Data helps to validate your hypothesis: Jubin from LogiNext

Jubin’s journey is a rather fascinating one. He went on a two-week break to the mountains of Himachal, which ultimately ended up being seven years. That’s right—he found himself on a transformative spiritual journey, and after finding his own center, came back to action with LogiNext as Senior Marketing Manager.

Transcript (auto-generated)

0:21 I started out as a journalist. By education, I did my B tech from a 90 student Mechanical engineering when I was with Tata Motors for a year, but writing and communications was always kind of my creative mode of expression, and I was used to write for the college magazine and things like that. That’s how I kind of landed up with YourStory early on, like the first seven years after Tata, I was working with YourStory in Bangalore. And while at YourStory in 2012-13 is when I had gone to Himachal for a two-week break, and somehow those two weeks ended up becoming seven years. And so pretty much a very early on into the digital nomad ecosystem, and I’ve been working remotely from that point onwards. So 2016 is something, there was a break of some sort like , when I was in Himachal a lot of things shifted for me personally and I got into Vipassana, and certain spiritual practices and from 16, 2020 I was completely away from the professional world where I went on the Narmada Parikrama. This is a 3500 kilometer walk along the banks of without phone without money. And all of that happened so I was on almost a four-year complete sabbatical break from the professional world. There were a lot of questions within me at that point in time and exploring them I kind of came to some kind of centering within myself, found my teacher, I followed this Anveda to school of thought and on world philosophy, and with that understanding I decided to come back to the professional world and spoke to a few founder friends I had. And somehow LogiNext was the first opportunity that kind of came my way and I look at communications content, a large part of marketing and this is how I kind of from journalism to completely away from the system and then back into the communications world. So that’s how I’ve landed up here.

Understanding data

2:42 So the way I look at data–data is, so in the tech world like there’s a lot of conversations around data and data is important but the frame of mind or where I come from, I believe data is something that one uses to back up your intuition. Because there are a lot of things that kind of shape us, while building a business while building a communication strategy, it can be anything. And if you purely go by data that will give us, lead us somewhere, but what my experience tells me and what I would like to rather believe is that experience and intuition comes first and because there are certain things that you’ve that have influenced you and certain belief systems you work with and it’s very important to go with that first and validate that with data. So that’s how I look at the importance of data that first it should come from within you, from your understanding and the direction that you want to take and then data becomes very crucial to validate those hypothesis that you’ve made or the direction that you want to go into. So that’s how I look at data.

Integrating data into campaigns

4:04: So at LogiNext we have been doing multiple–it’s a global company headquartered in New York. We have offices in Bangalore, Singapore, correct me, as in not Bangalore Bombay. The engineering teams sits in Bombay. We have a couple of people in Singapore, Malaysia, Dubai. So, we have done campaigns which are across the globe and a lot of it we have very in-depth data on, we have a very strong content pool as well. So, we know what kind of content is working, where a research team is there which is kind of looking out for events and special things which are very region specific and nationally specific. So, depending on that we come out with overall charter or a calendar of what are the campaigns that we want to do throughout the year and we also have certain goals which we have set up for instance, fast food restaurant chains of QsR chains, that is a big target market for us. So, we follow whatever might be happening in the market, but this is one area that we want to go after. So we build a campaign around US and QsR chains and then have our narratives and see what—that’s what kind of data comes in and see, what kind of positioning we can do with her campaigns to elect tactics within the campaign. And we use basically data for making the most out of the hypothesis that you’ll come out with her own research. 

Solving challenges with data

5.44: There are two segments like as I mentioned, fast food chains and courier expressing parcels. One of the interesting thing I think that kind of came out was like while we had clients in North America and we did a few press releases with the customer wins in this region, and while distributing them somehow we were seeing that there were good pickups or like data was showing that there was a good coverage in the Latin region, which was not really our target market as such or we didn’t think that this is a market that we should be focusing on. But that was an interesting insight that we kind of got that there is a maybe the North American market is mature and Latin is growing fast and hence there is more coverage and there’s more, you know media and news around it. And so then we focused our sales team–like a portion of it was dedicated towards Latin region and we saw a significant amount of, you know, traction from that. And, we have like, we recently did a press release with Cargo Expresso, which is one of the biggest courier companies in the Latin American region. So, that was in a way driven by data and insights which came in, and told us that we should be doing more in a particular region.And I think that was one of the examples that striking in in the last six months that came about.

The go-to metric

7:24: Engagement– suppose there are broad level metrics like number of pickups, tier one tier two, entire three publications–which publications are picking up. But one important measure is– it comes a bit beyond that stage when the conversions are happening is how to measure basically your relationships with a journalist or tracking those engagements, like even without sending out a press release or is the product pitch or is your pitch leading to engagements –is it genuinely generating interest within the journalist community? So that is an metric which I kind of look out for specifically. Like if I’m sending out even cold reach outs, not relating to any news per se, but, is a journalist communicating or engaging with my pitch or content or so that is a very key metric that I look at. And I think especially, I like that feature on the Wizikey platform where you can eat at least track or know what journalists are showing, you know, interest, I send this out and so this is one engagement from journalists before or, because this is something you can track over time and when you send out and use words like if it’s a funding announcement or it’s a customer when it’s a definite sure shot that kind of because journalists in essence are looking for news. But apart from that, how do you come across as a thought leader? Do journalists genuinely reach out to you to get interest, get insights from? So that is what I treat as a success metric in building relationships which will eventually lead to either coverage or that. So those are the typical metrics that any communications person would be tracking.

Tools for data insights

9:23: Wizikey is definitely something that we use, we evaluated Prowly also before this. Very honestly we have not been, since we have been looking to go out in the international markets and just spreading the word. So data is crucial. PR newswire again they have a good insights in terms of whatever press releases we do, what, what are they reach workers the pickups. But very honestly, it’s a pretty broken ecosystem that because a lot of these pickups, what I also see that over time get deleted or they’re not there. So it’s difficult to measure really what’s the impact so, what we’re trying to do is like see if these pickups over time or like how are they generating, how are the resulting into traffic. So, we’ve put in parameters on the website and see like how much traffic is coming in through the pickup stack of you had. So I think it’s still in early stage for tech led PR to come in and it’s evolving. But yeah, for me right now, like these are the visit key PR Newswire and we worked with a few agencies as well. So, insights coming in from there is something that we track.

My two Cents

10:58 I think one thing would be that, do your research like really well, actually look at yourself as an analyst of the space and a journalist should be wanting to talk to you because you have insights on this space. And, this can probably be done by building a particular niche, because if you’re working in an agency or typically you will have clients in multiple domains. But over time, if you can bring it to one and actually become a voice to be reckoned with in that domain, then building relationships or achieving your goals becomes much more easier. So that is definitely one. Second, fueling into the first one is again like document whatever you were gaining insights or whatever you were hearing because you get to interact with founders. You get to interact with industry leaders and so not just building relationships with journalists, but who are the other analysts in the space. And can you also, when you document these things maybe through a blog or a video on whichever way it can, then it becomes a personal brand for yourself and you become better at what you do. That would be the second point and 3rd point would be I think be open in general and this is a very genric thing. But being open to new ideas, being open to different thoughts and views and this is basically, being open to new life situations. This is what opens up the world to you and helps you to communicate better because as a communications profession, you’ll be sometimes, there’ll be a crisis of some kind. Sometimes there will be– you have to be dealing with egos of people, or basically how do you navigate through this? It’s very important for a communications person to be really open in this job and listen. So listening is a skill that one should be developing in order to– and not be judgmental at the same time because a company or whatever you’re representing can have any position. So, your role is to be neutral, taking all the inputs and communicate what the company’s goal is. So, it’s a in a very responsible job and listening and being open all kinds of possibilities is skills set one should be developing.