Interested in acquiring Millions of Visitors to your site? That too with Zero Marketing Budget! Don’t think it’s possible? Let’s learn from someone who has done it. Discover how SlideShare could generate 75 Million Monthly Visitors without any marketing budget through the recording of this Webinar led by Amit Ranjan, Co-founder of SlideShare.
Webinar Leader’s Profile:
SlideShare has been acquired by LinkedIn and Amit heads SlideShare’s Delhi office as its Director of Operations. He is a frequent speaker at tech/internet conferences. Prior to his entrepreneurial venture, Amit had a marketing & sales career in the consumer goods industry having worked with PepsiCo, Asian Paints and Godrej & Boyce. He holds an MBA degree from FMS, Delhi University & a Mechanical Engineering degree from NIT/REC Jaipur.
Twitter Handle: @amitranjan
As transcribed by Digital Vidya:
Q- How can a simple gadget a solar mobile charger be delivered to 75MN on a zero budget?
A- This question basically revolves around that every time somebody is using a product, how or what will you do what are the conditions you create so that a person spreads that product/ idea to somebody else. In this case, since we are talking about a solar mobile charger, then you should think what is the value that the solar mobile charger is giving to the end user. It is obviously a functional value, there could be other values as well that could make people think that I am being more environmentally conscious and they want to look environmentally conscious in front of their friends, relatives and network. So, may be one could capitalize on that and every time when somebody buys a solar charger, may be one could create conditions so that these people talk about it on social media and share that they have used your product.
Besides this, may be one could send them an e-mail with a snapshot of the product that they can easily share. So, it is essential to think along those lines and may be one will be able to figure to something that works for them. Moreover, one should lay emphasis to start off on a small scale and figure out what is working the best and the drive it.
Q- How would you engage with logged-in users?
A- Since the content was being given out in a logged out stage, there was lesser need for users to log into SlideShare and if they had logged into SlideShare then they could have got them to go to their profile, fill-out that profile and then we would have been able to use that to get more personalized recommendations.
So, let’s say a user is a working professional who is working in the field of Project Management. Once the user comes to SlideShare, he/she watches the presentation about Project Management but is logged out, so after watching the presentation he/she goes away. But unfortunately SlideShare now does not know who this person was and what this person came to SlideShare for. Instead of logged out, the user was logged in because in the profile you can ask people what are their interests, what is their industry and from there we could capture the information that this user is interested in Project Management. Then we can actually recommend content via emails and on the interface about Project Management and they will find it more useful.
Q- How would you prioritize at an early stage of a product growth: engage a smaller user base or grow a user base first and later start driving it?
A- So, is it distribution or is it engagement that you should focus on? In my opinion, you probably have to do both. But, if I were to build another product again, I would first get both distribution and engagement to a certain scale and once I have a base line level of engagement, I would not focus too much on it. I would actually focus more on distribution, but I will make sure that I get to a base line level of engagement because that engagement is important as that is the core value that the product is offering.
But, at the same time once you have that base line level of engagement, you need distribution. On seeing a lot of start-ups and products, if I were to get onto a least common denominator as to what is the single biggest challenge that every start-up after creating the product has, then it is the problem of distribution and the problem of people to come back. Today you have 100 users, you need to go from 100 to 200, 1,000, 5,000. So ideally, you need a base line level of engagement but beyond that I think you should focus on distribution.
Q- Are there any success stories from auto industry?
A- I recently was on a panel at TiEcon and the CEO of CarDekho was also on the panel and in my opinion, they have been very successful in doing some kind of SEO to drive their virality. They had a big SEO team and something which is not very common, which is to have a big team of content people and part of their virality has been driven by SEO.
Q-How can a start-up focusing on services for SME’s which has recently started website can market on social media, bring in clients say for example in LinkedIn?
A- One of the things that is happening with social media and which is increasingly visible is that different channels are being used by different classes of people or companies.Facebook is something which is more on the personal side but Twitter is something that is being used because it is by definition a broadcasting media so it is being used by a lot of businesses. LinkedIn is obviously a professional network, so there are a lot of links that the companies are having. So, what I would do in this case is that if you have any success stories on SME’s, I would convert that into a case study and I would do content marketing with that case study. Content marketing is something that goes strongly on SlideShare as well, but I would create a case study and put it on LinkedIn and SlideShare. On SlideShare for example, we have a lead generation programme, which one can actually use to have additional source of leads. So, that is the way you could utilize social media for SME’s.
Q- Are viral videos good ways to achieve virality?
A- Absolutely, viral videos are a great way of achieving virality for a bunch of reasons, one of them being that the video format itself is very appealing. It is a continuous string and there is something very raw, very engaging about videos.
We always actually felt and wished that SlideShare and presentations had a kind of an emotional connect or an emotional appeal that a white video can actually do. Moreover, people might not be aware but SlideShare now has videos as well. Talking about LinkedIn, we want to focus more and more on professional videos and the difference between presentations & videos is that videos make a personal connect much better than what presentations do.
Regarding virality on videos, one of things to notice is that YouTube videos that really go viral, basically tend to be anything between 40 seconds to 1 minute 20 seconds and it is never longer than that. A lot of videos are made professionally, but sometimes you also have private/personal or casual videos. You must have seen Charlie bit my fingers, one of the oldest videos which has got millions of views. So, for business situations and purposes, having a video which is short and tailor made will not suffice and casual videos may not work. In such cases, one would probably need a professional video. So, it might make sense to take the services of a professional videographer or a video company that makes these videos and try to achieve virality because videos are great.