The digital marketing industry grew from INR 47 billion (2015) to 199 billion in 2020 and is now expected to reach around INR 539 billion by the financial year 2024. I
1. Brief us about your business model like how did the idea come to start and how does it work (step by step procedure)?
Vaibhav and I have been in the digital marketing industry collectively for almost two decades now. We spent hours on researching, reading and implementing new technologies and ideas for our then clients and realized a need for marketing technology products. RankWatch (2013) was a result of the need for a scalable and accurate cloud-based rank tracking and website analysis software. With it, we could get actionable data on our clients’ rankings, backlinks, and SERP competitors to grow their organic traffic. Web Signals, our most recent product, was built to solve our own challenge of monitoring what people were saying about us and our competitors on the different media channels.
2. What are the unique key points of your company?
Web IQ has not only built cutting edge cloud software but has also provided the digital marketing industry with unparalleled organic marketing software such as RankWatch and Web Signals.
3. How are you different from the existing competitors?
Our competitors mainly focus on the end user market while we have a strong hold on the agency’s and big brands as we have a deep understanding of the Search marketing niche.
While setting up WebIQ, I and Sahil decided to help Marketing Agencies in an ever-changing digital environment with all the resources under one umbrella. Our products have a competitive edge with a one-stop solution for all the digital marketing agency needs.
We also provide a lot of complete free and top quality resources for people to use which helps us in our marketing endeavours.
We also track over 500 million keywords (Maximum in the industry on a single search engine) to get their top websites which so we almost have details of every single website/business on the web and their up/down trend data.
4. What is the funding status and monetization model?
Web IQ is a bootstrapped profitable company funded by its happy customers who pay monthly/yearly to access and use the platforms.
5. What challenges are you facing in running your business?
Marketing world and technology is changing fast, so we have to stay ahead of the game by ensuring we have the best product and solution for our customers. At the same time some of our competitors have recently had an IPO and hence have deep pockets, although it’s a great thing but we need to push even harder to ensure we don’t lag.
6. How has been the client or people’s response so far?
Our customers enjoy using our tools. We have some of the biggest brands and agencies in India and abroad using our softwares.
7. What are the traction details (like users, app downloads & other achievements of the company)?
We have over 2500 active paying customers and over 50,000 users of the software.
We get over 100,000 visitors looking for our services and content each month organically from Google.
8. How do you look at expansion?
We have spent the last one year building some ground breaking technology to enhance our platform and we expect people to love it.
We are also working on having multiple new used acquisitions channels (paid marketing and partnerships).
9. What are your marketing plans?
We get a lot of traffic from Search Engines, we are working on enhancing our conversion funnels and paid user acquisition channels and also look at forming a new vertical which will deal with user partnerships.
10. What has been the biggest learning so far?
Sahil shares, “We offered a solution to our end users for a problem we faced first-hand and I think that really helped our business grow, geographically and financially because we weren’t busy pleasing our end users.”
11. What is the market size and opportunity?
The digital marketing industry grew from INR 47 billion (2015) to 199 billion in 2020 and is now expected to reach around INR 539 billion by the financial year 2024. It is a huge industry leap, considering there is a huge demand for digital marketing software tools along with web analytics, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and market automation software in the market. Currently, the opportunity is huge as more brands and retailers are adopting digital advertising as means of communication with their target audience.
Source: Business World
