How Urban Ladder is Climbing Up with Facebook

About Urban Ladder:

Urban Ladder is Bangalore based, one of the best online furniture marketplace in India. This is started by Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa in July, 2012 in the competition with Pepperfry in January, 2012 and FabFurnish in March, 2012. Contrasting competitors which function as marketplaces, this Bangalore-based start-up owns processes end-to-end, it means they control the whole thing from selection of wood and designing the furniture to the delivery of the purchase.

Objective:

When Ashish Goel and Rajiv Srivatsa shifted to Bengaluru in 2010, they found that buying a high quality and designer furniture is really a tough job, so this idea came in their mind, a start-up, for a high quality home furnishing items, that makes easy to reach to people to their home furnishing needs. This is the way Urban Ladder came in the existence.

Marketing Plan:

Urban Ladder had not spent much on marketing initially, “We saw traction coming from strong word-of-mouth including social media promotion on Facebook and Twitter,” adds Srivatsa. Urban Ladder marketing budget apportions very little fund to Google AdWords, as founders trust of organic growth coupled with social media marketing and positive word-of-mouth

Urban Ladder had not spent much on marketing initially, “We saw traction coming from strong word-of-mouth including social media promotion on Facebook and Twitter,” adds Srivatsa. Urban Ladder marketing budget apportions very little fund to Google AdWords, as founders trust of organic growth coupled with social media marketing and positive word-of-mouth are sufficient for them. “We don’t do anything magical on social media networks; but being honest and transparent has helped us have loyal consumer base,” says Srivatsa. At the same time, Urban Ladder doesn’t run contests or give away freebies; instead of these, it focuses on consistent effort to fuel engagement on social networks. Contrasting other ecommerce companies, Urban Ladder mails newsletters only twice a week. “Visual effect become very imperative in our category and we always put effort to optimize that,” adds Srivatsa.

Starting problems:

In the very starting, Urban Ladder worked with PAN-India for logistic supply. But soon they realised to supply the goods by their own as the corner of large items got damaged when it was done by

In the very starting, Urban Ladder worked with PAN-India for logistic supply. But soon they realised to supply the goods by their own as the corner of large items got damaged when it was done by third party. Now they have their own warehouses, where packaging is done with at least five layers of foam to reduce damage during delivery.

In the starting, they tried to cover whole nation, but the problems of late delivery, poor customer service, and damaged products raised, so they targeted only for the 3 cities- Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai for 12 months. Now they deliver their products in 15 cities of India.

Facebook and Urban Ladder:

As mentioned above that Facebook is an integrated part of their marketing strategy. They claimed that 90% of their business coming from Facebook.

Currently their fan list is 5, 31,051 and increasing day by day. Initially they focused only on the organic growth by word-of- mouth on their Facebook business page without any contest and free gift vouchers. Now they have huge investor with them, Ratan Tata is one of them, they also go for Google Ads, different contests at Facebook and other social platform.

They made a short film “Homecoming” of 7 minutes, which touch to heart of every youth who all are living away from their parents due to their work life, but want to be with them. It is a good innovative content to engage user emotionally.

Their Facebook analysis can be view in below screenshot:

Conclusion:

This is the digital era, with an example of Urban Ladder, we can understand that any new start-up can be run efficiently without spending a big amount on marketing only. Use your money to build trust to your customer by giving them good quality product with excellent customer care service.

As good content is important to engage customers as Urban Ladder is doing so well.

Facebook is a very good platform for the marketing with huge audience, in cost effective manner. Just take care of your customers satisfaction on top priority and all will love you.

Image Credits: www.urbanladder.com, www.socialbakers.com.