Jayati Singh reveals Tally's influencer and word-of-mouth strategy

Delhi: Tally Solutions, an international business management software provider, has opened nominations for the fourth edition of their MSME Honours, to be held on June 27, 2024.

From a marketer’s perspective, one would term it a way to increase brand awareness but according to the company’s chief marketing officer, Jayati Singh, the event has less to do with brand awareness and more about capitalising on the existing brand awareness to spotlight MSMEs that are more than just a ‘pity tale’ of scarce investments. 

Being a product-based company, Tally, an international business management software provider’s core marketing objective is educating and informing consumers. 
 
In an interaction with BestMediaInfo.com, Singh remarked, “One thing is to keep all our existing customers abreast with whatever new is coming in the product. At the same time, there is a lot of focus on uplifting the brand imagery and relevance for audiences across all generations, and across all business types. Another key focus is in driving that education and financial literacy for our existing customers as well as prospects.”

Following the above core mantra, the B2B company that provides financial solutions to businesses relies on both ‘influencer groups’ and the literal ‘influencers’ of the social media world to tap into the tactics of updating and educating. 

Tapping into ‘influences’ 

Singh opined that there are influences at various levels. This gives birth to the ‘word of mouth’ dimension of marketing that could be from their own business fraternity or from the ‘influencer group.’

The ‘influencer group,’ according to Singh, are people who influence one’s end target audience, at different stages of their decision-making cycle, including but not limited to their presence at purchase points, to make a decision regarding the product. 

Singh also shed light on how a brand’s ‘influencer group’ is dynamic and changes depending on the growth of their product/service and the results sought (user procurement or user retention). 

“Making sure that your communication with the influencer group is just as strong as other avenues of marketing is key to vouch for discoverability,” she added. 

Tapping into the ‘Influencer’ story

Apart from the ‘influencer group,’ Tally also relies on ‘influencers’ and content creators to forward its marketing cause and contribute to the evolution of the brand’s target audience. 

Singh believes that content creators are nourished enough to reach into the B2C space and B2B space and can help in educating the audience about their services. 

According to Singh, the idea has primarily been to tap into the huge social media ecosystem amidst the bustling noise of content and find creators who can carry the right message about a specific product functioning, or a feature functioning and how it is helping in making the user's life become easier.

“We give influencers a sneak peek into the product and then we leave it to them to leverage their own style to create content around it.” 

WOM or Content Creators?

Talking about the effectiveness of the ‘influencer group’ versus the ‘influencers,’ Singh remarked that the brand relied on both at different times, depending on the marketing funnel. 

Singh remarked that the word-of-mouth tactic works better when the brand has a legacy running ahead, as it can tap into existing users to turn them into ‘influencer groups’ to attract potential users. ‘Influencers’ on the other hand, help in educating audiences to deliver brand awareness and product understanding. 

Retention vs engagement

Talking about customer retention and customer engagement, Singh highlighted that Tally Solutions invested in educational collaborations like the recent partnerships with Startup India, Invest India and Internshala to further the cause of financial literacy that aids their potential consumers in understanding their product better. 

Drawing the ‘FMCG vs B2B marketing’ line

Having worked for nearly 18 years in an FMCG and FMCD background and now working for a B2B product, Singh has noted three significant differences in the marketing approaches between her past and current roles. 

1. Purchase Cycle: Singh notes that B2C products market heavily based on the fact that they are an impulsive purchase and not much thought goes into investing in them. They depend on marketing tactics that help them achieve TOMR (top-of-mind recall) in their audiences. On the other hand, B2B products need to have ‘nurtured leads’ as the decision to invest in them is well thought out. 
2. Brand Loyalty: According to Singh, B2B products have it easy when it comes to customer retention due to lack of density in competition compared to B2C products that have a denser competing atmosphere with new brands entering the market quite often. This in turn, affects the marketing tactics that both of them use. 
3. Experiential marketing vs event marketing: While B2C products rely less on experiential marketing and events to further their cause, B2B relies more on the two as they have much to talk about, educate and spread awareness about, according to Singh. 

The ‘GenAI’ mantra

Apart from the marketing angle that uses GenAI for hyper-personalisation and targeting audiences with messages that speak to their psyche, Singh noted the strength of GenAI in the customer care domain. She added that catering to faster and more accurate solutions to customer queries is something Tally is working on.

“When it comes to marketing, one of the challenges that we used to face was how to make our brand look and feel and everything more. Gen AI helps both in terms of tailored visual content, written content and customer care and is something that we are currently exploring,” she added. 

She also added the word of caution that GenAI needs to be co-piloted with manual intervention to ensure one’s brand voice is communicated with clarity. 

Marketing challenges

Singh shed light on some common marketing challenges including serving an experience different from the rest of the competition. She also opined that the diversity in the audience pool can be both a challenge to analyse and an opportunity to segment dynamically and leverage. 

Tally Solutions has opened nominations for the fourth edition of their MSME Honours. The nomination entries will be judged by a panel comprising experts from the fields of technology, the MSME domain, and media.

Eyeing around 8000-10,000 nominations this year, Sign remarked that MSME Day has had companies eager to partner with them. 

“This is beneficial from both the visibility standpoint and also from an impact standpoint,” she added.