On Day 2 of Content Jam 2020, the Head of Brand, Aditya Birla Capital, spoke extensively on the role of content while presenting a case study executed by the brand Irrespective of what the industry is, content plays a vital role in the growth of a brand in today’s corporate ecosystem. Day 2 of e4m Content Jam saw Loveleen Sahrawat, Head of Brand, Aditya Birla Capital, speak extensively on the role of content while presenting a case study executed by the brand. “Nobody really gets up in the morning and says that I'm very excited, I'm going to get myself a mutual fund today. People are very clear, they want a new home, they want a new holiday or a new car. So, either there are anxieties in people's lives with regard to money or there are aspirations. In order for you to address both anxieties and aspirations, you need to understand people's need with regard to money. And, therefore, our unique model of protecting, investing and financing. All our 13-14 companies, which offer either life insurance, health insurance, genuine insurance, mutual fund PMS, or home finance, personal finance, business, finance, fall under this one brand architecture. Advising really is our DNA. So, whatever we do, we start with advice. We launched this brand in November 2017 and the landscape in November 2017 was changing fast. So, I think we were very fortunate that we launched this brand in a fast-changing dynamic environment. And therefore, in the DNA of the brand itself, I would argue, is social and digital,” said Sahrawat. According to Sahrawat, since mediums for content consumption are rapidly switching from appointment-viewing on TV to convenience movement, or viewing on mobile to multiple screens, it has become extremely challenging.

There is great opportunity for brands today, she said. “Brands that are entering the space to advertise are going to have a very challenging time. Brands that are creating content have to match up to third-party content, because you are eventually asking for 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes, four minutes of a customer’s or a viewer’s time. Why should someone give you that time and not watch a cat video on Instagram, right? A lot of times, I feel I'm competing against cats and dogs on Instagram. So that is really a big challenge for brands and this is how we articulated the challenge process. A brand needs to continuously entice various cohorts with relevant and unique content in order to engage people with enough provocation to convert them into customers for business.” “I think business has stopped really taking soft attribution seriously. The biggest challenge for brand managers and marketers today is the CFO, who's asking, so what did you do? And if you go back with consideration and engagement scores, they will just laugh at you. So I think another huge opportunity that social and digital provide us and didn't provide for especially in this case, was how do you actually go top of the funnel. In fact, beyond the top of the funnel? How do you actually reach out to 70-80 million people?” Speaking about their case study of different cohorts in different age groups, Sahrawat said, “When we started talking to a lot, one thing we do very actively is we look at data. But we also look at intent behind the data, which is we look at a lot of qualitative research. So, we are continuously meeting customers and post some interesting conversations on our social too. So we back the hard data with a lot of soft insights.” Sahrawat also spoke on how they devised a three-pronged strategy. “The first pillar was educate, the pillar was innovate and the third was advice.” “Another thing that we did, which I think was very innovative, is we took our podcasts, turned their IVR on Saturdays into money podcast. So if you dialled on Saturdays, you would actually get a press zero for a money podcast and we saw a lot of people joining us on Saturdays, to listen to our IVR. And of course, once the IVR was over, or if you left the podcast, even midway, we send an SMS which would give you a link to plan your money with us. So that was, in my view, a really nice innovation that worked for us,” she said. Then she spoke of videos and their engagements and how the brand managed to engage people with their innovating content. “We don't call it just in engagements, we call it awareness engagements. When somebody has seen a video more than 50%, right, then we know this guy's actively aware. Okay, and then of course, engagement rate is two impressions. So we were on, on an average getting 16%. In some campaigns, we've got something as high as 35%- 40% as well, but an on an average we got a 16% engagement, whereas the benchmark was 10 to 12%.” She said. She also mentioned passing on of cookies to businesses for performance marketing. “In these campaigns, we are not hard selling any product. But we are taking people from awareness to engagement to bottom of the funnel. But what we do is wherever we have engaged cookies, people who have engaged with us more than two times, more than 50% on a video, we started passing on these cookies to business for retargeting, and we did that successfully. And, of course, a lot of people reached our website pages as well, through which they reached various businesses and then call centers call them to convert them. This was last year. This year, if you ask me, we are not stopping at traffic to business. It's all about how many people have raised their hands on these platforms and how many of them have been directly converted. So we're looking at hard attribution,” she said while signing off.