How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
In 2015, I began my journey at TimeOut India as Head of Restaurant Relations. I worked closely with hospitality brands - ideating and executing their event IPS, curated Menus, Blogger Events and on a dynamic pricing app.
Having completed three years working with Restaurants and Bars, I noticed a need for excellent Social Media Management and decided to offer it as a service to our existing restaurant partners.
We started with three brands; however, with business moving quicker than anticipated, the CEO of TimeOut, Rajnish Rawat and I decided to partner and set up our Marketing Agency, Social Pill, which was officially incorporated in 2019, along with a third partner Neelesh Pednekar.
What are the various services provided by Social Pill?
Social Pill is a holistic digital marketing agency that specialises in Social Media Marketing, Digital Marketing, Performance Marketing, SEO / SEM, Website Creation and Management, Video Production and Augmented Reality (StickAR - Web based Augmented Reality stickers).
What makes Social Pill different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
The 3 founders of the company are each from 3 different generations. I’m born in the 90s, Neelesh in the 80s and Rajnish in the 70s. What this brings is varied experiences and perspectives which each of us can learn and feed off of. Each of us are able to bring out the best in each other and are each other’s biggest critique. I head the creative side of things, including the Social Media vertical, video production, photography, content development and strategies. Neelesh heads the technical side of things such as the Performance Marketing, SEO and Website Development. Rajnish runs the business including the Finance and HR Verticals.
As a millennial I’m able to understand the kind of marketing that young audiences expect from brand and curate communication strategies that focus on that. Neelesh is able to bring his 2 decades of technical knowledge and expertise with regards to how digital works and to build it further. Rajnish is able to look at things on a macro level and apply his decades worth of marketing knowledge to consult brands on the way forward.
Most importantly, we understand the marketing goals of the brand and curate customized plans accordingly. The processes we have in place and the kind of work we do, ensures that the client can let us take over.
What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Because we started working with restaurants and bars as our initial clients, it was very hard to diversify our portfolio at the pace that we would have liked. We mostly got referrals and leads in the same industry. In February 2020 we had 15 clients, 8 of which were restaurants and bars. In March, 2020 when the lockdown was announced, we lost 53% of our clients overnight which was a huge challenge. But because the founders values and ethics align very well together we were able to pull through and come out of it stronger. The founders did not take a salary and divided all incoming revenue amongst the employees on a pro-rata basis of their salaries. This helped our team manage their expenses while dedicating themselves to work harder to bring us to where we are today.
As of today we are a 30 member strong team, have increased revenues by 3x and worked with over 85 clients across various industries.
How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line Social Pill?
We see the Digital Services we’re offering expand to more clients, but alongside we also see ourselves setting up more verticals such as Video production and Augmented Reality.
We also see ourselves partnering with brands in a bigger way than just the usual retainership model, which could include direct stakes in the growth of the company.
We plan to launch 2 verticals, which include our own content creation brand to build an audience as well as a digital product creation vertical with our current IPs Ad Rocker and StickAR. Social Pill will also set up a research lab for pioneer cutting edge digital marketing products of the future.
If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
For someone starting out it is very important to get hands-on work experience as early as you can and as much as you can, before you join your first job. Internships are a great way to learn a lot in a small amount of time, without the added pressure of responsibility.
It is extremely important to upskill yourself, because as time moves along, so does the skills you need to have to catch up.
Other than that what worked for me is to hyper focus on the thing it is that you want to do and pour all your hard work into it.
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