Khatabook to go full throttle on digital, focus on local and gaming apps to get users

KhataBook, a digital bookkeeping and ledger platform, will go aggressive on digital and focus on local apps to attract MSMEs and acquire new users across products.

The app, currently being used by a number of small business has over 10 million active users, is available across the country and works on a regional level in over 13 languages.

They have also recently launched another platform ‘Pagarkhata’, which helps small businesses manage their employee salaries.

Speaking to BestMediaInfo.com about their growth plans, Ved Prakash Yadav, VP, Growth and Marketing, Khatabook, said their major focus will be on adding more users across products and acquiring new users.

Yadav spoke about their association with IPL 2020 and said it went well for them as all their objectives were met. “IPL went really well for us in terms of our objectives of building awareness, re-engaging the dormant users as well as increasing the adoption of payments within the app. We saw huge traction towards all the three vertices.”

“There was a huge ROI, we saw new users coming on the platform because of the campaign; we got another 1 million dormant users who had become dormant for multiple reasons, including Covid, at this time last year. We saw these users react to it and then we saw a 25%-30% increase in product metrics, just for existing users within that,” he said.

Yadav said though this year they did not associate with IPL, their plan is to go aggressive on digital and focus on newer local apps to attract MSMEs. “We experiment a lot with local apps and gaming apps such as ShareChat and Chingari. We use them for different purposes. For example, we see our audiences overlapping on these newer apps that are coming up. Wherever we see traction, we launch an experimental campaign and wherever it works for us, we double down there.”

“This year’s strategy will be similar because a lot of apps have been launched in the past six months and we will launch experiments on those. In the meantime, we will use standard performance marketing channels such as Facebook and Google. There will be a lot of experimentation in terms of re-engagement and remarketing,” he said.

Asked if the second wave of the pandemic will have any effect on their marketing spends, he said they are observing the current situation and have not taken any immediate steps as the lockdown is in just a few states. However, if it extends, they will look at reconsidering them. 

Yadav spoke about the growing competition in the digital bookkeeping market with apps like OkCredit and Bahi Khata, “What set us apart is that we have the best localisation and content teams. When it comes to clarity in the creatives as well as the variation and taking care of the diversity in communication, it creates a huge impact. It's about continuous efforts and the number of efforts we have put in the last two years for which we are able to reap benefits now. Even on the lower scale, we are 2.5 times our nearest competitor now.”

He said a huge amount of digitalisation is still left to be done in the space with a large number of small businesses to be tapped. He said there is a large scope in the number of use cases that are yet to be digitised. Their efforts will double down there as the biggest pool lies there. Yadav said they are focusing on getting bigger businesses and about 20-30 million users on the app.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com