Brief Profile of Mr. Aditya Dhruva
Aditya Dhruva, the CEO of Factoreal is a thought leader with a stellar track record of business innovation, strategy, and running profitable businesses. He has done his entrepreneurship education from MIT and is a graduate in Electronics and Communications. He has authored 5 patents and in his past, he has held various leadership positions at Comviva, Cisco and Nokia. In a career spanning 22 years, has led several businesses and portfolios at Comviva Technologies, Cisco Systems and Nokia. Building on that experience, he and his team have put Factoreal firmly on the SaaS innovators map in a very small period of time, thriving on innovation, simplicity and team work.
Q. Give us an overview of Factoreal, its services, and what differentiates it from its competitors.
Aditya: We live in the age of digitally-first customer engagement. Factoreal, founded in 2019 as a global Customer Engagement SaaS Platform company, enables end-to-end marketing automation of customer journeys at scale across channels. The company is headquartered in Jacksonville, FL, and funded by Comviva Technologies (part of Tech Mahindra). The marketing automation industry needs a reset. Factoreal’s omnichannel customer engagement platform is a tool designed from scratch for marketers helping brands acquire and retain customers by seamlessly engaging with them on all digital touchpoints.
Our goal for Factoreal is simple – we wanted to create a platform that helps marketers consolidate their Martech stack, unify all their customer data and gain deep insights into their marketing performance and customers with built-in ML powered insights. Our all-in-one marketing automation platform can help brands increase digital engagement, drive mobile app usage, boost customer retention, and fast track marketing ROI.
Using Factoreal, marketers can rapidly execute their marketing campaigns across channels, automate end-to-end customer journeys easily, quickly build dynamic audience segments to target and deliver highly personalized interactions.
For businesses looking to automate multiple baseline marketing functions, this platform is an indispensable tool that can be accessed at an affordable pricing coupled with our best-in-class support. With many pre-built integrations, Factoreal really makes it convenient for anyone to benefit from full-scale omnichannel marketing automation. Helping every marketer be a PRO is our mission.
Q. What does your growth journey with Factoreal look like?
Aditya: Take a moment to think about the Martech choices available today. Either they are too expensive and complex, cumbersome and feature-rich, or affordable and ineffective. This makes good Martech tools difficult to find and operate. Martech TCO is a concern for most CMO’s across organisations, be it an SMB or an Enterprise. They are actively looking for ways to contain their costs, without sacrificing fidelity or performance.
At Factoreal, we want to answer one of the most important questions businesses struggle with today –
“How can we simplify our omnichannel customer engagement?”
We are motivated to help EVERY organization, be it big or small, to define, execute and automate their customer engagement journey with ease.
Our priority is to help marketers to automate their customer journeys across multiple channels whether it is Email, SMS Text, WhatsApp, Push notifications, Facebook, Instagram, or even ad campaigns. Our self-service tool can support and assist clients in creating winning campaigns in less than half the time they spend today on their existing toolsets. For us, simplicity remains at the core of everything we do–whether it’s deciding the product roadmap or hiring the right team members or just providing easy solutions to customer problems.
This core value proposition of the platform has hit home across industry sectors, and we have seen success across Sports, Retail & Ecommerce and beyond.
Q. How have B2C consumer engagements evolved in the Indian marketing context?
Aditya: Digitization is transforming the B2C sales space and creating new engagement workflows in the process. As businesses and customers increasingly embrace digital and virtual sales, companies are opting for cutting-edge communication technology, ushering in a new wave of marketing tools.
To top it off, organizations have realized the need to create personalized customer experiences. In fact, seasoned marketers are betting on marketing automation to satisfy the customers’ growing appetite for personalized messaging and of course, enhanced experience. The holy grail of customer engagement today is to meet the customer on the right channel, at the right time, with the right message.
Q. What are the key drivers of marketing automation platforms? How does it elevate a brands’ 360-degree marketing initiatives?
Aditya: As organizations are adopting digital technologies, several factors are driving the growth of marketing automation platforms. Firstly, the need to understand customer better than ever before. Secondly, use that understanding to personalize communication. Thirdly, being able to automate most repetitive tasks to improve efficiency. Next comes the need to be able to use analytics to evaluate marketing performance and drive a continuous improvement cycle. Last, but not least, marketers need the ability to do all of this in a simple, effective, and less-cluttered way.
Q. How are marketing automation companies helping brands define their USP and curate marketing strategies?
Aditya: Marketing is an ever-expanding field. Investing in technology infrastructure to automate complex processes may ease the stress of time-consuming and menial chores while helping marketers to gather, manage, and analyze the data generated. Furthermore, a thoughtfully-designed marketing plan not only builds business awareness but also drives sales and turns customers into advocates, thereby bringing out the uniqueness of the brand to the forefront.
Factoreal helps brands reinforce their USPs by defining the audience niche, create a consistent omnichannel experience across channels, and establish a rock-solid brand identity. It also helps marketers to define their brand by segmenting the target market, creating a brand identity, and finding potential customers through website tracking, personalized content, and social media management.
Q. How can brands leverage contextual and personalized campaigns to drive user engagements?
Aditya: In today’s digital economy, brands are battling for customer attention. There are no two ways about it. Brands are leveraging hyper-personalization, which combines behavioral data, browsing behavior, purchase data, and personal information to create a one-to-one communication campaign with each user, at scale. Imagine getting exposed to ads that don’t feel like ads. Wouldn’t that be great?
One facet of personalization that brands are attempting to master is predictive personalization, which involves better understanding customers and designing compelling ads that are highly contextual to each customer’s brand journey. This makes business and logical sense as contextually relevant messages boosts brand affinity.
As per a survey from Econsultancy, 80% of companies report seeing purchase uplift since implementing personalization
Brands need to go beyond cookie-cutter approaches and a ‘one-size-fits-all’ digital strategy to captivate their customers’ attention and drive conversions. Considering that the average digital consumer uses more than 3 devices, and generates large amounts of real-time behavioral data, brands need a ‘partner’ to unify all the customer data points and create a central repository for powering intelligent engagement campaigns.
Q. How are Factoreal’s marketing tools helping MSMEs and startups in India?
Aditya: Factoreal’s new-age marketing tools can help companies in numerous ways. For example, these tools can measure customer engagement and analyze metrics for improvisation, which may further help companies to formulate their marketing and data strategy.
MSMEs are the engines of growth for our economy. MSMEs contribute close to 30% of India’s GDP. Additionally, small businesses help to maintain the towns’ distinct personalities. But sadly, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced hardships in multiple areas of business, government, and everyday life. It has changed the way businesses function.
Given the exacerbating impact of the pandemic on businesses, usage of automation platforms such as Factoreal can help the MSMEs reach their target markets and customers in a cost-effective way. Three USPs work in our favor: One, our platform requires a small setup time of just a few minutes. Two, it demands an extremely low learning curve. Three, it comes with affordable pricing options to help companies get off the ground as cost-effectively as possible. We are focusing on advancing our vision to offer the best possible omnichannel experience for our customers.
Q. What are some of the biggest challenges in measuring the ROI of consumer engagements and how does Factoreal tackle it?
Aditya: Marketing ROI should be measured with metrics and KPIs. In today’s digitally-driven world, marketing needs to be data-driven, which is not an easy task. In fact, when it comes to ensuring data-centricity, only a small percentage of businesses get it right. Most marketers spend only about one-quarter of their time collecting, organizing, and analyzing marketing data, instead of spending time on producing and planning content and campaigns–a big mistake.
To understand customers and move towards a truly intelligent experience, brands should combine the information they receive from a variety of different touchpoints and use that data in marketing campaigns.
Basically, marketers need a new approach to leverage reliable person-level data and drive effective marketing. Factoreal delivers person-centric insights, derived from a single set of data, quickly and reliably to drive higher levels of marketing performance.
To drive competitive advantage in today’s crowded and fast-moving marketplace, there’s a greater need to allocate budget and strategically invest in each channel, matching each spot with the best publisher and placement.
Q. How are AI and machine learning driving the industry? What are the other trends we should look out for?
Aditya: AI and Machine Learning are undeniably recognized as intelligent technology solutions today. Brands are beginning to see AI-driven values such as increased operational efficiency and improved customer experience.
Our extensive work with AI and ML has helped us understand how AI can automate significant assignments and enable workers to concentrate on high-tier work. On the Machine Learning side, brands can use it to extricate new analytics, transform the decision-making process, and drive better business results. In my opinion, AI, Machine Learning, Marketing and Advertising technologies, Voice/Chat/Digital Assistants, and Mobile Tech and Apps will be the five dominant technologies that will have the greatest impact on the future of marketing and improve marketing ROI in the long term.
Q. What does the future of marketing automation in India look like?
Aditya: I believe that marketing automation is an integral part of the digital strategy for any business today, even in India. Adoption of marketing automation has steadily gaining momentum in India as well. With more and more consumers moving to digital-first engagements, businesses in India have no choice but to rapidly adopt strategies and tools that help them engage with their customers effectively on all digital channels. The marketing automation market in India is expected to be valued at more than USD 500 million in the next 3 years, according to some projections. With many Made In India platforms such as Factoreal, the availability of technology to help businesses in India ride the customer engagement wave is bright.
About Factoreal
Factoreal helps businesses start small and grow big, with the right tools and guidance at every step of the way and can make one a pro marketer. The main aim behind the concept is “To Help Every Marketer be a PRO“. It is built to deliver an all-in-one digital marketing automation platform that empower ecommerce business owners to build lifelong engagement with their customers, bringing together easy ecommerce integration, email marketing automation, social media marketing, paid marketing, customer journey automation, and personalization & segmentation into one simple, connected platform.
