Purpose-driven brands grow 3x faster: Alpana Mandal, Spacebar

As Spacebar, a Mumbai-based premium content marketing agency, completes 10 years, we speak with the founder Alpana Mandal on what has shaped and continues to shape the industry. She shares her insights on the evolution of the fast-changing content marketing industry in India and how Spacebar has continued to adapt to these changes to remain competitive. As the content marketing industry finds itself at yet another inflection point with the emergence of generative AI, Alpana faces many forks in the road — like choosing between tech-driven marketing and human-centric communication, or deciding whether to make Spacebar a growth-at-all-costs unicorn or a resilient and steady camel. She muses over these questions and, as a first-generation female entrepreneur, shares her approach towards building a business, making decisions, and keeping up with change.

 

1. You started Spacebar at a time when “content marketing” wasn’t even a generally-used term, at least in India. What made you choose this field to start a business in, especially considering the fact that you didn’t even have a marketing background?

In fact, I started Spacebar when even “content writing” was a fairly new field. How it happened is purely a matter of curiosity meeting opportunity. I was seven years into management consulting at Ernst & Young, where I was managing enterprise application and risk management projects. I was itching to do something different and decided to take a sabbatical. It was during this time that I started exploring freelancing gigs. Writing is something I always knew how to do intuitively; I’d been writing poetry since I was 11, and even at work, people would reach out to me if they wanted speeches and such written. That’s how it started.

What I pleasantly found was that in the platforms I was using to look for customers, I didn’t see any Indians bidding for several technical writing jobs that were being posted internationally. That was a huge opportunity for me because my IT and consulting background made technical writing a unique niche for me. As an Indian, my rates as a freelancer were globally competitive, and the high research technical work was right up my alley. During that time, I found myself ghostwriting many books around information security, risk management, IT audits, etc.

In only a few months, I started reaching my bandwidth cap, and I came to a crossroads where I’d have had to either start declining new project work or build a team. Obviously, I chose the latter. Again, curiosity meeting opportunity. That’s how I started recruiting, and Spacebar came into being. From that day, on April 1, 2013, to today, ten years later, we have evolved from a pure play writing agency to a full stack content marketing agency with digital marketing, social media, SEO, graphics and video creatives, digital strategy, communication strategy, the whole shebang.

 

2. We often hear people use the terms content marketing and digital marketing interchangeably. Are they the same? If not, how are they different? And what inspired you to focus exclusively on content marketing? 

There’s a huge overlap between the two, for sure. But the difference is in the approach. A digital marketer will start your brand marketing strategy with “We will put out 2 posts a day on these 5 platforms, 1 emailer a week, and have ongoing SEO.” A content marketer will start with “Who’s your audience and what’s the story they want to hear?” The focus of content marketing is really on communication. There’s a video on content marketing that I’ve made where I talk about how we built the content strategy for a client by painfully listing down everything their customers had asked them in the past. That’s content marketing in its truest form. And I believe it is the correct approach to marketing because it is not a cookie-cutter technique but specific to a brand’s vision/problem statement.

 

3. How has the content marketing industry transformed over the last 10 years? How has Spacebar evolved with these changes? 

Oh the transformation has been phenomenal. Content marketing has evolved from being largely text-based to a combination of content formats today, with social media playing a major role. Search engines have made many strides in their algorithms to make substandard content ineffective. SEO has shifted focus from being keyword-centric to a more holistic E-A-T (Expertise – Authoritativeness – Trustworthiness) approach that prioritises search intent. 

Basically, what has happened is that with the rapid growth of our industry, many players emerged. A majority of these, even today, give clients hacks and tactics, but not a long-term strategy. I think a lot of startups fail because they never move up from the short-term hacks to the long-term brand strategy. The shift in Google’s SEO focus I spoke about above should be a wake-up call to brands and content marketers alike. At the end of the day, strong fundamentals trump lazy hacks. Thankfully, many companies are slowly realising this. For example, Airbnb moved from a performance-centric strategy to a communication-centric strategy two years back, and it has had a huge impact on their profitability. Actually, it’s not that performance marketing is useless, but again I have to keep reiterating – these are tactics that fit into a larger strategy. And that larger strategy has to revolve around communication. And you have to communicate to your audience using content, whether that content is textual, visual, oqr audio. So focus on content marketing. All other ‘types’ of marketing – digital, performance, social media, traditional – have to fit into your content marketing strategy.

Spacebar has stuck to the fundamentals of content marketing through the years. We have an unwavering focus on mindful marketing, which means we do not prescribe cookie-cutter solutions that can be copy-pasted across clients. What we’ve changed is the mode of communication – from purely text and SEO to a holistic content approach that includes a lot of audiovisual elements. Our recommendations to clients and the constitution of internal capabilities have also changed accordingly. In the future, I see a huge opportunity for each piece of communication to be available in all formats in one place for the audience to select from. So imagine you want to travel to some offbeat place in Maharashtra and find a web page that not only has a blog, but also a vlog, and a podcast. The same content is repurposed to different formats. You can take your pick based on your consumption preference. 

 

4. What about the things that haven’t changed in the ten years? Are there things at Spacebar you’ll never want to change, no matter the circumstances?

Mindful marketing. I’m a huge proponent. Just like how employers like candidates with passion, customers like brands that care. If you don’t care, you can’t sell. Not in today’s climate at least. When we talk strategy with our customers, we zone in on the purpose of the brand and the purpose of various slices of communication. Defining purpose is the most important first step for mindful marketing. Purpose-driven brands witness higher market share gains and grow 3x faster on average than their competitors, all while achieving higher workforce and customer satisfaction. We never lose track of this fundamental fact; we never will.

 

5. What are the things you know now that you didn’t know when you started?/ What are the things you know now that you wish you’d known when you started? 

That business development is best done as a relay race. One team for customer database generation/collation, one team for cold outbound outreach, one team for enquiries and one team for pitching. Till recently, the core Spacebar team – that’s me and my A team that reports to me – has been wearing all these hats. It’s really impressive how we’ve grown despite not having a dedicated salesperson, forget a sales team. Full credit to our own inbound marketing approach that has seen clients come to us rather than vice versa. But to scale in the way we intend to in the next few years, we are shifting gears and building a business development function that can bring us more clients that share our outlook on brand communication.

In terms of content marketing, this question is moot because our industry changes so quickly that what I knew when I started isn’t even relevant anymore. Every few months, platforms change their algorithms, alter accepted content formats, add new metrics, etc. One has to keep learning fresh things to stay ahead.

 

6. As a first-generation female entrepreneur running a bootstrapped entity, your journey must have presented you with a unique set of challenges. What were they? How have you overcome them along the way?  

Access to funds has not come easy to me. My business has been built purely with my savings and some debt. But as a woman, I think my biggest drawback has been mindset-related. I see it in many other female entrepreneurs as well. We are not comfortable taking big risks. My first instinct is to hesitate when making decisions that involve large cash outflows. I’m teaching myself to change it slowly. I’ve come a long way, but there’s still huge scope for improvement.

Then there’s the mild sexual harassment. When courting a lead or a client, you tend to call them a lot, take them out to restaurants, and spend a lot of time with them. This does sometimes lead to them getting the wrong idea and saying some inappropriate things. I’ve had to draw back because of this several times and, as an end result, lose the client. It’s sad because if I were a man, this wouldn’t have happened. Also, when you’re the owner of the business, who do you even complain to? You just have to learn and move on.  What’s worse is that this has left a sour taste in my mouth, and I hold back a lot more to avoid such situations, which I do think has an impact on the amount of business I develop. 

 

7. How will the current wave of AI-based content creation tools transform the marketing industry? What challenges will professionals in this field face? How should entrepreneurs make changes in their business strategy?

AI has increased the speed of execution and will continue to make the turnaround time from idea to execution shorter and shorter. This will affect the number of professionals needed to turn an idea into reality, and we will see a weeding out of those individuals that are not able to excel in either learning these tools or adding value to their output. Those who want to grow up the ladder in their field will have to make a shift from working in silos to learning more collaborative skills. Because the job of a human professional tomorrow will not be to write an article or create a graphic but work with others to identify and improve the user experience of that marketing piece or campaign. Employers will have to pick people with more empathy toward the customer. Entrepreneurs, in my opinion, should cater to more human touchpoints. That’s why I believe omnichannel is becoming such a huge focus now.

 

8. How is Spacebar adapting its approach to keep up with the emergence of LLMs and other content-creation tools? What do your future plans for Spacebar look like?

We’ve been using generative AI even before ChatGPT became a buzzword. I have been following OpenAI for a long time and have kept investing time to get the rest of the team excited about it. Not just for text but also for design and UI/UX. We’ve made it mandatory for people to upskill so they can not only use AI tools effectively but also add value to the content generated by them. We are slowly only retaining and pitching for projects that require multifunctional collaborative outputs and/or creative problem-solving. For example, building a brand voice for a new player, increasing digital outreach, or measurably enhancing employee awareness of organisational goals. We are also working on creating a new vertical that shares our content marketing know-how with others in the industry – this is one of our forays into human-centric experiential services. I’m very excited to get on that boat and take Spacebar to new shores!