September 25, Mumbai. The day has been a very long and tiring one as I was hoping from one meeting to another; ensuring each one of it is conducted successfully and had a productive outcome. Entrepreneurs, you might relate to this situation?
After finishing the last of my scheduled meeting, I headed straight towards my home. I live on the 5th floor. Typically, I take the stairs to make sure my cardio routine doesn’t get affected. But since, I had a very tiring day I decided to take the lift.
As I was waiting for the lift to reach the ground floor, I saw a peculiar person standing besides me. This peculiar, young boy was in athleisure clothing with a badminton racket in his hand. He had put on some rock music on his headphones and was grooving to the music. Little did I know that after 6 months, this young boy is going to become one of the most high-profile client for me.After an interval of 2 minutes, the lift arrived at the ground floor and both of us entered inside the lift. Both of us pressed the 5th floor button. I murmured inside my brain, “Oh, he lives on my floor. He must be living with the new neighbours who arrived last Saturday.”
The lift doors closed. As the lift was going up, I decided to have a small conversation with him. “ Hi, I am Arnav. You must be 503, right?”
As he heard me saying something, the young polite boy removed his headphones and spoke softly. He said, “Yes. We just arrived here last Saturday.” He further added, “I am Hridaan. Nice to meet you.”
As I pointed towards the badminton racket in his hand, I asked, “Is that the latest YONEX Arcsaber 11?” Hridaan firmly replied, “Yes. How do you know?” Well, I gave a smirk and told him that during my college days I used to play badminton a lot.The lift stopped. Both of our destinations were here. As I walked towards my home, I knew that something had clicked today.
After a few days, I bumped into the Hridaan again. This time I saw him playing a game of badminton with his friends. And my feet walked towards him. As I was watching them play, Hridaan invited me to play. After some hesitation, I decided to play with these young bunch of badminton players.
And as expected, Hridaan destroyed me. He won the match 21-5. But that was on the expected lines. After the match, Hridaan came and complimented me for my game sense. Although, I knew I was very bad, I felt appreciative of his calm demeanor and sportsman spirit.
He started talking about my technique and smashing ability. And gave me few tips on how to improve my game. As I was listening him speak, I got very curious as to what he does. And in the spurr of the moment, I asked him about his profession. He replied, “Currently I am in the 3rd year of my engineering. But I also have a side hustle called God of Sports, where I sell top-quality badminton products at an affordable rate to all the badminton enthusiasts.”
I was amused at the answer. Never in my wildest dreams had I imagine that a young boy of his age would be a self-made entrepreneur.
Hridaan further added, “This might sound bit odd, but by any chance, do you know any agency people who could help me scale up my business?”
And in my mind I was like, “What you’re seeking is right under your nose”. I excitedly replied, “Dude, you dont have to worry about this any more. My team at 12Grids will take care of everything.
”He didn’t seem convinced enough to hand me the mandate. So, I invited him for lunch on the weekend.
Over the course of next few days, I prepared a detailed plan of action to make God of Sports one of the biggest brands in the e-commerce business. From a seamless website to effective SEO strategy to social media, I ensured my plan of action covered every aspect of digital marketing.
And just like this, weekend arrived. Hridaan came to my apartment and we had a wonderful conversation over a delicious lunch. After a sumptuous lunch, we decided to have a small meeting on how to scale God of Sports.
I began explaining each point in detail. After a period of 40 minutes, my presentation ended. As soon as the presentation ended, Hridaan exclaimed only one word “WOW, when can we start?”
This was the answer I was hoping to get from Hridaan. I completed all the formality quickly and informed my team about the new project. The team was really excited to start work on God of Sports. Especially my Content Manager, who is a football fanatic, was especially happy to get a project that was close to his heart.
We started by revamping the website and launch an extraordinary and never-seen-before website design in the e-commerce industry. After thorough research and endless sleepless nights of brainstorming and discussions, we zeroed down on a WordPress-based theme that would suit the user's current needs. Our main motto was to make sure if any sports enthusiast lands on the website, he/she should get all the desired information related to his/her search on the webpage.
The release of the website marked the successful completion of Phase I. After the completion of Phase I, Hridaan witnessed a surge in the organic traffic and daily orders. He really appreciated the whole team for their relentless efforts. And was looking forward to the next phase to witness his dreams come into reality.
Phase II marked a distinct increase in business using SEO strategy and our social media powers to boost the brand's presence in the sports market.
For the Phase II, I decided to bring in the expertise of my SEO Manager to the fore. Typically, SEO and Quality Content go hand-in-hand. With God of Sports, the vision was to be the market leader in providing top-quality sports products and our users with valuable and SEO-friendly content on the major sports played in India.
This was a painstakingly time-consuming activity. The activity started by providing sports fanatics with a daily dose of trending news. This ensured that fresh content was updated daily on the website. Also, the activity gave the right signals to Google and ranked the content pieces on Google Search Engine Result Pages.
Now, coming to the second activity. The SEO team strategically selected a set of high-ranking keywords and decided to develop original content developed by the in-house team of content experts. The process helped God of Sports in ranking for the high-volume keywords related to the business and double the revenue for the brand.
In sports, a lot of content comprises demystifying strategies, tactics, and opinion pieces.
The team started with a campaign surrounding the 2023 FIFA World Cup. The sports content experts generated informative pieces on football that enthralled our audiences with detailed insights about the sport. The campaign managed to generate a niche among the football community with over 100K impressions in just over a month.
After winning the hearts of the football junta, the action moved towards Cricket, the biggest sport in India. The campaign was kick-started by the 2022 ICC T20 World Cup. The Content experts developed pieces that were loved by the cricket community. From opinion pieces about the T20 sensation Suryakumar Yadav to the best-playing XI of the T20 World Cup, every content piece performed exceptionally and helped carve a place in the cricketing circles.
The next campaign marked an entry into Women’s Cricket. With the commencement of the Women’s Premier League, the God of Sports team developed original and unique content pieces that deeply delved into the aspect of women’s cricket. The campaign proved to be a blockbuster success for God of Sports, garnering over 500K impressions in over three weeks.
These activities helped get a tremendous boost for God of Sports. Hridaan personally was very joyous and happy seeing all the organic growth. After the successful conclusion of both the Phases, Hridaan came to me and thanked for the awesome work the whole team has put together for God of Sports.
With the synchronised and continuous efforts, the 12Grids team managed to garner over 500% growth within the first 3 months of starting the activities in a full-fledged manner. Infact, Hridaan was so impressed and happy with our working style that he came on-board for our first-ever customer testimonial. Here’s a peek.
