Content is the ultimate thing that drives our marketing, says Aparna Mahesh of BankBazaar.com

Financial website BankBazaar.com’s core marketing strategy revolves around content marketing. Within a year, the financial brand has created more than 25,000 content pieces across platforms such as SEO, social media, LinkedIn, the blog on the company website and many publications. The brand spends 30% of its marketing spends on the content marketing front. The content team at BankBazaar consists of 10 people.

Aparna Mahesh, Chief Marketing Officer, BankBazaar, said, “Content is at the centre of our marketing strategy. Content is at the nerve centre of everything we do in marketing. Content is the ultimate thing that drives our marketing. While we continue to build awareness at a reasonable pace, we have simultaneously also been sharing a lot of knowledge. Putting out a lot of content that gives values to the customers and empowers them to take the right decision has always been our strategy.”

The brand has a strong content presence on Quora and is always ready to answer people’s queries. Mahesh said, “Quora might not be a part of marketing strategy for many people, but for us it’s a very important place where we are helping people address certain questions.”

Talking about challenges in the banking sector’s content marketing space, Mahesh said banking as a category is a limited pool of things that one can talk about and to present it in a manner which is interesting without losing the depth in the content is a very important thing to keep in mind.

Mahesh said, “When it comes to finance, it is about hard facts and you have to give them enough information. How do you give them that information in a manner that is not too boring, not too in-depth and overwhelming for them? How do you present the information in a very concise manner without going into very long formats because when it comes to India, people have very less patience when it is about very long-form content.”

Mahesh is very optimistic about the content space shaping up in India. On the other hand, she believes that it is not necessary that content marketing suits all the categories and it should not be force-fitted in brand’s marketing strategy.

“Today, a lot of people have realised that when your marketing focus moves from pure acquisition to retention, then automatically content and things related to content will play a major role. I see quite a few categories moving into this space. Certain categories lend themselves to content very nicely and few don’t. There shouldn’t be force-fitting content where it doesn’t belong,” added Mahesh.

BankBazaar’s focused areas are to help customers acquire knowledge and to be able to make certain decisions on the personal finance side. Secondly, the brand is highly focused on the millennials. Mahesh said, “As a financial services aggregator, we are very poised to service the millennials. These are the people who compare shops for every single product, including finance. Millenials have very limited patience and want everything instantly.”

According to the March 2018 data, the website receives around 35 million visitors monthly. BankBazaar’s operating revenue witnessed a 2X growth in FY18 while the total expenses grew by only 50% as compared to last year. Growth has been across all product categories: Credit product has grown 178% and insurance transactions have grown 146% during the same period last year. In FY19, BankBazaar is expecting to be EBITDA-positive.