Because the objective of starting the ‘Success Stories’ section is to cover inspirational stories from around the world, today we decided to cover the story of a young, dynamic and vibrant girl Swati Paliwal, who is a founder of CrescendoSPeak, India’s 1st influencer marketing platform.
An MBA Marketing and Operations from Symbiosis Centre of Management & Human Resource Development (SCMHRD), she possesses the corporate experience of working with companies like Flipkart, Idea cellular limited, Britannia and Zinnov management consulting.
Talking vis-à-vis to Swati, we were completely driven by her charm and enthusiasm. The amount of hard work and energy she puts into her work is astonishing. A marketing professional with over 6 years of experience, she takes life a journey of self-discovery working on what she loves (Digital Marketing) without counting the hours.
Her tech start-up offers social media campaigns a viral push by enabling the message sharing in bulk through one’s crowd network at the same time.
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The backbone of her success and resilience is no one else but her husband Mohit Gupta, who is also a co-founder of CrescendoSPeak. With a grin on her face, she reveals the inception of CrescendoSPeak came naturally to her husband as he is equally inclined towards innovative tech-driven ideas.
Besides her tech startup, she also manages her digital marketing consulting firm through which she has planned and executed digital marketing campaigns for e-commerce portals, hotels, boutiques, Silicon Valley startups, Kickstarter crowd funding campaigns among few other known names in the industry.
In order to learn more about this unique and one-of-its-kind tech start-up, we asked her a series of questions:
Can you elaborate more on Crescendo Speak to make it easier for our non-tech readers to understand what it is all about?
Social media platforms are like noisy stations where it’s easy to say something, but difficult to be heard. Our platform that gives you the power to get your message shared and heard by unlimited people at the same time. We help you build a crescendo for your campaign by connecting users on social media and on the pre-decided Peak day, all your supporters share your message with their friends and followers at the same time.
From where did this idea come?
I have been actively working as a digital marketing consultant and while running social media campaigns for companies; I realized that the organic reach of campaigns has decreased drastically. For any SME or start-up, it’s very difficult to get traction as the competition is very high in paid ad campaigns as well.
We usually get requests from friends to “share a post”, “like a post“ or “re-tweet content”. This is basically a standard way to leverage our connections and network of people to get organic reach on social media channels. What we take lightly is that our connections are basically influencers for their further connections and their support is a virtual endorsement.
This is an area where I saw an opportunity and thought why not make an official platform, which helps people to effectively use their existing crowd network to promote a cause/business/campaign. Hence the idea of CrescendoSPeak struck, and I started working on it with my partners.
Were there any challenges in the execution of your idea, especially being a woman entrepreneur?
There were times that I got raised eyebrows being a woman founder of a tech-driven product, but my knowledge about my field always managed to turn the shock into appreciation.
To be very frank, I was lucky in not having to face many challenges that were sexist in nature. But that can be attributed majorly to two factors that are, otherwise, the source of great difficulty for fellow women entrepreneurs. One being the support of my husband and family. I am truly blessed with brilliant support and encouragement from all my near ones (My husband and I share all family responsibility equally). Secondly, I believe mine being a tech product that deals with online marketing, it has lower strata of sexist narrow thinking.
Tell us about your most successful campaigns launched till date.
All our campaigns are equally important to us and we get involved in every campaign, helping the campaign runners to make it a success.
One of our most successful campaigns was an awareness drive done by doctors committee (FORDA) in Delhi in order to raise awareness on the 7th pay commission. Through just 500 supporters, they received a social reach of over 0.3Million people and drove over 10K organic hits to their website. Such is the power of our platform.
We even did a campaign for a political candidate J. The campaign ensured that his image and name were trending in his constituency just a day before the election on Facebook. (PS: He won too!!)
What is the vision of your start-up and are there any major accomplishments so far?
The main vision of CrescendoSPeak is that everyone, who uses social media to promote any content, uses CrescendoSPeak as part of their marketing strategy. All our efforts are built towards this vision.
Right now, we are taking one step at a time. We all know that the start-up industry is extremely dynamic. But in the next 3 years, we aim to make our product and deliverables strong and adapt as per the needs and requirements of the users, company, and industry.As the concept of CrescendoSPeak is new, it’s difficult to explain it the very 1
As the concept of CrescendoSPeak is new, it’s difficult to explain it the very 1st time, but we are blessed to receive positive feedback from all our campaign runners.
One of our major achievements is the strategic tie-ups and alliances we have done so far. We are the official outreach partners for some of the popular names in the Startup/SME industry and outside:
- Tipping Point event
- Ketto (Crowdfunding platform)
- Teach For India
- TIE Global Summit and TIE India Internet Day
- TEDx TughlaqRd (Ted Talks India)
- Josh Talks
- GEW (Global Entrepreneurship week)
- The India Network