With the hype around Shark Tank India building all the more with each passing season, most of the brands that have pitched in the tank have resorted to leveraging the show irrespective of them walking away with a signed deal from one-to-all sharks or with empty hands.
But despite Ankit Aggarwal pitching Unstop (formerly known as Dare2Compete) in Shark Tank Season 2 and coming home with a Rs 2 crore check for 4% Equity in a four sharks deal which included boAt’s Aman Gupta, Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal, Emcure Pharmaceuticals’ Namita Thapar and CarDekho’s Amit Jain, the B2B Edu-HR-Tech start-up has not skewed its marketing efforts only on elongating the shelf life of the PR it received from the show.
Speaking to Marketing Mind, Alekhya Chakrabarty, Vice President- Marketing and Growth, Unstop, mentioned that the startup did put out a YouTube video on ‘How to crack an all-shark deal’ on its official handle as it made more sense to them from a content perspective as compared to keeping its communications only to take advantage of the show’s popularity.
And wonder what happened next? The video worked quite well for the brand even though not a single penny was spent on boosting it only due to the startup’s content strategy.
This is just one of the many small examples that bolsters the brand’s belief in the power of content when it comes to marketing.
The focus of Unstop, in Chakrabarty’s POV, is more on content-led and product-led marketing and getting as much results as possible even with little amount of money being spent, for he believes that what the brand has managed to do is ace the product game.
During the course of the interaction, he emphasized that unlike B2C Marketing, there are no standardizations in B2B marketing when it comes to having a defined playbook, fixed annual operating plans, budgets, number of trials, etc. and therefore there are quite a few new experiments that are happening in the B2B SaaS ecosystem as the opportunities are immense.
“For someone like me who has transitioned from B2C to B2B as a marketer, a lot of the inspirations that I draw from the world around me are cross tabbed onto my current progress statement on the table. That being said, there are a lot of B2C learnings which can be imbibed easily into B2B marketing as well,” he suggested.
With this, he also stated that while it’s very simple to do some top-funnel marketing and middle-funnel engagement on paper, the challenging part for a B2B marketer kicks in when the output and outcome is very different from what he/she had envisioned and hence the need for experimentation and adaptation in the B2B space.
Picking from here, Unstop’s Chakrabarty pointed out that being part of a B2B brand, a lion’s share- almost 90% of his focus is on making sure that the consumer/user thinking and marketing leads to higher awareness amongst recruiters on what Unstop is and what solutions does it provide to make their hiring better. Additionally, his role also comprises generating more leads and helping the sales team to sell more as part of his marketing role.
“It is essential to understand that unless a B2B SaaS company doesn’t have a kick-ass product on the user’s side, even the best of marketing wouldn’t work. But because we at Unstop have a stellar product, it in itself does the marketing to a large extent and all I need to do is get more and more people to adopt it and that’s where my B2C DNA helps in making the task easier. Since B2B comparatively requires a higher push than B2C, over the last one year, I have focused on more top-funnel branding and partnering in a lot many industry events,” he said.
Furthermore, Chakrabarty also emphasized that the startup is also capitalizing on artificial intelligence to generate organic content for both SEO and YouTube, creating short form reels out of long format content, for writing better subject lines and body copy for its customized and personalized emails as well as video and image generation.
Having concluded Unstop Talent Meet some time back, doubled down on his belief that AI wouldn’t cost the job of someone who is actually good at something as he/she will only get better with the usage of AI. However, someone who isn’t good at his/her job and is not even upskilling himself/herself, would eventually be done away with, irrespective of the evolution of AI.
“Our key channels for the execution of marketing activities are social media platforms, videos, affiliates and even emailers. And while affiliate marketing helps us in user acquisition and referencing, it is email marketing which works in one of the best ways possible for us when it comes to conversions, unlike the B2C world which is a believer of flashy advertising,” he said.
Delving further into the marketing strategy of Unstop, he stated that since the intent is on doing core content-led and product-led marketing, his focus is on ensuring that the right kind of content is associated around Unstop which will further lead to brand building subconsciously as a brand is nothing but an idea which makes one choose A over B and what impacts those choices in the kind of associations one drives non-stop be it via a podcast, a blog content, or an email.
“We enjoy almost 2-3% click rates on all the blogs that we send out. In fact, these blogs are some of those under-the-hood organic traffic drivers for us. Similarly, on videos, we’ve had extremely good video click rates and some 60-70k views on the YouTube Shorts we created from our own 6-7 long-form podcasts without spending a single buck. Similarly, for us, we’ve seen 50-60% open rate on our emails,” he mentioned to name a few marketing achievements for Unstop.
Elaborating on Unstop’s target audience, he mentioned that the Ideal Consumer Profile for them is defined in two parts in the B2B segment with one being companies which have 1000+ headcount and the other with comparatively lower headcount as the investment amounts and organic conversations may vary.
“For the smaller ticket size companies, we target and network with them for jobs and internships section via organic listings and messages. But for the higher ticket size or 1000+ headcount companies, we generally talk to the CHROs, Talent Acquisition heads or even HR heads to understand their hiring needs and progress statements and then split that into three parts- talent discovery, talent assessment and talent engagement,” he said.
On the user side, he mentioned that be it UG or PG, or from Arts, Commerce and Science background or even in an Engineering or B-School, any student anywhere falls under its target group.
“Our complete focus is on early talent- i.e.- users or students with 0-2 years of experience as they get the maximum value out of our product offerings. In fact, all our products are designed keeping this segment in mind,” he shared.
Concludingly, he also mentioned that the way Unstop plans its content is by ensuring that the startup first understands the heat map of the student’s life cycle which includes knowing when they are going out for summers, when do they have their freshers’ party or any other fests, and then comes up with content ideas for text, video, social, etc.
