Anupam Mittal didn’t need to tell people he was one of India’s leading matchmakers. After all, Shaadi.com has helped 3.2 million people find spouses. To conquer the marriage mindspace,  his company launched a digital campaign that celebrated love and life; and helped the website get 2.6 million new profiles in just one month. 

Shaadi.com has been matchmaking for the past 15 years. So, we decided earlier this year that we didn’t need to merely tell people what we do. Instead, we wanted to celebrate the institution of marriage and the beauty of love with everyone—not just our members.

Shaadi.com's digital campaign "Love, Arranged by Shaadi.com" helped the website get 2.6 million new profiles in just one month.

We roped in advertising agency JWT to help create a digital campaign for this. After weeks of brainstorming between their and our marketing team, we launched the campaign, “Love, Arranged by Shaadi.com” on May 17 this year. We continued this campaign through the highly-viewed 2013 Indian Premier League (IPL) matches, until the end of July, to reach maximum viewers. Our first commercial tells the story of a couple who found each other through Shaadi.com and captures their moment of expression of love. We also got bestselling author Chetan Bhagat to narrate their story. That was a great pull since Chetan is a big draw with young people. Instead of just airing the ad on television, we uploaded the ad on You Tube as well. The video went viral on internet. Our first commercial got 5,49,981 views online. In fact, in June 2013, it was the most watched video on YouTube. We launched the second TV ad on May 31 along the same lines—a real life story of a couple who met online, got married and found love. Again it was a hit on the internet as well with 2,86,083 times. 

To promote the campaign and engage with the fans directly, our social media team ran several Facebook and Twitter contests. We started a series of Facebook contests on May 15. The first contest was to guess the new member of our team, and build up excitement about Chetan Bhagat as our brand ambassador. We followed that up with two more contests—the first of which asked viewers about Bhagat’s message in the ad, and the second contest asked them about the jingle in the ad to which the boy dances. The purpose was to get more and more people to watch these commercials. We also leveraged social media to talk to people about relationships in general. It helped us engage with a much larger group. Again, we did this through two contests—the first asked viewers about attributes for better relationships; and MyShaadi.ComPartner contest where people told us about the qualities they look for in a partner. From these two Facebook contests, we got 3,293 replies and 48,145 “likes”. 

We posted the MyShaadi.ComPartner contest on Twitter too. We received 80,000 tweets. At one point, the contest was trending in India for more than 36 hours. It trended globally for six hours! The success of this campaign helped us realise the power of Twitter, especially to help us engage internationally. The entire campaign has significantly increased the profile uploads on our portal. According to the Internet Economy Watch data by IAMAI & IMRB, our profile uploads increased to 2.16 million in June from 0.64 million in April 2013. That is an increase of 237 per cent!