Producing relatable, honest, quality content can help win consumer trust in brands, says Prateek Singh of LearnApp

LearnApp.com, a subscription-based online financial education company, believes that content marketing is the key driver to build consumer trust in brands. And producing relatable, honest and quality content can help one achieve that goal.

According to Prateek Singh, Founder and CEO of LearnApp.com, while winning the trust of consumers is the biggest marketing challenge, content marketing acts as a buoyant force to achieve that.

“People want financial advice but they can’t really decide who to trust for such information. Content marketing has helped us win the trust of consumers. It is the best way to educate people about money. Through content, we get to reach a lot of people and create brand affinity. Content marketing is the best way to make your consumers feel about the brand along with an opportunity to make them spend a lot of time with it. Any kind of media alone can’t do that.”

In May, LearnApp partnered with Tanmay Bhat, a standup comedian and YouTuber, to launch a series of videos explaining the basics of trading. The 10-episode series was launched on Tanmay’s YouTube channel – Honestly by Tanmay Bhat and featured Singh, donning the role of Tanmay’s financial tutor, explaining the basics of trading. The partnership aimed at filling the gap of the need for good quality financial education that is not just informative but also interesting. Through the series, Learnapp was able to reach more than 7.5 lakh people in four weeks.

Singh believes that one has to create relatable content for content marketing to work. When LearnApp started its content marketing journey on YouTube, the platform first put out content around 4-5 themes and saw which one resonated with consumers. “I see a lot of people put out content and wait for it to grow. One has to see what kind of content reaches people. So, one should first run as many experiments as one can and find out what users really care about.”

Another factor that helps to produce quality content is to be honest to the consumers. “A lot of people try to do the business news-style content: ‘Namaskar, aaj hum baat karenge…’. If it’s content marketing then you really need to connect with your audience and for that to happen, the content has to be engaging and the person should show the real him in it because the consumers can very well differentiate between fake and real,” Singh said.

LearnApp focuses a lot on production and, according to Singh, all the efforts one puts in producing good quality content helps brands fetch that extra seconds spent by consumers on your content.

Singh finds creating culturally relevant content for different language-speaking audiences as one of the biggest challenges as well as opportunities in content marketing. “We don’t understand whether the market for English or Hindi is larger. India is such a large country and we can’t just know it. I think that is an opportunity as well as a problem. Everyone’s context is different. For example, in the South, people invest more in gold, so how do you build content around that? In the North, people trust more in real estate.”

To test the waters of creating content in different languages, LearnApp.com will soon launch its app in Hindi.

The brand spends 10% of its revenue on marketing and is not a believer in mass advertising. Singh said, “We will only do it if we can get the same audience connection the way content does it for us. I don’t believe in the spray and pray concept.”

After the success of the Honestly by Tanmay Bhatt series, the brand is willing to work with more finance influencers and content platforms.

Talking about his expectations from content partners, Singh said, “We are open to collaboration. We would want good production quality. The content partner should add benefit and value to the consumers’ lives. It shouldn’t only be a soap drama. I think TVF and Pocket Aces have nailed the art of creating quality content. I can’t imagine the Kota Factory version of LearnApp or maybe I can’t visualise it. The content should be such that the user should walk away with something and change his life in some way.”

When it comes to collaborations with influencers, Singh wants deeper brand content integrations. He said, “I have noticed that many influencers talk about the brand once it’s over. I don’t think that’s effective. It needs to be a much deeper integration.”

Other than its PR agency, LearnApp doesn’t have any agency on board to help the brand with its communication strategy. Singh is proud of his in-house team doing the job well and is open for agency partnerships if they have something more to offer than LearnApp’s in-house team.

Singh said LearnApp will never want to associate with the content just for the sake of it and as the sponsors of any content. He explained, “There are two ways to associate with content. One is where the brand sponsors the content. The second way is that the brand actually builds premium content and gives it out for free. The content should always aim to add value to the consumers’ lives and that’s very difficult to do.”

LearnApp.com was founded in 2018 by Singh, Swati Sharma, Ankush Oberoi and Sohail Alam. The platform aims at adding new-age skills in trading and investment by the way of recorded video sessions by industry leaders and regular live sessions by industry veterans.

The platform has more than two lakh registered users and aims to reach 10 lakh by the end of 2021. LearnApp has grown by ~300% in revenues since CY20, and the projected turnover for CY21 is predicted to be ~500% of what it was last year.