Due to a sluggish start to the fiscal year with steep corrections in the market, the pressure on this year’s festive season is huge. In this brand-exclusive series, we speak to brand custodians to understand their FestiveBrandBrief22 for the upcoming season, which, despite the slow start to the year, is likely to provide a much more high-spirited and profitable fiscal.
In this exclusive FestiveBrief22 interaction, Anshuk Aggarwal, Co-Founder, AdYogi, speaks about the growth momentum the 2022 festive season offers and outlines how D2C brands are gearing up for it. He highlights how AdYogi leverages content-led awareness and client referrals for its marketing and underlines the importance of Omnichannel marketing.
Anshuk K Aggarwal is the Co-Founder of AdYogi, an exclusive marketing automation platform working actively with D2C brands to maximize their sales output, even on a limited marketing budget. At the company’s helm, Anshuk spearheads the product development and digital marketing segments.
His responsibilities include building a strategic roadmap for AdYogi, composing a scale-up blueprint for enterprise brands, coordinating with leading digital platforms like Facebook and Google for upcoming ad platform updates, and optimizing ad budgets.
Excerpts from the conversation.
What is your 100-word Brief for this festive season?
This year’s Festive season is expected to be much bigger than what we have seen in the last few years due to the diminishing impact of Covid. The closely packed festive calendar has had a significant impact on the marketing activities of brands.
Rakhi and Independence Day, for instance, were quite close to each other, and brands capitalized on that by rolling out special discounts, new collections, and a prolonged sale period. We saw a 30-40% increase in monthly sales across several brands.
Diwali as well is relatively early this time, so momentum will continue to be strong in September ahead of Diwali. Many brands associated with Adyogi have aggressive plans for Diwali this year starting with new launches, gifting combos, special discounts, etc.
So it’s safe to say, we are very excited for the upcoming month.
What are the need gaps in the product/service category you compete in? How are you filling those gaps?
If you are the owner of an eCommerce brand and are looking to get sales via platforms like Facebook and Google, you will soon realize that it’s more complicated than you might have thought.
You are bound to come across questions like – Which campaign to create – conversions or traffic? How to split the budget into top funnel and mid-funnel campaigns? Which ad format works best? How to track sales? Which interest groups to target? Which products to showcase in ads? Among if not a thousand then a hundred others. At AdYogi, our platform takes care of all this, and more, for you.
All we expect you to bring to the table is your brand and product knowledge. The marketing and technology expertise is all built into the AdYogi platform, so our users needn’t have any prior marketing knowledge. We make it simple! And together we deliver the best ROAS (return on ad spend) and help any brand maximize its sales for any given ad budget.
How have your brand- and your brand marketing strategies evolved in these past two years of the pandemic?
Ever since the pandemic, customers have become more aware and surer about what they want and with the hundreds of options available online, they expect you to have exactly what they want. This has led to a more personalized approach to the user journey – one that is frictionless, anticipatory, relevant, and connected.
To cater to this, we have incorporated the following strategies to market our services in the new normal-
Content-led awareness – we share a lot of the industry best practices in the form of easily consumable content which helps us connect with our ideal prospects.
From Sales-led to product-led acquisition – As compared to traditional methods of acquisition where we would directly jump onto connecting with prospective clients, the focus now is on scaling the pipeline through some of our free products.
Stronger referral ecosystem – AdYogi’s happy clientele has helped in building momentum on acquisition through quality referrals. Not only AdYogi’s clients but we get a strong momentum through our D2C enabling partners and Freelancers.
What is the perfect media mix for your brand?
For Adyogi, one of our biggest marketing channels is our client referrals- it’s an achievement that we are very proud of. We have a huge referral community that we’ve built over the course of the last 6 years.
For promotions, our main focus is on paid ads and PPC (as much as 40-50%) to reach our prospective audience. Among other channels, we have our website, social media, and emails along with organic media contributing to the rest.
Which are the most important categories that will see a big uptake in the upcoming Festive season?
This festive season is going to be huge for all eCommerce industries, there’s no doubt. Among the top performers, Apparel and Fashion, Jewelry, and Beauty categories are expected to get high revenue upticks during the upcoming festive season.
Home appliances will also see a huge hike. Our clients in these industries have already started rolling out special discounts, new collections, product bundles, etc. to make the most of the season.
Would you recommend more and more brands should also have, in time for the upcoming Festive Season, their own E-commerce platform on the web or app, online, for direct selling to consumers? Why?
The retail space has evolved faster than ever in the last few years owing to Covid. For brands to build a defensible business, they have to diversify their one-channel strategy to an Omni channel strategy to scale in a compounding manner.
Being an Omni channel helps with acquiring/reacquiring the right customers from the right channels at the right time at competitive costs.
Your marketing campaigns for the festive season – will they be mostly customer-acquisition-focused, or will there be brand-building elements too? And how important a role is the emerging AI-powered outdoor medium likely to play?
Festive seasons are a busy period for the whole D2C industry be it brands or service providers. So our main focus will be to create a balanced mix between brand-building and customer- acquisition.
Coming to the importance of AI-powered outdoor medium- for Adyogi, since our target audience is a niche space where the prospects are ‘online’ already. So, the AI OOH medium won’t have as big of a role to play for our audience.
However, if we talk about D2C as a space, this could prove revolutionary. It will help in more targeted advertising for outdoors; e.g. weather triggers where related creative could automatically be served to the billboards.
