Why We Started A Marketplace for Digital Marketing Services

What is Your Marketing List?

Your Marketing List is a two-sided marketplace for digital marketing services. This is a platform that helps businesses connect with digital marketing freelancers. In this article we discuss why we started this marketplace.

The pandemic has brought home to businesses that digital is where the future is. Well before the pandemic set in, marketers faced a fragmented and rapidly evolving digital environment. Operating in this environment is no longer an afterthought. For most businesses, marketing is digital.

What is a marketplace?

A haat bazaar, most often called simply haat, is an open-air market that serves as a trading venue for local people in rural areas. It is the local market in which people gather from certain areas for buying and selling of goods. The people met to exchange goods and services with money.

Bazaars have existed for as long as humans have engaged in trade. The earliest bazaars are believed to have originated in Persia, from where they spread to the rest of the Middle East and Europe.

Documentary sources suggest that zoning policies confined trading to parts of cities from around 3,000 BCE (before common era), creating the conditions necessary for the emergence of a bazaar. Throughout the Medieval period, increased regulation of marketplace practices, especially weights and measures, gave consumers’ confidence in the quality of market goods and the fairness of prices.

Today, markets can also be accessed on the internet through matching platforms. Or what we now call marketplaces.

We wondered if we could develop ‘weights and measures’ that will ensure quality of the platform, hence driving confidence in the platform.

Our approach – Jobs to be done

The founders of Your Marketing List come from the Clayton Christensen school of thought that marketers spend too much time trying to define their audience in nice 3X3 segments, with visuals and evocative descriptions. From the seminal HBR article, Know Your Customers’ “Jobs to Be Done”:

After decades of watching great companies fail, we’ve come to the conclusion that the focus on correlation—and on knowing more and more about customers—is taking firms in the wrong direction. What they really need to home in on is the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish. This is what we’ve come to call the job to be done.

We all have many jobs to be done in our lives. Some are little (pass the time while waiting in line); some are big (find a more fulfilling career). Some surface unpredictably (dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase); some regularly (pack a healthful lunch for my daughter to take to school).

When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, the next time we’re confronted with the same job, we tend to hire that product again. And if it does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look for an alternative. 

Our entire approach is to focus on marketing jobs to be done in a given circumstance.

In the context of this project, we decided to start with India as the ‘given circumstance’. We know from our deep experience of marketing brands that for most tasks knowledge of the local context is critical.

And in a market like India, the context changes across its length and breadth. Culture, language, symbols, food, clothes, almost all aspects of life have nuances that have huge impact on how one markets in this country. Only local talent matched intelligently to a particular task can deliver results.

We treated India as our test bed. Our vision is global. Our learnings from this market will become the playbook for rollouts across geographies.

What’s the demand for digital marketing services in India?

We ran a Google search on the demand for digital marketing services in India during the period June 2020 to May 2021. The results are presented below.

Sl	Marketing Jobs To Be Done	Search Volumes
1	Logo Making/Designing	2,785,250
2	PPC/Paid Ads	2,420,200
3	Website Designing	1,252,100
4	Social Media Management/ Online Reputation Management	798,050
5	Graphic Designing	608,900
6	Website Development	457,450
7	App Development	391,500
8	Email Marketing	217,800
9	Influencer Marketing	123,600
10	Content Management	10,850

The search volumes clearly indicate the size of the demand. The digital marketing services topping the list clearly show a vibrant growth-oriented economy.

The fact that logo making/designing had an average of 230,000 searches a month in the midst of a pandemic is telling. One wants a logo done or refurbished when one is starting a business or getting more optimistic about future prospects. The other items on the top 10 list add support that there is a large pulsating business environment in India.

The other deduction one can make is that there are no obvious offerings satisfying these needs or even if they exist the person in need is unaware.

At the risk of overstating this point: when we want bread and eggs, we call our kirana shop, when we want to buy a book, we go to Flipkart or Amazon. We don’t go to Google and search. We do that when we don’t have an obvious place to go to or a person to call to get that job done.  Or the place we used to go to no longer meets the need.

Survey to understand the demand for digital marketing services

To delve into the demand side, we conducted a survey among 48 marketers and entrepreneurs. We asked them the following question.

“Tell us about a couple of marketing resources/skills that you desperately needed in the last year and couldn’t find easily”  

There was an outpouring of responses to the query about resources they ‘desperately’ needed but could not find easily in the last year.

We next asked them:

‘Have you heard about any websites/apps that you can use to get specific marketing jobs done?’

Only 20 of the 48 said ‘yes’. More tellingly, when we asked them to name some sites/apps only 14 or 30% could name a relevant site.

We asked a final question:

‘Have you used any of these sites? If yes, for what. If no, why not?’

Eight of the respondents had used a service for a job to be done. What was interesting was some of the comments made by both groups:

• Used them several years ago, not recently
• Takes a lot of time to find a good reliable resource
• No. Trust deficit with unknown entities
• No, because no clear guidance available
• Still searching for a user-friendly site
• Not very organized and structured
• The response cycle through apps is usually slow
• Coz never heard of them

Opportunity for digital marketing services in India

There is clearly a demand for digital marketing services in India. The current brick and mortar solutions (ad agencies) are not meeting the need (hence the search volumes). The existing platforms (almost all global) have low awareness and gaps in delivery.

More importantly, matching jobs with suppliers is not the solution when it comes to marketing. Circumstance (in this case, geography and its history) has to be baked into the talent. The other key success for the platform will be the credibility of both sides (‘Trust deficit with unknown entities’). A trusted professional’s (a friend or friend of a friend ranks on top) recommendation usually trumps any cold, rational analysis when it comes to picking talent to work with. Then comes reviews by the general marketing community.

In the initial years, we are using external sources for validation. For example, LinkedIn profiles, websites, promoter bio write-ups on the marketer side and reviews, referrals and work done on the creator side. Over time, the platform will self-generate the validation needed.

Are you looking for help with your marketing? Perhaps, you have a requirement for a digital marketing service and you can’t find the right resource. Fill in this form and we will call you and understand your needs and find you the right solution.

How do marketplaces win?

Let’s get one thing straight. Marketplaces are a hard business to build.

On top of all the challenges that all start-ups need to overcome to build durable businesses (e.g. finding product-market fit (PMF), unit economics, beating the competition, etc.), marketplaces have to find PMF twice (for their supply and their demand), kickstart an impossibly hard flywheel, while at the same time beating out every much-simpler-to-operate non-marketplace alternative (e.g. Airbnb vs. hotels, Uber vs. taxis, YML vs digital agencies).

Fortunately, the marketplace model provides certain advantages which provide three routes to success:

1. Increasing convenience
2. Lowering price
3. Unlocking desirable supply

Let’s look at each of these.

1. Increasing convenience

If you think about it, all successful marketplaces take advantage of opportunities in or inefficiencies of how a need is being currently met.  Think about the original bazaar. It aggregated previously disaggregated supply to provide a hugely more convenient option for buyers to trust and transact.

UrbanCompany, formerly UrbanClap aggregates professionals for a range of services that are needed or can be delivered at home (beauticians, painters to pest control experts). Globally, Thumbtack aggregated thousands of plumbers, electricians, DJs, etc. This is infinitely more convenient than random googling or going through the yellow pages (digitally or physically).

UrbanSitter did the same thing for baby-sitters, Good Dog for breeders, Instawork for hourly workers, Rover for dog sitters.

The marketplace model allows you to offer the unbeatable combination of (1) variety and (2) trust, and when a start-up can deliver these reliably and on-demand, they win.

2. Lowering price:

The second route is to build a significantly cheaper option. Both Uber and Lyft followed this at the start and then moved up to being more convenient.

Many platforms use this as an entry strategy as did Fiverr in our category. Their name came from the fact that all services at the start were priced at $5. They have also moved up to convenience (width of offering-500 categories, choice of freelancers-hundreds for each job).

Pricing cheap is a difficult strategy to sustain as it inherently doesn’t stop someone else to come in at a cheaper offering.

3. Unlocking desirable supply:

A third, and maybe the most interesting, route to building a successful marketplace is to unlock desirable supply and then build a market around it. Airbnb is a classic example of this, having unlocked the supply of private rooms in people’s homes and then created a market for it. 

Your Marketing List has clearly chosen the convenience route. It is now up to us understand better what ‘convenience’ is made up for the Indian market.

Why us

The founder and the core team have 100 plus cumulative years in different aspects of marketing (advertising, brand building, direct, digital, social media and strategy) and in building solutions to solve for customer problems. This makes us uniquely placed to design the solution that will become the home for both sides of the global marketing fraternity.

How will the platform make money?

Our platform will make money by charging a fee for each client engagement for providing digital marketing services (it’s called a ‘take-rate’).

Our philosophy

We would be a true double-sided platform. Double-sided implies that both parties (demand and supply) will be of equal importance, and this will reflect in fairness, transparency, and equal opportunities on the platform through our policies.

A platform qualifies to be called such when it generates more value for its users on all sides than for itself. This will be our guiding light also. Trust and credibility will be integral to the design, not an afterthought. At the heart of this project is the dream that in our Indian avatar we will be able to contribute to reducing the job crisis facing India.

To learn more about topics on business strategy and digital marketing, you can read some excellent articles in our blogs section.