Quikr To Unleash Marketing Blitzkrieg – To Also Launch Paid Options

Quikr, the Indian classified portal seems to be on a rollout after acquiring its recent series B funding of $4 million. The company just recently appointed Mr. Pranay Chulet as a CEO. Quikr was formerly known as kijiji.in but was rebranded to reposition its image into the online classified market.

Afaqs, citing company officials, reports that the company would soon be launching a marketing blitzkrieg to enter mainstream use in Indian market.The marketing campaign would utilize the Search and online display channels along with the heavy use of radio and print advertisement to create mass awareness about the portal.

Pranay Chulet, CEO, Quikr.com, told afaqs, “We will spend the majority of our advertising budget on Internet marketing, while spending a minuscule amount on print ads, which we will use tactically.”

The site is currently garnering around 1.16 Million unique visitors a month and pageviews equivalent to 11.8 Million a month whereas its major competitor Clickindia currently gets 2.8Million unique visitors a month.

Quikr currently offers services for 18 cities and is increasing the service net every few months. Despite its presence in many tier-ii cities major traffic seems to be flowing only from metro and urban towns.

Change in Marketing Mix?

The company is already spending huge amounts on online advertising. The boost of print and radio advertisements would certainly be felt as majority of traffic comes from cybercafés showing the affluence among middle and lower class. This offline marketing strategy may pay-off well for the company as majority of audience in urban towns has access to FM and newspapers.

The company at the same time should also focus on Social media channels by launching Facebook Apps with some innovation never seen before. The Addition of SMS feature on Classified leads could also generate significant jump in traffic as it happened in case of clickindia.

New revenue streams:

The company can do well even if focuses on major cities leaving aside the Pan-India plans. The use of online classified for tier-ii and tier-iii cities will still take a lot of time to turn into a sizable market. The company at the same time should also launch strict moderating features so as to maintain a premium positioning which could help it to garner print classified users to its fold.

The company is also understood to launch a paid option where in a user would be able to add-on highlight and other premium feature for its free classified Ads. Although the days of paid classified sections in India are far away as in case of Craigslist’s Job listings model for major cities. The companies can certainly hope that it can garner enough viewers to generate revenues even from Online advertising and even VC’s does not seem to complain as they are betting on increased Online classified activities among Indian Netizens in the years to come.