Towards ‘Marketing-As-A-Service’
Given that the world has become digital, leveraging the power of pinpoint precision, the localised approach of hyperlocal marketing has emerged as a cornerstone. In the dynamic landscape of modern Indian business, hyperlocal marketing navigates the intricate tapestry of India’s diverse customer base. As technology bridges the gap between physical and virtual realms, hyperlocal marketing stands as a potent conduit, propelling businesses towards success in India’s vast markets.
Satya Prabhakar who is the CEO of Sulekha, Capshine and ProManage.biz came up with Sulekha.com in 2007. There have been turning points in the journey that resulted in the shift of focus, Sulekha became a platform that connects small to medium businesses' service providers to qualified customers.
Post Covid, Co-founder and CEO, Prabhakar figured out that the customers are not only interested in connecting to Sulekha’s customers but they need help in moving beyond Sulekha’s base.
Sulekha has secured funding from Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC and venture capital firm Norwest Venture Partners.
Sulekha is a digital consumer brand and technology platform for local services, connecting millions of users with local service SMEs in over 50 cities and 200 categories of services. Its highly scalable and intelligent cloud platform helps SMEs
grow their business, using a simple, yet powerful, mobile business app, in an affordable, transparent, flexible and easy manner.
More than 50,000 SME customers pay to get connected to precisely targeted consumer buyers matched to their service profile and location. Sulekha’s platform is monetised globally with a quarter of its revenues coming from outside of India. Capshine is an innovative mobile-led English fluency platform serving a vast blue ocean TAM (total addressable market) of over 200 million Indians seeking English fluency to advance professionally and arrive socially. Capshine is gaining rapid traction with more than 70 per cent of customers coming from Tier-2 and 3 cities.
ProManage.biz is a tool that helps businesses improve and increase customer engagement metrics and grow bigger in their local market. ProManage helps brands to standardise their digital storefront. After the brand standardisation work, the team works on optimising each of the business listings for hyperlocal discovery.
In today’s age Google My Business (GMB) contributes to 90 per cent of all discovery and actions. Prabhakar believes that hyperlocal marketing will soon become a must-do for all brands. Originally from Machilipatnam, Prabhakar got his B.E. from NIT, Trichy and worked at Philips. He gained admission into all the top four Indian Institutes of Management (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta and Lucknow) but enrolled at the University of Florida, Gainesville to get his MS in Computer Science. He worked at Honeywell (Minneapolis) as an engineer and AT&T (Austin) as a business manager before founding Sulekha with Sangeeta Kshettry.
