18+ years of experience in strategy, marketing, product, business development, and P&L. Managed global growth marketing campaigns for 140+ countries and established a partner network for 70+ countries. Startup enthusiast with profitable exits from previous ventures. Travelled extensively for work and built a great network of like-minded individuals.
Triumph Since Inception: The Saga of Our Reputed Business
Text Mercato was among the first few players who implemented the gig model for anything content. Having played a pivotal role in a global content enterprise, the company’s founder Kiran Ramakrishna wanted to replicate the gig content model in India and be a part of the emerging startup community.
‘Text’ is anything related to the content, and ‘Mercato’ relates to market/marketing. So our business is all about delivering content that adds value to the marketing campaigns. But the question always remained – How do we cater to the growing and diverse demands of the customers? The content was/is at the core of any marketing activity. Every industry requirement is unique, and so is the client’s need. On the other hand, there was a vast pool of untapped workforce looking to work as freelancers, including those who had active jobs, stay-at-home women, students looking to learn and earn, or experts who wanted to monetize their skills beyond work. Text Mercato’s unique WFH-GIG model bridged the gap between clients and content creators. Text Mercato emerged as a unique gig model startup that addressed quality and scaleup challenges without investing heavily in the infra and payroll workforce.
Inspiring Business Ventures: Unravelling the Source of Entrepreneurial Inspiration
Here is why, what, and how Text Mercato went from ‘idea to action.’
Words have power, and creating content is interesting. But the challenge was aligning the creativity of freelancers with the sales and marketing goals of the organizations. Anyone can write ‘words’. But what was needed was to create structure and process to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time. More than anything, scaling the content delivery was essential to manage parameters like traffic, engagement, leads, and conversion goals of the businesses.
Content can make or break a brand. Creating positive awareness across marketing channels with the right mix of blogs, social media, email campaigns, etc., is essential for business success. Subject Matter Experts and advanced writers with the skills to convey the story in the language of the customer remain a challenge to conquer.
Conquering Challenges: Elevating Business Success!
Taking the first few steps is a real challenge, especially when exploring uncharted territory. Text Mercato’s startup journey is a mixed bag of challenges.
Onboarding the right quality of resources in a gig model was an arduous task, especially back when LinkedIn was just about picking momentum, and job portals were only for full-time opportunities. Next, it was essential to train the resource to cater to the client’s expectations.
We had to establish the right processes, from having customers spell out the expectations to breaking down content briefs, allocating the right resources as per experience + industry creating a QC process through the layer of in-house editors, and CSMs to manage the end-to-end process.
Content is subjective. Finding the right balance between expectations and deliveries and creating newer benchmarks will continue to be a challenge in the ever-evolving content industry. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to servicing content needs. Assuming that all writers can do any category of content is inaccurate. The skills required to create crisp website content vastly differ from those required to write an engaging long-form blog, a viral social media post, or a PR with high open rates.
Turnaround time is always crucial. Content has multiple genres, with each category having its quality check and timelines. Defining and meeting the timelines and expectations requires additional effort. Training the writers/editors for SEO and marketing goals is essential. Most customers propose their content strategy for SEO and expect the output relevant to their goals.
Efficient data management is everything. The exorbitant amount of data inflow and outflow is beyond the scope of manual capacity. Automation was tedious but required to bridge the gap and keep building it to cover the ever-expanding roadmap.
Key Professional Values and Qualities: Understanding the Client’s Perspective
A long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship is of utmost importance to us. We strive to be trusted partners for all things content and marketing for our clients. We ensure to stay connected with them throughout the content creation process – from ideating to going live, to understand their pain points and address them effectively. We design and align our processes with the content and marketing goals of our customers and work at every touchpoint to achieve them. Timely delivery is crucial in our line of business to reduce GTM, and we have been able to honor the same along with scale.
Keeping the client abreast with quantifiable metrics supported by data is a crucial link in our delivery process. Weekly, monthly, quarterly, and YOY analysis, CSAT scores, feedback calls, and performance metrics, are some of the processes that are reviewed by management irrespective of the client classification and business size – solopreneur, mid-market, or enterprise. Emphasis on a proactive approach, rather than a reactive approach, is built into the DNA of the organization across hierarchies, helping us work closely with our stakeholders, maintain relationships, and contribute to the growth journey – theirs and ours. Well-built products and investment into technology enable us to execute the processes flawlessly and efficiently and keep us upgraded with ever-evolving landscapes. Augmenting with AI is the Text Mercato DNA, we are constantly investing in understanding the changing landscapes of technology.
Unveiling Our Industry-Catering Brand’s Distinctive USPs!
At Text Mercato, we are all about improving experiences for the clients as well as the creator community. We do our best to draft a metric-driven content strategy that aligns with client goals. We aim to deliver high-performing digital content to drive ROI for businesses that have a measurable impact on enterprise performance. Sharing the right content increases customer engagement, customer acquisition, and retention goals. Content created by Subject Matter Experts from the industry offers quality, while access to 10,000+ creators with varied expertise levels offers scale. A 4-level QC process ensures that the content is error-free and factually correct. The gig model has further empowered us to launch language & translation, design, transcriptions, video, and audio services.
Words of Wisdom: Stepping into the Business World
It is essential to ensure that your passion turns into a business that pays you. You have to find the niche, focus on building services and business, and eventually move into products. Understand the target market, know your audience, and learn about their pain points. Build something along the lines of what the customer wants and not what you, as an entrepreneur, desire to build.
Build the company with the right founding team and network with industry-versed advisors. If you are looking at the investment route, bringing in the right investors will build the foundation for the future. Listen and learn from your customers and be ready to pivot your route as per customer needs.
You can still work while you are building the startup. You need to have a plan B in place to secure the investment of yourself and your investors. Don’t jump into the startup till you have done all your homework on the product market fit and ability to commercialize and scale your business.
Embracing Innovation: Envisioning Operations with Emerging Technologies
Technology will always evolve. If we don’t adapt it now, the competition will adopt and build something superior. At Text Mercato, we have a research team to understand technology development on a day-to-day basis. It’s essential to analyze its value proposition in our product, process, and people efficiency it can bring. Augmenting with the latest technology may be the simplest route that will help us to be closer to customers. We identify these technologies along with our product roadmap, customer expectations and feedback, market trends, and size, and then take the conscious call for adoption.
The product offering is catered to the needs of enterprises, SMEs, and Startups and is further augmented by SEO analysis and intelligence which plays a key role in the success of digital content. The years of learning from customers are now taking shape in the form of cutting-edge products.
