Aditya Jalgaonkar, Manager Digital Marketing – Hafele India, shares insights on how full-funnel strategy works wonders with Quora and how brands this festive season can also focus on a content strategy based on the intent of the audience. Below are excerpts form our conversation.
What are some of the tips and trends you have seen in the last two-three years and how have you used platforms such as Quora to reach your consumers directly?
2020 and 2021 were not great due to Covid, and we have seen people not spending money and holding on to Liquid for the future. That was the scenario during the last couple of years.
In 2022, there is no scare of Covid, which we have seen during the festive season. I was reading a report on LinkedIn wherein an industry expert was talking about how malls are crowded with queues, airports are full of business travellers, airlines are running with almost full occupancy, and traffic is crazy during the weekend, so these are early signs that this festive season will be much more significant as compared to last two years (keeping my fingers crossed)
With consumer sentiments improving across crucial categories like essential and non-essential products and increased mobility, a September analysis by Axis My India said that 48% of consumers tend to shop more during the festive season than the rest of the year. It also revealed that 20% of the consumers plan to shop more this festive season compared to last year. Spends on non-essential and discretionary products like AC, cars, refrigerators, etc. have increased by 7% during this festive season compared to the previous year. So this is a perfect sign.
This year, as I mentioned, offline sales will be without any Covid restrictions, so footfall will be bigger as compared to the last couple of years, and again, people will have disposable income due to the Diwali bonus payout, so most of the Consumer durable companies will aim for 30-35% of revenue during this festive season which will contribute to their overall annual revenue.
Talking about Quora as a platform. For me, Quora is an educational forum wherein you will find all kinds of audiences. Now talking audience on Quora—Quora has somewhere around 300 million unique visitors per month. 88.7M answers were published on Quora between January 1st and December 31st, 2019. So in the last two years, we can say there will be a 20-30% jump. Now, this is the universe you have, and If you do proper research, you will find
1. How and what people are searching for
2. How influencers, users and brands react to certain questions
3. How do certain questions and answers get engagement in views, upvotes, number of comments and reshares?
4. How are other brands performing, and what is their business profile performance?
If you get this information and process it to create a multi-layer content strategy for Quora’s audience, then there is a big chance of success on a platform like Quora.
1. Informational Intent (Awareness)
2. Investigate (Consideration)
3. Transitional (Transaction)
As other platforms are struggling to give us organic reach on social media, the results are overwhelming if you work on Quora consistently. From my learning, if we keep our content tone an educational one, we will get better results.
What are some Ad spending trends you see this year? With respect to your category, is there a new entrant to the mix? How are you planning your spending this season?
The Indian advertising market is forecast to grow by 16 per cent in 2022 to reach (Rs 88,639 crore), becoming the fastest-growing market globally, this would lead to over 14.5 per cent growth by TV and 31.6 per cent on the digital side, said dentsu Global Ad Spend Forecasts July 2022.
TV has bounced back (boosted by the airing of new content and sports events such as the Indian Premier League, and Digital continues to grow. Though it is not back to its pre-pandemic levels, print has also made a comeback. Not related to the pandemic, but spends are moving away from print.
The FMCG segment has maintained the threshold levels during this period. Other upcoming categories include app-based clients, fintech, edtech, gaming, etc. These have received a lot of funding that translates into ad spends and campaigns. The third is the comeback or revival categories – auto, travel, etc. These three together have brought the ADEX back to pre-
pandemic levels
How did you leverage a platform like Quora to drive through the funnel or full funnel for your brand’s objectives? How are you planning to use it in the coming times this festive season?
Quora is a knowledge-sharing platform for me. When we talk about a full-funnel strategy, one needs to consider all three stages of consumer intent; As I mentioned earlier about awareness, consideration and conversion, I think Quora is the only social media platform wherein you will get customers with these three intents. Talking about our success story, we were using Quora platforms since 2016 and 2017, but it came into focus, especially in 2019, when we started focusing on intent-based marketing. After doing thorough research on Quora, we created a six-month plan to understand how certain things work. We began with FAQs through our Business Profile and then extended that to product-level Questions and Answers. Since then, it has been a consistent effort. Because of that, if you look at the cumulative total, we have already crossed 23 million views on Quora; we are ranking at the top as a Top Viewed Authors for a few relevant product categories. Some of our FAQs have been viewed in 8-9 millions above. This does not stop here as per Google Analytics data, traffic coming from Quora is spending a perfect amount of time on the website compared to other social media platforms, so these are the reason Quora has become an integral part of our online marketing plan. As closing remarks, if you provide the right kind of content consistently to the audience, which are different stages of the full funnel strategy, the chance of winning and retaining these customers becomes high.
How should brands approach custom marketing this season?
In India, there are many national and regional festivals. A brand must select a few festivals, especially for end consumer offers or schemes, so that the marketing budget can be optimized. We know for a fact that all festivals are of equal importance in a country like India, and as a marketer, we will not be able to miss them. Still, sticking to a few festivals from a marketing standpoint and budget optimization standpoint is essential. Again in festive marketing, consistency is critical. To give a quick example, Amazon has created an IP for the Great Indian Festival, which happens during festive seasons, and consumers wait for these 3-4 days. We have been following this strategy at Hafele since 2016, which is working well for us. We have successfully created IP for festive marketing, and due to consistent efforts, our TG waits for festive offers to release on specific dates.
Moreover, end customers and even publishers are aware of these IPs. Now they have started talking about our internal language, so my advice will be to define a few festivals relevant to your product categories, assess how your competition is approaching these festivals, create a concrete plan and replicate this every year by making some tactical changes as per the learnings. You will see success in festive marketing in India
