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What you will find in this case study?
1) About Ola
2) Growth and services of OlaCab
3) Facebook Campaign
4) Reaching to target audience
About Ola
OlaCab most commonly called Ola is an Indian taxi aggregator founded in December 2010 by Bhavish Aggarwal started its operation from Mumbai is now based out in Bangalore.
As of 2016, the company had expanded to a network of more than 250,000 cars in more than 100 cities across India. In November 2014, Ola expanded to incorporate autos on-trial basis in Bangalore. Post the trial phase, Ola Auto expanded to other cities like Delhi, Pune and Chennai starting December 2014. In December 2015, Ola expanded its auto services in Chandigarh, Indore, Jaipur and Guwahati. Ola is valued at $5 billion as in 2015.
Ola started from 4-5 cities now has reached to more than 100 cities and according to the company, 99% of its booking comes from the Ola app.
Growth and services of OlaCab
Ola started its service and gathered lot of attention from the people and investors. They now provide the service through different types of cab ranging from economy to luxury class. The cabs are booked through a mobile app or through a dedicated phone number. This cab service supports both cash and cashless payment options with Ola money. It claims to clock an average of more than 200,000 bookings per day and commands more than 60 percent of the market share in India.
In April 2016, Ola launched an e-rickshaw category on its platform that will enable the users to book rides on the electric vehicle in the Delhi-NCR region. A total of 5100 rickshaws will be deployed.
Facebook Campaign
Ola’s initial campaign #ChaloNiklo was not getting the desired results in terms of increasing brand awareness. Thus in October 2014, the company decided to move to the online ‘Marketing on Facebook’ platform that helps companies meet specific business goals.
In January-March 2014, the monthly active users over Facebook were 100 million; which by January-March 2015 jumped to 125 million which has now reached to 165 million in number. Out of this, 140 million users are mobile users. Undoubtedly, Facebook offered Ola a confined audience in terms of the number of mobile users who could be used to promote their app.
Knowing that Ola was an app-driven company, it made sensible business plan for the company to tap into Facebook’s network to reach its target audience and meet its goals to increase brand awareness as part of its #ChaloNiklo brand campaign on a large scale. It helped the company to target the right audience and finally increases sales by 25%, boosted online searches by two times and increases its customer base.
After getting quite reasonable response from its #ChaloNiklo campaign, Ola started running multiple Facebook ‘reach blocks’, which allow advertisers to reach all of a specified demographic on a given day. This included highly targeted video ads and photo ads featuring content from its #ChaloNiklo campaign that encouraged people to download Ola’s mobile app.
Reaching to target audience
Ola then focused on targeting specific audience. Ola was looking to target people over 21 and wanted to segment its audience by gender, and whether they accessed Facebook via mobile or desktop. The company also used location-based targeting to reach potential customers in India, and in a few specific Indian cities that were priority markets.
In just five weeks, from 5 January to 9 February 2015, Ola’s Facebook ads strategy helped Ola increase its customer acquisition rate by three times and brand-related online searches by four times. Meanwhile, sales increased 60%.
“What makes Facebook so useful is its flexibility and targeting compared to other offline and online media. It allowed us to set up and launch a campaign very quickly on a massive scale.
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