growth strategies and thus helps the businesses become more accountable, goal driven and competitive. Mentor: A mentor is usually a senior person having very high level of knowledge, experience and expertise and he provides advice and guidance to the mentee with lesser experience than him/her. Mentor guides the mentee with choosing among various career options, in gaining confidence and improving interpersonal skills. In short, a mentor helps mentee with both personal and professional development. The relationship between them is typically informal and in such cases it is not time restricted. Whereas, in sometimes this relationship could also be a formal one, thus here the mentor needs to follow a structured approach and set realistic expectations. Mentors possess a very positive approach, which makes it easier for the mentees to discuss their concerns with them and gradually overcome their problems. They also help employees in gaining confidence in their work and developing certain skills for value addition. Confident and skillful employees definitely are an asset for companies therefore more and more companies these days are investing in good Mentor Program to enhance their workforce quality. Mentoring and Coaching Programs at RA Consulting: We at RA Consulting, provide highly competent Mentoring and Coaching Programs. Our Mentoring programs have guided quite a lot of startups in understanding and attaining their goals, also we have coached many a teams in established organizations, in the domains like marketing, sales, communication, leadership and much more, in order to  upskill them. We offer tailor-made programs as per the company’s requirement on Coaching as well as mentoring. You may reach out to us at marketing@raconsulting.in and we will be happy to help.

I wish I could do what I like ! Isn’t this the story of most of us. We want to be our own masters, do things our way and be accountable for it to ourselves and our family. We wish to have flexi timings to work, which includes working odd hours of the day so that we are able to give reasonable quality time to our families along with profession. Having a sense of work life balance in life is the most important and critical factor in today’s world. Women are believed to be excellent multi taskers. Bearing the responsibility to mother children, yet keeping the professional aspirations high is something today’s women have grown up to do. Working in a regular 9 to 5 job is not able to fulfil this aspiration and thus they explore other options. Young Women aspiring to step in to the entrepreneurship domain / who have started on this path, are welcome to get connected and get professional guidance along with Analysis of your business model. Ways to scale up, methods of economizing the business, bringing more processes and professional approach in day to day transactions are some of the skills that we help you with.

“Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Let’s Discuss, Think, Plan and Implement. Together. Looking out for implementing things in business, you’ve always wanted to do ? Write to us and Schedule a discussion. ?Reach Out – https://forms.gle/ZHUbVxxD3SgMCp6RA ?Connect to Richie https://wa.me/919860465660 for any queries

Thank you Toastmasters for Pune Entrepreneurs 2.0It was a wonderful contest Indeed.Contests bring out the best in you.Contests bring you back into the game.Contests make you unleash your true potential.My First ISC Contest, standing in line with the Titans of our Club, having the trophy in my hand gives me the feeling of being on top of the world.Urging All Toastmasters to Participate in the Club Contests. You Will See the Change in Yourself.Thank you Ajay Hiraskar Amol Sheogaonkar Jyoti Hiraskar for motivating me and keeping the faith.#RAConsulting #WinningOrLosing #Experiencewww.raconsulting.in   Thanks all for the wonderful club contest at ‘TfPE 2.0 ‘!The results are out !International speech contest:1st Place: TM Amol Sheogaonkar2nd Place: DTM Ajay Hiraskar3rd Place: TM Richie AgarwalTable Topics contest:1st Place: DTM Ajay Hiraskar2nd Place: TM Siddharth Motiwale3rd Place: TM Richie Agarwal 

RAConsulting specializes in Food and FMCG, Milk being a very important sector for us. Annual Conference of IDA was a great platform to meet people and discuss about the latest happenings. My First.The Annual Conference of the Indian Dairy Association.Met Who’s and Who of the Industry.Chaperoned Ms. Caroline Edmond, DG, IDFAttended Speeches, Sessions and Ideation on various topics on Dairy and advances made by India and the latest trends in the world.The World Looks up to India. We are the Largest Producer and Consumer. Everyone wants to be Us.Feeling Proud of being associated with the Industry and happy to be there listening to the Titans !

No visit to Irma is complete without an interaction with the on campus participants.THE COCKROACH STARTUP.That’s what we need to build. And this is what we discussed in the WELL at the Milaap Vartalaap this time.A Full house and great interaction with the participants confirmed that Entrepreneurship is the In Thing !!The sharing of experiences made the icing on the cake. Thanks Meher Gadekar @Col Joshi @vishwanath Rao and spouses for your presence in the session. Thank you to the ISEC Team IRMA for arranging this. Thoroughly enjoyed.