POPxo's game plan to marry content with commerce

POPxo, one of the leading digital community platforms for women, has been successfully able to build commerce on its content platform. The company is now utilising the database of millions of its users to produce the categories of products these users are generally interested in buying in.

The company has already ventured into offline retail with POPxoSHOP.

Priyanka Gill

In an interaction with BuzzInContent, Priyanka Gill, Founder and CEO, POPxo, shared the challenges involved in the content-commerce approach, and why it is considered a massive opportunity.  She also talked about building a formidable retail platform on the back of content marketing.

Content is the best and most cost-effective way to build a large and engaged community. It only makes sense to capture value by adding a commerce layer to the monetisation playbook. The media landscape in India is evolving rapidly. There are a lot of publishers and platforms capturing value across the spectrum. The main challenge with a pure play content model is monetisation at scale.

“Page views and video views get relatively low eCPMs (Effective cost per mille) as the brands perceive the user’s purchasing power to be low. (This is pegged to the national per capita income). Plus the ad exchanges run by Facebook and Google take 50% of the ad revenue. With that in mind, at POPxo we are looking to add more monetisation layers by selling products directly to the user. We have millions of women who are active on our platform and channels. We know what they want and what works for them. Armed with this data we are producing products we know they want and love. We have large and effective marketing machinery. As a result, the content-commerce opportunity is massive,” shared Gill.  

Discussing the challenges involved in this content-commerce approach, Gill said that capital is one of the major concerns.

“There is a natural question as to how can a content company play strongly in the production-distribution-logistics areas. We have been lucky to have built a nimble team with a lot of experience in these areas. We have been pleasantly surprised to see how well investors are responding to our content-commerce approach,” she added.

Content is a fantastic way to build a large and loved brand. What users are looking for is products that offer great value as well as great designs. This is especially true for the female millennial user. Cashing on the same, POPxo is building a strong direct-to-consumer product line across fashion, beauty and lifestyle, and marketing the same via content and influencers.

Gill shared that it would be doing capsule collection launches in collaboration with Plixxo influencers in upcoming months. Plixxo, while collaborating with any influencer, keeps a check on the category/genre, reach, authenticity, engagement, value and content of influencers.  

Earlier this year, POPxo had launched Luxeva, a digital-first luxury content platform. It is a guide to all things luxury for both women and men across all lifestyle categories with a strong affiliate product plug-in. It has a leadership team with a 60:40 ratio of women to men.

Talking about the ROI garnered via content marketing on digital platforms, Gill said, “In terms of ROI, content marketing through digital platforms does have an edge as compared to vanilla advertising since the call-to-action is stronger and more immediate via the digital source - be it through swiping up to the brand's website or getting instant gratification on engaging with the customers - the chances of them making a purchase decision will always be higher on digital.”