A digital marketing agency for Aluva businesses, so the metro crowd stops at your counter

Since the metro opened in June 2017, Aluva has behaved less like the last town before Kochi and more like its first stop. That cuts both ways. Shoppers from Desom, Edathala and the Paravur side can reach Edappally in one ride, and they compare your price with the mall on a phone before leaving home. A shop that is missing from that screen loses the sale without ever meeting the customer.

The town also empties every morning. Commuters leave for the Kalamassery industrial estate, Infopark at Kakkanad and the airport, and do their searching at night, on WhatsApp and Instagram, often in Manglish. Kochi businesses with bigger budgets draw radius ads that reach across the Periyar into Aluva. Owners who could once count on the station crowd and the market are finding that footfall alone no longer fills the day.

We are not a Kochi agency. Our office is in Nellikuzhi, Kothamangalam, on the Aluva–Munnar road that starts in your town and runs through Perumbavoor to us. We drive in for the first meeting and the audit, look at your shop the way a customer arriving from the metro would, and then run the work on WhatsApp with a monthly review.

On paper Aluva is small: 22,428 people in a municipality of about seven square kilometres at the 2011 census. In practice it is the taluk headquarters and the market town for a ring of large panchayats; Edathala alone counted 77,811 people that year. Choornikkara, Keezhmad, Kadungalloor and Karumalloor add more, and their residents bank, shop, study and catch trains in Aluva. Your customers mostly live outside the municipal line, so your targeting should too.

Movement is the town’s trade. The railway station is the third busiest in Kochi, and travellers from Idukki use it because their district has no railhead. The KSRTC stand sits beside the station, the metro’s northern terminus is about a kilometre away, and a feeder e-bus runs from the metro station to the airport, 15 km off. Lodges, restaurants, phone shops and travel agents near the station live on that flow; everyone else has to catch it on a phone.

Three corridors carry the money. South, NH 544 runs through Kalamassery, with its industrial estate, CUSAT and the Government Medical College, down to Edappally. West, the 18 km Aluva–Paravur road carries shops, homes and Union Christian College to North Paravur. East, the Aluva–Munnar road heads through Perumbavoor’s plywood belt to Kothamangalam. Beside the town, Eloor’s island of chemical and fertiliser units, FACT among them, buys services, spares and transport, and searches for them like any other buyer.

The calendar has its own peak. Aluva Sivarathri, held on the Manappuram sandbanks of the Periyar in the month of Kumbham, which falls in February or March, fills the riverside with stalls for about two weeks, and food, travel and retail searches move with it. Federal Bank’s head office keeps a banking crowd in town on working days. Competition is mixed: Kochi agencies pitch here, Kochi advertisers reach in, and many Aluva shops still run on a signboard and a phone number.