The parent company of Paytm is One97. The company’s founder is Vijay Shekhar Sharma, established in 2010 and headquartered at Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
In this case study, we will go through the Paytm marketing strategy, its marketing mix, marketing campaigns, competitors analysis, digital marketing analysis, and SWOT analysis.
Let’s begin by learning a little more about Paytm.
About Paytm
Paytm (short for “pay through mobile”) is an Indian multinational technology business headquartered in Noida that focuses on digital payment systems, e-commerce, and finance. Paytm is currently available in 11 Indian languages and offers online services such as mobile recharges, utility bill payments, travel, movie, and event bookings as well as in-store payments using the Paytm QR code at grocery stores, fruits and vegetable shops, restaurants, parking, tolls, pharmacies, and educational institutions. Paytm was valued at $10 billion in January 2018. More than 20 million retailers across India utilize the company’s QR code payment system to take payments directly into their bank accounts, according to the company. Advertisements and paid promotional content are also used by the company to earn cash.
Now that we know about Paytm. Let us now go through the company in detail by studying its marketing perspective.
Marketing Budget of Paytm
Marketing budget primarily means the money allocated to the marketing functions and how it is intended to spend. Paytm’s cloud revenue went down by 38%. In the covid-19 pandemic, the payments related to entertainment and travelling have been severely impacted. The lockdown hit them hard and the total revenue of the company declined about 10%. They went from Rs.3,540 Cr to 3,186 Cr in 2020-21. The spokesperson of Paytm said, “despite significant disruption in the business of our merchant partners due to the pandemic especially in the first half of the year, we have had minimal impact on revenues, due to the strong recovery in the second half of the year”. However, the company reduces the marketing cost by 62% from Rs 1.397 Cr/year to Rs 533 Cr/year.
Marketing Mix of Paytm
A marketing mix can be defined as a model that an organization uses to increase the interest in the products\\services and image of a particular company.
4 P’s play the major components which are product, place, price, and promotion. Let’s go to the marketing mix strategy.
1. Product Mix of Paytm
Paytm is the acronym for pay through mobile. it offers various products and services in its marketing mix for example e-wallets, online shopping, latest news, vaccine slot updates, investment opportunities, and many more. Any customer can access the portal on their computers as well as mobile apps for making a specific payment. For instance payment of mobile recharge, bills, shopping, etc. Instead of using a debit card or credit card Paytm enables a user to make payments feasibly without them. Paytm also offers a facility of Paytm Bank from which a person can transfer money directly from his\\her bank account to someone else’s bank account for this he/she must give access to their saving bank account.
2. Price Mix of Paytm
Paytm serves as a medium for the customers to make the payments for the other services which they are availing for this Paytm is entirely free to use.
Paytm has received huge Investments like funding of 575 million dollars from China’s leading business group Alibaba, an Indian business tycoon who had invested in Paytm as a personal investment in the brand. These use services enable Paytm to get new customers on a broad basis and give them free services they also simultaneously give discounts and offers to promote their online shopping E-Commerce portal.
3. Place and distribution Mix of Paytm
Paytm is accessible everywhere through a smartphone or on a laptop having a proper internet connection just like any other app or website. Paytm is available throughout the country to provide payments and shopping feasibility. It is widely accepted as a mode of payment across various industries sectors and geographies. Offline merchants and several restaurants, grocery stores, supermarkets hotels, and many more places are accepting Paytm as a part of the payment. It is headquartered in Noida India but the feature of booking rail, plane, buses, has extensively provided reach to a greater market. Also now Paytm has launched services in Canada and Japan.
3. Promotion Mix of Paytm
Catchy phrases of Paytm as “Paytm Karo” have enabled Paytm to become a household name.
Multiple ad campaigns of Paytm are displayed on TV commercials, ad banners, billboards, print media such as newspapers, magazines, etc. The tremendous visibility of Paytm is not just because of these ad campaigns but also the fact that Paytm is highly involved in the sponsorship of various events, competitions, and many more. After the digital India campaign retailers are putting Paytm accepted banners which are providing strong visibility to the company. To gain global recognition Paytm sponsored and become a partner of the Indian cricket team.
Competitors Analysis of Paytm
The top 3 competitors of Paytm are-
1. Mobikwik
It was founded in the year 2009 by Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku, they commenced their operations as a mobile wallet to make digital payments convenient to their users.
The platform also enables peer-to-peer payment by unified payment interface, over the years they have served over 101 million registered users and more than 3 million e-commerce, physical retail, and biller partners.
2. Phonepe
In 2021, Phonepe achieved the milestone of 250 million registered users.
They have been awarded in the best mobile payment product/service category and the technology category at IAMAI India digital awards.
The Phonepe interface goes live across 10 lakh stores in 300 cities. By this, they became India’s fastest-growing insure-tech distributor.
3. FreeCharge
Freecharge was launched in September 2015 they came up with their wallet to pay across all platforms plus offline stores like shoppers Stop, McDonald’s, home stop, crosswords, Hypercity, and even for some e-rickshaws now the list is growing day by day.
The claim is to provide an easy and instant recharging process with a hassle-free online experience.
They also provide a safe and secure payment process with the best discounts available in the market.
Marketing Strategy of Paytm
In simple words, a marketing strategy refers to a business’s overall game plan for reaching prospective consumers and turning them into customers of their products and services.
1. Cashless transactions schemes
In 2016, they came up with an innovative initiative of “each one, teach one”. Paytm announced a scholarship of rupees 2100 for 10,000 users who will help them to increase digital inclusion and the practice of adaptation to Paytm. The scheme, “Scan any QR to pay using Paytm” was launched in 7 languages which were Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.
2. Sponsorship of events by Paytm
As we said the earlier company is highly involved in sponsorship they target a variety of events, tournaments, etc these events give them immense exposure. Paytm is also the official sponsor and supporter of India’s cricket team providing them worldwide publicity.
3. Promotion and advertising strategies of Paytm
The company’s online marketing and traditional marketing approach are centred on bringing visibility anywhere by sharing their advert on Facebook and Twitter or even subsidized posts on Instagram and in instances even Snapchat.
In an offline communication network, they probably use newspapers, transit media, and television.
4. Fast and efficient
Paytm Plays amazingly well with their words, as soon as the news of demonetization was conveyed to the country. They came up with a tweet; Paytm Karo. It was a splendid example of a brand putting up an example of relevant and moment communication. They gained amazing response as it was simple and user-friendly.
5. Their product, their hero
They often post the screenshot of their interface on social media platforms, this practice makes the user feel that it’s trustworthy and worth acknowledging. They Make their post in such a manner that their post becomes the hero of their advertisement.
Marketing campaigns of Paytm
1. Facebook Live!
Data Protection is a primary concern for everyone with the evolution of digitalization, hackers are growing as well. Making the people understand that their account is safe and secure was a big challenge for PayTM as well. So they came up with an interesting approach where they went live to their Facebook and explain the Process and measures towards their security.
2. Soldier mobile game
This turned out to be the perfect campaign for game lovers. Users were able to download the soldier game from the Paytm app. In this game, the Spartan Paytm soldiers were fighting against an army of frauds. The message which Paytm conveyed from this Campaign was how to make people aware of how Paytm protects its account.
3. The automatic start of the month message
At the start of the month Paytm initiated to send a reminder for the payments to other people by saying it can be easily done and stress freely achieved by using Paytm digital wallet.
4. Mumbai Dabbawallas
They collaborated with the Mumbai dabbawalas and requested them to please use Paytm cash as an exchange of money.
5. MBA Contest
Organizing such contests where the general public takes part often gets successful. In this campaign, a team of 4 was asked to create a video about how Paytm can be used, and the video that would get maximum likes would win.
This went viral and gave much more user retention to Paytm but this was Priorly for first-year MBA students only.
Paytm’s Digital Presence
Paytm takes digital presence as a priority they are highly active on each of the social media platforms.
They understand valuably that where their target audience is present.
They frame their content as per focusing on youth attraction, the meme marketing is extraordinarily amazing.
1. Facebook
Having around 30 lakh plus likes on their Facebook handle they generally post the same content for Instagram as well. Also share creative videos to enhance the use of Paytm daily.
2. Instagram
They have a huge follower base on Instagram with several 4 million followers.
They post creative memes based on the present trends and giving it a slight wordplay to add a flavour of humour. Also by posting Reels to persuade people for booking vaccinations slots.
3. Linkedin
Having the popularity of 7 lakh followers on LinkedIn they focus to create a sense of responsibility among their audience. Also playing the role of a change maker.
4. YouTube
Undoubtedly, their Advt campaigns are the best in spreading awareness among society towards digital payment. They post their advertisement on YouTube and have a great subscriber base of 316K.
SWOT Analysis of Paytm
We must understand the internal and external factors of a company it helps us in gauging its current status, along with providing valuable insights for its future position and this is achieved by SWOT analysis.
1. Strengths of Paytm
- Collaboration with merchants – Paytm is currently attached to more than 3 million merchants across India and the number is still growing.
- Multiple services- Everything which we wish for can be easily done on the Paytm app.
- Offers- Paytm is capable to grab and hold the attention of customers because of the never-ending offer stream.
2. Weaknesses of Paytm
- Lack of awareness among users- in India people still fear making an enormous transaction online which is making things worse.
- Need for its development- still remote and rural areas cant access Paytm.The overloaded site and slow servers.
- Poor customer service- it happens sometimes when people face very minor issues but when they contact the customer services of Paytm they get complaints like rude behaviour and are unable to handle many of the queries.
3. Opportunities of Paytm
- Growing demand- Today many corporates are adapting to the practice of online payment this has increased the role of digital payment platforms to a great extent.
- Demonetisation- one of the services that benefited heavily from the Indian government demonetization drive was online payment services and Paytm was one of the biggest beneficiaries.
- Online shopping- with the exponential growth in online shopping, people are more adapted to online payment platforms.
4. Threats of Paytm
- Competition – with the increasing number of entries, the competition is growing aggressively. Nowadays payment platforms like MobiKwik, freecharge, and many others are expanding their businesses Plus Airtel and Vodafone are also providing online payment gateways.
- Connectivity issue- most of the rural areas are still under the problem of connectivity.
- Safety concern- with the news of online digital scams the concern about one’s data safety is very common, people still fear to transact a great amount online.
Conclusion
By this blog, we tried our best to cover every aspect of Paytm in terms of marketing. We are pretty sure that now you have developed a better idea about the marketing strategies. Paytm has convinced most Indians to rely on the use of digital transactions. In the first 10 years of their journey, they were just a wallet and a bank and they have a vision that in the coming 10 years they plan to be a great financial services company.
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