Today, we sat down with Yogeeta Chainani, Co-founder of Swaarm to understand the current state of the martech market in India and how Swaarm leverages cutting-edge technologies like automation, data analytics, and AI to optimize marketing strategies for businesses.
Read the complete interview:
TechGraph: Swaarm has emerged as a prominent player in India’s martech market. Could you shed some light on the specific services or solutions the company offers to businesses/agencies operating in the A&M space, and how it differentiates itself from competitors? What sets Swaarm apart and makes it a preferred choice for Indian businesses?
Yogeeta Chainani: We aim to continuously develop solutions that simplify marketing professionals’ daily tasks. Marketers can now assess and analyze data in real-time faster than any other platform through one of our solutions, Explorer.
While Explorer makes all the critical insights for managing everyday advertising campaign operations easily accessible, through our Privacy Enabled Attribution (PEA Chain), marketers can track campaign and traffic sources along the entire advertising network chain in compliance with Apple’s privacy regulations.
The latest addition to our bouquet of offerings is the Advanced Privacy Suite (APS), the industry’s first complete solution that helps marketers, advertisers, Ad Networks, and Ad Agencies navigate the constantly changing privacy landscape.
Since our inception, we have gained the trust and confidence of our clients including Clearpier, AdsAndMore, and Apptrust among others, and their businesses all around the world. Our strength and competitive edge come from our ability to uphold our four basic principles- flexibility, ease of use, data reliability, and affordability, which are reflected in our offers.
Complementing the innovative tools and technology that help our clients grow their businesses, Swaarm offers the highest level of platform stability in the industry. It delivers exceptional customer support services of the highest caliber, right from personalized onboarding sessions through daily operations.
TechGraph: Considering the rapid growth of the martech industry in India, what opportunities and challenges do you see for Swaarm in this evolving market? How does the company plan to capitalize on these opportunities and address the associated challenges?
Yogeeta Chainani: With the growth of digital businesses, especially D2C brands, the mobile marketing ecosystem is growing astonishingly at a compounded annual growth rate of 45% to reach $1.9 billion (source: Prabhudas Lilladher). Indians will spend an average of 4.9 hours per day in 2022, making India the 8th country with the highest average mobile phone hours. By 2023, the share of mobile in digital ad spending is anticipated to be 78%, and it will continue to rise to 86% by 2027.
As a result of rapid changes in mobile and web marketing dynamics, many digital marketing agencies and networks are collaborating with businesses under immense pressure and have narrow profit margins. We envision marketers prioritizing and implementing automation so they can concentrate on tasks that add value while optimizing their resources.
By 2024, the marketing automation software market is poised to expand at 8.55% and reach a potential value of $6.4 billion by 2024 (source: Marketing Automation Market by Components-Software, Services). While more than 51% of businesses already use marketing automation, over 58% of companies intend to adopt it (source: EmailMonday).
Despite most businesses being stretched for margins, businesses must overcome critical barriers including getting C-level buy-in, budget allocation for automation, and employee upskilling to strengthen marketing automation adoption.
These enduring issues are not confined to the APAC region but are relatively acute given the significant advances and variety in the area. Marketers are also faced with challenges including the linguistic, cultural, economic, and technological variety in APAC.
Additionally, gaining C-level support along with a strong, coherent team effort between the key implementers including marketing, sales, customer service, and IT are prerequisites for implementing marketing automation. We have tripled our global team to strengthen our presence across geographies.
India is an important strategic market for us. Although we have struck a chord with boutique brands and agency partners in the country, we have barely started to scrape the surface of India’s massive mobile marketing ecosystem. With our innovative solutions, we will keep empowering marketers to navigate through daily and unforeseen market challenges.
TechGraph: India’s Martech landscape is quite diverse, with various local and global players vying for market share. In what ways does Swaarm collaborate or partner with other agencies/ companies to enhance its offerings and expand its reach within the Indian market?
Yogeeta Chainani: We closely work with our clients and build our solutions from the ground up using their inputs. All our solutions are developed with a focus on meeting customers’ needs whether it’s related to automating daily tasks or navigating privacy regulations introduced by the government or restrictions by mobile companies.
Additionally, we ensure that we keep innovating our platform and that our infrastructure is stable, smart, and reasonably priced. Increasing our team size will be a strategic move to stay on track with our growth roadmap. We are thrilled about the journey ahead of us as a company.
TechGraph: Data privacy and security have become critical concerns in the digital marketing space. How does Swaarm ensure customer data protection and maintain compliance with data privacy regulations in India? Are there any specific measures the company has implemented to address these concerns?
Yogeeta Chainani: Our latest addition – the APS solution enables marketers and advertisers to focus on creating meaningful, successful advertising campaigns by removing the complexity associated with privacy features introduced by Mobile and Desktop platforms recently.
With the APS solution users can evaluate their campaign performance metrics in every environment including iOS where IDFAs are uncommon, Android where the user agent is being deprecated, or on the web where third-party cookies are being phased out. It ensures campaigns are measured and monitored accurately while maintaining users’ privacy.
TechGraph: With the increasing demand for personalized and targeted marketing campaigns, how does Swaarm leverage automation, data analytics, and AI to help businesses optimize their marketing strategies?
Yogeeta Chainani: In light of the changing business ecosystem, including modifications to business models, operations, or consumer preferences, automation can aid marketing teams in accelerating, scaling out, and focusing on those important activities that will drive the business.
Building campaigns strategically involves selecting the right platforms, advertising formats, and optimization goals, focusing on the appropriate audience, and, of course, creating campaigns that appeal to the target audience. With real-time data analysis and analytics, businesses are using automation in performance marketing more than ever before to synchronize their offers and marketing campaigns.
Investing in AI-powered integration and automation, which enables marketers to integrate their apps and data and automate their processes and workflows, is swiftly becoming an essential step. Undoubtedly, automation is required to build and expand a high-performing marketing company.
TechGraph: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in India’s business landscape. How does Swaarm cater to SMEs’ unique needs and budget constraints, enabling them to leverage Martech solutions effectively?
Yogeeta Chainani: While our solutions are suitable for all businesses irrespective of their nature or size, SMEs can effectively leverage our martech solutions and newly launched privacy-enabled attribution tech.
From Apple’s deprecation of IDFA to the (still-evolving) Google Sandbox, privacy is a top priority for mobile marketing. The IDFA changes have impacted many companies, causing consolidation of companies across the mobile advertising landscape.
However, smaller businesses didn’t receive much assistance in navigating the new environment in the post-IDFA period. Hence, we came up with the industry’s first APS solution that enables privacy without sacrificing performance measurement and advertising functionality.
At the same time, we recommend automating whatever you can. It helps marketers free up to 40% of their working hours, allowing them to concentrate on tasks that are creative and add value, like relationship management and business development. This helps smaller teams create effective campaigns and ensures advertising budgets are spent wisely.
TechGraph: As the martech market in India continues to evolve, how does Swaarm envision its future growth and market positioning? Are there any plans for expansion into strategic verticals or geographies? Additionally, what investments is the company making in research and development to stay ahead of emerging trends and technologies?
Yogeeta Chainani: Setting up the background here, since our inception in October 2020, our journey has been incredible. Although we have our headquarters in Berlin (Germany), we have tripled our global workforce and strengthened our presence across geographies- Germany, Poland, Spain, Romania, India, Denmark, and Lithuania which enables us to offer services globally.
Innovation coupled with technology to meet our client’s needs is the foundation for developing any of our solutions. Having said so, we aim to continually disrupt the existing martech ecosystem by offering useful and sophisticated tech solutions. As a strategic move, we will keep increasing our efforts to expand our customer base, drive deeper penetration in existing, and enter new geographies.
TechGraph: Can you provide insights into the measurable impact Swaarm has had on its clients’ marketing efforts in terms of increased efficiency, ROI, or other key performance indicators? Are there any notable success stories that demonstrate the value delivered by the company’s solutions?
Yogeeta Chainani: No matter how big or small a company is, our solutions can help. One such name includes Spyke Media, a mobile marketing agency in need of a more reliable and innovative tracking platform switched to Swaarm. Spyke migrated to the Swaarm platform to use a more advanced automation suite and analytical features. As a result, Spyke Media enhanced its campaign profitability by 100% in the first quarter.
On the other hand, Ads and More, a mobile marketing agency based in London turned to Swaarm when it needed a performance-based tracking platform that provides trailblazing campaign management and sophisticated automation features as well as a powerful analytics tool to access critical insights to gain a competitive edge.
As it turned out, Ads And More increased their revenue by over 1000% in the first 3 months after the company launched. Since then Ads & More has had consistent month-over-month growth, swiftly becoming a major player in the industry.