What Snehil Gautam teaches about AI in marketing

My personal opinion is we are just a step behind that technological solution in VR which will kind of make it inexpensive, make it scalable. So for most consumers the house hunting journey starts on digital. How do you ensure that it also ends on digital in terms of conversion? So it's very critical for us especially because we have housing and Makaan as demand aggregators. So lots of consumers come to housing.com and Makaan.com to find their homes. And then we have a prop tiger which is an offline arm where transaction happens on the ground.

And we have brokers on payroll who do transactions on the ground and we earn commissions out of it. So it is the entire ecosystem. Entire ecosystem. So we are purely O2O model which is online to offline model. So it is very important for us to understand where the user is in his home buying journey. And so that you can pass on the baton to prop tiger or housing. So I think what we have done is we have created lots of content based on home buying journey. So there are different phases. Like there is a pre-discovery phase.

You start to think about buying home. So you will go and find what is super built up area, what is built up area. Then you have a discovery phase where you start to look at what localities I should be investing in. What price points. What price points. And then there is a shortlisting phase. Where you have shortlisted the locality and price and now you are thinking about. So then your offline thing comes into. Then you kind of do the offline. So what role has branded content played in your journey?

We have a good social media presence, digital presence in itself. And we levered a lot on that. On the branded content we have started to do it. Did you also do some integration in Lovepur? No, no we did not. We did not. So we did with you know one of the largest content makers in the country right now, TVF. We had done some branded integration there. With TVF. So you need to be very choosy about the content creators. Right. And then you map it out which ones really integrate with your product and you do it. If you want to target the younger audience.

Right. Then you would like to do lots of branded content. I will tell you one survey which we did. And we figured out that 40% of my core audience is light TV audience. Okay. Which means they are not on TV. So I think you will have to differentiate your audience. Right. If you have to look at the younger audience branded content does make sense because. Or maybe it makes sense. They consume lots of. Not as much for buying a house but for renting a house. Renting, PG, co-living you know. Anything.

I could name your competitors say something like Nest Away. Sure. Sure. Sure. So you know we want to get into all those spheres. Or OYO homes. OYO living has come out. Yeah. Has come out. So we don't want to get into property management and all. Right. It will be more of a discovery platform but. Rental discovery. Rental discovery. But in a much better way. So the product which you will see in next few months will have a much larger scope in terms of. Right. But as a technology platform I think housing has always been at the. Yeah. I agree. I agree.

Right. So again coming back to technology. The virtual reality experience in India is not say as popular as in western countries. So how are you kind of developing that. If you ask my opinion VR in general had lots of issues. Okay. If you remember five years back VR was a buzzword. Everyone was really optimistic about it. But it did not take off. Right. As it should have. So there are lots of issues with VR in general. But if you have to look at real estate there are use cases for VR. For example if you want to look at a flat under construction project.

Right. So VR is the solution. Right. If you are in Delhi and you want to see a flat in Bombay then VR is a solution. Right. So there are use cases. My personal opinion is we are just a step behind that technological solution in VR. Which will kind of make it inexpensive. Make it scalable. As we speak Japan would have already found it. Maybe. Never know. So what role does artificial intelligence and big data play in your scheme of things. Your targeting of consumers. Well for any digital platform I think it's inevitable. It's inevitable.

You know you need to use artificial intelligence. But in the stage it is. Correct. So you know we have a multi-million users who come to our platform. There are lots of data which gets generated. Artificial intelligence is part of our scheme starting from user acquisition to user recommendation to what listing to show to the users, emailers. You know we have what we have done is artificial intelligence is part of each and every vertical of our sphere of our ecosystem. Whether it's product, tech, marketing, even ops.

We try to figure out which photo we should put on the listing. So that the listing gets more user engagement. So it's a huge area for us. So how is your marketing strategy like? You have TV and then you have digital. Yeah. So we use all channels which are available right now because you know the pattern of usage of my core audience is changing very rapidly. As I mentioned you know 30, 35 to 40 percent of my user are light TV audience because they are not watching TV. They are watching Netflix, Amazon Prime. So I need to figure out now.

That's a challenge for my team and for myself. That how do we target these 40 people. We are doing you know normal digital channels like Facebook and Google etc. But there has to be a different way of targeting. Or local publishers. So we need to figure that out. So how do you unwind after work? So you know I like to meet people. So I like to meet people. I like to meet different genre of people. Right. As a marketeer it is very important because you kind of understand the human psyche better if you meet different set of people. So I like to socialize.

And other thing is I have a keen interest in dramatics. So you might see me on stage acting or directing.