MUMBAI: Connecting more than 4 million users to about a hundred thousand brands across 10 cities in the country, Delhi-based discovery and recommendation platform Little Black Book (LBB) is leading a diverse route in the evolving world of content-led commerce. Probably the first home-grown brand helping the audience in exclusively discovering and recommending places and experiences around them, LBB today is an extremely popular reference in the vocabulary of Indian millennials.
LBB founder and CEO Suchita Salwan told Indiantelevision.com that the concept of LBB has grown from a mere discovery and referral platform to a marketing support for SMEs and even larger brands. The platform is not only helping small and medium businesses get popular and increase footfall but is also creating enriching and interesting marketing campaigns for brands like Cadbury’s, W, and Fabindia.
“We have grown tremendously and have secured more than $7 million worth of investments. But the mission of LBB is still the same, as it was when we started it in 2015. The core of LBB has always been about how to discover, what to discover, and for whom to discover. We have based our business on consumer insights, market dynamics, and as well as changing technologies,” she noted.
The platform, which also is available as an app, at first glance might look like any other content platform online with well-written posts on eateries, tourist spots, experiences, and products aided with well-captured pictures and sharing options, but has a very different model of functioning.
Salwan shared, “The content that you see on LBB is community-generated and not created in-house as other traditional content platforms host. That is our key differentiator. Secondly, we are not an entertainment platform like them, but an infotainment channel.”
She added, “The audience that comes to LBB has very high intent. They land on our platform only when they are seeking authentic experiences or places, which they can put their money and time on. For example, someone watching how south Delhi girls talk is there for entertainment and not looking for some brand they might have plugged in.”
This whole model helps the businesses and brands in getting authentic attention that eventually leads to increased recognition, popularity, and footfall in their physical stores or online channels.
Salwan said, “We have two business models. The commerce side of it is very young and recent. For the past 3-4 years, we have been actively working with brands, of every size, and helping them get more eyeballs, and launch new products in a more targeted fashion. Our promise to a brand is better revenue and recognition. We work on multiple sides of the campaign to achieve this. We provide full-stack solutions to Indian brands that want to target the young Indian millennial audience.”
The online platform is quite popular among the masses and has over 1 million app downloads and an average app rating of 4.6 on the Google Play Store, as shared by Salwan. Similarly, most of the brands now recognise LBB and are willing to spend some money on marketing through LBB.
Speaking about how LBB markets itself into the B2B space, Salwan shared that the platform has been lucky in terms of recall. “We have recently grown our sales team and it is quite young. Fortunately, for us, a lot of brand managers are already LBB users and have our app on their phone. They know what our brand is about.”
She continued further, “A large part of our marketing has been really organic. The referral rate on LBB is very high; people telling their friends to download the app as it is very useful. Other than that, SEO is huge for us. We spend a lot on optimisation on Google. Facebook and Instagram are the other recent channels that we use to get consumers on our platforms.”
