SUMMARY
Little Black Book’s Suchita Salwan And POPxo’s Priyanka Gill Have Cracked The Code Of Digital Media Marketing
A report titled ‘Mobile Internet in India 2017’ estimates the number of mobile Internet users in India to reach 478 Mn by June 2018. With such a deep Internet penetration in India, digital media has been a growing phenomenon in India.
The country’s media and entertainment (M&E) sector is poised to touch $45.1 Bn by 2021, expanding at a CAGR of over 10.5%. A PwC report revealed that the segment has undergone substantial progress since 2016, when its valuation stood at $27.3 Bn.
As one of the leading names in the digital media space, POPxo and Little Black Book (LBB) have been continuously proving themselves and winning in their own game.
Women-led successful platforms have been boasting of their huge digital media reach and have been flying high on the success. However, the magic isn’t in the pretty faces but the super brains behind the startups.
At Inc42, we caught up with Priyanka Gill, founder and CEO of POPxo, during a Facebook Live AMA to understand how POPxo managed to crack the code of digital media.
Priyanka Gill, a fashion journalist, shared that the startup is about real women, without assuming she is a rich woman who can afford to spend one lakh on a dress. They have been focussing on relatable content. POPxo, a women-focussed digital media startup in the entertainment tech space, has raised $11 Mn funding from investors like IDG Ventures India, Kalaari Capital, etc.
At present, POPxo has been able to create over 2,000 pieces of content which include 150 videos, over 800 stories and a large number of social media graphics.
Also, the team focusses on data and because of that POPxo has been the seventh largest video player in the country on Facebook and had got 178 Mn video views in August 2017.
Talking about the survival kit of POPxo, Priyanka Gill averred, “We survive just by being better, by being faster and bigger, and by being the first go-to market with everything we have. I think we do a pretty good job of that.”
While at the same time, since its inception, LBB has grown to be a robust recommendation platform with over 2 Mn monthly users and over 30,000 local businesses across the country who have benefitted from it. LBB’s growth, till date, continues to be 80%-85% organically.
After its last round of funding in October 2017, Little Black Book (LBB), an online platform for local recommendations and discoveries, the total investment stands at $2.5 Mn (INR 16.5 Cr).
With a focus on millennials, Suchita Salwan, founder and CEO, LBB, shared during an Inc42 Facebook Live AMA that the startup is very cognisant of the fact that millennials just don’t eat and drink, they do a lot with their time and money. “We as a platform enable brands to give millennials access to information they can use every day. That has helped us to stay relevant to millennials.”
Also, Suchita Salwan believes that the key is in keeping it simple, especially when you are an early-stage startup, you can’t own every single platform. “You can’t be the king of Instagram or the king of SEO or Twitter.”
She added that it is important to figure out what platforms work for you and using those to your advantage makes a lot more than sense than trying to do everything and making a hot mess out of it.
Explaining what works for LBB, she said, “So, for instance, Twitter for LBB is great for brand presence but it is a very small percentage of the traffic that we get. SEO for instance has been absolutely the best way for us to acquire organic traffic. Facebook, for instance, is a great way to ensure relevance and engagement with your audience.”
In the digital age, recognising who to appeal to and how to appeal is the key to success. And right here, we have got the lessons from the successful digital media entrepreneurs.
