Web or mobile - both are extremely critical and form a big part of our overall marketing mix
24 Jun 2015

Sumeet Singh is the National Head – Marketing & Communications at Info Edge Pvt. Ltd., which is an Indian online classifieds company founded in 1995 by Sanjeev Bikhchandani and headquartered in Noida, India. It owns internet properties Naukri.com, Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, Naukrigulf.com and 99acres.com.

At Info Edge, she is responsible for all online and offline marketing, brand strategy as well as corporate communications. As the head of marketing, her role includes budgeting, strategizing, planning and managing TV, print, online, outdoor advertising and direct marketing campaigns.

Sumeet was instrumental in setting up the strategic alliances and corporate communications department which boasts of over 150 alliances in association with leading publications and websites across the country.  Public relations for all the brands also fall under her domain.

Prior to Info Edge, Sumeet was the founder executive director of The Indus Entrepreneurs, Delhi and has also served as the executive director of the Indian Venture Capital Association. During the course of her career she has been associated with CII and served on the IT advisory councils of 6 states and was involved in policy framework work.

Sumeet started her career with NIIT in Delhi in their ETG department as a management trainee and moved on as area manger sales. She did her MBA in Marketing and Sales from Pune University.

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Sumeet talks about Info Edge’s online strategies to engage with the youth, the changing online classifieds segment in India and how social media has helped in shaping the digital space in the company. Excerpts:  

Q. How does the digital medium - Internet as well as mobile, fit into Info Edge’s plans to cater to their customers?

For us, digital is very critical. It forms a very important part of our marketing mix, essentially because our businesses are all on the Internet and therefore all our consumers have to be online by nature, otherwise they can’t consume our products. So be it Internet - Web or mobile - both are extremely critical and important and form a very big part of our overall marketing mix.

Still I feel that when it comes to brand building and brand awareness in this country, TV still plays a very important role. And I feel that if you are really building a brand then it is quite difficult to build it just based on digital. You obviously need a 360 degree, and TV forms a very essential part of it too. So if you can afford everything, the great, but if you can’t afford everything, then TV and digital both become important.

It is also very important to know, who is my TG? And where are they? For example, we have a business called Shiksha, where people come and choose what are the right courses and colleges for them. It is not in the K-12 segment, but it is for people who are choosing their next course after 12th class or vocation courses or their higher-education, and it has a very robust study abroad section as well. So if I look at that TG, then that TG is very online today. They are on YouTube, social media and the stickiness on online is far higher with them than on TV. On the other hand, if I look at 99acres.com, which is my real-estate portal, there I cannot do without TV if I am building my brand.

Q. India is witnessing a lot of progress in the digital and mobile space. And it is not just the internet population that is increasing but the number of smartphone users is also on the rise. What do you think about this development and how is this affecting your business?  

Well, most of the businesses that are on the Internet can feel the impact already. For us, we don’t really advertise on the mobile, but even with no real advertising push we are seeing a lot of organic traction. For instance, for Naukri.com today, 45-50% of our traffic is on mobile. For a site like Jeevansathi, we have about 60% traffic on mobile. And it is not like we are really going out and doing a major App download campaign or trying to get a lot of mobile traffic, this is all happening organically.

And we do know that in the next 3-5 years, because of an increase in smartphone penetration there is going to be a huge population in this country that is going to access the Internet just through the mobile, and not through desktops and laptops. Therefore building the right products for the mobile are very important. Hence, we are really focused on the mobile platforms. We constantly wonder, what can we do with these apps? Which phones require a lighter app and which don’t? What kind of experience do you deliver on the phone? Because the real-estate available on the phone is so much smaller than that on desktop/laptop screen. Also, for sites like Naukri and Jeevansathi, essentially a lot of people come to our websites to register for them, and then they start receiving jobs from recruiters, our alerts go, and filling a form on the phone is very different from filling the form on a desktop. Mobile is not the best device if you have long forms to fill. So a lot of science goes into designing that. It becomes essential to answer, how do I get a smartphone user to register on mobile, while making sure that the quality of the form and the experience delivered on mobile should be same as that of the desktop. Because end-of-day when the recruiter is viewing something, he should not see something as being inferior to another. So a lot of our work and efforts is going in this area.

Q. What are the marketing initiatives that you are undertaking online to stay ahead of the competition?

So there is one part which is our bread ‘n’ butter, which is performance advertising, it is an acquisitions strategy. We have tried to be quite straight and upfront when it comes to performance advertising because that is very conversion driven. Luckily, we are a profitable, listed Internet company, so we are not working under investor pressures, where we need to deliver on unique visitors or we need to deliver on traffic, or mobile app downloads. We believe in quality and ROI. So what we are doing is, essentially, we understand what kind of people come in and convert on us, we are very conscious of the fact that there is no point in just getting cheap traffic. You can still get very cheap traffic in India; with bounce rates as high as 80-85%. So we are very cautious of who and what kind of people we get.

For instance, we do a lot of advertising on Facebook, which is not really for a brand, but for delivering the right message to the right consumer. We have been doing remarketing now for last four years. So we have been pioneers in a lot of things, for example, we were one of the first companies in the country to start SEM, we started way back in 2004. We started doing Facebook 6 years ago; we were their special beta partners in India, when they were not even looking at India, and we did some integrations with them then. We tried to keep ahead of the curve, by trying and getting on to things early. I wouldn’t say we have mastered everything, but definitely there is an early mover advantage.

And we are always open to working with newer players, newer platforms and newer technologies to see how we can improve and what will work for us. Because everything doesn’t works for all our products. Something that works on recruitment might miserably fail on matrimony, for some reason or the other and vice versa. And since we have so many verticals within Info Edge that there is a lot of cross-learning as well.

Q. As a CMO, what are the main challenges you face, especially in being able to optimally tap into the digital medium?

A big challenge is really finding the right partners to work with, and by this I don’t necessarily mean digital agencies only. But if I look at the biggest challenge that a lot of us have found is, whether we have the best creative agencies or not? And this challenge is very common to the fraternity. So you have one set of agencies that belong to this genre who do fabulous viral work, like they create the best videos for you. And then there is another outfit which you require, that understands the consumer mindset and is creating something else for it. Today, we are seeing a lot of bright people who are identifying this gap and getting into this by opening boutique agencies. So I think that one major challenge for digital is, do enough creative people understand this space? And I think the situation is much better now.

Till about two years ago, there were not enough tools available in the market where you could actually target a user across platforms, so you had tools available according to different platforms and therefore you looked at a unique visitor on Yahoo, a unique visitor on Naukri and a unique visitor on Rediff, but there was a lot of overlap, and therefore you could not look at everything in one window and therefore spend your money judiciously. And then instead of doing a unique cap or a frequency cap on four, most of us were doing it on 5 individual websites or networks or exchanges. Today a lot of tools that have entered the market in the last two-three years help us get that one minimum view. I think that from an advertiser’s perspective, from a marketer’s perspective, end of the day we want to catch a unique eyeball. And those kinds of tools are making life easier.

It’s not that much about just the communication sometimes people say there is a communication overload and a lot of people have to say that about digital. As marketers you want people to see relevant messaging and if they are not engaging with you or interacting with your messaging, it is better to just back off, instead of badgering them because a lot of them then call it spam. Today it has become more easier because tools have become more sophisticated, even at the digital workforce now you find a lot of people who are trained in digital, so that also took time, because this was a new field.

Even today, if you look at mobile marketing, has India mastered the art? No. We are just kind of learning it still. This whole shift from traditional offline to digital, I don’t think we are right there yet. As a company, as Info Edge, we are, but as a country, as marketers, a lot of progress needs to be made still. Since we are an Internet company, and our audiences were only online, therefore online advertising always became as important as offline. 

Q. Is social media having any significant impact on how you market your products or services? What is your viewpoint on the growing consumption of social media and its place in the digital mix?

As a marketing tool, social media is wonderful, because it’s a listening tool. It has enabled us to reach a lot of consumers directly and in a short span of time. So you see a lot of people actually taking out their angst on social media, as a marketer or a corporate communications person what is nice is that you can respond and enough people turn around and they don’t mind thanking you for your responses. So I think that one big thing it has done is that it has brought consumers much closer to the brands, because there is a faster interactive way of doing it.

Secondly, platforms like Facebook, for example, give you immense targeting opportunities. So it helps you in reaching out to audiences and giving them the right message. Today, Facebook allows me to target people based on designation, interest groups, among other criteria and therefore I can show very relevant messages to a particular group of people. So it has given us both access to the right people as well as targeting capabilities.

Thirdly, social media has helped shape digital in India. If I look at how digital has moved in this country, apart from the Internet players, you did not see a lot of traditional offline marketers on digital till about 5-6 years ago. And I think we can give a lot of the credit to social media as it has given a big push to digital advertising in India. From a digital industry point of view, social media has helped digital advertising to scale up to where it is today.

For Info Edge, we have a different social media strategy for different brands. For instance, with Shiksha, where our audiences are far younger, it plays a very important role, maybe it even plays a larger role than Google. So for our marketing mix for Shiksha, Facebook is far more important to us than Google, primarily because youngsters are spending so much time on that medium.

Q. You recently unveiled an ad campaign for 99accres. How is the campaign faring?

We did a 360 degree campaign, and thankfully its delivered very good results for us. We did one new TVC on new projects around December and we just released one two week ago, which is around rentals and mobile. Both the communications was done by our creative agency, which is JWT (Delhi).

Then our outdoor we did with an agency called Span Communications. Digital we don’t do with any agency, as far as the media piece is concerned, as we have a large in-house team to look after that. But we do work with a digital creative agency Landscape, it is a boutique agency run out of Gurgaon. We have a large in-house design team of around 30-35 designers, both Web and UIA, who work with marketing on marketing design and graphics etc. And our media agency is Lintas media group.

It was a pan India release, the outdoors was in the 5 metro cities and Radio was everywhere, we covered about 25 cities. And TV of course was everywhere, and it’s still running. We also took some big blockbusters like Akshay Kumar starrer Baby and we are also a sponsor on Indian Idol. So there are some big ticket items that we have taken to get those impact and media spikes.

Q. How much of your total marketing spend is allocated for digital?

It is different for different brands. For Shiksha it will be close to about 70%. For Jeevansathi, digital is just about 25% and 75% is TV. Naukri on the other hand is all on digital, because we feel that the brand is built, we haven’t really gone back to TV because we already have over 70% of the traffic share in this market and therefore don’t need to do brand building any longer. So in the case of Naukri, it will be 90% digital and 10% other stuff. In the case of 99accres, it will be somewhere around 60-40, where 60 is digital and 40 is ATL and BTL all put together.

 

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