A

Project on

“Marketing Plan for New Service”

In partial fulfilment's of Banking & Insurance Management subject

For

IMBA Programme, Faculty of Management, GLS University

Submitted By:

Mahi Acharaya 201800510010121

Ashish Gadariya 201800510010140

Ronak Maloo 201800510010151

Kruti Malvi 201800510010152

Abhijeet Mandal 201800510010153

Prishita Sinhara 201800510010169

Submitted To:

Dr. Apeksha Chanpaneri

Class : T2
Submitted Date: 30th January,2021

Page 1

 Company Overview
Inshorts

Introduction :-
• Inshorts is a Noida-based company that provides a content discovery app for Android and
iOS. It aggregates news and other content such as videos, infographics, and blogs and
summarises them in 60 words or less. As of April 2019 its app had received more than 10
million downloads.
• Brief-In 2013, three IIT students, Deepit Purkayastha, Azhar Iqubal and Anunay Pandey,
launched an application called Inshorts, a pioneer in short form content.
Today, Inshorts is India's highest-rated news application with more than 15 million
downloads both on Android and IOS.

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History of Inshorts :-
• Inshorts was founded by Azhar Iqubal, Deepit Purkayastha, and Anunay Arunav, all three
of whom were dropouts from the Indian Institutes of Technology. Originally called News In
Shorts, the company later rebranded itself as Inshorts. It was launched as a Facebook page
in 2013 before being shortlisted as one of Nasscom's 10,000 Startups. It was incubated at
TLabs and in 2014 raised funding from Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, co-founders of
Flipkart. Additional early investors include Ankush Nijhawan, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Manish
Dhingra, and Times Internet.
• The company launched its app on Android first in 2014, following up with iOS in 2015.
Later in 2015, Inshorts moved into the vernacular mobile market by launching a Hindi
interface of the app. Inshorts rebranded from its founding name, News In Shorts. Part of the
rebranding also included expanding the content beyond news aggregation, adding videos,
infographics, and blogs. In October 2015, it acquired Beta-glide, a fellow TLabs incubated
business. Beta-glide is the creator of Retention.ai which tracks the uninstall of apps to help
with customer retention, the technology for which it was incorporated into Inshorts.
• In 2016, the app collaborated with over 30 content publishers and 5 e-commerce players to
scale up its platform. In 2016, Inshorts won the IAMAI (Internet And Mobile Association
of India) ‘Best Innovative Mobile App of the year’ award. The company generates revenue
from the advertisement banners in the form of short videos, or pictures. The first ad on its
app was published in July 2016. The company became operationally profitable in
November 2017, garnering a net revenue run rate of Rs 25 crore.

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 Chapter 1
Business Analysis and Development
Customer needs/problem Recognition :-
The trio had observed that the youth in India was increasingly getting disconnected with the
idea of reading news every day. Being youngsters, they could relate and understood that the
long-form nature of news items made it difficult for most youth to keep up with all the latest
national and global happenings. So the Inshorts tells you the what in 60 words. The brief
length of content with a link to the original story.

Details :-
Inshorts is free for end consumers and monetises through B2B channels through advertising.
Azhar noted that brands typically sign up for ads and sponsored content together through
annual contracts, and pay on the basis of impressions (views) and engagements (likes and
shares). Currently, Inshorts is working with almost 100 advertisers and claims to be adding
around 10 new advertisers every month. Their client list includes brands like Vodafone,
Oneplus, Mercedes, and Myntra. The platform provides non-intrusive ad formats that fall
under three main categories:

• 60-word format :- Advertisers can share their ads to Inshorts reader base in 60 words
along with an embedded picture or video. All of Inshorts editorial stories follow a similar
format, so this ad has a “native advertising” feel to it. The ads though are listed as
“Powered by” along with the advertiser’s name.

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 • Designer cards :- A full screen ad experience, advertisers can use this format to share
images, gifs or videos etc with the audience.

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 • Banner cards :- These are the ads which show up above or below the news article on the
platform. Inshorts notes that these are generally used for launches as they guarantee a lot
of visibility.

Point of differentiation :-
Inshorts news are more precisely or as you can say, accurately is targeted to that mass of the
society who are none viewers of the daily news and also do not have enough time to go
through the long news articles in this fast-paced life and work pressure. Unlike the other news
apps, Inshorts aims at keeping these people informed globally with its short, crisp, and to-the-
point news. It aggregates news from the most preferred and renowned news sites and presents
it in just 60 words.

Demographic :-
Inshorts is for the people who have a time crunch and would like to read news in short. The
major followers of the app fall in the age group of 18-40 years. The gender ratio of the app is
60:40, which is 60 males and 40 females.

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Objective of the business :-

• The main objective of in-shorts is as in our fast moving life we don't have much time to
read news and so in-shorts is providing news in just 60 words.

Chapter 2
Marketing Mix tools

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 1. Product :-

• The service product provided by Inshorts Application is the e-news. The brief news is
provided in 60 words summary by Inshorts application.

• The content provided by this application is very crisp and clear. It also have different
language option so the non-English speaking people can use it.

• They also provide customised news for customers own preference. This application
also have a feature called insight, which is very informative.

• This app is very useful to have quick glance at news headlines at any movement of the
day.

• Introducing SEARCH for easier access to information. Search lets customers find
any short, recent or old, by simply typing in a keyword in the search box

• News Reader – Read Summaries of All Breaking News.

• My Feed – A feed of latest stories, videos and other content personalised for its
customers. Inshorts intelligently learns preferences of their customers as they swipe,
and displays stories personalised for their customers in ‘My Feed’

• Share the most important stories in one touch.

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 Price:

• This application is providing instant news for free of cost.

Place:

• This application is available on google play store. As it is available online so it is easy

to access at anywhere at any point of time.

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 Promotion :

• They are doing promotion on social media platform by publishing their

advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• They are also have their presence on social media by having page on Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

• InShorts pioneered the concept of short-form branded content on its app, which is the
driving wheel for its growth and profitability.

• The platform currently has non-intrusive ads, broadly divided into 6 categories out of
which “60 words branded story” is the most preferred one.

• The company regularly collaborates with brands such as Uber, Airtel and Netflix for
advertising. The nature of the advertisement is non-invasive, skippable and appears
exactly how a story card would, and has a native advertising feel to it.

• Brands are shifting towards more sophisticated forms of marketing, rather than
pushing the products onto the consumer, they are now more focused on
communicating values, building trust and customer loyalty through content and brand
marketing. An effective content marketing strategy helps immensely with awareness
of brands and key messaging and also with customer acquisition which is highly
measurable.

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 • The campaigns on Inshorts are designed to help the brands connect with their
audience through innovative and engaging ad formats like Motion stories, Vertical
videos and digital magazine. And since millennials like to share interesting and
relatable content among their peers on social media, the brands have seen fantastic
results in the past.

• The company did tie ups with popular brands like Zomato and Amazon to push their
content. For example Zomato campaign, it just said a South Delhi establishment was
the most popular restaurant in NCR.

• Traffic Generation: Inshorts have an agreement with a few media houses where
Inshorts send traffic to them. So, for every click to the website Inshorts is given a
commission.

People:

• Inshorts has 5 current team members, including Co-Founder and Director Anunay
Pandey.

• They are devoting special care in motivating their service employee so they can do
their work effectively and efficiently.

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Physical Environment:

• They have their physical presence in Noida, Uttar Pradesh.

• Their office is designed to reflect Inshorts’s organisational ethos. Their office

represents their work philosophy, the open layout represents their openness in culture
wherein everyone is welcome to contribute ideas and views across the board. There
are no dedicated seats as there are no rigidly defined roles.

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 Process:

• Inshorts uses 4 technology products and services including Google

Analytics, jQuery, and Google Fonts.

• Inshorts is actively using 36 technologies for its website, according to BuiltWith.

These include Viewport Meta, iPhone / Mobile Compatible, and SPF.

• Inshorts is striking a balance between AI and editorial inputs. An AI-backed algorithm

called Rapid60 automatically condenses a news article into a 60-word brief. The
algorithm is born out of analysing a database of more than half a million articles
summarised by Inshorts editors during a five-year period and can summarise more
than 100K articles per month.

The Flower of Service

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 Information:
• Inshorts is a news app that selects latest and best news from multiple national and
international sources and summarises them to present in a short and crisp 60 words or less
format, personalised for you, in both, English or Hindi. All summarised stories contain only
headlines and facts, no opinions, to help you stay informed of the current affairs. Whether
it’s the latest government policies or shakeups in Bollywood.

• They are also have their presence on social media by having page on Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn and Instagram. So if the customers wants to be in touch with them, they can
easily contact them.

• The customers can contact the Inshort through websites

- Support: contact@inshorts.com

- http://www.inshorts.com/android/tnc

Consultation:
• They have added a layer of personalisation to our content using Artificial Intelligence and
Machine Learning. Their` intuitive content recommendation engine learns from the user
preferences and behaviour and accordingly provides a personalised array of shorts in the
‘My Feed’ section of the user. Along with AI, they are fulfilling the growing demands of an
entitled consumer to deliver a deeper level of intuitive personalisation.

• Inshorts uses this personalisation engine to target advertisements. Analysing the

behavioural pattern of readers and looking at the previous history of the type of content
consumed by them, Inshorts serves relevant ads to its users.

• Payment:
As this service product is provided free of cost so, there is no need for payments.

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 • Exceptions:
They are providing all type of news like if something goes viral on social media and at the
same time in politics, in daily life and many more all is published at in-shorts app.

A convenient and user friendly app for people interested in the latest news updates

• Order Taking:
Inshorts is using enrolment based service. For access the application, they are asking for
gender information, age, language preference and areas of interest.

• Hospitality:
They are also providing service in offline mode. So if the customers don’t have internet
connectivity, then also they can use the application.

• Billing:
As they are providing free of cost service so, there is no need of bill generation or the
payment.

• Safekeeping:
They are not sharing their customer’s data to anywhere else, which they have collected at the
time of accessing the application.

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 Chapter 3
Target Audience :-

Inshorts’ target audience is people who spend a lot of time on the mobile and don’t follow
any other traditional channel or read a newspaper. Inshorts is for the people who have a time
crunch and would like to read news in short. The major followers of the app fall in the age
group of 18-40 years. The gender ratio of the app is 60:40, which is 60 males and 40 females.

Demographic :-
Inshorts is for the people who have a time crunch and would like to read news in short. The
major followers of the app fall in the age group of 18-40 years. The gender ratio of the app is
60:40, which is 60 males and 40 females.

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 Positioning :-

• The brand's tagline is 'Stay Informed' which itself tells the positioning of the app. A very
small investment of time is required from the users' side to get updated on the daily dose of
news. One just has to swipe the screen to get crisp news in a paragraph or 60 words.
• Inshorts, through its 60-word shorts, provides users a content discovery experience that
allows them to read a lot of news items in short, in a short time. With a few swipes, the app
claims that consumers can keep abreast with all the important news of the day.
• Commenting on the launch of the campaign, Azhar Iqubal, CEO & cofounder, Inshorts
said, “Being an internet company, we are launching our campaign online first and intend to
go all out with ATL and BTL campaigns later. Through this TVC, we hope to keep users
updated with simple, factual and to-the-point content which can be consumed in minimum
time.”

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