Yes as a start up, Healthkart is quite disciplined and prudent when it comes to marketing budgets. Having said that, content marketing is strategic investment for us to grow the nutritional supplement category in India where in the concept of preventive healthcare is still in nascent stages. Hence we have never put any kind of cap on content marketing or assigned a fixed percentage of overall marketing spends for content. Broadly speaking, in early days 25-30% of our marketing money was spent on content marketing; currently this number hovers around 15-20% (not by design though). Given that we are digital first brand company, most of our spends are on digital medium only.

We started with in-house content team for first 3-4 years but in last couple of years have collaborated with agency partners to build content along with our in-house content team. This has helped us to get the best of both the worlds: faster execution speed, greater flexibility and sharper customer insights through in-house team while exposure to various digital innovations and learning from best content practices of other industries through our agency partners.

I believe some of the major factors that go into above decision are speed and flexibility of execution, technical expertise of team with regard to digital formats and most importantly understanding of core consumers.

We operate in Health and Wellness category wherein the consumer is very inquisitive and constantly seeking out information. As a matter of fact some of the most searched queries on Google are around Health and Wellness – “How to lose weight?”, “How can I build muscles?” and so on. So we face an uphill task of creating up to date and novel content pieces that have to be scientifically well researched and authentic. This has been our single biggest challenge since inception. In order to successfully navigate this we have invested in a strong content team comprising of passionate category users and experts. Fuelled by their passion for health and fitness, they invest a lot of time in upgrading their domain knowledge and staying up to date with latest development/innovation in this sectors helping us create well researched and novel content.

I believe in today’s digital age, most of the brands tend to be short -sighted and end up prioritizing sales over consumer connect. As a result most of their marketing efforts are transactional in nature. For brands to be effective storytellers they need to connect with their consumer’s emotions and craft their communication with their consumer as the protagonist and not their product/service. At Healthkart, we used the aforementioned principal to craft brand communication for MuscleBlaze, our sports-nutrition brand.

Given that content marketing is a strategic initiative, we don’t tend to peg any ROI against the same. We believe our content marketing efforts are largely responsible for our very high TOM among health and fitness consumers thereby making us #1 Health destination.

My favorite content marketing initiative is Healthkart Connect. Healthkart connect is our honest attempt to create a content destination for health and fitness consumer where they can get every information related to health and fitness –health blogs, transformation stories, videos, Ask Me Anything. This is a content platform of consumers, for consumers and also selective content by consumers.

At Healthkart, we would continue to invest in creating meaningful content for our audience. One specific goal we are chasing in next 2 years is to focus on vernacular content starting with Hindi and then regional languages.

I am of a firm belief that content marketing is a marathon and not a sprint. So one has to stay invested in content marketing for long enough to reap its optimum benefits. If we start measuring the ROIs of content marketing in the early stages, we may end up killing it prematurely, so patience is the key when it comes to content marketing.