Introducing, Educating & Establishing Debt Management Solutions in India with SingleDebt
Industry: Fintech
Company Background:
SingleDebt, a pioneering Debt Solutions Company with extensive experience in the debt management industry for over 40 years in the UK, emerged in 2018 as the first of its kind in India. With a mission to assist individuals grappling with personal debts such as credit cards and personal loans, SingleDebt aimed to establish a robust digital presence to reach its target audience effectively & educate them about the category & their rights. SingleDebt saw the growing debt problem in India with no means of helping individuals who were falling into debt traps and spiraling out of control. With an immense population, SingleDebt saw the opportunity to provide their services in India and ease the burden of debt to those that could not manage.
Project Overview:
Par Marketing was entrusted with the task of elevating SingleDebt’s digital footprint. Based on our experience and research of the Indian consumer and macro-economics trends, Par Marketing built the brand’s awareness to the far reaches of India via laser targeted strategy, Social Media, SEO, Content Marketing, PR and paid campaigns.
The project encompassed several crucial aspects:
- Category education by highlighting the criticality of the consumer need including search engines to educate the masses of the growing debt problems in India
- Building brand awareness and trust particularly given the nature and sensitivity of the service.
- Lead generation through paid advertising on social media platforms
- Development of an optimized website integrated with Zoho CRM, Dialer, and other APIs such as WhatsApp.
- Creation of customer portals and mobile apps for enhanced accessibility.
Challenges:
The main challenge for this project was the sheer resistance SingleDebt faced from customers as well as financial institutions when setting up the processes. Unlike Debt Management in the UK or US, there were many more layers involved to get a debt management plan set up for a customer. The main differences were that in India, customers are faced with illegal harassment from banks and recovery agents when they attempted to recover outstanding dues which SingleDebt was not prepared for. Overtime, SingleDebt established a legal arm and opened a law firm called Lion Law which helped in fighting against the illegal activities done by the banks and recovery agents. Alongside this, another department was set up called Paralegal that exclusively dealt with shielding the customers from recovery agents and banks. Par Marketing introduced a ‘Call Forwarding’ service of multiple harassing calls by the recovery agents to the customer directly to the paralegal department.
The next challenge we faced was generating the right type of customer through paid advertising. The main hurdle we faced here was the people of India may keep their debt problems to themselves and were not willing to open up to the fact they had a problem that they could not resolve. In some cases, the service was too good to be true. Getting people to respond to ads about their debts became a challenge. Google had then restricted our ad account due to the nature of SingleDebts business. According to Google’s regulations, advertising for debts or personal financial issues was prohibited.
The integration of the SingleDebt website to Zoho CRM also became an issue from a development aspect. Mapping of fields and customer data integration proved challenging due to the bespoke Zoho language and the complexity of the SingleDebt processes.
Strategy and Results:
Being the first and only service of its kind in India, over time the SingleDebt brand has become nationally recognised. This is solely due to the digital marketing techniques such as SEO, PR, Paid advertising, development, content marketing and the social media activity implemented.
SEO:
The SEO techniques have enabled us to optimize the keywords that are most frequently used and searched for on search engines by consumers dealing with daily stress and confusion related to managing debts, financial instability or knowing their legal rights against creditors. These keywords have been strategically placed throughout the website and the social media platforms and also many blogs related to the keywords have been written. The blogs and articles have been optimized and posted on relevant websites resulting in an average 11.84% MoM growth in organic traffic, 43.90% MoM growth in direct traffic and activity within the SingleDebt website with improvements to ranking keywords resulting in a 50% ranking result MoM.
PR:
The PR activities have helped propel the brand further into the FinTech & Startup sector by producing compelling content and articles based on the founder, the goals and future scope of the debt industry in India. Getting regular articles published in major broadsheets such as The Times of India, Economic Times, Business Today, CXO Today, Zee Business and many more including local and national publications. These publications have also led SingleDebt to win the SOS Nitelife Excellence Awards in 2023.
Performance Marketing:
Brand awareness campaigns have pushed the SingleDebt brand to a target specific audience that has opened the services to customers who had no access to financial help.
Lead generation and conversion campaigns have evolved over time as we learnt which audience was most responsive, which type of ad creatives worked best for these audiences, the ad titles, descriptions & primary text and the topic of conversation. Rather than talk about debts, we offered the customer-centric benefit of protection against harassment (as harassment would only exist if you were in debt). This proved to be a major breakthrough in generating the right type of customer for SingleDebt and producing them in large volumes. Over the past 5 years, we have managed to reduce the CPL by 70% which has remained steady for the past 2 years. Monthly quality leads (number of prospects passing the eligibility criteria out of the total leads generated) saw an avg monthly increase of 24%.
Development:
The development and integration of the website data into the Zoho CRM also married up after meticulous testing and development processes implemented. Alongside this, we integrated WhatsApp and a ChatBot onto the website with an automated chat flow. This chat flow would indirectly generate a lead and also filter out any lead that did not fit the criteria and only put through customers SingleDebt could help.
WIth a seamless flow now in progress, the development team of Par Marketing developed a customer portal and a mobile app where the customers can view their accounts, check the status with their creditors, make a payment, raise any legal tickets and many more features that make things simpler for the customer and providing a clear, efficient customer service and experience. This is reflected in the growing number of reviews on platforms such as Google Reviews and Trust Pilot that have had a sharp increase in positive reviews (Google Reviews has 4.7/5 rating from 2,371 reviews and Trust Pilot, started in Feb’24, has a 4.6/5 rating from 251 reviews already).
Social Media Marketing:
Organically, the social media activities including a financial education program with institutes have grown the followers and engagement across SingleDebts social channels by making consumer-debt and related harassment a mainstream conversation. Content interactions have increased and continue to grow in followers with an average growth of 68% annually. We have increased the organic leads generated by 476.07%, a 44.87% increase in Instagram & Facebook followers and 8.53% increase in web traffic all within the past year.
