PromotedSpeechlessbyRoshanAbbas&SiddharthBanerjee

About the client

For many of us in India, Roshan Abbas needs no introduction. He's been a popular media personality — a beloved radio and television host through the 90s and 2000s. One of India's finest orators and storytellers, Roshan Abbas is an actor; TV & radio host; producer; creative director; film & theatre director; author; and public speaking coach.

Since the early 2000s, however, Roshan has become a leading entrepreneur and angel investor in the creative landscape. Roshan founded and led Encompass (now VMLY&R Commerce Encompass) as Managing Director into becoming India's largest, most awarded experiential marketing agency. He was also an initial investor in and continues to be a mentor-partner at The Glitch. Both ventures have been acquired by WPP.

First contact

After working with the Kommune team and selling out tickets for their event Mehfil, Kommune's co-founder Roshan Abbas approached us with two objectives:

1. 01Make his book Speechless — a 2018 Bloomsbury title co-written with Siddharth Banerjee, former Director at Facebook India — an Amazon bestseller. A result of five decades of collective experience, the book is a compilation of learnings, tips and tricks for anyone who wants to become a master of effective communication.
2. 02Generate leads for high-ticket corporate workshops on brand storytelling that Roshan conducts with some of India's biggest companies.

Strategy

Since it had already been a year since the book's release, we had to get creative in the way we marketed it. We wanted to establish Roshan's identity as a speaker, champion of performance arts and entrepreneur among audiences that were unfamiliar with his endeavours of the last two decades, beyond his radio & TV hosting days.

Our goal was to achieve the Bestseller spot on Amazon in as many categories as possible, and to generate leads for Roshan's corporate workshops.

The first step was to create a personal branding website for Roshan Abbas — a necessary exercise to position him in his current avatar and give us a platform to showcase his workshops. Since we did not have access to the Amazon page (the listing was handled by the publishing house), we also built a dedicated site for the book so we could track ad performance.

We then analysed the Amazon listing and created a checklist of recommendations for the Bloomsbury team to implement. Finally, we planned a two-phase social media ad campaign. Phase 1 identified the best-performing platforms and creative; Phase 2 doubled down on the winning content for maximum efficiency.

Results

Through our marketing efforts we ranked Speechless as a Bestseller on multiple Amazon categories, including a #1 rank in Business Communication.

Roshan's website

We wanted to establish Roshan as a performer and master communicator right at the outset. A montage video of him at events communicated this simply and effectively without resorting to too many words. As a public personality there are many sources online with their own impression of him — via a video we shot and edited, and a detailed write-up, we gave Roshan a platform to tell his own story. Both the book and his two workshops on Storytelling and Effective Communication were profiled on the site. As per due process, we created two design options for the client to choose from and went into development once he was happy with the designs and features.

Speechless website

This site was a necessary step to gauge ad performance. Without access to the Amazon page, we had no way to track user journey beyond ad click-throughs. This landing page let us track journeys longer and gave us a platform to collect data for retargeting ads. The focus was a simple site that gave anyone interested a glimpse of the book and more information about its two co-authors.

Amazon listing

Despite not having backend access, we did a thorough hygiene check and created a list of recommendations for the publishing team. One key recommendation was to target relevant categories — but also those that were not too crowded. This meant looking outside Amazon's auto-selected categories, which can be too competitive or irrelevant to how the author wanted the book marketed. We culled an exhaustive list of relevant categories that gave the title a better shot at bestseller lists, along with a keyword list for the publishing house to update on the backend.

Organic marketing

To make the most out of Siddharth and Roshan's social and professional networks, we planned an organic launch calendar for both websites.

Performance marketing

Creating marketable content. We picked fun tidbits from the book for Roshan and Siddharth to use as fodder for videos. We edited these into 15-second snippets used as Instagram Story Ads and Instream Skippable Ads on Facebook. We also created a 20-second showreel — a montage of TED Talks, interviews and speeches — to target cold audiences and establish Roshan as an authority on public speaking. Quotes from the book became static ads that gave audiences a glimpse of the content, while testimonial-based ads worked as retargeting tools.

Marketing & advertising. We segmented target audiences and built dedicated Facebook & Instagram ad funnels for each. Retargeting redirected users to other online Roshan content that would deepen interest. We built a database of audiences from Phase 1 — landing page visitors, form sign-ups, workshop attendees and more — and paired it with interest-based ads in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. In Phase 2 we capitalised on Phase 1 learnings and pushed the top-performing videos to newer audiences, extending the winning content onto LinkedIn and YouTube.