Grovention is a company operating since 2018 to help clients create an optimized digital presence and conduct strategize marketing campaign that can drive revenue. Shobhit Saxena, the company’s Co-Founder, shares with Business Upside India how the company has grown and their future plans. Here is an edited excerpt of the interview.
Edited Excerpt of the Interview
Business Upside [BU]: You describe yourself as a “digital growth agency.” What does it actually mean?
Shobhit Saxena [SS]: We are a digital growth agency that lives by the words.
Simply put, we help businesses, startups, or brands grow their online presence, influence, and revenue.
Building digital presence and marketing is vital now. As an agency, we help businesses, small or large, make their online channels a profitable revenue stream. In a nutshell, we build custom and diversified strategies to drive users that convert to the client’s website.
Whether they have a large or small budget, we have the right solution to scale their growth as they demand.
[BU]: What should be the main mantra of a startup, according to you?
[SS]: Funded startups should focus on getting profitable first. Yes, acquiring users for their business is essential, but it should not be at the stake of burning the investment. Many startups fail as they focus on building the user base and making everyone happy but fail to monetize later. An example of the same can be seen in Ola.
The self-funded startups should focus first on getting an online presence in a planned way so they can showcase their products and services to their users and prospective customers. They should also prepare a monthly budget to spend on their marketing. Initially, they might not be profitable, but later as the user recognizes them as a brand, the conversion will be much higher.
[BU]: What makes you survive and grow in this hugely competitive sector?
[SS]: Having a USP that solves a problem and no one offer is great for startups to dominate, and to survive, they need to keep evolving as per the demand of their users.
For a service-based business like ours, it is crucial to maintain top-quality work to survive in this competitive market.
Deliveries, whether strategy, content, copy, design, or development, must be above the mark. To stay in the market, we have consistently added services that our clients need and provide a complete environment for their digital needs.
We only pick projects that we know are under our capabilities.
With this, we have been able to make our clients stay longer and get referrals that are easier to convince.
[BU]: What are the key factors a successful digital marketing team must possess?
[SS]: Being ready to learn, staying open to discussions, diversified skills, experiments, and data analytics are some qualities of digital marketers to form a successful team.
Besides the above, being omnivorous and technical help them adapt to new technologies and understand the specific needs of different business verticals.
[BU]: Do you feel the need for any change or innovation in this sector?
[SS]: Digital growth or the digital marketing sector is booming, and there is no doubt about it. Every small or large business needs an internal team or agency to market its products and services online.
The marketing channels are evolving, adding new features and ways to reach different audience segments.
The only need for change, I feel, in this industry is having a standard. I have worked with freelancers and agencies who try to deliver the committed work and bill for it. Even in this era, marketers sell template work. This should be prohibited.
[BU]: How do you analyze the audience?
[SS]: Audiences on digital platforms are majorly segmented based on demographics, income groups, interests, etc. It helps a lot if clients have historical data in their marketing tools.
When starting from scratch, analyzing the audience for a client involves a lot of research. We use marketing tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, and others to peep into competitors’ audiences and use the data for client strategies.
Once the client’s campaigns have some learning, we analyze the data and read their behavior in the marketing tools to refine them further. The analysis helps define the right audience for clients and optimize the campaigns.
[BU]: Why do businesses need you?
[SS]: The answer to this is straightforward, distal marketing is profitable, and if businesses want to grow, they need it. So, there is no doubt that all companies need digital marketing.
To add, why do they need Grovention? We keep a hundred percent transparency with the customers, have an experienced team, provide UI/UX design services, do end-to-end development, possess 360° marketing capabilities, have an excellent track record, and sign NDA if required.
[BU]: What made you become an entrepreneur, and what would be your suggestion to those who want to be entrepreneurs?
[SS]: I have hired a lot of freelancers and big digital marketing agencies in the past during my tenure with brands and SMEs. Their quality of work was not up to the mark, which led me to build Grovention.
The core of Grovention is to provide one digital agency that can offer quality services to help build its digital presence and help with growth marketing.
The suggestion to new entrepreneurs is to gain in-depth knowledge of their products and services before jumping into the waters. Market research is crucial; never conceptualize based on your thoughts; dive deep into the data instead.
Another thing that they should focus on is the complete life cycle. Every point of the consumer’s journey should be mapped at the initial stage for different use cases.
Lastly, I recommend young minds not to run the business at a loss for long. Try to monetize it within a year or two. Otherwise, your audience might not be willing to pay a higher premium later for you to become profitable.
[BU]: What are the two qualities you look for while hiring your employees?
[SS]: Everyone wants to hire a perfect employee who can finish their job on time. But this doesn’t happen in the real world.
A candidate is suitable if s/he understands 50% of the profiles’ responsibilities. Above this, I try to see if they are true to me in telling me what they have done and what they know. Secondly, I determine if they are ready to learn new things. The above two qualities in a team member help to frame into an excellent employee.
[BU]: What are your upcoming business goals?
[SS]: We have a list of goals to achieve in the coming year, and we are confident that we will be able to accomplish all.
- We have some new services planned for our expansion; all those will be added to our website within the first quarter.
- We are planning to dedicate a few resources who will work dedicatedly on our brand-building and marketing activities.
- We plan to upgrade our work portfolio by showcasing the latest deliveries and growth case studies.
- Further, we have planned to double-fold our team by the end of this year, with team members and executives for various skills.
