Brand & Design

Riding on the social media wave, #Influencer #Marketing has emerged as the next big thing. We have also recently launched our new initiative for Influencer Marketing in India which can be seen at www.influencer.in. In this context, the Social Beat Influencers’s Meet was held at the Hotel Vestin Park today. The guest list included content marketing experts, bloggers and social media influencers, as follows:

• Mr. Rajasekar, Head – Content & Social Media marketing, Bharat Matrimony
• Naveena Vijayan, Sub-editor, The New Indian Express
• Sarath Babu, Twitter Influencer & Blogger
• Shrinidhi Hande, Travel & Lifestyle Blogger
• Pari Vasisht, Food & Home Blogger
• Balaji Vijayaraghavan, Co-founder, Insightz Media Pvt. Ltd.

The agenda revolved around content marketing, its evolution and future trends. The key discussion points that came up for discussion are briefly mentioned as follows:

• Content Strategy for blogs: With content marketing driving businesses, brands who haven’t taken to blogging as a marketing medium are missing out. According to Mr. Rajasekar, Head of Content Marketing at Bharat Matrimony - blogging by brands should not just revolve around lead generation in the short-term. The blog strategy should have a 360-degree approach whereby they should look at brand-building as well as providing relevant information to the readers who can be their future customers. This is a long-term strategy that can yield multi-fold returns for their efforts.

• Key goal of influencers: The influencers need to develop a niche for themselves in their area of  interest, like lifestyle, travel, etc. Apart from various monetization opportunities, it also gives them a chance to establish themselves as an industry or domain expert.

• Monetization of blogs: If you have an excellent blog, then you can look forward to monetizing it easily via various ways like collaboration with brands and Google AdSense. Google AdSense is an advertising program that works based on relevant content targeting. For example, in case a food blogger activates the AdSense program, then ads related to restaurants, food, etc. shows up next to the blog posts.

• Freedom of speech working with brands: The freedom of speech issue discussed was one of the key points discussed. When bloggers work for brands, there is an important question involved – while reviewing a product, a blogger has a responsibility towards his readers but when one is paid by the brands on the other side to review the product, do you have the freedom to write about the cons? What should be done in such a case of conflict in interest? The panel was of the view that it’s ultimately the readers who should be the priority in the above scenario, as they have a responsibility towards their followers.

• Creating the DNA in organizations to take user feedback from social media and implement policies: When brands go online, it is a double-edged sword. While it makes it easier for brands to reach their customers, it also opens an easy way for their customers to share their feedback in the public space. While good feedback is welcome, but negative feedback is dreaded by many brands. The discussion brought about an important aspect that it’s not the negative feedback that matters, but how you handle them. The organization’s DNA should have the ability to quickly handle negative feedback and improve the organization. Once a negative feedback is addressed appropriately, the now-converted happy customers will be the biggest brand ambassadors for their brand.

The meet ended on an enthusiastic note with demand for more such events in Chennai. We are equally excited about the next Influencer meet. Watch this space for more updates.

Twitter is the fastest growing social media platform & the significance of Twitter can be emphasized by a simple fact that 8000 tweets per second is the average around the world.

What it emphasizes is the fact that it gives a huge avenue for businesses to connect and engage with fans. But the question is how? Most businesses are coming online and have a social media presence on Twitter but not all businesses leverage it in the most effective manner to build a strong brand, engage and have meaningful conversations with the fans. Here are some of the key points that can help in the above:

• Share unique and interesting content - This is the first step towards It is not about tweeting all the time, rather it is about tweeting content that can arouse the interest in your fans and help you gain new fans. People like to read and share great content. If this part goes right, re-tweets and favorites would follow automatically.

• Track your brand mentions and keywords - With millions of conversations happening daily on Twitter, you are missing out on market intelligence and a certain competitive edge if you are not tracking your brand, keywords and mentions along with the competitors whom you would like to keep a close eye on. Search alerts and setting up RSS feeds can go a long way in helping out with this.

• Be ready to handle a mixed basket - The biggest benefits of easy accessibility to customers can also prove true for the converse- it will also provide easy publicity for all the negative comments about your brand. But, how you handle it becomes more important. Acknowledge and reply to a positive comment, but also acknowledge a negative comment and immediately work towards addressing the concern. It can surely win you more hearts!

• Look out for interesting tweets on your brand or the industry and leverage it to engage and drive conversations

• Use the Twitter “Favorites” option effectively - The twitter favorites feature can be an effective tool to showcase interesting conversations with or about your brand. It can be made into a compilation of testimonials from fans.

• Use hashtags and images as far as possible - Different studies show that the tweets with hashtags and image links can get up to 2 times more engagement on an average than tweets without hashtags. But more is not always good. Usage of more than 2 hashtags results in a significant drop in the engagement rate.
• Quick response management - Fans expect brands to quickly acknowledge their appreciation or respond to concerns raised. This is true for all social media channels, including Twitter.

In order to cash in on the festive season, the online shopping portal Flipkart has started its “Big Billion Day” Sale from 8 am today. Flipkart's Big Billion Day sale will run till 10^th October. The date for the sale to begin 6/10 gains significance as 610 was the flat room number from which Sachin & Binny Bansal started Flipkart in 2007.

There are multiple attractive deals in different buckets like Steal Deals, Limited Stock Offers, Save More, Upcoming Deals & Partner Offers. There would also be Lucky Draws every hour.

Heavy discounts are being offered on smartphones and laptops. Nokia Lumia 525 offered at 90% discount, went out of stock within a couple of mins. Samsung Galaxy Tabs & Kodak Cameras were also sold out within minutes of opening the sale. Today we will also see the launch of brands like Alcatel OneTouch Fire C and Lenovo Vibe Z2, exclusively on Flipkart. Some of the good deals on offer with the starting prices available on different sites at 12 pm today, are shown below:

There is a big disclaimer attached to the items purchased as part of the Big Billion Day sale. Flipkart has already conveyed that there will be no refunds or cancellations for the items purchased as part of the Big Billion Day sale.

Within a couple of hours of the sale going live, there has been an outcry on the social media sites like Twitter due to lots of products throwing up errors on the face of immense traffic on the website. Numerous products have already sold out.

What do you make of the sale? Is it an attractive marketing plan? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below

A quick glance at the above stats conveys a simple but important message: Be it business owners, industry experts, students or entrepreneurs - LinkedIn cannot be ignored. And, B2B companies have more reasons to be active on LinkedIn – it’s an excellent platform to generate quality leads. Here’s how you can get more B2B leads using LinkedIn:

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are an excellent platform to connect with peers within your industry. It allows you to join up to 50 groups, and you should make the most of it by joining groups in your industry. Once you are part of a LinkedIn group, you can easily filter the members based on your criteria and your prospect list is ready.

Direct Sponsored Content

The direct sponsored content feature helps to promote an industry whitepaper, a case-study or a blog post right in your prospects feed. The features such as Localization helps in precise targeting for your sponsored content to a specific region. Instead of a direct sales pitch, content that helps the prospects in their business has higher chances of getting more traction.

Long-form content can get you a double bonus

The long-form posts on LinkedIn is an excellent way to showcase your brand or expertise in the relevant target segment. In a lot of cases discussed in my network, long-form professional content also help in the professional job searches. It also has more reach compared to the short-form posts.

Reverse engineering the content strategy

A “spray-pray” approach for content marketing will never produce results. Reverse engineering can give your content strategy a definitive edge. What this means is – instead of sharing only “hard-sell” content, you can share content that will benefit your target audience. For example, it can be simple tips to help their businesses or new developments in their industry.

The more attractive it is, the more traction it gets

A closer look at the LinkedIn stats suggest that the visually attractive posts helps a long way in getting traction for your content. Just addition of an image to the content post can help to get 90-100% more engagement than a post without an image. Addition of SlideShare presentations can give another big jump in the engagement rates.

Do you leverage LinkedIn to generate leads for your business? Comment & let us know why or why not.

References:

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2014/05/04/new-research-2014-linkedin-user-trends-and-10-top-surprises/
2. http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/by-the-numbers-a-few-important-linkedin-stats/#.VCnAIfmSySo

The entry barrier to starting a digital agency or an app & web development company is low and this has lead to the birth of companies with different focus and capabilities. So when we started out in 2012, it was imperative for us to figure out what is our USP, leveraging our strengths. We knew we wanted to create a full service digital agency which was not only creative but also delivered strong business results for our clients, in terms of revenue growth and lead generation.  Today, our agency is a leading digital agency, with strong results in Ecommerce, Entertainment, Real Estate and Healthcare.

Your Brand & the first crucial steps

The first decision possibly is whether to start on your own or look for Co-Founder/s. While selecting a co-founder, one should be ready to professionally complement each other in terms of working style, team handling style etc. Moreover, one should see if the long term personal and professional goals along with risk taking appetite are in sync with each other. For us it was easier as Suneil (the co-founder and my brother) were involved in another venture and were aware of each other’s working style.

A key element when starting the venture is finalising n the legal structure for the entity, which includes sole proprietorship, Limited Liability Partnership, partnership, or a Private Limited. We finally chose a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) to create the venture as a separate legal entity which ensuring appropriate governance.

Coming up with your brand name (and being able to find that domain), logo & your own website can be a time consuming process. We brainstormed on ideas with the domain registrar’s website open in order to check whether the domain is available. More importantly, the brand name needs to communicate what differentiates you from the other agencies.

Getting the first client

Even before we incorporated the company, we had our first client. Suneil & I had experience in digital marketing and with a small team, the journey of Social Beat had begun. Having worked in different companies prior to starting up, both of us had strong professional networks that we started tapping into to get our first set of clients. Given our value of guaranteed business results from online marketing, we were able to quickly ramp up to a team of 10 members in a year and to 20 members now.

Apart from word of mouth, online marketing proved to be a pivotal tool for us as well and it has helped us scale up our client base. We initial leveraged social media and later on Google PPC, Remarketing and a strong content & SEO strategy. We practice all the tools and strategize that we propose to clients, and we treat ourselves as a client internally so that the content & marketing strategy can help us get more clients.

Scaling up the venture

Growth is the critical oxygen for a startup. The key drivers for the growth in any start-up are the initial team members. For a digital agency, the key roles include a strong design & development team which can create responsive and engaging websites; Social Media & Community Managers who can help build the brand for clients with the support of creative designers; search Engine specialists, Advertising and Analytics Specialists.

Building the team with individuals having the right mindset and skillset is a continuous challenge and needs to be a top priority. At our agency, each team member takes strong ownership. This has resulted in many internal referrals for hiring, which also ensures the right fit for the team. We have also tried other channels for recruitment – HR consultants (some which are specific to start-ups), Linkedin, Word of Mouth and Job Sites etc. Depending on the role, different channels work better.

Given the evolving digital space and the need for strong growth, training becomes a critical role and we are working on putting in practices to ensure cross functional learning.

Being ready for the big challenges

Doing a startup is one big challenge and if you love to take on challenges, there is nothing like starting a venture or joining an early stage venture. We regularly have to address key challenges: Like setting up of processes to scale the organisation, knowledge sharing and training to stay updated on the latest developments in the digital marketing space, surpassing client expectations and delivering strong results. The energy of the team is what drives excellence every day. So, if you’re planning to venture out, choose your team wisely. There is no better day to kickstart than today.

This article was originally published on Social Samosa

Firstly, thanks for the positive response to our article on top digital marketing courses and top venue booking websites in India. Now, we have come out with the list of top lifestyle bloggers in Chennai, as part of our series ontop bloggers & influencers in India. So, here goes the list, in no specific order:

1. Blog: http://theurgetowander.com/

This blog, aimed at individual travelers, inspires you to cut your strings holding you back and go out exploring. A great array of experiences and cultural perspectives from her travel. The visual aesthetics of the blog is worth mentioning. The lines – “Come wander with me”, aptly describe the essence of the blog.

Continue Reading

In today’s rapidly changing marketing landscape, digital marketing has become an indispensable part of a business’ overall marketing strategy. Most marketers today have understood the importance of digital marketing and the mammoth difference that a well-executed, result-oriented digital strategy could make to the overall growth and profitability of a business. Going by the Marketing Budgets 2014 Report, 71% of companies surveyed are planning to increase the amount they invest in digital marketing this year.

Crafting a Result-Oriented Digital Strategy
Crafting a winning digital plan entails understanding the business in and out, clearly defining its goals and drawing up a profile of its target audience. All these differ from business to business and hence there is no one size fits all strategy. However, there are certain key ingredients listed below which must be effectively incorporated into every digital strategy to successfully drive business growth.

1. Website Design
The website is, and should be, the focal point of every digital strategy as this is where traffic from every other digital marketing channel would be directed. A poorly designed website can ruin most of the effort being put in on the other channels. Listed below are some key questions to ask, while checking if your website is optimized to convert maximum visitors into leads/customers.

• Is the website responsive and optimized for all browsers and mobile devices?
• Is it correctly Search Engine Optimized?
• Does it have a Clear Call-to-Action?
• Is it clean and easy to navigate?
• Are there multiple lead capture points
• Is the contact email/phone clearly visible and clickable?
• Is there a link to the business’ Social Media pages?

2. Search Engine Optimisation
Amongst all other components of a digital strategy, SEO plays a major role in customer acquisition and sales. Almost every customer begins their search for a product/service on a search engine and ranking high in search results, for the right keyword, can drive a large volume of organic (un-paid) traffic to your website.

With paid advertising getting increasingly expensive across channels, it is essential that every business invests in SEO to attract a good percentage of organic traffic, reduce the overall customer-acquisition cost and boost profitability.

3. Blog
Maintaining a blog which constantly shares valuable, informative, engaging and relevant content plays a pivotal role in attracting the right kind of audience to your website. Apart from this, it also establishes your business as an expert or thought leader in the space and builds trust with prospective customers. Apart from the fact that a good blog can be an excellent source of inbound traffic and leads, the content helps your SEO efforts as well.

4. Social Media
Social media is an extremely effective medium for branding as well as lead generation and developing a cutting-edge social media plan should be a major part of your digital strategy. The plan would entail clarifying business objectives for social media, putting together a content plan (audience analysis, content categories, post frequency, post timings) and determining the main metrics and KPIs that would be used to consistently set targets and measure success

5. Paid Advertising – Google Adwords/Facebook Ads/LinkedIn Ads/Retargeting
Paid advertising is essential, especially for businesses that are in the startup stage, to help get the word out and extend their products/services to a greater audience. It can help get consistent and valuable traffic to the website while SEO and offline efforts are yet to begin showing results. For established businesses too, paid advertising is an excellent customer acquisition and branding channel and should be given due attention while drafting the digital strategy.

While paid search campaigns on Google Adwords offer the benefit of being highly targeted - displaying ads to people actively looking for your product/service, retargeting campaigns as well as campaigns on the Google Display Network, Facebook and LinkedIn offer a wide range of targeting that could help you reach out to the right audience with ease. Promoted posts on Facebook and sponsored updates on LinkedIn too help get the message out to a larger audience.
Each medium’s relevance and effectiveness for the business in question must be analyzed and ad spends allocated accordingly. Spends can then be re-allocated to the medium that is performing best and delivering the best results.

6. Email Marketing
With the growing popularity of social media, email would seem to be losing out on its sheen as an effective digital marketing channel. However, this is far from the truth and email marketing is still as effective as ever. If statistics are anything to go by, 95% of consumers use email and 91% check their inbox at least once a day. Also, a recent study by McKinsey found that e-mail is still a significantly more effective way to acquire customers with the rate at which e-mails prompt purchases being at least three times that of social media and the average order value too being about 17 percent higher.

7. Analytics & Reporting
As the digital strategy is being executed, it is of paramount importance to constantly analyze results and compare them with the set KPIs to check if all campaigns are on track to yielding the desired results. It is therefore essential to draw up a list of key metrics, for each of the channels listed above, that will be monitored and measured at pre-set intervals.
Keeping a close tab on analytics data can help drive the strategy in the right direction and correct any errors early enough before a considerable amount of money has been spent.

Right Integration is the key
Each ingredient in the digital plan has its own unique benefits and, in order to gain real value, they will have to be perfectly integrated keeping in mind the broader long-term goals of the business. It is this seamless integration that will eventually determine how successful the strategy will be and how quickly it will begin showing desirable results.
Offline Integration matters too
Digital Marketing definitely has its benefits but it still cannot replace offline marketing in entirety, at least for now. Forward-thinking marketers have understood this and are working on integrating offline and online marketing efforts into one synchronous campaign for a powerful lasting impact. Things as simple as on online check-in help customers communicate their physical interaction with your business, to the online world . Ensuring that your digital strategy integrates seamlessly with your offline efforts will go a long way in enhancing the bottom line of your business and boosting your ROI.

Is your digital marketing strategy working for your business? Contact us is you are looking for the best digital marketing agency in Mumbai and digital marketing agency in Bangalore.

Content is King

In the age of content marketing, blogs form the major chunk of content on the web. One of the oldest forms of social media communication is still going strong. They are the fastest growing medium on the web in India, with a growth rate of ~48% in the last calendar year. Apart from providing necessary information to potential customers, active bloggers are a brand in themselves.

The IndiBlogger & BusinessWorld Study 2014 - A Review

IndiBlogger & Business World studied the Indian blogosphere in Dec last year and came up with interesting statistics. The survey in itself was one of the largest of its kind, done across 1059 responses to a questionnaire, 318,059 blog posts submitted on IndiVine and 35,464 blogs.

Unsurprisingly, English is the primary blogging language for 88% bloggers with Hindi being a distant second at 5%. The study reinforces the fact that blogging and social media is essentially a young generation phenomenon with approximately 80% of the bloggers under the age of 35 but what surprises is the fact that 75% of active bloggers are male.

Blogs on Healthcare grew at 90% in 2013

Food and Drink, Travel, Movies & Technology seems to be the preferred blogging topics but healthcare has seen the highest growth last year. Twitter & Facebook were the top-2 social media network but with LinkedIn now jumping in the competition with the blogging platforms with its “Create A Post” feature; it will be interesting to watch the impact of LinkedIn in 2014. Currently, with 63% share, BlogSpot is the hot favorite.

Bangalore, Mumbai & Chennai are the top-3 cities in terms of blogger base

It’s the metros that rule the roost currently with 12% bloggers from Bangalore & Mumbai each. 86% bloggers monetize their blog in some way or their other & 56% of the blogs influence buying decisions. With a steep rise in the usage of social media by brands, blogs have become an integral part of the marketing & brand-building strategy. Hence it’s not surprising that guest blog posts stand at a high of 35% among all posts.

In 1639, a Nayak ruler handed over a small strip of land to the East India Company to build its trading warehouse. Little was known that it would lay the foundation for one of the historic cities of India in years to come.

22^nd August, 2014 would mark the 375^th anniversary of Chennai, earlier known as Madras. As part of the 375^th anniversary celebrations, the Murugappa group has launched the #TheMadrasSong to celebrate the occasion & give a fitting tribute to the history, tradition, and culture of this city.

Check out the song that captures the soul of Madras:

In fact, the Murugappa group has planned a notable month-long campaign to celebrate the 375^th year with already underway contests such as #FavMadrasMemory Map & photo contest, daily Madras trivia and the upcoming Murugappa Madras Quotient Quiz 4^th edition on 6^th September.

#FavMadrasMemory Map app that asks people to mark the spots that has given them their fondest Madras memory, has turned out to be very popular among the citizens here. It gives them a chance to reflect back to the memorable times spent in the city.

This is the time to be in Madras and enjoy the city at its best. Umpteen other events have been planned across the city such as quizzes, heritage walks, photo exhibitions, lectures, etc. Social Beat is proud to be associated with the #Madras375 Celebrations.

Today, approximately 60% of Indians are shopping online and it is anybody’s guess on what would be the future of ecommerce in India. As the Indian e-commerce industry grows, practices such as dynamic pricing will gain significance and give strategic advantages to the e-retailers who use them.

What is Dynamic Pricing?

Simply put, Dynamic Pricing is the multiple price changes in a product at different times of the day. These price changes can be based on the consumer behavior on the website, the browsing patterns, etc.

Amazon changes its price every 10 min on an average

The most notable proponent of dynamic pricing is the airline industry – the sheer range of variation of ticket price can surprise even those who are in knowledge of this widespread practice. The airlines have been able to maximize their profits using this. The e-commerce industry statistics point out that Amazon changes its price every 10 mins on average¹. They have been intelligently using dynamic pricing for more than a decade to undertake empowered business decisions. Offline retailers like Walmart have also followed suit in recent years.

Not leveraging pricing as a factor to drive sales? You are missing out on a big chunk of your revenues.

With technology as its backbone, the e-commerce retailers have the complete information from the pages browsed to the time spent on each page to the past purchase data. Moreover, you cannot simply change the price tag once a customer steps into the store, but in an-online counterpart you can change the prices for every customer who logs in using a plethora of information including browsing history.

Just think of a case where you browse through a product category for a long time and yet does not carry out a purchase transaction. In such a scenario, the e-commerce retailer has the data available and can roll out an immediate 24-hour expiry coupon for the purchase within that product category. This not only sounds interesting from a user point of view, but also makes business sense for the retailers.

If a number of e-retailers offer a standardized product, then in that case, price becomes the differentiating factor. Consider the following example for Samsung Galaxy S5:

Is dynamic pricing alone going to win it for the e-retailers?

Though many would want to differ on the importance of pricing, citing other factors like shipping, products on offer and customer service as equally important. Of course, these factors are also important, but in a price-sensitive market like India, dynamic pricing is going to play an important role in shaping the future of e-commerce.

¹Amazon price changing machine http://www.retailwire.com/discussion/17222/amazons-price-changing-machine