We get inspired by things around us. Something beautiful happened when we were about to label a digital marketing project a flop, facing the client’s wrath.
It was mid-June 2022, we were in the fourth month of a digital marketing project for a logistics business and we could see things not going the way we planned.
Before I tell the story, let me tell you the way we work on a digital marketing project.
Digital marketing is a broad term used for promoting brands with digital channels, such as Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Paid Ads Campaigns, Email Marketing, etc. to promote products or services to targeted audiences.
Small and mid-size businesses, whom we serve are mainly interested in Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
SEO is a process of getting websites in the top positions of Google search engine result pages (SERP) when a user searches for services or products the business is offering.
For example, if you need a language Trainer, you may search for “online French classes”.
There you will find a list of website links in Google, and you may end up clicking on any of them.
Similarly, if a French Trainer has a website and wants to be in the top 10 results, he may search for an SEO agency like ours.
Next, if approached, we pitch a plan that obviously may vary from business to business, but usually a six-month-long agreement for performing SEO.
We tell the client that we are going to work on the website for six months and assure him that he will start getting responses in terms of clicks and business leads from the end of the third month.
So the client expects results from the fourth month, at least a few leads if not in big numbers, and trust me, we make it happen every time.
Now coming back to the failing project, it was June 2022, the magical fourth month of SEO when the client could expect to start getting a few leads.
We also understand that sometimes instead of the fourth month, we may start getting leads from the fifth month. In some rare cases it starts even from the sixth month but by looking at the website position in Google search result pages and impressions in the Google search console, we know magic is going to happen very shortly.
In this story, we were at the end of the fourth month and we had no hope of getting good results anytime soon. I had a gut feeling of failing the project and facing the wrath of the client.
One day, while working on the social media pages of the project, I came across a Facebook post that had an old story of Shivaji and Khichadi. Khichadi is a simple Indian cuisine typically made with rice and lentils cooked together with spices.
The Story
The story is of the time when Great Maratha king Shivaji Maharaj started expanding his territory very fast and he started annexing territories from more and more powerful kingdoms.
There was a period amidst these conquests when he was failing in almost every endeavor he undertook.
Soon after one such failed conquest, Shivaji went to a village near the battlefield. He was very hungry, so he asked an old lady for food.
She kindly cooked him Khichadi without knowing he was the king. She served him a hot plate of khichdi. Shivaji, eager to eat, touched the middle of the plate and burned his finger.
The old lady saw this and told him, “Brave soldier, you eat like your king fights battles.
You start from the inside, just like he attacks forts first instead of the outer areas. Why not try eating from the corners first, like attacking the edges of a kingdom, before going for the middle?”
Shivaji understood his mistake and realized why he kept failing. From then on, he always conquered the outer areas before attacking the main fort in his battles. This lesson stayed with him forever, thanks to the wise old lady.
Lessons Learned
The story quickly made me realize why we were failing the project.
I could relate the story to my situation. We were trying to pull the website up on the Google search result page for the keywords that had great traffic but had high competition as well.
Just like Shivaji wanted to win valuable forts but with high security first.
The website SEO could take more time, maybe a year or a year and a half, and it’s really not possible to convince the client at least at this stage.
By the time we realized, it was too late.
Now from the story of Shivaji eating khichadi from corners, we realized that targeting low-competition keywords but with low search volume may help keep a small number of leads coming.
It’s really hard to convince clients to keep paying for six more months without business leads. Instead of focusing on PAN India, we created pages for all Tier-1 cities where the business already had branch offices and started promoting them.
Fortunately, with less competition, we started getting good impressions in the Search Console and a few business leads started coming from the start of the sixth month.
Google business listing for their branch offices also helped us get more calls.
Finally, we were able to convince the client that the high-competition keywords would take more time but it would give us a large volume.
Later we made it happen too in the next six months.
Thanks to the Shivaji and Khichdi story Facebook post!
I am Sunil Tarwara, a seasoned IT professional with over 13 years of hands-on experience in Website Development and Digital Marketing. With a deep understanding of the challenges faced by businesses, I have been trusted by hundreds of clients to achieve their digital goals. I have Master’s degree in Information Technology.
Apart from websites, I like hill stations.
