“Digital Media”:An Effective Media For Rural Communication

The Indian market has expanded in the last few decades. Earlier the companies focused their efforts in fulfilling the requirements of urban consumers. But today the focus of the marketers has shifted towards the rural India, which is the real bazaar for the marketers. Big companies are adopting new marketing strategies to reach this huge blue ocean market. Rural India is emerging as a large market for a number of goods and services – be it a consumer good or a white good or a financial service.

The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a big ground breaking change in the media consumption habits, including those in the rural areas. As per a Kantar study, currently estimated at 574 million, the number of monthly active internet users in India has grown 24% over that of 2019. And the highlight is that India’s rural areas are driving the digital revolution, with a 45% growth in internet penetration in 2019 as compared to urban India’ s 11%. Rural India has 264 million internet users, this is expected to reach 304 million by the end of 2020. The analysis comes from the ICUBETM report prepared by data, insights and consulting company Kantar. Local language, Multilingual content and video drive the internet boom in rural India, with 2.5 times rise in penetration in the last four years. Mobile is the device of choice for 100% of active users to browse the internet.

Does it mean that digital marketing will gradually edge out traditional advertising activities in the rural markets? Rural marketing expert Prashant Mandke says, “I don’t see both these mediums competing with each other. Outdoor branding has always been relevant and will continue to be so in rural markets. Marketers will need to analyse the digital marketing options for targeting the rural audience in these times of social distancing. Hence the combination of physical on ground activation and digital marketing to amplify it will be used by the marketers looking to manage their territory sales”.

Among the big Advertising agencies in India, the first to explore an Indic language digital suite was Eggfirst, a Mumbai based advertising agency. The agency co-branded the initiative as IndiFirst, being India’s only Indic digital advertising and technology suite, that helps marketeers achieve branding & performance goals in tier 1, 2 and 3 markets. Unlike conventional advertising, Eggfirst looks at communication as the building block of every business because that is how people and business work and grow together, through communication that creates better opportunities for business conversion. All in all this is how Eggfirst as a traditional advertising with data driven digital marketing services keeps brands a step ahead of the competition.