Retail

How social community engagement of mothers helped The Moms Co. grow their business during the pandemic


While it is true that the pandemic halted businesses around the world, adversely impacting the small businesses, the Internet remained open. Social media became an important tool for many SMEs to engage with and leverage the platform to use it for their benefit. Apps such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp played a key role in enabling these businesses to make a new start and optimise their customer engagement.

Earlier this year, Facebook India conducted a survey with OECD and the World Bank and found that 41% of operational SMEs on Facebook India are now doing at least a quarter of their sales digitally. One of these SMEs being mother and baby healthcare firm, The Moms Co., which deals with toxic-free products for newborns and mothers.

Founded three years ago by two young parents Malika Sadani and Mohit Sadani, The Mom’s Co’s journey started from a personal experience. Both the couple’s daughters had skin conditions which made them scourge for natural products that were free of toxins and artificial fragrances.

“It was very hard for us to find those products in India and we ended up getting them from abroad or depending on friends and family who would travel to get the stuff. It was during that time we realised this wasn’t a long-term solution. We started our research to find out why these products are not made in India only to realise that many parents like us were looking out for natural, safer options for their children. There was clearly a demand but a lack of supply,” Malika said, at the Facebook Fuel for India event.

This motivated the couple to start their own firm to produce chemical-free products for newborns. The company kicked off with a Facebook post announcing the arrival of The Moms Co. and what it is looking to build. In a span of three years, the company has serviced over a million customers and delivered to over 15,000 pin codes across India.

“Based on the suggestions from the community we’ve built, we have gone from 3 to 40 products,” Mohit said.

It’s all about content

For The Moms Co., the business was brisk with many new initiatives in the pipeline until Covid hit the country in 2020. Following the guidelines, the company shut its offices and made sure their staff worked from home. It also stopped their retail expansion plans but used this time to focus on improving their service and products. They engaged with customers and mothers in particular to understand they can serve them better through a bunch of different initiatives.

Building a social media presence in today’s era has many benefits for small businesses. It not only widens the audience reach but also gives people opportunities to compare, improve and optimise their marketing approach. Further, it is all about refining content on social media enough to gain as many viewers and potential customers, which can be done through many interesting activities.

“We also reoriented our approach on how content was put out on the platform. As soon as we went into lockdown, we launched a program called ‘21 Days of Bonding’. The entire campaign ran purely on Instagram and Facebook, where we would help moms to figure out one activity that they could do with their kids to keep themselves busy. We got a lot of appreciation from them, there were no posts done on business or products but just hearing moms and understanding what their concerns were,” Malika explained.

In another short campaign, The Moms Co. launched and ramped up an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session called ‘Mondays with Malika’, where she would speak to the customers directly on Instagram to understand their concerns and what they are looking out for. The AMA was always signed off with ‘Let me know what ingredient you are looking out for which you want us to introduce in our portfolio’ or, ‘What products you want us to introduce on our portfolio’. This has helped the team to bring a lot of product developments.

“The entire NPD (New Product Development) cycle for us right now is very interesting and is actually getting built from responses that we get from customers at Instagram,” Malika said.

A third initiative taken by The Mom’s Co team was on Mother’s Day. They created a filter where users can send a lovely message to their mothers saying ‘You are my MasterChef idol, You are my supermom’. According to Mohit, the filter got The Moms Co. four million views on the day with hundreds of thousands of moms actually using it and creating it for their mothers.

“What we’ve realised is that it’s a time where as a brand we stand for hope and optimism beyond being natural and toxin-free. We have really tried to become much more personalized in the way we tell stories in the last few months. Today, we have tripled our traffic on the website, our revenue is double vs pre-Covid and our repeat rates are significant,” he said.





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