Sushant Sreeram, in his profile as Vice President – Product Marketing, HolidayIQ.com plays a crucial role in the growth and profitability of the business through scaling the company’s product marketing initiatives. He also identifies underlying shifts and emerging opportunities in India’s travel space to further strengthen the HolidayIQ.com brand among travellers.

Prior to his current profile, he was heading Acquisition Marketing at eBay India where he was responsible for brand development via ATL and BTL campaigns along with strengthening the customer base amongst online shoppers in India. With over 8 years’ marketing experience, he has worked with brands like Textron Inc., Hindustan Unilever Limited. Sushant has also dabbled with entrepreneurship having co-founded Inkfruit.com, an online democratic apparel brand.

In an exclusive interaction with India Digital Review, Sushant talks about how digital medium is helping their company in brand building and marketing. He also explains how mobile medium will change the way content is being created and consumed as well as HolidayIQ.com’s upcoming initiatives.

HolidayIQ.com has been using digital for both building the brand and acquiring consumers. How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in your company’s plans to reach out to consumers?

As a digital business and as one of India’s biggest travel websites, we leverage the digital medium heavily to further strengthen the HolidayIQ.com brand and to become the de facto destination for information and traveller advice for all Indians. A majority of our marketing investments are currently in digital media from search engine marketing and optimization, use of digital display formats to showcase the HolidayIQ.com value proposition, engaging with travellers through social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and working with key partners to extend the reach of our content which is reviews, ratings, photos and videos from Indian travellers. The future of digital content access in India is going to be through mobile and we are making some big bets in this space through our mobile-friendly site [m.HolidayIQ.com] and through a slew of both traveller and hotel-centric apps that you will see in the market very soon.

Tell us about any exciting online campaigns that you have executed for the brand?

While we do execute campaigns from time to time with the #ICantTravelWithout on Twitter being the latest one which attracted more than 3,000 tweets in less than 4 hours, we look at our involvement in various forms of digital media as on-going programs right from our Facebook engagement initiatives to how we are looking at YouTube as a platform to showcase traveller opinions and so on. Our display remarketing campaigns through Google continue to give us returns and we are always on the lookout for high-impact tactical opportunities to build buzz around the brand.

In your category, performance based advertisement works the best. With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India? What are your visual brand building plans on the internet?

Let me take both the above questions together. Online video consumption in India has doubled in the last 2 years with close to 60M internet users now actively consuming video content. Till now, a majority of the brand building efforts through video have relied on porting ideas and techniques [and creatives as well] from TV to the internet through pre-rolls, video ads, etc. We believe such approaches alone don’t do full justice to the digital medium. What the digital medium offers is the ability, esp. for content businesses, to produce fantastic content at low cost, reach a large audience with low fixed investment thresholds and to be able to constantly receive feedback from consumers. And for a user-generated platform like HolidayIQ.com, the ability to involve the traveller community in creating this content makes for some very interesting possibilities.

Do you feel that online companies should build their brand on traditional media and acquire customers online? Is brand building possible on internet?

Let’s understand that digital and traditional media are both just that – media to reach potential and current consumers. It’s the underlying idea behind the communication that is far more important to think through and typically the communication objective plays an important role in defining the media mix itself. Digital and traditional media both offer their own unique advantages and we constantly evaluate our media plans across tradition and digital media, both of which have finer segments. Is brand building possible on the internet – absolutely. Should an internet business stay off traditional media without objectively evaluating it – suggest not.

HolidayIQ.com has launched online hotel advertising product ‘CentreStage’. How has been its uptake?

Incredibly well! The need for such a product was first perceived in our interactions with hoteliers and we just created a product that we believed would provide them with exactly the right marketing vehicle to reach their prospective guests. CentreStage today contributes to greater than 10% of our revenues. And thanks to the constant interactions we have with hotels and travel agents, many more such products are in the pipeline.

How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India?

As a user-generated content platform focussed on travel which is a qualitative experience, we look at social to both widen the reach of our content through use of Facebook pages/apps, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube, and also to personalize content on our site for each user through showcasing holiday opinions of his/her friends. This is done through implementation of the Facebook Open Graph and today, 20% of all the time spent by our users is in this personalized environment.

What answers do you seek from your digital advertising agencies and digital media partners while promoting your brand on internet?

We work with Orchard Advertising on defining the brand architecture and core communication objectives and we work with partner agencies to ensure perfect execution specifically in the area of performance marketing where the expectation from the agency is in delivering to scale and efficiency benchmarks. Our Social Media ideation and activation is done completely in-house as is our Content Marketing initiatives.

How do you see your marketing objectives aligning with what the online medium offers from two years down the line?

I think the India online landscape is undergoing some major changes and we feel HolidayIQ.com is best poised to tap into emerging opportunities. As mentioned before, we are going to see a much higher percentage of solus mobile internet users over the next couple of years and the mobile experiences we are building for travellers will provide them with real-time holiday planning information that will help decision-making in-transit/at-destination. When we think of digital media, we look at all forms of digital communication and we will continue to make investments in areas within digital communication but not necessarily the internet as traditionally defined.

Content consumption in vernacular languages is already on the rise and is another area we are actively evaluating both from a product and from a marketing standpoint. At the end of the day, our marketing objective is simple – to be available to every Indian traveller on every access point in every language expected and provide every piece of holiday information/advice needed to make their holiday experience memorable!