A Marketing Splash Without Breaking the Bank
- BY Shreyasi Singh
In Sales & Marketing
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That the world of marketing is more and more determined by swipes, tweets and posts is undeniable. Yet, even as marketing blogs and successful marketers extol the virtues of digital marketing, very few Indian companies have managed to craft brands using digital media as a central medium. It’s why Breaking Stereotypes, a social media campaign run by TrulyMadly, a four month old “modern matchmaking” company is an interesting case study of how to use the medium effectively.
TrulyMadly was launched on February 14, 2014. Although it’s in the somewhat crowded matrimonial space, founders Sachin Bhatia, Hitesh Dhingra and Rahul Kumar, all of whom come with many years of e-commerce experience in earlier ventures such as LetsBuy.com and MakeMyTrip, believe their site stands apart. “Nothing has really happened in the matrimonial space since the late 1990s. Even the payment plans of the three major sites are identical. Plus, the profiles on these sites are mostly used by parents. Many young people don’t associate with these sites,” says Dhingra.
So, TrulyMadly was conceived as a medium for young people in their mid-20s to connect—both for meeting new people and for long-term relationships. To tap into this segment, the founding team knew they had to get some basics right—a stringent verification process that kept fake profiles out, an equal mix of men and women, and the element of being a social site that appealed to their social media driven target group. With the parents being out of the picture, they also had to figure out what young singles look for in their partners. “We had many conversations with young people,and compatibility is the word we kept hearing. It’s an ambiguous word—so we said, okay, let’s define compatibility,” Kumar said.
The TrulyMadly team set out to build a compatibility algorithm where profiles are matched not on religion, caste, astrological charts but hobbies, interests and socioeconomic filters. “Because we saw ourselves as breaking the stereotype of conventional matchmaking, we wanted a campaign that also talked about doing so—of making your independent decisions based on who the person really is and not falling for lazy clichés,” says Kumar.
“We knew we couldn’t market this like other e-commerce companies. It’s not a transactional site. We had to have an emotional connect,” Dhingra says.So, when their digital marketing agency Drizzlin came up with this idea, TrulyMadly knew it was going to work. The Breaking Stereotypes campaign started with creating profiles of people in the founders’ social networks. It was a simple idea, says Dhingra, but one that managed to tap into a conversation larger than the company’s product. “All we did was send a photographer and a placard to create these shots. I doubt if we spent more than Rs 1,000 per profile. It’s just that the content resonated with our target group.”
Finding the way to make a campaign go viral is the Holy Grail for today’s marketers. On this account, the Breaking Stereotypes did well. Since it was launched on April 9, it has reached out to 4.5 lakh people through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Considering that TrulyMadly is a four-month old company, this impressive outreach has signifcant business impact. Dhingra and Kumar say the Breaking Stereotypes blog received more than 7,400 unique visitors. Approximately 29,000 people have engaged with the company’s Facebook page, and there have been more than 3,000 interactions on Twitter. This social media buzz has resulted in close to a 330 per cent jump in unique users onTrulyMadly. The campaign was also aimed at appealing to both genders, and to focus on a few geographies, mainly Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai to boost membership. It achieved that and has helped the start-up further the brand positioning they want.
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