What Aashish Chopra teaches about B2B marketing

My next guest is Ashish Chopra who is an award-winning viral video marketer. In 2018 alone, three of his videos clocked the highest ever engagement levels in India. Recently, he was credited as the content marketer of the year. Welcome Ashish. Ashish today will spill the secrets of creating super successful videos. His topic crafted by him is how to reach millions. How simple, right? Ashish Chopra team. How to reach millions on shoestring bhajachar? How can we reach millions? Now that video is everybody's

center of attention. I remember five years back, I made my first video which went viral. And that was like the happiest and the scariest time of my life. Happiest because I was in the video and people were recognizing me in the street. So I was in my orange tartan and on a black t-shirt going around. I didn't change clothes for two days because people were recognizing me on the street. And then it was also the scariest time of my life. Scariest because if the next video is not a hit, then I'm like a

Harry Bovej of internet marketing. One hit, one hit and I'm done. So I was really scared that, you know, like what, why did that video work? And that started my journey in obsessing about why did that video, you know, catch the fancy of the entire world at that time. And the last four and a half years have been obsessing about the fundamentals behind what really works and what doesn't work. Tireless experiments. There's no gyan, no philosophy, no brain farts about, oh, this should be done on video.

And I'm so glad I was having marketeer's orgasm sitting here. Everybody was talking about video, which was not happening last year, which was not happening the year before. The last year, the biggest trend in marketing was video. This year, the biggest trend in marketing is video. And next year is video in regional languages. And everybody is joining the party. When LinkedIn came on video, I'm like, you know, the parties has begun. Because B2B content was all the, this is Bob.

Bob needs a product. Bob uses our product. I'm like, to hell with Bob. Like everybody's, you know, opening up to the idea of video. But with that opportunity, then millions of people are consuming content on smartphones and they're moving away from TV and all the stats. There are some challenges which, you know, we work with, obsess about when creating content. But the challenge is there's so much chaos and the attention span is not there. Like you said, attention span of goal

which is eight to nine seconds. We work with the assumption that attention is three to six seconds. And then teens say six seconds, but we didn't hold their hand and take them on a journey. Because I was in a metro the other day and I was amazed. I go in the metro to sneak behind the people how they're consuming content. I'm like, now make a celebrity, Shahruh Khan video or make a video of 10,000 production content. The effort goes up like this. Right? Which was the moment of truth that, you know, that three to six seconds

and I just had this insight last week as well that it's not just about the first three to six seconds. The idea is to have engagement every six seconds because there's so much option. And with the challenges, the only thing which I focus on and obsess about is because the goal is that videos should reach millions, it should impact a million lives. Right? Is the operating word for viral is share worthy. If somebody shares that video, then that person gives you incremental reach. If the person shares

that video, you're entering into space of his friends and family and that's where his brand you want to be. A part of authentic conversations. What I'm most excited about finally is that Hindi is front and center. Regional language is a big trend next year and I'm really happy to experiment in regional language content. So yeah, thank you for having me. It's amazing. Wonderful. We'll take a question for Ashish. Yes. What are the kind of things you do just aside from base metrics, which all of us have access to,

to sort of immerse yourself and your teams more in the consumer context? See, one thing I've realized is that if we have consumer in B2C space, for example, right, you can't take decisions about consumer sitting in a boardroom. We have trains. I mean, there's number one trains app. We were creating a video for the trains app and so we figured out all the pain points a train user faces. I'm like, we can't discuss this in a boardroom. We made a list, googled it, had a 200 point obsessive micro moment list. But we took a train trip.

We went to Bareilly twice. Right? I'm like, okay, because we figured out the insights that, for example, when a person travels in trains and he has to go to the washroom, the chair is in the chair. You don't care about the chair. Those are tiny micro moments which you only have to walk in their shoes to actually realize. To me, the only thing is that obsessiveness about the customer experience. It's more about, you know, user's a bad thing and you'll figure out that, bro, what's the pain point?

Because as a product, you can solve one pain point of the user. Right? Great. But there are so many other pain points in the orbit which you can solve with content. And if you can creatively solve them, then, you know, like he'll be sharing with the peer groups and you'll be part of conversations. Because branding today is not about recall, recall, recall. It's about relevance. Who's talking about your story? So from chappal to video, share worthy is the key. Thank you so much. Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you.