Sulekha.com expands presence; to spend Rs 12 crore on brand building

The local classifieds portal is now available in 28 Indian cities and plans to launch services in Dubai and London in four months. It will launch a TV campaign soon

Sulekha.com, a local classified advertisements and yellow pages portal, has now expanded its presence to 20 Tier II and Tier III cities. Earlier, it was offering its services in eight metros, including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.

The new cities the website will now cover include Agra, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Kochi, Coimbatore, Goa, Indore, Jaipur, Jalandhar, Kanpur, Lucknow, Ludhiana, Madurai, Nagpur, Surat, Tiruchirapally, Thiruvananthapuram, Vadodara, Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam.

Speaking to afaqs!, Satya Prabhakar, chief executive officer, Sulekha.com, says, “There are many reasons for expanding our services to smaller cities. Increasingly, a large number of Internet users are from Tier II and Tier III cities. Around 25-30 per cent of our traffic also comes from these cities. These cities see a lot of business and, therefore, offer a lot of revenue opportunities. Many searches on our site from outside India are focused on business in these cities.”

Prabhakar adds, “We will be expanding to 15 more cities in the near future, but that will take us more than six months. Globally, we will be launching our services in Dubai and London in the next four months.”

Sulekha.com allows free as well as paid ad posting services. If a member opts for free ad posting, he is allowed a total of eight-10 ads in a year. In the paid ad service, a member is charged $1-10 for a single ad. The website currently has 80,000 members using the free ad service and 20,000 members using the paid ad service. Sulekha.com expects to get 30,000 additional paid advertisers with its recent expansion.

Prabhakar says, “We will spend Rs 12 crore in 2008-09 to build our brand in India. We will use both traditional and digital marketing. The second round of our TV campaign will be launched in a few weeks. We will use outdoor advertising and also carry out below-the-line marketing activities. Digital marketing will include display and search marketing.”

JWT Chennai handles the website's creative duties and Interactions looks after its media buying and planning as the agency of record.

The website receives 2.5 lakh users per day and earns its revenue through paid listing and display advertising.