CEO Insights India

With several organizations entering into the F&B as well as e-Commerce space, the Indian marketing sector is having a good run with a secure future with ample opportunities. However, the majority of the advertising firms still are opting for the traditional marketing approach of networking, word of mouth, and so on. Sandeep Kelvadi, Co-Founder & Head of Marketing, Pixelmattic, however, opted for a counter intuitive approach with a combination of researched content, common sense SEO, customer-focused website, and so on. His out-of-the-box innovative approach has been helping the firm generate leads every week for the last seven years.

In an exclusive interaction with CEO Insights, Sandeep shares his early experiences, the digital strategy consulting sessions at the firm, and much more:

Shed some light on your professional journey. What was the inspiration that led you to the Marketing sector? What is the motivation that fuels your professional routines?
After completing my Masters in the US, my first job was to work for a growth stage startup where I helped set up as well optimize Salesforce CRM for the sales team while writing code for automating sales tasks and that was my first taste of marketing. Even after starting as an entrepreneur in 2010, I made all the rookie mistakes. But the experiences from a failed product startup, pivoting to a services business, rebranding, and re-positioning an edtech product startup into a niche web agency have been full of lessons and insights. I discovered marketing out of necessity and like the best things in life, you stumble across something that captures your imagination, and it develops into a deep interest. I continue to be a marketing student and learn about its enormous influence on business, culture, and more.

You possess over a decade of

experience, how has been your path to success and what is your success mantra?
After creating Pixel mattic in 2015, unlike many generic web agencies around us, we opted for the counter-intuitive path of being specialists. We also decided not to rely on traditional forms of business development such as networking, cold emails, and word of mouth to grow our business. After I took up the responsibility of marketing, we built a sustainable lead generation system for our business with a combination of highly researched content, common sense SEO, and a customer-focused website. This marketing approach has helped us consistently generate leads every week for the last seven years. To achieve sustained marketing success, you need to uncover the real truth about your business and its customers as well as with the ongoing experimentation with the message and how it's delivered.

Define Pixelmattic as an organization and its current market position. What makes the company unique?
Pixelmattic is a fully remote digital agency that helps B2B businesses solve their marketing and website roadblocks to growth. We, at Pixelmattic, help business owners of B2B companies build a sustainable and repeatable digital marketing system with brand strategy as their key competitive advantage. Unlike most digital agencies, which focus on short term goals of generating leads through ad campaigns, our approach focuses on building digital assets that will provide ROI for a long time. We also offer help to marketing teams at fast growing startups with WordPress solutions and expertise and provide them with reliable and specialized WordPress consulting to ensure the smooth running of their marketing operations on the website.

Give a brief account of your digital strategy consulting sessions? What are the major factors you take into consideration while suggesting solutions to businesses?
Our consulting sessions with business owners and senior executives at B2B companies are

called brand therapy sessions. Our goal is to shift our customers' mindsets from a traditional view of marketing to a first principles-based approach to brand and marketing. This mindset shift ensures that they are not distracted by the latest craze in the digital marketing world and can instead focus on sustainable approaches. Customer research always drives our digital strategy, which involves speaking to our client's customers directly through one-on-one interviews. We supplement this with secondary research using various digital research tools. Our research-based approach to developing brand marketing strategies for our B2B clients is always specific and unique to that business and not based on a cookie cutter approach.

The second major factor is to be practical and sustainable. Just because a tactic worked for a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, doesn't mean it will work for you. We create solutions that are grounded in practicality and sustainability. Our goal is to help B2B businesses narrow in on their brand positioning and establish marketing routines that work and can be sustainable.

What are Pixelmattic’s long term and short term plans? Based on your experiences, what would be your advice to entrepreneurs starting new in this domain?
In terms of short term plans, we are focused on helping B2B businesses, particularly B2B services companies like IT services, with our brand marketing program called the Digital Growth System. Our long term plan includes looking at other niches in the B2B space that we believe can benefit from a brand strategy and a research based marketing approach.

The advice I would like to give to the budding entrepreneurs is to either be a specialist with a strong focus on a niche market or go broad with an Amazon-like approach as the agency business is a competitive space. My marketing advice for business owners of B2B companies is to develop a first-principles-based long-term marketing mindset.

Sandeep Kelvadi, Co-Founder & Head of Marketing, Pixelmattic
Apart from being the Co-Founder & Head of Marketing at Pixelmattic, Sandeep is a lifelong learner, brand therapist to CEOs, and a hobbyist photographer and is also learning how to be a good father every day.

Hobbies:Photography
Favourite Cuisine:Italian
Favourite Book:Italian
Favourite Travel Destination:
Any hill station with a view