In conversation with Samar Kagalwalla, Head Marketing and Growth, Onsurity
Samar Kagalwalla is the Head-Marketing and Growth at Onsurity. He is a growth marketer with 15+ years of experience and has lead teams across the banking sector for brand launches, digital, social & content marketing, and offline customer connections.
Agency Reporter- What are the three mistakes you feel startups should avoid when creating their go-to-market marketing strategy?
Samar Kagalwalla- Firstly, I often find startups in a quick rush for results when it comes to measuring the impact. Results are the most important metric when it comes to measuring impact. But the methodology or the process to reach the result sometimes is very fragmented. In that case, you have to reinvent the whole process every time you need to do a similar campaign. So whenever a startup builds its marketing strategy, it needs to first figure out its segment targeting and positioning matrix.
Secondly, sometimes people tend to create big marketing models. The result is often a tangled mix of multiple models and metrics. Don’t overcomplicate things because you will end up with a confusing marketing plan. Instead, have a simple AIDA (Attention, Interest Desire, and Action) model plan in place. When you have a business that is ready for scaling, you don’t have time to keep tweaking the methodology. Have the awareness and intended desire action model. Keep it simple. Build your foundation and move to the next level. Of course, the corporate world comprises more evolved models of working- be it in branding, marketing, or advertising. But when you come to the startup side, you need to go back to your roots. You will be fed with a lot of information. No one model is right or wrong. First see what results you are getting by implementing one thing and then maybe you can take on the next model.
Also, sometimes businesses are too focused only on acquisition. Acquisition is a crucial process where one initiates contact and turns potential customers into leads. Now, the problem is that many businesses don’t have a defined customer acquisition strategy. It’s easy to keep doing what you think is working. But this often leaves marketers missing out on other aspects of the customer’s journey. Most businesses make the mistake of investing too little in channels that actually help in reaching out to the maximum number of potential customers.
However, from a marketing standpoint, you need to crack all the touch points in a customer’s journey. Start with customer adoption which charts an entire course beginning with a breakthrough phase up until the final adoption. Then comes the phase of retention which involves a high level of engagement. And finally, build strong customer referral programs.
AR- What have been your challenges in marketing for a B2B2C brand? How different these challenges are, when marketing for a big brand vis a vis a young startup?
SK- I always believe that people should keep reinventing themselves. Moving from a conventional corporate to a startup ecosystem was quite a change for me. But I believe both have their own pros and cons and people should get a taste of both worlds. There are a couple of things I have observed in the startup versus corporate scenario.
For starters, building a brand with clear values, a mission, and a vision is one of the biggest challenges in a startup. Corporates have a clarity of purpose and know what they are doing is right. Startups need to have a similar kind of confidence. They need to believe more in themselves. They must believe that what they’re doing is right. Any kind of insecurity or fear can hamper their growth prospects.
Secondly, as a startup, if you are too focused on brand strategies and measuring business outcomes, you may end up ignoring or missing the customer journey as a whole. You need to build a strong foundation first. The role of design, communication, content, channel selection, tech backing, and funnel must be assessed first. Only when you know the efficiency or quality of the input should you worry about the output. Instead of being purely output-driven, if you focus on the other aspects, you will be able to create a bigger impact.
The third challenge startups face is driving a culture of collaboration to be scale-ready. Most of the bootstrapped startups have individual contributors but as they expand, they need to form teams and structures, which requires collaboration to derive results. Since startup employees wear multiple hats, they sometimes end up taking up too much work. Setting clear roles and responsibilities helps keep everyone accountable and enables cross-team collaboration from the get-go.
AR- Can you share when you took a different, novel, or outside-the-box approach to a strategic initiative?
SK- All marketers understand that at the end of the day it’s the human who’s buying the product- be it for himself or for the business. It is important that the brand balances both the emotional and rational way of thinking when it comes to some of the B2B decision-making. For the last 10 – 12 yrs, I have always tried to humanize B2B marketing for the brands I have worked with, making it more emotional and community-led than transactional. This was a fairly new concept in the BFSI industry at that time.
However, I have established the banking brand in the small and emerging business community on the back of 3 pillars: Knowledge, Sports, and CSR. Today, the same trends have been adopted by Indian and MNC banks, citing examples of work done by me and my team over these years.
As part of Onsurity brand building, we have adopted the billboard effect on the back of our performance campaigns. Again, it’s a unique approach to adopt within 15 months of a start-up. Today, this has increased our organic traffic and conversion by 3x, reduced CPLs by 2x overall, and increased business by 7x since last January.
AR- Pre, During & Post-Pandemic: Can you share your experience as a marketer? What changed for you as a marketer during these phases?
SK- Prior to Covid, working out of the office was the norm. But now people work from home and other locations convenient to them. So we have to ensure we cater to all of these requirements of the end consumer and this is where the use of tech in marketing efforts comes into play. However, Covid also gave us time to also pause and reflect. We started Onsurity in 2020 which was the Covid year. Our entire product development and experience have been kept in mind the diversity and the geographic diversities of India, as well as the expectations of consumers in various working lifestyles.
Today, we are going through a very interesting phase. Affordability, purpose-led initiatives and a health-first approach have started gaining prominence in building brands around trust. Online platforms are providing last-mile insights for better consumer experiences and efficient deliveries. For example, look at how Amazon’s advertising revenue is outperforming Meta and Google using the last-mile strategy. Also, post-Covid people are realizing the value of not only good health but also good mental health. Coming to having a culture around mental wellness, I think we are interacting with a lot of startups and SMEs these days where employees are getting very vocal about it. I think it is a step in the right direction.
AR- Please share some key takeaways from the campaign that didn’t work out as you planned.
SK- My key learnings have been to not make promises you can’t keep as an organization. Sometimes brand campaigns end up putting excess pressure on the infrastructure which can prove to be harmful, particularly to growth stage start-ups.
Secondly, the truth is that content marketing does not work without context. Having context is extremely important in marketing. It allows you to enhance your customers’ experience with real-time data, gain insight into their demographics and desires and also understand where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Measuring marketing campaigns provide actionable insights that help in streamlining spending and growing your business. While KPIs for brand campaigns are useful to keep track of, they should never be business conversions. Though two distinct things, sometimes the term KPI and conversion are used interchangeably. This should be avoided no matter how tempted one is to prove ROI in actual business.
AR- Is Onsurity a health tech or fintech brand? How are you positioning Onsurity as a brand, with its offering falling under multiple industry buckets?
SK- Today, if I was part of a corporate firm, I would have had my health benefits or health covers included in my compensation package. But imagine you go to a small consultancy of just about 10 people. They may be paying you very well but when you ask them about the health benefits you have they will not have an answer.
This is not because the intent is not there, but because they do not have the access to those products. There are two reasons for this. The first is that they are usually serviced by a community which is typically the broker community or the agent community. The other is that they are usually left to buy retail health benefits which are extremely expensive and block their working capital for almost a year.
At Onsurity, we identified all of these instances and we came up with India’s first employee health benefits program to be paid on a monthly subscription basis and we start at Rs 145 per month per employee. We are a health tech providing financial independence to its members through best-in-class health care benefits. We clearly position ourselves as India’s 1st monthly subscription-led employee healthcare platform for small and emerging businesses. I’m very happy to say that 85 percent of my customers today are getting access to health for the first time.
Onsurity has also been showcased in the launch season of The Great Indian Disruptor by Disney Hotstar, for the innovation in the healthcare space. This is a matter of great privilege from us as a brand and us as an organization.
AR- What’s your view on Brand Bharat vs Brand India?
SK- Brand Bharat is helping brands from India unleash real customer value. The line is diminishing and Bharat is turning out to be one of the most profitable adopters of tech and innovation. As products get more localized, the customer journey will be more personalized and technology will penetrate every aspect of this revolution.