‘VivaConnect Believes in Constant Evolution and Grown Much Beyond Being A Company’

‘VivaConnect Believes in Constant Evolution and Grown Much Beyond Being A Company’

Mobile Marketing concept is quite familiar nowadays with growing penetration of smartphone among Indian consumers. The companies offering mobile marketing services turn bullish on to grab the huge potential market. VivaConnect Pvt. Ltd, one of the well-known players in the segment, also working towards capturing maximum market growth. Bharatesh Salian, Chief Strategy Officer, talks to DIGITAL TERMINAL on this latest marketing trend and shares his strategies for further growth.

DT: How do you see the growth of Indian mobile marketing Industry?

Mr. Salian: India has over 154 million smartphone users out of which about 86 million users enjoy internet access over their mobile phone. With this exponential growth in smartphone market, mobile app industry is likely to grow fourfold into a whooping Rs. 3,800 crore industry by 2016.Augmented Reality (AR) concepts will have higher takers among TIER 1 & TIER 2 cities, enabling Brands and Enterprises to process even more of interactive content right over mobile screens building fruitful engagement. Last year even brought amazing shift of E-commerce to m-commerce, which is expected to promote m-wallet initiatives in next 2 years.Coming to rural userbase, Finance minister ArunJaitley’s decision of allocating Rs.500 crore for building infrastructure as per the National Rural Internet and Technology Mission will spur the growth of mobile & internet services in rural regions of India. Mobile marketing services are growing at a steady pace.

DT: What are the major challenges vendors has to face in the industry?

Mr. Salian: Since Mobile marketing is relatively new addition to traditional marketing vehicles, its still to get a significant share in overall marketing budget. Opting for mobile marketing services requires a certain level of technical expertise to understand the possibilities it can create. Industry is yet to learn that mobile marketing generates higher ROI and has more benefits than other marketing vehicles.

Secondly, The overall teledensity of our country had notched 74.02% by 2013, yet flip-flopping Telecom regulations and policies have adversely affected the rapidly changing market conditions, also slackening growth of data services. Thus engaging population over data services is a major challenge.

Also, encouraging people to transact over mobile phones and increasing use of payment gateway stands as a strong challenge. Security is always a concern for all and more so when its about their money, thus gaining this trust will come gradually.

DT: What are the services and solution you offer to Indian customer?

Mr. Salian: VivaConnect is a creative Mobile Marketing Company having India's LARGEST infrastructure for Voice and Missed Call Services. We ideate solutions for Brands & Enterprises over missed calls, sms, email, mobile apps and voice platform.

Our solutions are often a combination of more than one service, for instance, consider Missed call Bank account balance check service. As and when a bank customer gives a missed call to check his bank account balance, he receives a prompt reply over sms furnishing his up-to-date account details. Saving him time, hassle and money (Its a free service for end user).

In that manner, we finely tune mobile services to match clients objective and mobile using habit of their intended group. So basically services of sms, mobile app & voice stay at the core, as we weave an engaging brand experience around it. Most of our solutions build an engagement at ‘zero cost’ for the end user and are great for authenticating, registrations, activation/deactivation, voting, polling, sampling, gratification and more.

In 2013 we launched ‘LiveTalk’ - a service for audio broadcasting live events over a phone call. It was developed in conjunction with Bharatiya Janata Party, and it powered up live broadcast of their pre-electoral rallies over phone call. Over a lakh callers spanning from length & breadth of India enjoyed a real-time connect with rallies over their mobile. LiveTalk was awarded Gold trophies at Indian Digital Media Awards 2014 (IDMA), as the Best Innovation in Mobile Marketing and Best Use of Technology.

DT: Which are the verticals you serve?

Mr. Salian: We gladly serve Brands, Enterprises and Media, actually numerous entities from all walks of the industry. That’s the absolute beauty of offering mobile marketing solutions, they are useful to every communication taking between brands and the consumer.

Our clientele includes prominent Consumer Brands, Enterprises from Banking, Financial services and Insurance, Food & Beverage Industry, Entertainment and Media Houses, TV channels, Radio stations, Political parties and many more from other walks of Industry.

DT: What are your marketing strategies? How you are working to promote your services in India?

Mr. Salian: We have a brigade of eminent sales force and ideation team that comes up with fantastic concepts for mobile marketing initiatives. In the initial years it had been our satisfied clients that got us another clients account. Moreover, we are having strategic tie-ups and partnership with other enterprises.

There’s active discussion and sharing of insights of mobile marketing over social media platforms as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We have occasional press releases and publish articles encircling mobile marketing industry over online media. Then there’s regular post over our company’s blog and a monthly newsletter.

DT: Tell us about some of your leading clients.

Mr. Salian: We are extremely proud to have some of leading names from the industry as our esteemed clients.The list includes Central Bank of India, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra, Reliance, Sharekhan, Vijaya Bank from BFSI sector. We are serving Doordarshan, Sony Television, Life OK and Zee Entertainment from Television industry. We are also associated with LUX, Ponds and a few brands under Hindustan Unilever (HUL) Limited and BIG 92.7 FM among the radio network. Pizza Corner, Wok in the Box, Box8, Sandwizza, Cheelizza and more QSR’s from Food & Beverage Industry (F&B clients are under our newly launched company - DONE Solutions Pvt. Ltd.). We even empowered services for Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during pre-election period of 2013-14.

DT: What are your future plans in terms of new market or new solution?

We believe in constant evolution and hence have grown much beyond being a company that just provides mobile marketing services, we’ve always believed in fostering innovation. In alignment to our belief now we are encouraging fresh ideas that could grow into reality and become services for masses and materialise as a company.

VivaConnect has grown into an incubator to promote budding talent across the country. We’re honouring path breaking concepts and fresh ideas that project a potential to materialise as services. The brilliant minds bring such concepts to table are not only rewarded with monetary rewards, they will also be taken further to grant profit sharing initiatives and launching of a company.

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