Social Samosa speaks to Soumyadip Chatterjee to know more about the e-commerce platform's strategy to harness digital marketing and further strengthen the brand value.
Harping on the digital wave to accentuate the e-commerce business, Snapdeal with a significant amount of followers across social media platforms is betting big on contextual and relatable content creation.
In conversation with Social Samosa, Soumyadip Chatterjee, Brand Marketing Director, Snapdeal speaks at length about the Snapdeal social media strategy, why the duration of the content is not of much relevance but quality matters, creating platform-specific content, building fashion communities online, and driving positive conversations, and more.
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Could you briefly tell us about the popular trends that defined Snapdeal’s social media content in 2021?
In 2021, we adopted a video-first approach, whereby we created two video-led campaigns to build on our positioning of Brand Wali Quality, Bazaar Wali Deal. We have collaborated with multiple influencers, meme pages, YouTube channels, and publishers to create interesting content for users and followers. This is a major part of our strategy in 2021.
We have also implemented moment marketing on relevant occasions. We used Instagram stickers and polls on Twitter to comprehend audience preferences, which helped in creating the right content strategy. Since our target group relates to desi pop culture fashion, it inspired us to create posts with punchlines from popular Hindi TV shows.
How do you plan to improve your social media marketing performance?
Data speaks volumes and it helps us constantly learn and unlearn through what works on the platforms and for our diverse target group. Keeping up with the trend across all platforms, we are one of the first e-commerce brands to try Facebook Branded Content Ads and Youtube Creator Promotions.
We are focusing on creating specific platform-first content and making our YouTube page a digital fashion TV catering to the needs of target groups. Similarly, for Instagram, we are exploring reels and model images with the best potential. We are also building a new Fashion@Snapdeal IG community to bring together value lifestyle seekers and fashion enthusiasts.
Please take us through the content buckets you have in place - what kind of content has managed to receive a good response?
Our content plan is broadly divided into 4 major approaches:
Trends and Conversations: This includes festival-centric content that would interest our target audience. We are leveraging memes and capitalizing on moments to create relatable content.
Relevance and Connect: Our users are mainly from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Therefore, creating relevant pop culture-inspired content comprises a major part of our content mix. We leverage famous scenes, dialogues or characters from TV shows such as Taarak Mehta ka Ooltah Chashmah, Bollywood movies and songs, which can also be related to our products and fashion. This connects robustly with our audience and has a higher impact.
Category Context: Trends and tips showcasing Snapdeal’s focus on fashion content.
Campaign/Brand Communication: Communicating Snapdeal’s core positioning Brand Waali Quality, Bazaar Waali Deal and other value propositions such as free delivery and tactical sales-driven messaging.
How do you see the association with Riteish and Genelia impacting Snapdeal’s growth and business? How do you strategize to obtain the ROI?
Riteish and Genelia are a natural fit for Snapdeal since they are deeply rooted, carry family values proudly, and yet hold a modern outlook. As they are forward-thinking and fun-loving, both represent our target audience – the digital Bharatiya. Since our audience relates and vibes well with them and their content, they naturally perceive Snapdeal to be having the same ethos, which is exactly our objective.
At Snapdeal, we accord major importance to the ROI, including brand marketing. We have strict internal benchmarks and metrics that are tracked regularly to know the ROI. We have seen encouraging growth in terms of search volumes, visits, and orders, etc. after we launched the first brand campaign in April with Riteish and Genelia.
Take us through the consumer response you have seen during the pandemic
From the beginning of the pandemic till September 2020, we reached out to a million additional customers while our daily order volumes have gone up since the beginning of 2021. As a result, we have picked up positive social media conversations.
Snapdeal featured in 100M+ social conversations during the campaign period, thanks to media planning that helped us reach the right target group in terms of age, gender, and location. Moreover, taking a challenging anti-brand positioning helped us get noticed, which was backed by extensive influencer and meme marketing activities.
What’s your objective when it comes to your social media presence?
We aim to improve our engagement rate across platforms by creating relevant and snackable content for viewers. We are also working towards increasing the duration spent on watching video content by creating shorter videos. Social media is also helping us stay connected with customers and making it easier for them to reach us whenever required.
How do you think e-commerce brands can best leverage creative storytelling in their social media marketing strategy?
Social media is a powerful medium to reach target audiences. Accordingly, it is important to use creative storytelling to keep viewers interested via quality content. Furthermore, it’s necessary to listen to the audience. Brands must understand the crucial difference between what their target audience likes and what they aspire for. Not all brands can/should relate and not all brands should try to be aspirational.
Besides, brands should invest 90% of their time in designing communiqués that achieve the desired perception. It’s always good to represent real-life, unstated events of customers in a fun manner. We have noticed that raw and real scores are always higher than expensive production designs on digital.
Meanwhile, forget long form, short form, or duration-based content for top-of-funnel campaigns. Instead, focus on the hook in the first 5 seconds and every 5 seconds thereafter. Hiring a great video/textual editor will help.
Could you comment on the evolving nature of digital content for e-commerce sector brands? What changes have you seen recently?
Content on social media has evolved over the years and become seemingly more real with greater reality/dramatized reality being produced. Internationally, while deep integrations in web shows are underway, we are noticing this trend slowly picking up in India as well, for example, TVF’s Kota Factory, which was amazing.
The way content is consumed and liked has also evolved. Earlier, users looked at information and entertainment separately. Recently, we have noticed that the line between informational content and entertaining content is slowly fading away. Now both experiences must be delivered to the viewer at once.
What are the digital marketing trends you foresee in 2021 for the sector? How would these impact your strategy?
So far, 2021 has been an impactful year in terms of digital marketing and will continue to be so.
In the coming months, we will notice:
More measurement in brand marketing. Publishers and agencies who haven’t truly evolved (beyond just writing ‘digital’ in their decks!) will have a hard time procuring marketing moolah. This means a sharper focus for us in selecting and continuing marketing channels.
More brand building. With data-driven performance marketing and customization nearing its peak, a huge number of brands that have already achieved digital transformation will now race to build a more salient, robust and trustworthy brand than their competitors. The bar for creative strategy is going to be set high and we are ready for it.
Brands signing up long-term contracts with influencers who match their values. Brands are treating top influencers as no less than celebrity brand ambassadors and don’t want to miss out on their huge online following. This gives us more scope to experiment with content and delivery formats.
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