Tag: content marketing

How a Video Got Reach of 25 Million – Case Study at #11MarCon

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Presented the ixigo case study at the IAMAI Marketing Conclave in Mumbai last week. What an exciting event, enthusiastic audience and an experience to remember. On Day 1, there was an interesting session on video marketing, with who’s who of the video marketing world defending their stands.

It was a revelation to learn that we’re doing two things very different from the industry:

  • we produce all videos in-house and
  • we don’t focus on influencers (the messengers), but focus on producing kick-ass content (message) for our social community instead.

On Day 2, had my little case study presentation. The story of how we pulled a reach of 25 million from a video, and the best practices in viral video marketing. The energy was infectious, the session went off script, rapid fire answers to interesting questions from the audience. Find the slide-deck from the event below, and tweets about it. 

Slide-deck : Case Study

Tweets from the event

 

Imagine 3.5 Lakh Influencers to Share Your Content [Video]

At DMAI roundtable, May 8, 2015
At DMAI roundtable, May 8, 2015

A great deal of attention has been focussed on thought leaders or “Influencers” in the rapidly evolving marketing landscape in India today. The traditional idea of Influencer Marketing in any given industry, is about focussing on the ‘thought leaders’ or messengers to spread your story. With numbers to backup my argument, I feel that in today’s exploding internet scene in India, we don’t have to find a perfect bunch of people to spread our content; If we focus on the message (instead of the messengers) and make it share-worthy, it doesn’t matter if the users who share it have 20 friends or 20,000.

When your message is powerful and easy to share, then everyone’s a messenger :)

Here’s a video from a brief talk of how, by focussing on the message, we turned 50% of our Facebook community of 7 Lakh into Influencers!

What Matters More in Influencer Marketing: Message or the Messenger?

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Fifteen years back Malcolm Gladwell wrote ‘The Tipping Point’ and idea of influencers was born. Gladwell argued the “Law of the Few: The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.” It meant that a select few individuals had the power to influence their tribes and as marketers we had to find these mavens, these super-influentials and have them on our side. Over the last few years, I ran campaigns with this rule implanted in my head. If I focus on select few, treat them well, win them over, then we win the game. Well, all that changed, in the last one year.

When The Message Trumped The Messenger

In August of 2014, we released a video, a travel hacks video for ixigo. The video got mere 300 views on YouTube and died, but the second day we released it on Facebook as a native video. That day, Gladwell’s law in my head was shattered forever. We got 50,000 views on first day, and the video went on to become a 7 million views hit, shared by 3.5 lakh people over few months.

Half of our 7 lakh fans on Facebook suddenly became influencers.

Every ‘share’ our content got, influenced users, with many fans specifically tagging their friends and family to see the video. That one video had the reach of 25 million, which was about 25% of Facebook’s user base in India at that time (view case study) We followed by releasing a bunch of videos, from the learning, and got phonemenal success. One such video was shared by a Facebook user and it alone got 2.4 million views on his page. The question we now ask before we dive into designing the message: How will people be compelled to talk about this and share it? Sharing became the new currency :)

Influencer Marketing On its Head

With the learnings from that one video and many other viral hits later, the best practice evolved into making share-worthy content. If the content (the message) is compelling enough for anyone to hit share, then everyone is an influencer (messenger); We didn’t have to find the perfect people to spread the idea, if we focus on the message, make it compelling and easy to share, it doesn’t matter whether the individuals who share it have 5 friends or 50,000, whether they are popular or not.

However what may be true for one vertical may not be true for another. I’m sure many a marketing strategies are working great by engaging selected influencers. We did some influencer marketing campaigns in the past which were successful, but nothing came close to the phenomenal numbers we saw by focussing on the message.

I would love to hear your experiences with Influencer Marketing, your challenges and if you think this game is changing faster than we thought :)

Interview: How I got into Viral Content Marketing

dv-interview-aashish-chopra-LN

Digital Vidya, Asia’s leading digital marketing training company recently interviewed me after the success of the webinar I did last weekend on Viral Video Marketing. Includes the story of how I got into digital marketing, my insights about the mistakes organisations commit today and key takeaways from the webinar.

Digital Vidya: How did you get into Digital Marketing?

Aashish: I was in grade 9, when a friend from IIT was helping me with physics, and more than the time we spent understanding physics, we shared tools to build websites. It became a competition of sorts after our physics sessions to share what we had done the previous day in building new features for websites. He went on to finish his degree and become a developer and I started designing websites and solving web presence challenges for small businesses. That’s when I got on the web development bandwagon. After years of helping SMEs with websites, even starting a business in Canada, I realized that building websites was half the game, the real action for any business or ROI came in with what the website did for them. It was an exciting time to be alive back in the day, rapidly changing internet scene, social media in its infancy and SEO being the king.

Then the game changed, and social became the big thing, that’s when I dove into Digital Marketing. From social media marketing, to the evolution to content marketing and now focused on content which can go contagious and viral. I realized that the success of any social marketing plan is dependent on remarkable content. So Content Marketing became my obsession and after success with visual content, mainly Infographics, I started making videos. Within one year, got five viral hits, two awards and millions of views. With India rapidly growing in internet penetration, millions of new users are discovering internet through their mobile devices, it is no longer about tools and technology but how to leverage these in impacting their lives. Also I feel social media has an element of activism, and with the democratic nature of sharing, all that is needed is a good idea acted upon, which can change the world.

Digital Vidya: Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?

Aashish: If you look around, where are people spending their time. It is no longer TV, Radio or Newspapers. With millions of Indians getting on the mobile bandwagon, internet grabs the most eyeballs and is rapidly growing. And for any entrepreneur, marketing professional or student, this is where you would be competing. You can start a food business, lead marketing for a big brand or be studying law for that matter, if you need your ideas, products or services to get to the users, it is all about marketing in a digital world.

Digital Vidya: According to you, what are the top mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?

Aashish: I believe mistakes are good, marketing is all about experiments. You do ten experiments, two work, which give you indicators and best practices for future, on which you can build upon. The mistake is not learning from those mistakes, and be shooting in the dark. Organisations must get obsessed about users and about being authentic and transparent. It is about users not fancy tools. The big problem I see in the industry is the focus and obsession with ‘virality’, I feel the obsession must be on impacting lives of their customers, virality will take care of itself.

Digital Vidya: Please share top 5-7 takeaways from the Webinar you would like to share with our community.

Aashish: The takeaways are focused on content marketing and videos:

  • Don’t start with the intent to go viral; Viral is the result, focus on value for the user.
  • Start obsessing about your users’ pain points and how content can impact their lives.
  • Whatever you produce: landing pages, articles, infographics, slides or videos. Make for mobile screens.
  • Start the culture of experimentation, do ten experiments, two may work. Learn and improve.
  • It is better to execute a good idea, than to wait for that awesome one. Action is everything!

You can read the full interview text on their blog here.