How BharatMatrimony IPL campaign blended real-time match updates with brand services

For its IPL campaign, BharatMatrimony leveraged contextual advertising while marrying the match moments with the brand services as part of the marketing campaign.

Tapping on IPL 2020 moments and leveraging contextual advertising, BharatMatrimony IPL campaign launched a series of initiatives for audience engagement, while marrying the topicality of IPL with a series of witty and quirky posts.

Category Introduction

While about 10-12 million marriages take place every year in India, online accounts for less than 10% of the marriages every year as per KPMG Report 2017. Matrimony.com is the market leader with a 60% market share (ComScore Report 2017).

The Indian wedding market is pegged at over US$ 56 billion with an estimated growth rate of 20% YoY. Of this, the matchmaking component is estimated to be about Rs. 2,500 crore. The market is estimated to grow at the same pace over the next twenty years.

Brand Introduction

BharatMatrimony is one of the most trusted matrimony brands, with over 3 million active customers. It comprises a network of 15 regional portals such as MarathiMatrimony, BengaliMatrimony, TamilMatrimony, KeralaMatrimony, and TeluguMatrimony. It has also established a considerable retail presence with over 130 self-owned retail outlets across India.

Summary - BharatMatrimony IPL Campaign

Riding on the cricket fever, the brand launched #CricketAndRelationship  #RelationshipLessonsFromCricket and #IPLHumour to integrate its service and the game. It also launched a campaign #PerfectMatch that trended during IPL.

Objective

To deepen the connection with the audience through non-intrusive, contextual, and topical advertising, while showcasing creative, quirky, and humorous content that’s relevant and relatable to the interests of cricket fans.

Brief

To blend the nuances of marriage, relationships with Cricket and let BharatMatrimony connect with the audience through relatable contextual advertising.

Creative Idea

To showcase BharatMatrimony as a brand that’s vibrant and connected with the millennial audience.

Challenges

To creatively blend the nuances of the game with the brand, constantly look for moments to leverage and keep the social posts light with a tinge of humor. Managing multiple channels of social media was another challenge for the brand.

Also read: Case Study: How BGauss executed hyper-local targetting through micro-influencers for Diwali campaign

Execution

BharatMatrimony attempted to driving social engagement through contextual advertisement posts, by marrying Cricket and Relationships in IPL 2020. Leveraging the consumer interest for IPL which peaked especially in 2020 due to the hiatus of Live sports during the pandemic, the brand initiated content properties such as 'Relationship lessons from cricket', 'IPL humor', and 'Cricket and relationships' leveraging topical and key moments from the matches in real-time.

The approach for the campaign involved:

• Creatively integrate cricket’s nuances with relationship and marriage
• Post during interesting moments in the match
• Leverage cricketing terms & lingo

In an attempt to time the initiative perfectly, the campaign talked about what singles are looking for, in their Perfect Match executing an interesting play on words.

Right from the absence of audience in the stadiums to strong partnerships and superovers, the brand leveraged various high moments of the tournament.

The brand primarily leveraged Twitter as it’s the medium for interaction when IPL matches were live.

Results

• The initiative helped BharatMatrimony achieve a reach of over 20 million users.
• The campaign received more than 1300 RTs and 3000+ likes and 1000+ responses during the campaign.

Quote

Rajasekar KS, GM – Marketing at Matrimony.com, said, “Cricket and BharatMatrimony is a perfect match. It took 6 weeks of preparation for the contextual and topical marketing campaigns. We knew that people were going to be glued to the TV as IPL offers great relief from the Covid stress we are all undergoing. This offered a good opportunity for us to ride the buzz by sharing content that resonates with the audience. Knowing the pulse of the audience is key to success on social media. Crafting short, creative, quirky, and relatable content is critical. Blending what the brand does into the campaign is important. Combine that with the ability to ride on a big event like IPL and you have a winning combination. That’s exactly what the internal Social Media team at BharatMatrimony did very well. Contextual and topical marketing always sparks a conversation, doesn’t it?”