Categories
Marketing social media

The Leap Of Faith

Once the Kizuna.in website was created, we quickly created some facebook, Instagram and twitter presence and decided to make some telesales effort to sell Kizuna India Badminton strings. During the Covid lockdown, we did some work collating a data base of sports dealers from the list of dealers listed in the Victor India website and couple of other reputed sports distributors in India. We also had our own dealers in south India with whom we still have good relations. It was decided that our earlier dealers in Kerala and Tamil nadu will be dealt by Rajesh. All new as well as earlier dealers in Karnataka and AP-Telengana will be handled directly from our office in a digital and tele-calling mode. Meanwhile, Rajesh started placing some reasonable numbers of Kizuna India badminton strings through his dealer contacts. 

Immediately after the website and the social media presence were created, we attempted making some cold calls. The usual stuff of telesales. Kizuna, made in Japan, Badminton strings, premium, excellent sound, and durability, better than BG65, better thanBG66 Ultimax, etc. The recipient’s responses were also equally cold with responses like Kizuna?, what Kizuna ? etc.

We decided to call this off and start a campaign on Whatsapp. We also realized that we have a pretty large database of people who contacted us for purchasing racket stringing machines. Our communication with this data base started giving reasonably good responses. They were mostly stringers and someone contacting them directly for supplying strings was mostly welcomed by many of them. We started calling them once we started getting a feel that the chats on Whatsapp are maturing to a conversion level. Over a period of time we started fine tuning on our tele-calls script. We created different sample packs for strings to first try our strings. We created Google pay to make payments easy. All this started paying off. We started getting our first order from the digital marketing effort and also from past good deeds, business integrity and relationships. 

Along with the above, we started making posts in social media and started asking our friends and well wishers to give us likes in our social media presence. The blog was started. Testimonials were started with real feedback from players and stringers who were early converters. We did some fine tuning of the website for making it SEO friendly using the yoast plug-in. Kizuna badminton strings were made available in Amazon.in. Advertisements for strings were run in Amazon. Prices were reduced so that players will start getting. We started getting some orders in Amazon. 

Real people started stringing using Kizuna Badminton Strings and started playing with rackets strung with Kizuna badminton strings. A journey with its beginning in times of a pandemic started bearing fruits albeit small.