Sadia Haque is the CCO of DataBird and co-founder of ShareTrip. Before beginning her entrepreneurship journey, Ms. Sadia spent 10+ years in the marketing and branding department of some of the leading brands including Grameenphone, BBC, Nokia, and Banglalink. Currently, she leads DataBird’s marketing, human resources, and customer support efforts.
In this fascinating interview, Ms. Sadia talks about DataBird’s communication philosophy across its portfolio companies, ShareTrip’s digital transformation, and how the travel tech company has built a strong community around travel, dynamics of community building, the interdisciplinary nature of marketing communication, and why marketing is not merely about communicating with the outside world, why your international communication and team dynamics are critical elements for your strategic decisions, shares how she finds the balance between her busy schedule and her personal life, and reflect on why it is critical to take care of ourselves while chasing ambitious goals at work and much more.
Future Startup
Thank you for agreeing to do this interview with us. Let’s start at the beginning, the transition of ShareTrip from offline to online? How did you make that transition and what has changed in your communication due to this transition? From there could you give us a glimpse into the marketing operation of ShareTrip and DataBird?
Sadia Haque
You know the origin of ShareTrip, we started as the Travel Booking BD. In 2018, we became a part of DataBird, a holding company with operations in multiple verticals. A year later, we officially rebranded TBBD to ShareTrip. TBBD had both online and offline presence. However, online was not a priority. We had a plan to convert to the online operation but did not convert to full-scale online service until the beginning of 2018.
The transition was brought forward by a number of trends converging at the same time. First, we could see a sudden rise in interest in travel across society and a shift towards online. All of a sudden, traveling appears to become a necessity rather than a luxury. Be it a 3 day holiday or a one month holiday, people begin to take traveling as something they identify with. Second, travelers started to take convenience as a critical factor while availing of travel services. With travel becoming part of their regular life, most people wanted to have these services easily. Online appears to be a viable alternative. Third, we could see an increasing online transition of services and businesses and growing convergence between the online and offline world. We could see the internet rapidly becoming the medium for everything.
Since we are travel aficionados ourselves, we could see this shift in the consumer market first hard. The convergence of all these trends culminated into the transition of ShareTrip. We started the transformation with an ambition to attend the transformation of travel in the internet age. We wanted to be a pioneer in the sector in Bangladesh.
We made two decisions: ShareTrip will serve all kinds of travelers and provide comprehensive travel solutions. If you want individual tours, transfer, airport pick up and drop-off, tour package, we have you covered. We took stock of all that one might need when it comes to traveling and put together a strategy to offer that to our customers. We built our app and website with the goal of turning these platforms into complete travel solutions for our users. Building these platforms was the first part of our work. Once we launched these platforms, we next focused on bringing in customers to use our app and services, that is where marketing and communication come in.
Social media is a big part of our communication strategy. A large number of people who book tours and travel services online, spend a significant amount of time on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. To that end, we started with paying attention to build a strong presence on social media platforms, particularly on Facebook. Eventually, we have expanded and built a strong presence across all these digital platforms. Each of these platforms serves a different purpose with their unique usage pattern and user interaction. Digitally, wherever you go, you’ll find us. Our goal is to be with customers wherever they go.
Philosophically, we aim to be useful to our users in every platform and channel where we engage with them. We do this by giving them information and support to plan and execute their travels and tours well. The goal is to create awareness about what ShareTrip is all about. We aim to be helpful rather than being too ‘pushing sales type’ on these platforms.
You certainly need to generate a certain sales volume. That’s the ultimate goal of any business and that’s eventually how we measure our success and failure. But we also take a long-term view of things. We have put equal importance on creating top of mind awareness in the market. The goal: it does not matter whether you use our platforms or not, whenever you make a plan to travel, we want you to consider us in the first two platforms you think of. There are global platforms like booking.com and Agoda. You would consider them. We also want you to consider ShareTrip along with these platforms, if not before these platforms. That’s one of the key goals of everything that we do in marketing at ShareTrip.
After that, whether you would use ShareTrip depends on a lot of other things such as service quality, experience, knowledge, expertise, and so on, which I would eventually have to ensure once a customer starts to use our service. But to begin with, we have to be on the consideration list of people.
Philosophically, we aim to be useful to our users in every platform and channel where we engage with them
This philosophy is something that we have translated to the DataBird level across our products and portfolio. That’s one.
When we started to grow as a company at ShareTrip, we decided not to be a typical company. We started to contemplate the kind of organization we wanted to build. Every organization needs some beliefs and motto that ensure everyone in the organization is aligned with the same vision. We have been lucky to have an excellent group of people. We have structured and optimized the company to achieve this goal. These two initiatives helped us to achieve this goal relatively easily.
ShareTrip is structured in a way where we have all these functional units and departments such as HR and Admin, Technical, Product, Customer Service, Marketing, Sales, Finance, and Accounts, etc. In some units, we have multiple sub-teams such as in sales we have teams for B2B, B2E, and B2C.
We have built an organization that can operate independently with limited outside dependencies. We have certain beliefs that dictate how we operate and make decisions as an organization. Kashef, the Founder and CEO of ShareTrip and the CEO of DataBird, and I worked in the corporate world for a long time. We have a certain way of working and seeing the world. We look for similar worldviews in the people we bring in into the company. Cultural fit is something we take very seriously.
We take hiring very seriously at DataBird as we are moving into expanding some of our products and services. This is the same with ShareTrip because the people you bring into the company define the culture and service you offer to your users.
I'm talking about all these things because marketing is not communication alone. It is more than that. We can bring customers in through communication and sales. It is simple, you put a nice visual out there, run some ads, and convince a customer to buy from you. To me, that part is easy. But the most important part is how you are serving that customer when he is finally taking your service. There needs to be a humane approach to serving your customers. That is where people play a critical role. From there, it is all about your culture.
This is critical because customers will come to you seeing a lucrative offer or a visual but they will only stick with you if you serve them well, treat them well. When we are hiring we keep these things in mind. We make sure that we have a culture where we treat customers humanely and provide a sense of personalization for each. Our communication must be excellent. Our strategy has to be sound. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to human interaction. If people don't find that meaningful and can’t connect with you, no amount of communication would save you.
We believe in the team and keeping people for the longer term. People usually don’t consider spending too long in one company as a good thing. If you spend a long time in one company, it is often viewed as a limitation of the employee. But if you look at the advanced markets, people work for a long time in one company. And when people spend 10-12 years in one company, they gradually become part of that company, they become equity owners, partners, etc. We want to build that kind of culture at DataBird. We don't want you to come and join us for a six-month, take experience, and leave. We want someone to join us and stay with us for the longer term, own the company and own the vision and mission of the company.
We want to create an environment to ensure people who join us stay with us for the longer term. The journey is for the longer term so they could see their contribution. We plan to reward people who stay long-term and make significant contributions in their portfolio or area of work or DataBird by making them equity partners of the company. So that they value and understand that I'm being appreciated and acknowledged for my contribution and hard work. That's the vision we have.
We look for character in people. People are a critical part of our operation and an integral part of our communication strategy. You don’t see this when you see a banner of ShareTrip or a new offer, but it drives everything. While this philosophy originated at ShareTrip, we are now applying it across portfolios of DataBird. These are on the philosophical level.
If I come down to the execution level, our every communication effort begins with having a thorough understanding of our target customers and their needs - who are we talking to, why, are we applying the right approach, whether they have the need, etc. This is a continuous process and a never-ending learning curve.
We have been doing a ton of things when it comes to communication. Over the last two years, we have been paying a lot of attention to partnerships and building associations. We work with banks and many financial organizations that want to collaborate with us. We do things jointly. We work with smaller shops and outlets who want to be associated with us. We are honored that people and organizations want to work with us. One example, we have partnered with healthcare service providers such as Praava, Prescription Point amid the pandemic who are providing COVID testing and treatment facilities. It is a designated service for ShareTrip customers.
This is a way for us to build credibility and network in the market, grow my bucket of services and add more dimension to my work. We have come out of the approach that we are only a travel company and we can't do anything else. We have come out of that narrow vision. We believe that we want to be part of people's lives as a brand.
To that end, our communication strategy is robust. We are playing with a much larger canvas. For example, someone who might come to us for travel services directly, in the future, is now learning about us from our healthcare service partner, maybe from a coffee outlet or a bank promotion.
We have an excellent working relationship with our investor partners: Tanveer Ali and Siamac Kamalie. They are hands-on with our challenges and how we are finding the solutions. Their expertise has helped us in devising a coherent and effective strategy for DataBird. The localization is important, but, for DataBird, we need a blend of localization and globalization, which we are getting from Tanveer and Siamac. We have regular insight and knowledge sharing sessions where they give us an understanding of best practices across markets since they have exposure to global markets. These help us in making better decisions across portfolios at DataBird.
We are looking to build for the longer term. In the startup world, you see a lot of short-lived success. We think differently. We are here for the long-run. We don't want to be a company that will fizzle six months later. Our planning structure is multi-year in nature. We are looking into building an organization that would sustain for a long time.
We look for character in people. People are a critical part of our operation and an integral part of our communication strategy. You don’t see this when you see a banner of ShareTrip or a new offer, but it drives everything.
Future Startup
That’s fascinating. Offline and online are two different worlds and operate differently. What are the challenges of these two worlds? How do you see the world of digital communication? How does your marketing work now that it is distinct from what you used to be in the past?
Sadia Haque
Offline communication continues to be considered as something quite important. People still consider being able to publish an ad in a print newspaper means you are a legit company. The challenge with offline is that you can't measure whether your ad is producing any result or not. The assumption is that if you run an ad in a print paper, your ad will reach the people who read the newspaper.
But you can't always operate with some assumptions. Data is critical in the world we live in today. At DataBird, data plays an important role in how we operate. As a company, we have the privilege to look into a large amount of anonymized consumer data across several verticals. Hence a lot of decisions that we make depend on data and consumer insights.
For example, a lot of our communication is highly customized and personalized. For example, when we transitioned from TBBD to ShareTrip, our platform of choice for communication was Facebook, we used the broadly available options on Facebook. Now we have brought a lot more sophistication to our targeting and reaching out to customers.
We have developed several in-house communication platforms. We have an excellent app user base who come to our platform daily. App allows you to have intimate relationships with your users. It enables personalized communication. We can send notifications tailored to a particular group of users. We have built an in-house EDM where we can send targeted messages to select user groups. We have created different groups to communicate with our customers such as most loyal customers, top-tier customers, and so on. We send different communication to each of these people tailored for their needs. We are building in-house tools because it allows us to understand our customers better and thus design personalized communications.
Data remains the centerpiece of our strategy. From MAU and DAU to app notifications, we track every communication we send to our users. It allows us to understand our users better and understand which method works the best.
On Facebook, we are strong in terms of facebook parameters. We certainly seek to improve further on these metrics. This is the same for a few other social media platforms. At the same time, we seek to be friendly and useful to our customers on these platforms. If I only post on Facebook but don't respond to people when they engage with my posts, it does not work. We make sure these things are taken care of.
Communication should be a two-way thing -- the biggest difference between the offline and online world. In offline, communication is one way - brands are talking to customers. In the online world, communication is always at least two ways - customers can talk back and ask questions, and share their opinion. People could respond to your messages. We acknowledge every message that we get. We routinely receive positive critical feedback from our customers that helps us to improve our overall operation, customer experience, and so on. We never take this feedback as negative feedback, instead of as our opportunities to improve.
From within, it always feels good when you have created a service or a product. But it is only good when an outsider says it is good. In the early days, suggestions, feedback from our users helped us to improve. While we listen to every feedback our users have for us, it does not mean we listen to whatever people have to say. We give every feedback enough importance, but, at the same time, we understand the reality of the online world where anything can go viral for no good reason. Small things can go viral and big things can go unnoticed. To that end, understanding the prioritization and business requirements is critical.
How people perceive you and how you are being accepted is critical on the internet. You get to understand what are your challenges and opportunities and how you can attract new consumers. That's one of the major challenges we faced during our transition.
The major challenge in online communication is having a complete understanding of what online communication is because this is a hyper-fast space and things change daily. Facebook, Google, and everyone in the space is bringing innovations daily. Things change overnight. To that end, dealing with a world that is in constant flux and staying on top of things is a major challenge.
I'm talking about all these things because marketing is not communication alone. It is more than that. We can bring customers in through communication and sales. It is simple, you put a nice visual out there, run some ads, and convince a customer to buy from you. To me, that part is easy. But the most important part is how you are serving that customer when he is finally taking your service. There needs to be a humane approach to serving your customers. That is where people play a critical role. From there, it is all about your culture.
Future Startup
What is the core philosophy that drives your communication and marketing?
Sadia Haque
It has to be user friendly. Every business has a digital presence these days. Even most offline businesses have social media pages. It is a crowded space. In order to stand out, we have to create a point of differentiation. That is one of the key priorities in everything that we do: why would people choose me over other options.
If you look at our design, it is distinct from what you see in the market. We are conscious of the smallest details because tiny details are important. The font, the text, and the font size - all these things are critical and we pay attention to such details. The tone of voice is critical because it tells what kind of a company you are, whether you are reliable or not. Everything that we do from sharing an image to a post to a video has to have a hook so that people use it and come back to it. It has to be useful and relevant for our users. Primarily, from a consumer point of view, these are the things that we consider, while building the communication materials.
Then how we decide about the communications and campaigns varies from projects to products to services. When we are running a campaign with a partner, we consider the point of view of our partners and make sure that it blends in well with our tone of voice. When we are doing an in-house campaign, we look into how engaging the visual is, how engaging the main heading into that creative, etc. I incline towards these things probably because of my experience in PR and communication. I think these are some of the things that keep consumers hooked with my product and services.
Future Startup
How do you make strategic decisions in marketing and communication? How does your process of designing your marketing strategy look like, be it a campaign or a longer-term strategic plan?
Sadia Haque
That comes with a bit of prioritization. We do a lot of work on an ad-hoc basis. The structure we follow is that at the beginning of every month we set a target that these are some of the things that we aim to focus on this month. We prioritize the services that we want to focus on. We prioritize the destinations that we want to look into because we are into the tourism sector. For example, we are focusing a lot on domestic travel now because of the COVID restrictions.
Our strategic decision, be it marketing strategy or campaign strategy, begins with why: why we want to do something, what do I want to achieve from a campaign. Then we explore benefits we expect, benefits our consumers will get, etc. For every communication, we have a set of objectives that we want to achieve such as people we want to reach out to, why as in the result that I want to achieve, and what is in it for my users.
Then comes how much do I want to spend on this and how much is going to be my acquisition/awareness cost, what are the platforms that I'm going to explore, and so on. We have our in-house platforms. There are external platforms. Usually, if it is a big campaign or a big announcement, we go to every platform. If something needs to be micromanaged, we single out things, think about the most cost-efficient way, and so on.
For example, one of the main challenges for us when COVID came was that we were known as an outbound tourism company. Because we have always promoted services for out of Bangladesh travel. We had a plan to work in inbound travel but we originally did not plan to start it this early. We wanted to start it sometime later when we would have a stronger market position. Due to COVID, we had to prepone it and shift our focus to our local travel services. This kind of major shift in strategy is usually guided by the major changes in the industry and the world.
COVID has been an exceptional case. While we all know the negatives, it has brought about some positive changes as well. One such change is the unparalleled rise of domestic tourism. In the past, people would go to Kolkata for a three-day vacation whereas it is the opposite now. Everyone is into domestic travel and tourism. When shifts of this stature take place in the market, it becomes the guiding star of our strategy and execution plan across the operation.
We are heavily data-driven in everything that we do. Even if I'm organizing a Facebook campaign, I have a pre-campaign target and a post-campaign analysis - what do I want to achieve and what did I achieve in reality. That guides the rest of our communication strategy.
Every business has a digital presence these days. Even most offline businesses have social media pages. It is a crowded space. In order to stand out, we have to create a point of differentiation. That is one of the key priorities in everything that we do: why would people choose me over other options.
Future Startup
ShareTrip has successful loyalty programs, how do you build a community around brands? How are approaching community building at the DataBird level?
Sadia Haque
Building a community is challenging. Although the word is being commonly used nowadays, it is a difficult thing to build a strong, lasting community. Community means you have a group of people of the same mindset, taste, principles, and philosophy. There has to be a common denominator among the members of a community. Otherwise, you don't have a community. One positive side of us, which has helped us to build a strong community relatively easily at ShareTrip, is that we all are interested in travel. This has helped us to bring a large number of like-minded people together. We then introduced several initiatives to engage the community. For example, our gamification features, loyalty programs, and content-driven initiatives.
We introduced gamification because we knew if I introduce an app or a website people would use it, probably to make a purchase or to search a destination or chat or collect information. But that's purely need-based. If I want to take a trip in February or March, I would check the ShareTrip website at the end of January or at the beginning of February. That’s not a lot of use. More importantly, you forget when you are not in touch. We thought there has to be a hook to engage people, bring people to our app, and use it regularly. That's also building brand awareness and building loyalty and building a better relationship with our customers.
From that, we came up with gamification ideas to build a regular relationship with our users and be useful to them almost all the time. For example, the rewards we offer through our gamification features are mostly outside tours such as free hotel stay or a free ticket or a free activity such as balloon ride, etc. But now that outbound tours are closed you could not do much. Having the central control of our platforms means that we can modify things as per requirement. With the outbound tourism almost closed because of the pandemic, we introduced domestic services and offers in our gamification section, leading to a rise in the engagement of our app and website. Not only that, just to keep our clientele base hyped up we introduced travel trivia. Travel trivia asks you to share your travel knowledge, which not only became educational to many of our customers but also they were part of the virtual experience of traveling. We have a set of questions and you answer them. We had weekly, fortnightly and monthly winners. As you play, you keep on adding to your scores. These initiatives have helped us to engage our users, understand them better.
How are we strengthening the community? As I mentioned earlier, you need to have a common denominator. For us, it has been travel.
If I take that to the DataBird level and apply it to other brands of DataBird, the biggest thing that we see is the hub of consumer insights that we have. We could see the patterns of a Boitoi user, we could see how people read the news, what type of news a user prefers, and so on. We are being able to track all these consumer behaviors using which we could create patterns and features.
If you compare the community we have built at ShareTrip and our other portfolio companies of DataBird, we are still working on building a strong community across all of our portfolio companies collectively. But we have a strong understanding of the market and we are being able to take that understanding further every day.
I'm hopeful that we will be able to build stronger communities in all these businesses in the coming months because we have this excellent consumer insight. I could see how people use various of our platforms and how they switch from one platform to another and so on. Our ambition eventually is to bring all these insights together and generate patterns out of it, generate trends out of it, and use these insights to serve our customers better through bringing in more innovative products through technology.
This is going to allow us to develop a deeper understanding of our users across our products and that is one of the tools that we aim to take advantage of when it comes to building community across the DataBird portfolio of products.
Building a community is challenging. Although the word is being commonly used nowadays, it is a difficult thing to build a strong, lasting community. Community means you have a group of people of the same mindset, taste, principles, and philosophy. There has to be a common denominator among the members of a community. Otherwise, you don't have a community.
Future Startup
How big is your marketing team? How does your marketing team function as a department at the DataBird level?
Sadia Haque
We have a quite large marketing team. It is an interdisciplinary team. We have people who look after specific functions and collaborate with other relevant departments within the company. We have people looking after the content, we have product managers working with the product team to reproduce the product description for our audience so that it resonates with them, we have social platform managers, and so on.
Many of our products at the DataBird level are yet to go to market. We are working in those areas. Once we commercialize these products we will operate centrally and have a central team who will look after the different brands, portfolios, and products.
While we plan to eventually have a central marketing operation at the DataBird level in the coming months, DataBird itself will not be the face. Each brand such as Ridmik, ShareTrip, Boitoi, and our other consumer brands will be the face themselves.
We don't want to build a super-app. We want to build independent products and brands. All of these brands have underlying connections and discovery advantages but they will operate independently.
We want to understand customers across platforms. We don't think super-app when your services are as distinct as travel and news. It is a better strategy in making the effort into understanding your users across platforms, glean insight from that and use it to improve your service and serve your customers better.
Our goal is to establish each DataBird company as an individual consumer brand and make each brand independently sustainable. Many common threads connect each of these brands. One of them is of course data and consumer insights.
I maintain a physical notebook to organize my work. The first thing I do entering the office in the morning is making a to-do list. I review the list at the end of the day to reflect on my progress. That's the kind of consistency I need to maintain. I prefer having a structure and a list of priorities for my day. It gives me a sense of control.
Future Startup
That was it about DataBird. I wanted to learn a bit about how you operate as a leader. What is your management philosophy?
Sadia Haque
I believe when you are building a team, you must make your team feel valued. Otherwise, the vision that people will be loyal and own the company and stay with us for a long time would not happen. We pay a lot of attention to the capacity building of our people. I empower people to take on assignments, do things even when it might slow us down a bit. Unless I delegate and allow people to do things, make mistakes, they will not learn and grow.
One of my ways of operating is I make people accountable. Without responsibility, there is no accountability. To help people grow, it is important to appreciate them when they are doing something right, helping and guiding them to improve when they are making mistakes. That's how I operate.
Future Startup’
How do you stay productive?
Sadia Haque
I have an internal standard, a habit I developed pretty early in my life. And I'm quite consistent at pursuing that standard.
I maintain a physical notebook to organize my work. The first thing I do entering the office in the morning is making a to-do list. I review the list at the end of the day to reflect on my progress. That's the kind of consistency I need to maintain. I prefer having a structure and a list of priorities for my day. It gives me a sense of control.
Future Startup
What does a typical day of your life look like?
Sadia Haque
If I give an overview of my day, it is sort of a balance between home and work. In the early days with ShareTrip and TBBD, I used to have defined 10-7 working hours and would not spend any extra hours at work. Then I came to realize that my responsibility deserves more than the typical office hours. Thus working hours are longer now.
The morning begins with my family preparing my two daughters for school when they have school, and in general, for the day. Then I come to work.
I like the idea of balance. I tell my team that maintaining a work-life balance is important for sustained productivity and sanity. Working long hours doesn't necessarily mean you are super productive. It can mean you are either being ineffective or you are sacrificing part of your life or you are doing everyone's job indicating an even bigger problem.
Work-life balance is critical to me. I don't know how good I'm at maintaining the balance. After office, I spend time with my family. On weekends, I try to spend quality time with my family.
The challenge is that having a job versus having your organization are two different things. Running your organization often means that there are no weekends. Despite the limitations, I try to prioritize and go accordingly.
Future Startup
How do you learn new things?
Sadia Haque
I’ve kind of matured working at ShareTrip over the years. When you are working in a corporate environment there are a ton of egos and people seldom take others' opinions seriously. I was like that as well. I was certain of my point of view and would seldom listen to what others have to say. When I started working here I came to learn that unless I'm open to new ideas and ideas of others, I would not grow and my organization would not move forward. I've started listening to others intently. Now I appreciate diverse ideas and what others have to say.
I've started listening more to Kashef because he has such a diverse experience and understanding of the work that he offers invaluable inputs that help me see things differently. This is one of the major changes in how I learn.
My area of work has become more complex and multidisciplinary. As a result, I am required to understand these challenges from a polymathic perspective. I'm still on the learning curve and working on these areas.
I maintain a physical notebook to organize my work. The first thing I do entering the office in the morning is making a to-do list. I review the list at the end of the day to reflect on my progress. That's the kind of consistency I need to maintain. I prefer having a structure and a list of priorities for my day. It gives me a sense of control.
Future Startup
What are some of the lessons you have learned from your journey so far?
Sadia Haque
In a corporate environment, you are mostly thinking about yourself and rarely about others. You do collaborate but you put self-interest ahead of the team. Here, it is completely the opposite. It all has become about collaboration and team.
It is critical that you rest and repose and have some space for yourself to maintain your sanity and mental health. It is for everyone, particularly critical for female founders. Unless you have time for yourself and prioritizing your wellbeing, you'll eventually burn out.
Conversation and edited by Ruhul Kader, Tithi Chowdhury contributed to this story.
