Zoomcar shares content strategy and expectations from content creators

For a lot of brands in India, content marketing is an on-and-off aspect and not the most important part of their marketing strategy. But for Zoomcar, a self-drive car rental platform, content marketing is at the epicentre of all its marketing initiatives. 

Varun Jha

Varun Jha, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Head of Demand Business at Zoomcar, said, “Content has been the buzzword for all brands. But I don’t think many marketers have understood it well or have been able to make most out of it. For us, content is at the epicentre of every marketing strategy. Our users interact with the brand for an average duration of 18 hours, therefore, content is really important for us to engage with them. With the kind of engagement we have, the consumers go and talk about the brand on various platforms. Like this, content helps to get a genuine piece of word about us and does not sound like a sale at all.”

The brand fetches a lot of user-generated content and places its bets heavily on creating video content creation. Zoomcar has been working with a lot of platforms such as Pocket Aces and TVF and is looking to explore newer options in the arena of content creators. 

The brand saw a massive uptick in new customers when it did a snackable piece of content, ‘If salary were a person’, with Pocket Aces’ FilterCopy. The brand witnessed a 3.5x increase in their organic traffic on its website and subscription to ZAP (monthly subscription of cars) increased to 40% in a few days. 

The brand is looking beyond digital and for the right partners on TV to maximise reach. Jha said, “We would go beyond just digital. TV has a massive reach in India. We are looking for a lot of co-curated shows on TV as we want to maximise our reach. If you do something on TV in a sustained manner, you get a lot of direct traffic. Mobile web traffic will certainly spike up by 7-10 times. You get a new audience through content on TV.” 

In the past, Zoomcar has done shows with TLC and Network18’s Money Control. The brand has now collaborated with Living Foodz for a show which will star celebrity chef Ranvir Brar, who will travel to Leh Ladakh in Zoomcar. The show is in the post-production stage and will be launched in late August. The idea of the show is not to build awareness but to inform consumers about brand experiences. 

The brand hasn’t explored radio much for its content initiatives and finds little hope on print when it comes to content marketing. Jha said, “For us, radio is still a very advertising-led medium. Print doesn’t work much for us until you have a big sale kind of a thing. The OTS (opportunity to see) is just for 10-15 seconds on a jacket ad. It costs crores. It doesn’t justify ROI.” 

Recently, we have seen many brands partnering with music streaming apps for customised music or even launching original music experiences on these apps. Zoomcar is also set to join the music bandwagon with others who find huge content potential on music streaming apps. 

Jha said, “Music streaming is at an all-time high. We are launching Zoomcar’s custom playlist on our app. It might be powered by Gaana or Spotify. You can have the custom playlist on the Zoomcar app, according to your trip type. This is something that no one has done yet.” 

Jha exclusively told BuzzInContent that the brand will launch an in-house content hub, ‘Zoom Studio’, by the year-end. “Over there, we want to do a lot of Facebook Live and podcasts with a lot of like-minded influencers, which we find relevant. As part of the studio, Zoomcar will revamp its blog, which will be broken into micro-blogs under various categories.” 

Zoomcar hasn’t been updating its blog off-late and with Zoom Studio in place, the brand will transform it from a text-based to a video-led blog. Jha added, “If you are creating a blog just to tick a KPI, is not a right approach. The blog shouldn’t just be another thing or a secondary thing. I personally want a lot of video blogs to be out there than just text-based ones. Therefore, we are revamping our blog.” 

With content being at the epicentre of all the marketing activities at Zoomcar, the brand is also approached by a lot of content companies with pitches. Speaking about the brand’s expectations from the content companies, Jha said, “Be any type of agency, if you have done your homework about the brand, it really helps. That means you also have business empathy towards the brand. They should be a little more courageous to be presenting some outrageous ideas and not play safe. They should be bold and aggressive.” 

Giving an example of its social media agency, Jha said it also works if the agencies come with samples of campaigns done. “When we called for our social media agency pitch in January, we had top five agencies pitching. Our current social media agency had already created a rap song for ZAP Subscribe. We never asked for it. They have created a lot of other content ideas and presented it live,” Jha said.

He added, “That makes us realise that people have so much fire in their belly. At a pitch stage, if someone is going an extra mile and burning money, it’s just not about winning the business but the kind of passion they bring to the table. Passion has no limits.”

Even though there are designated creative, digital and media agencies in place, a lot of brands work with separate content companies. Does that mean the existing agencies are not able to do their job?

Jha answered, “I do work with my mainline agencies for campaigns every six months. But content is something that is always on. When you have an always-on strategy, the point is that every agency out there will pitch you with a content idea.  In the future, we will see a lot of content-led startups budding in India.”

He said, “Content is not just about distribution or having ideas. It is also a tech problem. Content is about the distribution of an amazing idea. It is also about how you can have a platform that is not a monologue and provides two-way communication. In the future, we will see a lot of bigger networks like Alibaba acquiring content companies.”

Jha pointed out to a trend of the millennial audience moving from Facebook to platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. He said that although one can see the trend in the shift of audience, video remains the core of all these platforms. 

“The generation of millennials has moved to TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. They have a Facebook account but they don’t log in. Facebook has become for older people. Different platforms target different age groups. Irrespective of what TG they target, all are video-led. The kind of audience that is there on Facebook has a perfect match for traditional brands,” added Jha.  

Zoomcar did some pilot testing in the form of paid campaigns with TikTok, but that did not garner much of ROI for the brand as the target audience wasn’t common between the platform and them. 

A lot of marketers tend to focus more on the content creation and ideation side, but the most difficult part of any content journey is its distribution so that the brand fetches maximum return on investment. 

To overcome this challenge, Jha believes brands should partner platforms that have a good subscriber base and there should be a substantial overlap in the kind of audience you are looking for and what the platform has.