Now is the time to grow your tribe and love them – Talk Marketing 057 Ranil Rajapaksha

Today’s guest is a business marketing, computer science and maths graduate. He has sales and marketing experience going back to 2004 when he was involved in selling advertising or providing advertising. He has digital experience going back to 2006. Since then, in the meantime, he has run email marketing and digital marketing agencies. He is a founding member of The Face of Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit networking community, and community consultant with Snap-Poll, which is what we are going to be speaking about today. Interestingly, between 1990 and 1995. He wanted to be as good a drummer as Ricky Rocket, and as good a guitarist as Joe Satriani. Imagine if he had only focused what might have happened. Today’s guest is renewal. Ranil Rajapaksha.

00:00 Introductions
11:07 How are you qualified to talk about community development?
25:30 What is the formula to grow businesses?
55:22 How do you establish relationships with communities?
1:04:06 What is the relationship between brand, community and consumers?
1:19:39 What is the key to successful marketing?
1:21:33 How do you communicate effectively with large numbers of people?
1:26:35 Who do you work with and how do you add value to their lives?
1:28:23 What should people read?
1:33:37 Who can you introduce us to who might enjoy to be a part of the Talk Marketing series?

Martin Henley
How are you qualified to talk to us about this thing is the question whether it’s community development, data insights, market insights, market development, whatever we decide it’s going to be called. The second question then is, who do you work with? How do you add value to their lives? The third question is, let’s call a community development. I think that’s the I think that’s, you know, I’ve got a sense of what we’re going to talk about, I think that’s the most sensible description. So the third question then, is how what what is your recommendation for people who want to get better at Community Development? The fifth question is, what should people read? And now that’s the fourth question. The fifth question is, who can you throw under the bus who might enjoy or at least endure to have a conversation like this with me? I’ll need two people from you. Okay, cool.

Martin Henley
Question number one, how are you qualified to talk to us about this community insights or community development thing that you’re busy with? Maybe you should just tell us what it is? And then we can get over ourselves?

Ranil Rajapaksha
Yeah, sure. So it’s basically called Snap Poll. And as in a quick way of doing a poll, the company is only a year old. And I’ve been involved in it. You know, from from pretty much from pretty much the start. It was an idea that came about in lockdown. When in Melbourne, we’re the most lockdown city in the world. I think we had six or seven lockdowns, you know, in the space of not not alone, a lot, a lot of time. And there were a lot of people mountain that was suffering, a lot of people that we knew that wasn’t doing too well. Unfortunately, the focus was looking this way, not much looking this way. And what we realise is, people weren’t being heard, essentially.

Ranil Rajapaksha
The role of government is to actually serve its people, the role of businesses to serve its clients. What we thought was, we had access to 6 million Australians. What can we do with that? Privilege? So we ran a couple of polls called Australia has spoken in 2020, just for just for shits and giggles, really, just to see how it work. And the response was phenomenal. So people were at home, and all of a sudden, they were actually willing to speak up about whatever the topic was. We then fast forward to Snap Poll, and we ran a few polls regarding mental health.

Ranil Rajapaksha
There’s a team of us, and we really took some time to develop this instruction is really well, because we want to ask the right questions in a right way. And what we what we uncovered is just unbelievable, what people are going through and emotional and stuff. And you know, they actually share that with us. And I think the secret sauce is the way we are speaking to them. And I’d like to kind of hopefully uncover that and give some value to the rest of your your listeners in terms of the world before COVID, world after COVID.

Ranil Rajapaksha
To answer your question directly, What qualifications do I have? I’ve been in marketing for a while, I worked in a in a Murdoch newspaper for four years. And a friend of mine said, come and work in an ad agency, digital ad ad agency, I’m like, what people are gonna find stuff online. This is in 2004, took the gamble, never looked back and kind of saw the evolution of digital advertising, which has been amazing as it continues to evolve. Do I know everything? Hell no.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?