Social Beat: India’s Digital Marketing Evangelist

When the well-known mattress brand, Wakefit, was considering restructuring its identity into a home-solutions provider, it approached Social Beat for a comprehensive make-over solution. Social Beat conducted competitor surveys and analyses, developed the brand’s new positioning, and curated online content among other digital branding initiatives. This enabled Wakefit to record a 57% growth in monthly organic traffic and 132% growth in monthly organic revenue in February 2022, as compared to July 2021.

This is just one of the many success stories of India’s leading digital marketing companies, Social Beat, which has over 60 leading brands including boAt, Fortune Oil, Tata Mutual Fund, Tata Cliq, Bharat Matrimony, Indian Terrain, Zivame, Canara HSBC Life Insurance, JK Cement, Livguard, Mankind Pharma, Wow Skin, Kapiva, Go Colors, Veeba and Arvind Brands among others as its clientele.

The boot-strapped company started in 2012 by Suneil Chawla, a former consultant for global consulting major Bain & Co, and Vikas Chawla, who has diverse experience in marketing, sales and HR with stints in TI Cycles, the Murugappa Group Corporate and Taj Hotels, is currently managing around Rs 900 Crore of digital media spends, and is slated to grow to Rs 2000 Crore in next two years.

Enabling the transition of marketing from offline media to digital

Social Beat was started by the duo as a social media marketing company at a time when the country witnessed rapid adoption of mobile phones, tablets, computers and larger screens. The company was quick to identify the growing opportunity in digital branding, marketing and advertising beyond social media marketing. 

Starting with clients from Chennai and with sectors such as real estate, it expanded its library of services over the last decade to all aspects of digital marketing to business conglomerates and leading start-ups across the country. From seven employees in 2012, the company now has over 300 members in offices across Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi National Capital Region and Mumbai.

In the process, it has widened its expertise to digital media planning and buying, influencer marketing, programmatic marketing, performance marketing, video creation and marketing, content and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy & marketing, multilingual marketing, market research and analytics.

It currently has specialized solutions for sectors including e-commerce and direct to customer (D2C) brands, Fast Moving Consumer Goods and retail, banking and financial services, healthcare, education and real estate. Another specialization of the company is to work as a growth team for start-ups that have disruptive technology solutions, including boAt, Khatabook, Upgrad Campus, Dhan, Niyo, Healthkart, Shobitam among others.

Commenting on Social Beat’s growth over the last decade, Suneil Chawla, co-founder, said, “A key aspect that enabled our scaling over the last decade was our being able to identify emerging needs and developing the capabilities and services to meet them effectively. This, along with a tech stack that complemented our expertise, the ability to attract and retain talent, our core values based functioning, and gaining the trust of clients based on our performance made all the difference”.

The company has firmly established itself as a brand and performance marketing partner with Return on Investment focused results. So that, today, it manages over three per cent of the country’s digital spends and has a 75-plus member media team to handle brand and performance marketing, combining creativity with performance. It’s digital- first creative approach and proven track record of creating growth at scale for brands, in-depth industry and competitive analysis, mapping digital behaviour of consumers for brands, along with customised platform-specific strategies have made Social Beat a leading evangelist of digital marketing.

Specialized platforms for digital effectiveness

In the process, Social Beat developed three products that have played a pivotal role in its success.

Influencer.in: The exponential growth of social media , and especially short form videos, resulted in the emergence of social media influencers who were followed by a large number of people. Soon Influencers were contracted by brands to seamlessly promote their products in their videos and reels. However, contracting influencers who might be scattered across regions & geographic locations was a challenge for both brands and digital marketing companies. 

Identifying the opportunity early, Social Beat developed Influencer.in, a platform to enable brands to discover content creators and influencers relevant to their brand or business, and contract with them based on comparable criteria on the platform is a seamless, simple process. The platform also offers an Influencer Price Index for brands to determine a fair price to offer based on the influencer’s reach and engagement potential with performance tracked on a dashboard in real time.

22languages.com: One of the biggest challenges the brands and marketers face is the diversity of cultures and languages across states in the country. Today, two thirds of the search volumes are from outside the top six metros and nine out of ten internet users consume content in Indic languages. 

Once again, Social Beat identified the emerging need early, and launched 22Languages, a platform to enable brands to create written and video content in regional languages, ad campaigns in languages, as well as language blogs and websites. The key difference is that language writers are briefed on the initiative, who then ideate and create content in that language using its idioms and expressions. So it is not a translation, but a transliteration in the language.

D2Scale: The rise of Direct to Consumer companies within the last decade, which exploded during the pandemic, saw the launch of Social Beat’s D2Scale, the D2C Marketing Centre of Excellence to scale DC brands with specialized services. This covers everything from strategy, full-funnel marketing, optimizing listings on marketplaces and the website, on platform strategies for increasing the average order value and repeat purchase. As well as enabling the right tools such as website builder, Customer Relationship Management software, shopping cart software and marketing automation tools essential for the success of the brand.

Growing recognition

The company is a Premium Business Partner of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, a Premier Google Partner, a Salesforce Partner and works closely with platforms like Shopify for ecommerce enablement. Over the years, Social Beat has won recognition in the form of a number of awards from Google, including the Innovation in Display Advertising, Creativity and Effectiveness. It has also received awards from a number of other platforms, and named the Fastest Growing Agency by Agency Reporter in 2023.

Vikas Chawla, co-founder, Social Beat elaborated on the reasons for growth, “We instituted a system of challenging our talent to take responsibility, to innovate, and to grow with the freedom to learn and experiment. This had a huge dimpact on our ability to scale with many of our Core Team members that lead teams today being home grown. We believe our culture of continuous learning, meritocracy, and fostering initiative has made a significant difference to our ability to scale”.

Enabling all aspects of digital transformation:

Social Beat is enabling end to end digital marketing effectiveness for its clients today by not only growing brand presence and sales, but enabling higher levels of customer conversion and retention through marketing automation and customer data platforms through its Salesforce implementation practice.

The company has been at the cusp of the transition to digital marketing for marketers 

not only through its services, but by sharing its learning with academia and industry in a number of ways over the years. Its blog is rich with digital marketing trends, case studies and insights, while its YouTube channel has videos by Social Beat’s experts sharing their insights on digital marketing. 

During the pandemic, the company’s popular Digital Leadership Summits held in various metros moved online with the videos of industry experts available on its YouTube channel. And ‘Decoding the Digital Jungle’, a book on digital marketing by its experts, is fast becoming the go-to manual for both practitioners and students of digital marketing to understand it’s nuances.

Over the last few years, Social Beat enabled brands to catch the consumers imagination with virtual reality promotions and uses Artificial Intelligence for research and campaign optimization. While it may be early days for most brands for Metaverse promotions, Social Beat is staying abreast of developments so that it can introduce the right kind of service when it’s adoption moves towards becoming mainstream.

All so that it can continue to be a catalyst for brands to use digital marketing according to technology, platform and consumer trends in the years ahead.