The market place at a regional level works on several different parameters as compared on a macro length, such a nationwide or an international level on a local level is surprisingly short. It is vital to understand regional markets and then start from the bottom rising upscale to a macro national level. It is common to note how MNCs or franchises make the fatal of imitating a tried and tested international style of marketing and targeting its customer base. Regional markets already have their own trusted brands, method of selling, decade’s worth of trust and a customer base that’s simply too loyal to budge the comfort of familiarly. Therefore, it is important to understand the basis of such loyalty and how regional marketing works to best capture it.

Even in the digital web space, regional markets have a very different pattern from local markets. In a recent summary of surveys conducted on digital marketing regionally, the following vital bits of information were revealed:

Indian languages are massively consumed

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If these statics don’t make you re-think how you should be utilizing local languages in your website, app or portal, then nothing would. For a majority part, customers and consumers in India relay on local languages.

• Almost 60% of users in urban India access online content in Hindi, followed by Tamil and Marathi
• 88% Indians are non-English speakers (FICCI KPMG report)
• 127 Million Indians consume content in local languages (IAMAI +IMRB Report)

Audiences Define the Language

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The internet in its totality runs on English. This makes sense on the surface of it – language’s primary purpose is to communicate with others, and if your language is restricted to a smaller audience then the purpose of communications is ruined. So while English is a universal language and efforts should, in theory, be made by everyone to adopt it for the sake of simplicity, people have a lot of religious, cultural, national and self-pride associated with their language and this switch takes time.

• A growing population believed their local language helped them be more grammatically correct in their communication with others.
• Facebook accounts for the highest usage of regional language adoption amongst other social networks.
• Countries like Brazil, India, Mexico, Indonesia and regions in Africa are seeing a rapid growth in Facebook users.

Top Languages Used In India

As expected, Hindi remains the most popular regional language, followed by Bengali, Telugu, Marathi and finally Urdu. F41% of the Indian population using Hindi is a very large statistic that’s difficult to ignore for entrepreneurs and start-ups alike.

Trend Analysis

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Trend of the local language being used by the Indians is growing at a consistent rate keeping pace with the increasing Internet users of India. This is important for those establishing their start-ups right now or in the near future to consider.

According to MindShift Metrics, the number of local language users can increase by 42% by December 2016 and possible have a 22% growth in active Internet users.

How do these statics support your understanding of the Indian marketplace? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India