Lokal aims to become the one-stop destination for all things hyperlocal: Jani Pasha

Founded in the year 2018, Lokal is a platform revolutionising the hyperlocal content space and advertising for Tier 2+ users in India. Lokal is redefining how people in India engage with their surroundings by being a source of news in several Indian languages, including Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Punjabi, serving 225+ districts, and 1,000+ towns and cities. The platform has managed to garner a loyal reader base of 4.5 crore users, with 45+ million app downloads. The personalisation aspect as well as the rapid dissemination of hyperlocal content are some of the key differentiators of Lokal, which provide updates about events, happenings in local regions, real estate listings, job postings, matrimonial services as well as serves as a platform for buying and selling commodities.

Lokal has an extensive advertiser base involving those from fintech, health, Agritech, real money games, Edutech, and has clients such as Khiladi, Stashfin, Amazon, Axis Bank, cashE, Bajaj EMI, Swiggy, Groww, Plantix, Fi Money, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Plantix, and others. It has overtaken the response rates of its competitors by 5-10x times.

In a conversation with Adgully, Jani Pasha, Founder and CEO, Lokal, speaks about the platform’s journey since inception, leveraging next-generation technologies, growing the hyperlocal content on the platform, and much more.

Lokal is redeï¬ning how Indian citizens engage with their surroundings by supporting multiple Indian languages. How did Lokal’s journey begin?

We started building a news app called TheSoup that gives news in the form of a timeline. We built this when Donald Trump won the Presidential elections in the US and there was a lot of discussion about social media echo chambers and fake news. We thought our product would solve it. We built the product, did several iterations based on user research conducted on different user bases based on age groups and locations. We ï¬nally came about the dearth of hyperlocal content and how local content and other use cases on newspapers can be digitised eventually. Since then, we have focused on being true to the user, which has proven to be the best direction to move in at any point in time.

Since its inception in 2018, Lokal has evolved itself into a single platform for all Tier 2+ needs and as a trusted source of accurate and reliable hyperlocal information, with a presence in over 250+ districts, 1,000+ towns and cities across 8 states in India. Lokal’s platform provides comprehensive solutions for local updates, classiï¬eds, information on jobs, real estate, matrimony, ï¬nancial services, and more, making it easier for people in Tier 2+ cities and towns to access the information and services they need.

What differentiates Lokal from other hyperlocal app brands?

Lokal is a robust use case-based platform. We host content that has many use cases like local jobs, matrimonial, normal buy & sell, classiï¬ed business marketing, and local businesses can market their products on our application. To encapsulate, we are providing different services and simultaneously also bundling them on a single platform, hence we aim to become the one-stop destination for all things hyperlocal.

We are leveraging next-generation technologies like AI, ML, and data analytics to enhance our customer experience. However, two of our unique technology implications are given below:

Bringing technology and language together:

For a platform like Lokal, where we study and evaluate user demands and consumption habits and then assign appropriate material, content optimisation is critical. Due to the feature-rich corpus in English, a variety of features, models, pre-built sentences, tagging, post tagging, and other options are available, unlike in the local languages. This is one of the industry’s most pressing issues right now.

Scaling as per location:

Our technology allows us to expand at the highest level while also personalising the feed so that each user receives content speciï¬c to their geo-location and district.

For example, because matrimony is not a location-based service, the radius for this service is signiï¬cantly broader than for a job search. However, it will be localised in terms of jobs. As a result, all these algorithms are tailored as per user preferences and vertical understanding.

Other approaches are listed below:

Vernacular: Provides access to information in the users regional language (Currently expanding from 8 different languages)

Hyperlocal: Catering to hyper local communities, providing them, with hyper local information

User Sourced updates: Content can be uploaded by the users (undergoes machine moderation and human moderation)

Integration: Integration of all needs of Tier 2+ users into a single platform - needs such as, local news, Jobs, Matrimony, Real estate, etc.

Multi-format: Availability of multi-format content that can be uploaded.

These are the innovative aspects of Lokal.

What is the strategy behind Lokal app’s hyperlocal content and how is it inï¬‚uencing user engagement?

We, at Lokal, have identiï¬ed the speciï¬c content categories and verticals that resonate the most with our audience. We continually reï¬ne and expand those categories by:

Relying on data models of content consumption of user
Building a lot of feedback loops internally
Posting popular content that gets seen automatically, content creators also learn
Incentivising creators based on response
User research on what content they consume

What is Lokal’s marketing strategy?

Location targeting is at the core of our marketing efforts - district/ constituencies
Optimising D0 to D30 experience through deep links, simple onboarding and relevant content
Local language communication
Marketing collateral nuances keeping Tier 2, Tier 3 users in mind - visuals/ copies/ designs
100% digital campaigns - Facebook and Google, ad inventories, OEMs

What is the ad revenue model of Lokal? Which brands is it collaborating with?

Lokal offers ad space in the following forms:

Local Classiï¬eds
Local Business Ad Spend
Brand advertisements

We collaborate with brands dealing in the healthcare sector, ï¬ntech, Edutech, Agritech and real money games. For example, Amazon, Khiladi, cashE, Stashï¬n, Bajaj EMI, Axis Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Fi Money, Groww, Swiggy, Plantix, etc.

What are the key metrics that Lokal is providing to advertisers for successful hyperlocal campaigns?

Presence: 250 Districts, 1,000+ towns & cities | 9 States
Reader Base: 4.5 crore
App Downloads: 45+ million
Businesses helped: 100,000+
Engagement Time: 10 minutes
DAU: 2.5 million
MAU: 10 million
Geo level and relevance level targeting

What are its extension plans into newer categories? What efforts is it taking to enhance user experience?

We are constantly on the lookout to expand to new categories for both content and other use cases apart from Jobs, matrimony, Buy & Sell and real estate. We discover new categories/ inclinations by conducting regular user research and being up to date with what is trending in the hyperlocal communities of the states we are operational in.

Apart from this, we also utilise our resources in enhancing our user experience by focusing on user research. We increase the discoverability of content on our platform by increasing popularity and personalisation.

How has Lokal’s proï¬tability journey been in 73 of the operational districts and becoming a one-stop solution for Tier 2 users’ needs in India?

It is more fulï¬lling than we imagined. We are helping new internet users to experience easy access to local information, relevant connections and convenience for the ï¬rst time. Interactions that used to take weeks and months, like hiring someone, buying property and ï¬nding a relevant match, are reduced to hours and days. If you build a valuable platform, monetisation is not that difï¬cult. Our journey of proï¬tability started by building valuable products for the user.

How has Lokal’s performance been in the previous fiscal?

The year 2022 had been great for Lokal. Our density of user base in matured locations grew by 2x, classiï¬eds on our platform grew by 8x. We also started building sustainably at a location level.

What marketing strategies and activities did Lokal undertake during the ï¬rst of this year?

In the ï¬rst year, the entire focus went into growing in our initial 10 locations and building a playbook to launch more locations. We focussed on getting the creators and getting the right content on the platform. What we realised is that once we get a critical density of users on the platform, the platform self grew organically via our content share loops, where our users shared our content on Whatsapp/ social media with our watermark.

What are the future plans of Lokal?

We want to expand into new categories and product capabilities. We intend to address every concern of our user in a manner that aligns with our goals as a company. We are also building a content platform with a high frequency use case of local updates making users discover and adapt to new digital behaviours of discovering local jobs, matrimony and new products.

The key to growing in this sector is to understand what the user wants and needs in his/her daily life. As we keep increasing the range of services offered, we never cease our interaction with the users.