If you are staying in India auto rickshaw is a common thing for you. Few days ago I saw a little innovation in marketing by an auto driver.

I was going to my college (whoever don’t know I’m also pursuing BE in Mechanical Engineering besides working in my company) but missed my college bus. So I thought to go by auto. But as I’ve a lot of time in my hand I thought to pick up a shared auto (a video on shared auto) which can drastically reduce my travel expense to 1/3^rd.

There is a circle where the auto rickshaws used to stand. The people used to come there and pick their auto which is also shared by 3-4 people. But in morning there used to be less frequent customers. So my auto driver went a bit back & picked up people. Making me amazed the auto was filled up within just 2 minutes instead of 10-15 minutes and I was a bit confused! How he did it & why he did it? Because those people would have came to him only. Why he did travel a 100meter extra? I planned to calculate how much he is gaining or loosing from other auto drivers. I found that his income is about 44% higher than that of other auto drivers.

I was surprised how he did that. He started filling up when his turn came. He picked up the same people who were coming to pick his auto and he covered a 100m extra. I did a simple calculation as follows:

When I asked him how he found this effective technique, he replied, “Just from regular observation.”

What a small biz can learn from it?

I made some notes which I think is worth sharing.

i) Businesses should closely observe their customers

If you are running a website then closely observe the analytics, where from they are coming i.e. the source or referring sites, their geographies, their demography etc.

ii) Come one step closer and engage them early:

If you are seeing more visitors are coming from a referring website, go one step close by increasing your presence in that website (b’coz your target audience is there). So reply more to their blog posts, you can also discuss about some peoples’ reply there. You can even request for a guest blogging in that blog. As they have made a link to you and user finds it terribly good, your blog post valued more to them.

You can see the same thing in our site. We are now developing different microsites (under progress) for each target market we found in doing business. Here we are engaging with them before they come to us for a solution that we are providing as a service. This saves a lot of time in our marketing. Usually companies are satisfied that their target market is visiting their site. But if they will push themselves a little further to help visitor more, then they can save a lot of “time=money”. [If you are tweeting about this article please use a has tag of #timeismoney]

So if you are selling a chocolate making device, then join your target audience at chocolate making training websites or at chocolate company website or chocolate lover associations.

iii) Save time in every process. Because 13minutes = 44% more income:

This incident made our people to sit and think where we can save more time. And we found some measurements which told us that we can get 3months of holiday in a year fulfilling the same target doing each bit of work.

You seem to learn bit more from this auto driver?? Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment and tweeting me @sanmaya.

Photo Credit: Deepak Gupta