In the spring of 2016 Vikas Sharma and Deepti Awasthi Sharma started a business venture which catered to entities looking for Out of Home (OOH) hoarding solutions. They identified a lack of structure when it came to outdoor advertising, particularly with hoardings and saw an opportunity. They cashed in on the unexplored opportunity and started a company by the name of GoHoardings.com. They started with 10 Out of Home (OOH) sites which primarily included Billboards and Unipoles and in the next 8 months, they acquired 100 OOH sites for their business wherein they added Unipoles, Cantilever, Gantry and Backlit Mupi to name a few.
As of March 2018, GoHoardings.com has 1.2 Lakh OOH sites spread across 140 cities wherein they enable users to plan, book and manage their campaigns from anywhere. They have extended their services to include advertising over Mall Media which encapsulates Signage, Glass Wrap P&M, Light Boxes, Glass Façade among others. They covered Multiplexes in which they forayed into On-Screen and Off-Screen Advertising. They’ve established their presence at airports with Pillar Mounted and Wall Mounted Panels. They even advertise in office spaces mainly using Video pods and advertise through automobiles by customizing the exterior of vehicles with brand logos.
An amazing testament to their success in such a short span of time is the client base they’ve built including names like Oppo, Idea, Indiamart, Vodafone, Gillette, Hero among 40+ others.
GoHoarding has its headquarters in Noida from where they manage the operations of the 140 cities in which they are functioning. As they’ve grown, they’ve steadily increased the size of their team by bringing more people on board to manage the administration and operations of the company.
The primary motivation behind this venture was to provide businesses with a service which was radically different in its approach as compared to other firms that provided the same service. They wanted to position themselves as a one-stop solution for businesses in over 140 cities covering all sorts of Outdoor Advertising needs by providing exemplary service, a wide reach and quality assurance. The differentiating factor between GoHoarding and other firms is the extensive use of technology to assist their clients in a better way. They used Analytics to forecast the ROI of putting up a certain kind of advertisement in a certain area. They also provide an exact count of the footfall in that area. They catalogued a list of hoardings and provided Geolocations in each city, where the best deals were available. They also enabled clients to have direct access to their services by eliminating the middleman.
All these efforts helped businesses looking to advertise in open spaces to save money at crucial points, thereby adding value to their experience of utilizing the services of GoHoarding.
In order to facilitate the needs of their clients, a conscious effort was made to make sure that the web development process was thorough and detailed. The basic layout had been prepared using WordPress and custom plugins were used which used the data provided by GoHoardings. Post that, the next step was disseminating the data in order to make categorization of the data easier. We used the Tech Stack, which is basically a combination of programming languages. Tech Stack was used for sequences such as Development, which was done through languages like PHP, HTML, CSS, Database Creation, which was implemented using MySQL, Content Management System via WordPress, Server, which was hosted on Amazon Web Services E2 Instance, JavaScript Wrapper, done through JavaScript+JQuery, CSS Wrapper which used Bootstrap and Source Control through Bitbucket. Consequently, it made an analysis of the available data much easier and enabled taking the little chunks and organizing it in a systematic manner in order to make the website accessibility easy. Such categorization greatly helped in lessening the load of the data and as a result, accessing the website became faster.
To provide further ease of use, a map was provided on the website so that any client can check any available billboards or other advertising space of a particular type at a particular location. Having access to this data made it easier for them to decide whether they’d like to advertise at that particular location. They could factor in variables like cost, reach, impact on the local audience and accordingly weigh their alternative options.
The incredible rise of GoHoardings has shown that taking the first mover advantage in this segment has worked in their favour and going ahead, as they expand further, their scale of operations is sure to surge.