Evaluating channel-specific audience behaviour helps Wildcraft create engaging content: Gaurav Dublish

Gaurav Dublish explains how Wildcraft India customises messages, tone, visuals and interactions for each platform to achieve high engagement.

To stay relevant among their audience base, Wildcraft India went beyond its product focussing on the purpose at hand. ‘Desh ka Naya Chehra’ encouraged people to share their maskfies to raise awareness about wearing masks in public. In conversation with Social Samosa, Gaurav Dublish, Co-Founder, Wildcraft India talks about their recent campaigns, pandemic's impact on branding and dwells on the finer details of their social media and marketing strategy.

What are the different ways in which Wildcraft India uses various social media platforms?

As a brand for the younger audience, it is critical we talk to them where they are. Hence, we leverage all major platforms right from Facebook and Instagram to Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. When it comes to content creation, we consider channel-specific audience behaviour and then mix it up to educate and engage with conversations around our products and categories. 

Our continuous goal is to measure, study, and devise new strategies that increase our content shareability.

When posting the same content on different platforms, what's your process of optimising the piece for each platform?

The bottom line for posting content on a platform is to first understand who we are talking to, and what are they expecting on that channel. We also consider popular formats and trends for each channel. Our message, tone, visuals and interactions are custom-made for each platform to ensure the highest level of engagement. 

Certainly, there are basic hygiene practices that apply to all channels. Such practices include adaptive video resolutions, file sizes, CTAs as examples.

To put it simply, on Facebook, we think reach, on Instagram – we think engagement, and on Twitter – it is all about conversations.

Could you tell us about the demographics of your target audiences on social media? How do they differ across platforms?

Our most dominant age groups are 18-24 and 25-34, especially from Tier-1 cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Pune, with the M-to-F ratio of 3:1. However, with the recent 360-degree integrated campaign, #HainTaiyaarHum, we have put a clear effort to shake these numbers with our range of life-essential products that have a nationwide & gender-neutral appeal.

Wildcraft India is most visibly conversational on Twitter. Could you tell us about your Twitter strategy?

Twitter is essentially conversations for us. Be it corporate communication, customer service or feedback management. Lately, we have seen a huge spike in interactions around safety or masks, and we intend to actively participate and contribute to these.

Our Twitter strategy is simple: be part of conversations, be responsive, and interact to add value.

We tend to take up the educational route since right now most of us need guidance with safety measures, both in an individual and collective sense.

However, we do occasionally jump on the #MomentMarketing bandwagon - a recent example being our tweet to Twinkle Khanna. Going forward, we intend to leverage Twitter by keeping tweets quirky and less formal.

Which are the three campaigns that worked best for the brand in recent years? How have they contributed to the brand's growth? 

Over the years, we have worked on multiple campaigns including our Rainwear lines (Let it Rain) and our Autumn-Winter lines, which highlight our key proposition of - “Ready for Anything”. In the past, we have explored movie tie-ups and product placements with considerable success.

But perhaps, our most recent campaign, #HainTaiyaarHum, is our biggest one yet. During the pandemic crisis, it was important for Wildcraft brand to leverage its expertise in design, materials, and manufacturing to offer quality protective gear at affordable prices. Being a brand with a relatively niche audience in the outdoor and adventure space, it is now critical for us to reach and connect every Indian, and that is exactly what #HainTaiyaarHum has achieved. 

As a social media subset of this campaign, our engagement activity on TikTok generated over 17 billion views with over 10,000 user-generated videos.

Is there a conscious effort to balance product shots and content featuring products when choosing pictures for social media?

Yes, absolutely! As a brand which specialises in performance gear, it is important to create content that shows our product in action. We also balance our content to make sure the audience is able to see our range of products and its appeal, aesthetically and functionally.

When working with influencers, what's the selection criteria?

When we select influencers, the first check is gauging their knowledge of the brand and how they relate with it. This takes collaboration to a whole new level. The next, but equally important, is to see if they fit our brand persona. The potential reach and engagement are also considered, however not at the cost of the first two points. We do work with many micro-influencers and have seen great engagement levels. Our intent is to leverage influencers to build trust, improve storytelling and reach out to the newer relevant audiences.

We believe most brands are moving towards micro-influencers who are subject matter specialists and offer qualitative over quantitative results.

While creating communication for the recent mask offerings, what were some of the things that were kept in mind?

The clear objective of this campaign was reach and awareness across the country. For this, it was important to establish a clear call for India to step out with confidence as we equip them to embrace the uncertainty. It took a series of regional campaigns to reach out to every corner of the country, released in seven languages – Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. And, the focus was the emotional motivations of our audience, backing it up with key technical and performance offerings.

What are some of the content consumption patterns you have come across under lockdown? How did they shape your communication?

As people have stayed at home, digital content consumption has increased by leaps and bounds. Hence OTTs and social media platforms were a no-brainer to start with. However, a product as mass as masks demanded us to do TV commercials, which also performed exceptionally well as they were strategically timed to drive traffic to our e-commerce site. This helped us implement a ‘carpet-bombing’ approach that earned millions of new eyeballs for the brand. Having said that we are strong believers that digital is the way forward, and we plan to further strengthen our focus towards it.