In Conversation with Rohan Bhargava, CashKaro.com on Digital Marketing Strategies

Rohan Bhargava, CashKaro.com talks about the brand's Digital Marketing Strategies that combine using useful content to generate leads and branding. The company uses Instagram for employee advocacy. All in all, the brand uses social media heavily within its marketing mix!

How do you plan your content strategy for the month? Tell us giving examples.

CashKaro.com is India’s largest cashback and coupon site. It enjoys a fanfare of 5 lakhs+ on Facebook and is slowly gaining traction on Twitter and other social media platforms. Given the operating domain, content plays a pivotal role in connecting with our audience.

As a brand, our content strategy is defined by the objective of the month; it can be either to generate traffic to the website, increase sign ups, to drive sales or to push our referral program. For example this festive season our objective was to drive sales, so we pushed and promoted all the related offers available on our partner sites. On an average we promoted 10-12 offers a day vs. 4-5 posts a day during rest of the year.

For example, we curated a dedicated blog during Navratri for our users to shop from Myntra.

How do you use your presence on social media to get people clicking on your website? Which platform gives you the most clicks to your website?

While our presence in the social space through Facebook and Twitter acts a mode to interact with our users, it also acts as a medium to apprise them of newest offers and cashback deals. We regularly run contests to engage with our audience and interact with them to build long term association. Sometimes we run campaigns ONLY on Facebook to incentivize users with extra cashback.

For example, during Diwali we ran a Facebook contest where users could win iPad Minis.

On Twitter, we engage with tweeple on topics related to online shopping, fashion or electronics and educating them about the brand and why CashKaro best defines ‘Shop smart and save more’ concept.

Facebook followed by Twitter as a platform gives us most clicks to our website.

How does Cashkaro.com handle crises? What if there is an irate customer trolling you on twitter? How do you manage this customer? Give us your fire fighting strategy.

We have a dedicated team who handles customer complaints. All complaints are filtered as per category defined internally and taken forward personally. On Twitter, if we get a customer trolling us we tag our CRM handle @CashKaro_Cares who in-turn responds back and resolves the problem. As a standard we tend to reply within 2 hours during working days.

Do you have an internal team who works closely with your agency on social media? Give us your workflow for the day.

We have a dedicated team of 5-6 people within the CashKaro.com team who work on social media strategy and amplification of the same. On any regular day the team starts their day by checking the social media platforms for any queries and initial updates. Post which they sit with the promotions team to decide offers of the day and de-brief the creative team on the same. The various posts are then published at regular intervals of the day.

How much of your budget is allocated to social media than traditional advertising? Being an online brand do you see a difference between how you allocate money for marketing versus how largely offline brands do it?

Our investments in the social media space are based on objectives and tasks of the brand. The budget is never allowed to be a constraint and that as a percentage of the overall marketing budget is a derivative than a starting point.

It’s always a debatable topic when it comes to online vs. offline advertising – In my opinion both complement each other when used in conjunction with the marketing objective. Online is measurable in terms of ROI and traditional in terms of building brand value. Due to the measurable aspect of online marketing we deploy resources and effort on this channel a lot.

Employees can be your best brand ambassadors. Do your employees speak highly about you on their social platforms? What liberties do you give your employees when talking about your brand?

Indeed, employees are one’s best brand ambassadors. We have a young team who is socially active and they believe in the brand as much as we do. They often post about CashKaro.com out of their own volition and share whatever deals they feel relevant to their networks.We regularly have interactive group sessions where we take feedback and try to incorporate them as much as possible. We don’t believe in a restrictive policy hence employees are free to post what they like about CashKaro.com.

How does engagement on social media help you in reaching your customers vs using traditional means of communications like advertising? Give us an industry perspective bringing in your experience in the social space.

The key tenets of our social media policy hinge on communication, engagement and building long term association with our fans across multiple platforms in innovative ways and manner which is in sync with our brand values.

Our target is anyone who shops online, between the age of 18-35 years and who love to SAVE J Students form a large share of our active user base. We have even created a special Student Ambassador Program – this enables us to reach out to a larger audience and engage with them in the social space. Since inception, we have seen a 200% growth in student participation on Facebook and Twitter.

Does being on instagram and pinterest really help? If yes how.

We are active on Instagram. We use this platform primarily for imagery purpose and aspire to be the ‘Best work place’ in India. Young graduates now like to work at places where they can seek comfort, flexible working hours and just work in closed cubicles.

Talk to us about a recent Twitter and Facebook campaign you have conducted and how it has impacted your sales

A Twitter campaign that worked really well for us was when we showcased 5 must-read books to our Twitter audience early this year. We picked out 5 best-selling books from Flipkart and on popularizing #ShopFlipkartViaCashKaro, we managed to drive sales on these books too.

While RT’s and Favourites were not abound, the number of sales was good and we intend to run similar campaigns again in the coming few days. We plan to replicate the same campaign for mobiles, laptops, pendrives, shoes & other products. See here.

As for Facebook, when the media was talking about Chetan Bhagat’s latest “Half-Girlfriend”, CashKaro posted offers for the same on Facebook. This worked wonders for us in terms of getting sales and we got a good number of books sold through that offer.

To further incentivize online shoppers (over and above getting Cashback) to shop via CashKaro, we gave away iPad minis & mobile recharge vouchers to encourage people to shop via CashKaro. This campaign did well and we got a reasonable amount of traction too. Diwali was also the season where we realized that limiting Facebook posts to 3-4 posts a day wasn’t the best way to go about marketing on Facebook. We went all out and there were days when we posted over 12 offers, all of them performing decently well for our brand.