Category: Interviews

Great content sets your brand apart from the masses, and can effectively deliver your brand’s message to the audience. Posting relevant, meaningful content on your website and social media will boost your search engine rankings and will also position you as a brand expert.

This blog contains the content marketing interview with Murali G.A, head of digital marketing at RentSher, where he talks about the importance of content in today’s day.

But before moving to the interview here’s a little read about RentSher and Murali

RentSher

RentSher is a major online rental marketplace for Events, Electronics and Medical Equipments. It is scalable as a marketplace and enables social sharing and promotions.

With mass consumerism picking up in India, the team believes that people are bound to have spare products to share, rent or sell.

Murali G.A

Murali heads Digital Marketing at RentSher, where he works towards strategizing, planning, creating and implementing the campaigns for RentSher to increase brand awareness, website visitors and leads. He also handles various Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram for RentSher to promote their services.

Content marketing interview with RentSher

Q1 What is the relevance of content in today’s day?

Murali’s Answer: Content plays a major role in online marketing and creating good content is essential for any brand. Be it a B2B or B2C organization, content creation for your website and other mediums of promotion is critical.  Before hopping on to writing “good” content, know your audience and their needs. Creating content without research and analysis is a waste of time and efforts.

So, you need to be judicious about crafting a good marketing strategy.

Q2 Explain us a little about how you use content for your brand.

Murali’s Answer:  Our presence is across PAN India and we use content to reach out to more and more people. Our business model caters to both customers(B2C) and startups, corporates(B2B)

This means that content marketing for B2B and B2C verticals simultaneously happens for our brand.

Acquiring customers is by default the strategy of any brand, but our focus is to also retain them. With our present content strategy, we have been able to achieve a 40% retention rate. The loyalty of customers matters to us a lot, and therefore we continue to be in touch with them even after sales.

We make sure that we provide offers and update them with new arrivals so that they stay engaged and also have a brand recall.

Q3 Is there a difference in the content that goes out to your two different audience categories – Customers(B2C) & Businesses(B2B)?

Murali’s Answer: Yes, the approach is different for both segments.

B2B Segment

For our B2B content marketing segment, we focus on creating whitepapers, case studies, customer testimonials and newsletters.

We believe that white papers are great when we cater to corporates and startups because they by nature are very detailed and can help the clients take faster decisions.

• Content marketing Case studies help us in being more credible in the eyes of our consumers.
• Testimonials are the living proof of our successful services and hence work like a digital word of mouth for us.
• Updating our clients with new product listings and features happens through monthly newsletters.

B2C Segment

For our B2C segment also, we send out newsletters, but with a different approach, tonality and design. Apart from this, we focus largely on social media handles to increase customer engagement.

To provide a visual appeal, we create short videos on youtube about our products,services and events that take place through us.

Their Social Media Handles

We had a chance to look at the social media handle of RentSher, and we noticed that,
They haven’t used content that glorifies their products and services. Instead, their content is straight-forward and focuses on user benefits.

Twitter

For example, in their Twitter Post about home & kitchen appliances they have mentioned the home-delivery of those products.

This is a great post because,

• Content talks about benefits that users will get upon buying the products
• Because of the non-salesly approach, users will not shy away from exploring the products.

Facebook

Next, in one of their Facebook posts, they talk about a birthday party that they organized for one of their customer’s daughter.

This is a great post because,

• Through the personalized approach of addressing customers by their names, they are making the customers feel important.
• At the same time, through this approach, they are reaching out to new people who might have a similar need.

Linkedin

Their SlideShare about easy DIY Valentine ideas is wonderful.

This is a great post because,

• They are providing the right type of content at the right time to users.
• The users will refer the brand to their friends because they themselves found it useful.

Youtube

Here is an example of an interesting short video made by RentSher about what they do. This quick video talks about how you can rent items online without hassle.

Q4 Are there any tools that you focus on?

Murali’s Answer: We do not want to unnecessary invest in a lot of tools.

We use only a few of them, like Google Analytics, Google Adsense and Google Adwords. We track customer activity through Google Analytics, this includes – the source that they have come from, where they are landing, the points that they drop off at and many more. This gives us a fair sense of how to move ahead towards our goal in a better way.

Q5 Do you consider Blogging as an important part of your content strategy?

Murali’s Answer: Blogging is very important to us. Our aim is to have blogs that our users find useful, and also enjoy reading them. For example, we have a blog called “Significance of costumes for Janmashtami and Independence” This is an interesting read for the users, as it brings them closer to the festivals by giving them necessary information about god and leaders.

And at the same time, it benefits us, because we can talk about the costumes that we rent out during the festival.

Another one that I want to talk about is – How to Earn Extra income Without Investment?

Here, we have a catchy headline, which draws people to our website. After landing on our blog, there are two good things that happen,

• The users learn about how they can get extra income through the p2p lending business model.
• They will be confident in exploring the rest of the website because they found this particular blog useful.

  You can check out RentSher’s other blogs here.

Q6 A successful campaign that you want to talk about?

Murali’s Answer: Yes, there is a recent one that we ran for Christmas. The idea was to create buzz much before the actual festival date. We started promoting our products 10 days prior to Christmas on social media and through emails. On different days, we highlighted different products and services and the result was phenomenal.

We got double the number of orders than we expected. Additionally, we got orders for New Year’s too.

Our intention for this campaign was to attract corporates that organize Christmas events for their employees.

However, to our surprise, we also got orders from individual customers through this campaign. So it was a double win for us.

Q7 Any advice to the content marketers out there?

Murali’s Answer: Well, it is very important to be in tandem with all the team members.

I am talking from my personal experience. The Christmas campaign that I spoke about had surpassed our expectations, and there was more demand than supply.

The situation didn’t go out of our hands because our different teams(the ones handling backend and marketing) were well coordinated.

Thus, it is important to stay ahead of things and avoid poor customer experience.

Another suggestion for the content marketers is to be very aware of the audience that they cater to. Especially if they have multiple audience segments. The idea is to classify them into different lists and create content that suits each of them.

There is no one strategy that fits all.

You need to think of many ideas according to the many customers you have, and then only will your content  strategy be successful.

So, with this, we have come to the end of our content marketing interview. We heartily thank Murali for taking out the time to talk to us and sharing some important insights that will benefit us and other content marketers.

Content can help a brand get the right audience at the right time.

However, creating good content doesn’t come easy. We at WittyPen can write quality content for your business which will boost your marketing efforts in no time.

Download the E-Book to get started with us!

Content is the backbone of any brand that is out there. Without the right content, a brand may get crippled and can fall down. So it is important to have a well-researched and a well-documented content marketing plan that complements the ideology of your brand.

To reinforce the importance of content, we asked one of our industry experts, Subhash Dawda, head of content at DHFL General Insurance some questions about succesful content marketing. But, before we proceed to that part, we would like you to know a little about Subhash.

About Subhash

Subhash started writing at the age of 16 years. He loved writing since he was young, and slowly converted his passion into his profession. He freelanced for long, with some of the most prominent brands such as One Plus and Gillette. He credits these brands for giving him a lot of exposure to the world of content. Post his MBA, he worked with TheBagTalk, who he had also freelanced with earlier. Together they produced some amazing content.

Presently, Subhash takes care of the content strategy at DHFL general insurance.
He says that ” Content is the centrepiece of what we do here”.

Content is a part of thought leadership, inbound marketing, SEO, audience building and segmentation. Audience engagement and segmentation are the most crucial aspects for us.

Targeting audiences purely on customization is our key. Warm, hot or cold leads, people who know something, a lot or nothing about what we stand for, we target them all in different ways.”

The question-answer round 🙂

So, we had a lot of questions in our mind, and we shot them all one by one. Our first question was,

Why is content so important to you?

Subhash’s take on this,
“Content is the king, and it might be the pauper in cases where it is misused”

Brands today, a lot of them focus on “Selling”. People, your users don’t like that. We at DHFL GI, believe in caring for our audiences, by making content that reaches out to a larger set of people, helping them in ways that may not be directly related to selling insurance. We want to make our communication helpful and make them understand that we are not there only at the time of sale, but we are there throughout their customer journey.

It becomes quite challenging for a company like ours where we encounter our customers once or maybe twice a year. So, the plan is to stick on for longer without shooing away our audience through “flashy” sale slogans.

Our communication is focused on “We care”.

Not only post sales but at the beginning, in the middle and every other time, we project ourselves as the “people who care for you”.

We focus on the four lines of business –  health, motor, travel and home. Our content marketing program focuses on how can we help our users to stay better at all of these, like how can our users travel better or how can they ride better?

For instance, our blog on “how to take care of your hair while you ride, or what are the group formations you should follow while you ride together with rider friends?”, focuses on aspects beyond insurance. We are trying to think like a rider does, and we do it because we do not want to give the usual “insurance dope” to our users, that other brands may offer.

Here is a screenshot of their blog on Group Riders: Your Full Guide.

We at WittyPen personally think that this is a great step taken by Subhash and his team. This is customization done right. Through blogs like these, the team at DHFL GI understands the pain points/concerns of their audience. And tries to solve them, rather than just sell what they have. This is what makes them one of the best insurance companies in India.

They have some other interesting blogs as well. For example, they have written about “How To Manage Pain While Biking”?, Tips On Using The Best Helmet, Traffic Fines That You Could Potentially Face and may more.

You can check them out here.

Subhash further adds,

Every insurance brand out there has hundreds of blogs that just list the products, their features and that’s that. We here are focusing on identifying needs and educating them further on it. When you look at a third-party liability blog, it tells you about the product—as well as explains whether it’s the correct insurance for you or not. So your decision is much easier.

When we further asked about the major platforms that they use for promoting and sharing content, Subhash said,

Our aim is to have maximum interaction happen on our website, and we want our users there to be engaged and take actions. Social media is used to proliferate the content ahead, and ultimately land them on our website.

We evaluate our next course of action based on how our users are responding to the content we serve. Our websites will soon open newer vistas, such as infographics, varied story-based landing pages, videos, etc and then we will have many more ways of making them stay for longer on our platform.

His answer to “What are your core priorities in terms of content?”

Getting free traffic through SEO.  Making our audiences our hero. Helping them get the most through what we offer. And finally, break the walls that conventional insurance companies have built.

Challenges in content marketing

We know that creating content comes with a lot of challenges. We even wrote a blog about it 🙂

Now DHFL GI is an insurance company, a finance company to its core. And, usually, for finance companies, it is very difficult to establish trust in the minds of users.

When we asked the same question to Subhash, he responded by saying,

As far as trust-building is concerned, we didn’t have to worry about that much. We have had our group brand “DHFL Home Loans” and their ambassador Shahrukh Khan to create that element of brand recall and trust”

But the part about engaging people with finance, and especially insurance is a tough nut to crack. This is where our main challenge lies.

To get people buy online is not easy. Ours is a low engagement product and has a longer process. Not many times do people consider it. Hence, there is a continuous battle for traffic.

Even though India’s got some of the cheapest insurance globally, insurance is still a push and not pull market.

Our purpose is to make insurance more exciting for our users to consume. So, we take a better route, where we make people understand that it is not about bundled insurance or more profitable insurance. It is about what is the right fit for you.

We educate them and build a story around products that are not easily sellable.

We also think that, that any content strategy should have a healthy blend of paid and organic marketing. Facebook algorithms pay lesser attention to organic posts these days, so it is pretty important to have a paid strategy well integrated with your organic strategy for a wider reach.

His take on the target audience,

Content creation depends completely on who you are targeting. There is no one TG that we are targeting. Sometimes we talk to parents, and sometimes the young millennials who ride bikes. Our tonality and language changes while we address the different segments.

Women are a key influencer group for core purchasing TGs. So, for example, from a health insurance perspective, women as caregivers play a major role in influencing the decision-making process.

Another example of an influencer group is parents, parents are very concerned about their children’s’ safety while they ride. So, we have a blog addressed to them, that talks about the gears that their children should have when they ride.

When asked, Are tools important? His response was,

Tools are, of course very important. The biggest brands with great content strategy track every single customer movement.

But tools are not the only criteria that you should be looking at. There are deeper metrics that you should be focusing on.

Do you think that the biggest of brands out there would have been focusing on tools when they just started out?

No. In their nascent stage, they would have just started out with a basic website, where the focus would be only on CONTENT.

For any field that you want to specialize in, knowing the fundamentals first is important. So start small and create content that resonates with your audience’s mindset.

What will you do with tools, when you don’t have data to analyze?

First, bring in that audience, get your graph of traffic up, and then start analyzing, measuring and implementing the multi variants.

We personally use Google Analytics, at DHFL GI. In my previous jobs, we’ve used KissMetrics, Fullstory and a few more. For us, Fullstory works wonders, because it gives us a full record of user activity through video sessions. Their important actions are recorded, and that helps us to create content accordingly.

His take on the important metrics tracked and audience insights at DHFL GI

Well, while we focus on the basics such as shares and likes, what we really care about are the in-depth metrics such as the time spent on our blog, average page depth, and more. This is what enables us to tweak content in specific ways that might appeal to users.

Bounce Rates are also important because there might be a lot of headlines that are catchy, click-baity and shareable, but the content inside might not strong enough to hold the users.

Audience insights help us in creating a perfect content marketing plan to improve readability and traffic

There are certain topics that we as a team are very excited about and we think that they would click with our audience.

But insights from the audience might tell us a different story altogether. So, that makes us go back to the board, brainstorm and draft content that can work better.

Audience insights are very helpful and can help us content marketers at every step in the customer journey.

For example, an important insight that we gathered was the readership on long-form content. People don’t have a lot of patience while they read elaborate content. But recent data shows that Page 1 posts on average are at least 1900 words long. This put us in a state where we had to constantly battle between readability and SEO.

So, the solution to this was to have the meat of content in the very beginning.

Even if our audience doesn’t read the entire piece, they will surely take something helpful and interesting out from their initial read-only.

The audience insights from long-form content also allowed us to come up with another really cool idea. It was to hook our audience through a unique way.

We ran a test blog, which is essentially India’s first talking blog that has a character talking to the audience. Our plan was to have this character at places, where our audience might potentially drop off, and through this, we created a hook that sort of could pull them back or make them stay longer.

This character is a real person and not a mascot, and we did this because we wanted our audience to relate to the character. The best part about this character is that it addresses you by your name, every time you visit the blog.

We have also put downloadable content at many of these potential drop-off points. Through this, the users will feel that they have taken something useful even when they did not read the blog completely. In the future, we want to focus on more evolved and conversational chat-bots, and we are working on them.

So, we asked Subhash our last and the most important question,

We have also put downloadable content at many of these potential drop-off points. Through this, the users will feel that they have taken something useful even when they did not read the blog completely. In the future, we want to focus on more evolved and conversational chat-bots, and we are working on them.

So, we asked Subhash our last and the most important question,

Any advice to the content marketers?

To which he responded,

There are several factors that you should consider while you draft your content marketing strategy. And these suggestions hold true for people aspiring to be content marketers as well.

Research Well
Being a writer is different from being a content marketer. You can write all you want, and all that you like if you are a writer. But if you are a content marketer, every piece that you write will have an approach and a thought process. You need to write according to “who”, “when” and “why”.

You need to have your competitors and non-competitors, jotted down. You need update yourself with the latest trends in the industry, and you need to know your users really well. Have a formula in place, and then sit down and write. And also remember, having a formula also doesn’t mean that your content piece will be successful in the first attempt.

The industry is constantly moving, and there are changes every single day. You might have to produce different type of content every day.

Be sensitive to the needs of your audience
You need to be considerate and very sensitive to the needs of your audience. Just because you have the power of the pen, you can’t write anything. Today, social media is a very powerful tool, and the audience is very vocal about their concerns.

It is funny to think that it is easier for negative content to get virality as compared to positive content.

So, if there is some content that you write that offends your audience, then there is a good possibility that your brand may be heavily criticized on social media.

You need to be able to communicate your message properly by not being too intrusive, and by not being too creepy. Even if you have to sell something, you need to do it subtly.  Voice your concerns, but don’t force your perceptions and draw a line. So to keep consistency in your content always keep a marketing strategy checklist.

General industry is as difficult as a Niche one
So if you have ventured out in an industry that is very niche, there would be challenges in your content statergy. There would be a very targeted audience, and there might be gaps between the audience and brand. It might also be difficult to create engagement and educate people about the brand.

But that does not mean, that creating content for a field that is already there is easy. Because then, you have so many people to compete with, and content out there is generated like goods in a factory. So, there are thousands of people who are doing what you do. Therefore, you need to create content that is really unique.

For this, an important parameter is to map customer journey. Creating content is a much easier process if you have a customer journey in place.

You would know the exact content type for a certain audience at a certain stage.

At DHFL GI I’m happy to work as part of a marketing team that is constantly on the cutting edge of technology and the fact that we can do such experiments with content is a clear mandate from our leadership which helps us go beyond traditional marketing models.

Concluding

We had a great time interviewing Subhash. We had a lot to take home – newer perspectives, challenges that we were unaware of, and solutions that can really work.

We heartily thank Subhash for taking out time to answer some of the most important questions about content marketing.

At the end of it, we just have to say that content marketing is a field that is ever evolving and rapidly booming. If your content marketing plan is good, then you can easily create a brand recall in the minds of your audience.

We at WittyPen constantly try and create content that matters. If you are looking out to get some awesome content for your brand, then download the E-Book rightaway.

“This post is a part of our Content Salad series, where we invite industry experts to share their knowledge. The content marketing case study of Canva, a leading graphic-design tool website, is offered to give you a glimpse of the thought process of leaders in the industry and a chance to learn from the best“

Kavita Yadav is the India Growth Lead for Canva, one of the most popular free graphic-design tool websites. An IIT Alumna, she is passionate about using analytics in different areas which cover Business Strategy, Marketing, and SEO.

“Content is king!” How many times have you heard this?

And how many times have you come across a beautiful blog with awesome content but sadly, no traffic? If you run such a blog or are planning to invest into content marketing, but afraid of failing, then see this graph.

Canva’s blog traffic in six months. Relieved? 🙂

Well, it is obviously not easy to replicate the same success but at the same time it is not impossible if you formulate the right strategy and follow it dedicatedly. Canva did the same. Andrianes (Canva growth head) made a strategy that was executed by Anna (Canva’s blog lead). They explain how Canva’s blog grew to 1 million monthly visits by making some changes and using the power of content marketing. The blog section at Canva was launched in 2014, and since then, the blog got 2,457,779 sessions. On an average it was around 409,000 a month. Earlier, traffic from social media used to be the major contributor of the overall traffic. Once the strategy was moved to content marketing, Canva saw a huge boost in organic traffic and in august 2015, organic traffic surpassed social media traffic. During the month of January 2016, there were 1 million visits on the blog!

How did Canva do it? Or more importantly, how can you do it?It makes for an extremely interesting content marketing case study. Canva realized the power of research in making a successful content strategy. What do you do when you start a blog? Start looking for an awesome WordPress theme or installing GA, Mailchimp, looking for some good writers & designers.

Most people do the same but jump right in without proper research. Well this case study is more valuable to those who get some traffic and want to take their blog to the next level. Paying Attention to SEO, Back to basic SEO is dead, right? This is as true as “Elon musk is Batman” and “Trump is an alien”.

Every time a CEO rejects to get their site follow SEO strategies, a little panda dies. You cannot deny how important SEO is, and if you do, there is a big chance you’ll lose.

The traffic on search engines stays for long. It doesn’t pop up like soda and get down. Once you start ranking for a specific keyword, it is there to stay.

This is not applicable to any other strategy you follow. Whether it is Paid Adverts or social media, the moment you pause the campaigns, the traffic vanishes. But that is not the case for SEO.

This does not mean that you don’t write viral content, as they are a nice way of giving your blog a push, but they will give you spikes instead of constant sustainable traffic for the long run.

Social media spike

Organic traffic Yes, SEO takes time. Good things take time, right? Stick to SEO for better search engine rankings and long term and stable traffic.

Here is how you do it (Step by Step):

1. Search for articles published by your competitors:

See what they are writing. Understand who is your target audience. Canva was lucky here as anyone from an about to marry couple (who wants a wedding card design) to a tech blogger (who wants a banner for a blog post) were their audience. If your audience is specific, see what they will like to read. For example, if you have made a tool for developers, see what kind of content developers are searching for. Selling a b2b tool? Target CEOs, CTOs, and decision makers. You have to understand your target audience.

2. Search for the relevant phrases and keywords:

You don’t want to write an article which no one is looking for! So: Make sure the article has a target keyword which is well searched. Use keyword tools like Google keyword planner and keywordtool.io to find out searches your keyword has. Once your finalize the keyword and topic, make sure to target similar 3-5 keywords around the main keyword. This will help you gain additional traffic. Also, I have seen the main keyword not getting ranked but these smaller and easy keywords start gaining traffic easily.

3. Write SEO Optimized Article:

Ensure that your content is detailed and worth reading. If you think any article is not worth it, delete and redirect, improve it. Do not write it for search engines but make sure it has at least some mention of the keyword you are targeting. Canva blog already had a good number of articles published. So they went on to clean it up as a part of their content audit. Here is how they did it: Made a list of all their published articles. If there were multiple articles on same or similar topic, they were combined into one long and detailed article. Improved existing article by adding more content, deleting poor quality content, and making it SEO optimized. Changed the slug to keyword optimized one. Made sure to redirect old URLs (Do remember 301ing).Here is an impact of the above exercise on one of their articles:

Amazing! Isn’t it? There were many such examples that lead to an increase in overall traffic. Keeping A Check On Publishing Frequency The team at Canva ensured that at least one article was published every working day. Getting articles published daily is a tough task which the team was able to do perfectly.

Here is how they did it all: All articles publications were scheduled at least 6 weeks in advance. Earlier, they were doing it max 3 weeks in advance, which used to end up in hassles. During that time, if an article did not go the way they wanted, there used to be no backup available.

Now with 6 weeks advance schedule, they have plenty of time for managing tasks. A checklist was created to sort out the editorial process. This helped in maintaining consistency across all articles published on site.

Below are a few points of the checklist:

• Keep the number of words between the headline and the first image to 150 words (Images are important!).
• Ensure that the paragraphs are not too long.
• Make sure you use hashtags and number subheading correctly.
• Make sure images are displayed properly & have right alt text.
• Ensure that the article has relevant internal links.
• Make sure all links are working properly.

They set a process of hiring new writers on board. Canva has a very good team of writers. The process not only included hiring, but also reviewing of existing writers. They kept adding new writers and kept reviewing the ones already on board.

You can consider hiring freelance writers or an agency. If a blog is able to get articles published at fixed intervals, it really helps in creating a set loyal audience around it. It can bring good traffic from social media and newsletters. Also, a regularly updated blog is considered a good sign by search engines and you might end up ranking right after the article is published (yes, without even building a single backlink! Google loves fresh content 😉 )

Canva’s content calendar Feel free to use project management tools to manage your work. It not only improves your efficiency but also gives you visibility. If you don’t want to go for some paid project tool, then you can use Google’s free tools.

Using Awesome Graphics! The writers at Canva ensured that they used top notch graphics. They curated the best graphics and added them to the articles. This resulted in endless pins from Pinterest. The traffic from Pinterest was so huge that, at some point, it surpassed Twitter! If you don’t believe words then see for yourself:

Images are the key ingredient for the traffic they are getting from Pinterest. Eye catching banners help a lot in getting attention from users, especially from social media. Graphics like below are bound to increase your user engagement. And the best part is, you don’t need a designer for this. You can create these graphics easily at Canva.

Source: Sharpe & Associate Inc.

All these efforts mentioned above look very common and there is no rocket science behind it. But let’s accept it, we forget the basics and keep finding that new shiny object, that one new thing which can boost up the traffic of the site.  And it never happens because we miss the basics. What you can do? Don’t forget the importance of content marketing and have a content marketing plan. Many of you might get overwhelmed by the number of things you need to do to increase traffic to you blog. Yes, this is quite a task, but you don’t need to do it all at once. Take it step by step, one thing at a time. I hope you got enough motivation by reading this content marketing case study of Canva and are all pumped to invest into content marketing.