Adyogi is a Marketing Automation Software, developed with a vision to help e-commerce businesses large or small, acquire customers online and thereby increase revenue in the most efficient manner. AdYogi, connects directly with the brands to understand their products and analytics, the platform allows brands to create ads of pre-defined categories such as best sellers, etc., at the click of a button.
In an exclusive chat with medianews4u, Anshuk K Aggarwal Co-Founder, AdYogi speaks to us on the growth of the company since its launch, their USP, their expansion plans, and focus in 2022.
It has been 7 years since AdYogi was launched, how has the journey been?
When we started the Adyogi journey back in 2014, we weren’t as hands-on about eCommerce or marketing. At the time, the “Direct-to-consumer” terminology hadn’t been coined yet and there definitely were no big VC funds chasing DTC brands around. Most retail brands were not as warm towards the idea of an online presence. They weren’t even considering building their own brand websites. And it was still early days for Shopify in India. So in that sense, we were very early to the party.
Amid all this, we were approached by a boutique store in Mumbai that wanted us to run Facebook ads for its online website. That’s all that was the start. And today when I look back, a lot has happened in these last 7 years and we are absolutely excited to have witnessed the evolution of this industry.
Today there are many platforms, what is AdYogi’s USP?
If you are the owner of an eCommerce company and are looking to get sales via platforms like Facebook and Google, you will soon realize that it’s more complicated than you might have thought. You will come across questions like – Which campaign to create – conversions or traffic? How to split the budget into top funnel and mid-funnel campaigns? Which ad format works best? How to track sales? Which interest groups to target? Which products to showcase in ads?
The AdYogi platform takes care of all this, and more, for you. All we expect you to bring to the table is your brand and product knowledge. The marketing and technology expertise is all built into the AdYogi platform, so our users needn’t have any prior marketing knowledge. We make it simple!And together we deliver the best ROAS (return on ad spend) and help any brand maximize its sales for any given ad budget.
With digital the go for brands, how are brands optimizing this to the fullest?
Over the last 2 years, there has been a lot of push to go Digital. This got further accelerated due to the Covid impact.
Recently, one of our largest brands touched 100 cr annual sales on their website alone. 2 years ago this number was not even close to 10 cr. So imagine scaling 10 times in a span of fewer than 2 years. This is the power of Digital. Over the next few years, I can see more than 50 brands crossing the 100 crore sale mark purely from their website alone.
AdYogi manages USD 30 million worth of ads and is the largest agency for Facebook, can you elaborate on this?
Currently, we work with 250+ direct-to-consumer brands globally. Nearly 80% of their total ad spends are on Facebook and Instagram. The balance of 20% goes to Google and YouTube.
In India, we roughly manage around 2-3% of Facebook’s overall ad spends. Given the scale, we are supported by Facebook’s agency program. This gives us access to Facebook’s latest features, technical support, customer care, etc.
How have you navigated the past two years?
The last 2 years have been a roller coaster ride. When the lockdown happened first in June there was a lot of uncertainty around whether eComm deliveries will be allowed or not. Plus there was some confusion around essential and non-essential. Wave 2 was slightly different in the sense that eCommerce logistics was not impacted at all.
Keeping these ups and downs aside, what really changed however were several offline players that were reluctant to go online, suddenly realized the importance of “online”. This, over time, made it easy for us to reach the decision-makers and also reduced the sales cycle significantly. Adding to that, we also witnessed several brands rapidly scale during the pandemic on the back of increased demand for online buying. (since malls and offline stores were shut at that time). So overall we saw heavy tailwinds in our industry. This also helped us grow more than 100% each year from 2020 onwards.
What are your expansion plans; will you be raising funds again for the expansion?
Of Late, we are seeing a lot of interest in selling direct-to-consumer. So in 2021 we rolled out a plan specifically targeting the new D2C startups called ‘AdYogi for Startups’. This is a more self-serve plan where we groom the founding team on how to use AdYogi platform to set up their Facebook & Google campaigns. Sort of like an accelerator. This has become popular among the startup community and we already work with 100+ founders directly for growing their D2C stores.
This is a highly scalable model and over the next 2 years, we plan to work with 1000+ DTC brands. We are also getting traction from brands in ME And SEA and that’s the natural next step for us. We may raise funds for our expansion plans in 2022. We are in initial discussions with some of the inbound interests we have got.
What would be AdYogi’s focus for 2022?
2021 was a wonderful year at Adyogi! We saw many clients climb up the ladder and reach over 60+ lakh sales in a single day (Nov) on their website. We also saw our biggest client reach the 100 Cr annual sale milestone and many others reaching for the same. In 2022, we plan to carry forward this trend and focus on building more such 100Cr success stories.
While we are on the topic of scale-up, driving sales from ad platforms like Facebook and Google is one of the key challenges for any DTC founder today.
To address this, AdYogi is launching a program specifically targeted towards DTC founders in 2022. In this, we plan to work with 100+ DTC founders over 2022 in training them on how to run performance ads. At the end of this 4-week crash course, founders will be fully equipped to run their performance ads in-house using the AdYogi platform by just investing an hour a day. The best part is, the program does not even expect any marketing knowledge to begin with! It is designed to be flexible and adaptable!
Where do you see yourself in the next 2 years?
In the next 2 years, we would like to work with 1000+ direct-to-consumer brands. We are looking to expand into the Middle East and Southeast Asian markets and open offices there. We will also be integrating TikTok and Snapchat into the AdYogi platform to help brands diversify from Facebook and Google.
In addition, we want to build a strong freelancer community to provide account management services on top of the AdYogi platform. Think of this as AdYogi certified agents working with brands to help them with performance marketing. This will reduce the dependence on assigning an Account manager from the AdYogi side and help us scale very rapidly. In terms of scale, we are looking to manage $200M of annual ad spends by 2023.
Top initiatives AdYogi will be taking in 2022?
In 2022, Adyogi looks forward to mobilizing the growth of the entire DTC industry with our Adyogi for Startups initiative. With this model, we allow eCommerce brands to leverage creative automation and targeting optimization for maximum ROAS and faster-than-ever scale up.
Another vertical that we are excited to accelerate is our Adyogi for Agency model – “collaboration over competence”. With this initiative, we plan to join hands with digital marketing agencies and offer them a more organized infrastructure for better revenue and client retention.
On top of that, we are also building our Partner referral directory which will pose as a 360-degree solution: bringing the DTC ecosystem together. This initiative is a game-changer for all our clients and would help them win at all fronts – be it funding, creative, store design, logistics, payments, or any other stage of their scale-up journey.
