MUMBAI: Myntra, India's largest fashion e-commerce portal, publishes close to 50,000 pieces of fresh fashion content every year, as nearly half of adults in urban India – some 200m people - are consuming some form of content online for at least an hour each day.

Gunjan Soni, Myntra's chief marketing officer, addressed this topic at the recent Content Marketing Summit Asia in New Delhi, where she reported that "the stories we hear about the growth in consumption in the digital media is not hype, it's actually happened!"

Accordingly, "we are transforming ourselves to become a content platform in addition to being purely a commerce platform", she said. (For more details, read WARC's exclusive report: Myntra's content marketing mantras for India's fashion category.)

"As marketers we have to sit up and take notice, and look at leveraging how we are using content across the touch points of the consumer journey," she added.

The Myntra app gets close to 18m daily active users, not all of whom are there to purchase. "We have made sure Myntra is an exciting window shopping experience anytime you have free time on hand," explained Soni.

"In our mind, [the app] is a digital publishing platform."

She argued that the ability to produce good quality, "truly powerful" content could give smaller organisations an edge over bigger ones with more financial clout.

One aspect of the portal's content strategy is to embrace Bollywood influencers – which it sees as being critical in the fashion category.

"Not only do you need to create the right influencers, you have to use them at the right time," Soni said. "This creates a cascading network of impact – influencers can be helpful both at the top of the funnel and at the conversion stage."

For example, Myntra works closely with Bollywood stars Deepika Padukone and Hrithik Roshan to co-create the brands they own, and then promotes the brands jointly with them via social.

"We use a network of twenty celebrities to maximise reach with people posting on their social handles," Soni explained.

"We obtained 25 million total unpaid reach due to celeb posts on their social handles. This is priceless because these are fans directly engaging, and then reposting on their own."

Data sourced from WARC