Sanjeeta KK, a Chennai-based food stylist, has been writing a food blog for over five years now. Her photographs attracted local businesses such as high-end food stores which wanted her to style their products for their publicity material. She got written up in local magazines as well and her career as a food stylist took off. Today, Sanjeeta gets assignments not just from Chennai but from overseas as well thanks to her website.
There are many like Sanjeeta, with businesses bigger and smaller. Take the case of Rachel, a yoga instructor, as another instance. Having a website brought more students to Rachel’s classes. It’s not just the stylists and yoga instructors. Savitribai runs an agency that trains women to work as household help. In reality, Rachel and Savitri are characters in web hosting company Big Rock’s TVCs, but you get the drift. As a small/medium business (SMB) owner, you need a website to let the world know about you.
Big Rock started advertising its services in India about four years ago. The other is GoDaddy, for whom actor and disco superstar Mithun Chakraborty put on his dancing shoes to tell SMBs it is imperative they own a website to expand their business. There are many other Web hosting firms, but it seems these are the only two with TV campaigns. In fact, Big Rock’s TVCs have won awards at Goafest, this time for the third year in a row, in the Telecom Products and Solutions Category.
Shashank Mehrotra, general manager and business head, Big Rock, says the advertising is timely as a number of small businesses are poised to take off. “As the Internet population grows, the search for goods and services will explode. Companies like ours are providing the infrastructure, and we go beyond registering the domain name.” BigRock advises clients on Web hosting, business email, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, website builder tools, ecommerce solutions and also enables customers to connect with web designers of their choice. Having a memorable domain name, backed by a professional email address and a sophisticated website go a long way in building credibility for a business, he adds.
One can build a website for as little as ₹2,000 in annual fees. However, if one were to purchase a domain name and Web hosting package and work with a web designer, it would cost around ₹12,000-15,000 a year on average.
Amit Agarwal, a personal technology columnist and blogger at Digital Inspiration, says that not having a website for one’s own business is the loss of an opportunity to control the brand. Links to the business will appear only in directory sites and customers might click away to another business.
Platform for SMBsIn an earlier interview to cat.a.lyst , Rajiv Sodhi, GoDaddy’s India Managing Director and Vice-President, said there are over 30 million such entrepreneurs in India. Nearly1.5-1.6 million domain names are registered in India every year.
Sodhi and Mehrotra both decline to reveal the size of their companies’ business in India. Many are purchased on a whim, or to protect one’s brand, says Mehrotra. Only 40-50 per cent of domain names sold result in a live website being generated. Globally, it’s a $10-15 billion industry, he adds.
Both companies are clear that their campaigns need to start with creating awareness of their existence and the benefits for SMBs of getting a website. GoDaddy entered India in mid-2012 and its business grew by 86 per cent in the next year or so, Sodhi says. This Arizona, US-based company has been selling .in domain names since 2009 but there had been no India Web site.
Big Rock is a part of the Directi group. In early 2014, BigRock and a couple of other Directi group companies were acquired by the Nasdaq-listed Endurance International group (EIGI), a major web hosting conglomerate.
Mehrotra says that the TVCs are important and they are an investment in the brand. Research indicated that it needed to be a mass product and there is nothing quite like running a TV campaign. Being targeted at SMBs, it needed to penetrate Tier 2 and -3 towns also, and discovery of their company is more likely on TV than on the Internet, he says.
GoDaddy’s campaign is in Hinglish, for the same reason. However, Mehrotra, who takes the Mumbai local to work, says every single person now has a smartphone and is using it to read or watch something or the other, and so a campaign on the Internet is necessary too.