White Rivers Digital’s Shrenik Gandhi on data analytics
White Rivers Digital is a two-year old full service digital marketing agency which has seen a 67 per cent growth year-on-year. “We do social media marketing, digital marketing, online brand image management, and handle the complete gambit of online marketing for brands,” said Shrenik Gandhi, Co-founder of White Rivers Digital.
The agency is dealing with clients across domain which includes names like RedBus.in, Irish House, Future Group, Café by the beach, and is also looking after ecommerce brands in India and abroad. “We also look into event based marketing, we are also servicing the real estate marketing in digital and mobile marketing domain,” he added.
“We act as marketing consultants for our ecommerce clients,” said Mr Gandhi. “If we look at ecommerce in India there are majorly two segments, one is the big companies which are the venture companies like Flipkart, Jabong and fashion companies like Yepme, and then there is another group in the ecommerce market which caters to a niche market like LimeRoad or Turtle. These are the smaller guys but they are actually the one who are churning out profits,” according to Mr Gandhi.
Unlike a lot of digital marketing agencies in the market, White Rivers Digital also looks after the offline marketing for a lot of ecommerce clients where they need not dedicate time and resources as it is their non-core areas. However, “They have very few touch points in the offline market but they have to go out there to create awareness about their brand,” added Mr Gandhi.
The marketing agency is also actively involved in branding through the social media platforms. “We hold a firm belief that we are in a much more connected world. Unlike in 1990s the brand cannot do anything they like and get away with it,” pointed Mr Gandhi.
For instance, White Rivers Digital is closely working with the social media page of Redbus.in. “Redbus.in is a service provider and a facilitator therefore it needs to have active participation on the social media platform. We manage social media for them and accordingly route positive, negative and neutral comments to the respective department,” said Mr Gandhi.
Overall in 2015, one of the most prominent trends seen by the marketing agency is that India as a market has skipped the age of tablets and PC and moved to mobile. Mobile is increasingly becoming the first screen for a large number of consumers in India. It has become the major platform that everybody is going to be playing on, Mr Gandhi observed.
Consequently, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram have been seen gaining traction. So, we will be seeing more mobile based content and more video content coming on board but as the industry matures brands will have to come out with more innovative content for its market, said Mr Gandhi.
We have seen that mobile is contributing as 40 per cent of the entire market. So, we as an individual agency are picking up states and studying the usage patterns and are according customising our strategy to reach a targeted group of consumers, he added.
Focusing on the major challenges that haunt the marketing industry in India is that despite many platforms coming into the arena, Facebook continues to rule the roost. “So, the only innovative strategy for the brand is to create its own media platform and drive consumers towards the same,” said Mr Gandhi.
Also, unfortunately our industry is largely ROI (Return on investment) driven, he adds. “The client gets impatient and ask where is the audience and who is the audience which is going to read the message. So, the marketers must invest more towards data and analytics, and figure what big data is all about. They should integrate data analytics into their backend,” Mr Gandhi opined.
