Clinics/ Hospitals are soon realizing the above trend and moving towards creating an online presence which helps them retain their existing patient base on one hand and broadening it on the other. The infographic above evaluates the current trends in online presence of clinics. Three categories of clinics- eye, dental and maternity were surveyed for the purpose. It shows that online booking is an important functionality enabled by most dental clinics; nearly 80%, also have a presence of Facebook. Key players in the maternity segment have maximum likes on their page from all the clinics surveyed. The average domain rank of eye clinics is the highest, implying better visibility on various search engines. The following are the three Key areas of focus in the digital strategy for clinics.
User Friendly website
Creating a website with the end-user and their pain points in mind is the first step to building a robust online presence. For example, one of the issues that patients face is to obtain doctor appointments, if this issue is addressed upfront by enabling online booking both the patients and clinics would benefit. Also, other functionalities like submitting patient queries can be enabled. An A/B tested website would ensure optimal use and low bounce rates.
Search Engine Optimization
With so many clinics competition for new visitor traffic online, having a website with both online and offline SEO will help drive new and targeted traffic to the website.
Social Media Presence
An impressive and interactive social media presence, is the best way to engage at an informal, yet at a high responsive mode with patients. While achieving brand awareness, reputation is built by sharing important/ useful information, responding to queries and interacting with patients regularly.
An increasing number of business owners are now convinced that Social Media offers massive potential which can be effectively leveraged for the growth of their business and have been devoting resources to making it an essential element of their marketing plan. However, most of them are finding it difficult to ascertain the effectiveness of their campaigns and to measure the Return on investment to justify campaign expenditure.
Why ROI is important
After all, it is the bottom line that matters the most to any business and every business owner would want to know if all the time and money being invested in Social Media is making any difference to it. In addition to this, the inability to measure returns from a campaign makes it difficult to optimize it because it is extremely difficult to manage and optimize something you can’t measure.
The Challenge in Calculating ROI
The textbook definition of ROI (the benefit from the activity divided by the cost input into it) is difficult to measure when it comes to Social Media because a large number of its benefits are qualitative(visibility, brand awareness, customer loyalty, trust and interaction) which cannot be accorded a fixed numerical value. And given the number of metrics that can be tracked, if you don’t choose the right ones for you, the calculations will just go nowhere. Methods and models to measure ROI are constantly evolving but no standardized best practice has been developed yet.
This is not to say that ROI cannot be measured. It is absolutely necessary and can definitely be done but it’s just that there is no One-Size-Fits-All method for all businesses. The calculation is wholly business-specific - every business has different goals and objectives and different metrics have to be employed to evaluate those targets. For example, a business which sells products online can calculate its ROI from Social Media more easily than one that doesn’t. Hence, it is extremely important that effectiveness of the campaign is measured in the context of one’s business goals to help determine its business value.
Defining Business Goals
You need to clearly define the outcomes and purpose for your Social Media Strategy – why you are doing it, what exactly do you want it to achieve and by when. This will differ from company to company and will include end-results like:
Measuring Intangible Benefits
Intangible benefits from Social Media - visibility, brand awareness, customer loyalty, satisfaction, trust and valuable customer interaction and feedback offer long-term business benefits. If the purpose of your social media strategy is to increase brand awareness and build an engaged and relevant following, then the key metrics like Reach, leads, Engagement and number of Fans/Followers would need to be tracked using Insights, Facebook’s built-in analytics tool or other applications. The data obtained can also be improved upon and by adding one’s own metrics such as post reach or post engagement relative to the number of fans.
Further, data concerning popular perception, feedback and sentiment about your brand can be gauged using tools such as SocialMention or Radian6. A good understanding and analysis of these metrics can help measure the effectiveness of the campaign in the context of building brand awareness.
Measuring Tangible Benefits
Website traffic, leads, conversions and sales are the most important metrics for a business which directly impact profitability. Google Analytics is an excellent free tool to track the number of website conversions that come from your various social media accounts while other paid tools like MozAnalytics and KissMetrics are also available. Keeping track of advanced metrics like Cost-per-lead and Cost-per- conversion help give a better assessment of the campaign and make it easier to quantify benefits relative to the cost of acquiring them.
Returns from Ad campaigns
Choosing whether to run a Facebook Ad campaign or a Google Adwords campaign for a better ROI depends entirely on the type of business, product/service and targeted audience. Facebook Ads offers extremely niche targeting and a number of Ad types to choose from but they typically tend to convert lesser than Google Adwords campaigns. However, Facebook Ads are much cheaper to run and hence, most often result in a better return on money spent. Eventually, the best way to choose between the two, from an ROI perspective, would be to try out both and see which works best for you.
When it comes to Social Media Ad campaigns, tracking returns on Ad spends is a much easier process than arriving at the net return from the entire social media campaign. Facebook Ad Analytics allows you to track conversions that happened on your website from of each of your Ads using the Conversion-Tracking option. This is done by placing a code provided by Facebook called an Offsite Pixel on your website which alerts Facebook once your conversion is complete. Facebook then gives you data on the number of conversions from each Ad and the Cost-per-conversion. Apart from helping arrive at an accurate value for Return on Ad Spend, this also helps optimize the campaign by determining which ads are performing better than others.
Arriving at the campaign ROI
All the Metrics and Data that we just discussed are not ROI. They are just indicators which dissect each portion of your campaign and tell you how it is performing. Each metric will have to be co-related with the results that come from it and translated into financial value to arrive at the total monetary gain from the campaign. This divided buy the cost of the campaign (Manning costs, outsourcing costs, Agency fees, Ad spends) will give you the net Return on Investment. To reiterate, the entire process will be a futile exercise if you don’t have clear specific goals in the first place, because then you have nothing to measure against. So get on with brainstorming that crucial first step and let the campaign roll. Social media done correctly definitely delivers excellent results. Keep monitoring what you’re getting out of it and optimize your strategy accordingly.
Do you have a different view/process for measuring ROI of your Social Media campaigns? Do share it with us in the Comments section.
12 Salient Points you shouldn’t miss before you hit the “Send” button on your Email campaigns:
Even tiny errors in your emails can have a big impact on their Open and Click Through Rates. Most mistakes can be avoided if we adopt a Checklist approach to sending each email. So, we’ve put together an Email Campaign Checklist with the most important practical points which need to be checked-off before the email is good to go. We usually recommend using Mailchimp or Sendgrid for sending out emailers and tracking its results.
Subscriber list:
1. Has your distribution list been revised and cleaned of opt-outs and complainants?
From & Sub lines:
2. Does your “From" line include your company name or brand?
3. Is your Subject line clear, catchy and answers the reader’s question “What’s in it for me?”
4. Have you checked that no spam trigger words used in subject line?
Copy (Text and Content):
5. Have your Emails been personalized with correct names? Improves open and click-through rates.
6. Have you used Headings with short paragraphs, bold and bullet formatting to enhance Scanability?
7. Is your Call-to-Action, if used, strong and strategically positioned?
Important Details:
8. Is the Unsubscribe button/link clearly visible and working?
9. Is the link to web-based version (View Emailer on the Web) clear and on top?
10. Are all links working and have custom parameters been added to track in Google Analytics?
Images:
11. Are all images alt-tagged with correct links?
12. Have you checked the Image-text ratio? (Ideally 50/50; 80/20 acceptable for E-commerce e-mailers)
If you’ve answered “Yes” to all these questions, you can go ahead and send the email.
For any queries on your email marketing campaigns or if you wish to optimize them, please contact us and we would be glad to help.
There is no magic wand to predict what 2014 will bring for us. There will definitely be innovations in digital marketing and communication. Predicting trends is a fun exercise nevertheless and here is our take on key trends we can expect to witness in the new year.
Political Parties will invest significantly in Social Media
With the upcoming Lok Sabha elections and the emergence of the AAM Aadmi Party, we can expect significant investment of time and marketing spends on social media. Gujarat CM Narendra Modi is already one of the most popular Twitter celebrities with over 30 Lakh Followers and newly elected Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal has nearly 10 Lakh followers. The action in the online political space is bound to heat up.
2014 to be the year of the Mobile Web
Mobile Commerce has long-held promise in India, but looks like 2014 will be the year when the promise turns into reality. Large ecommerce websites like MakeMytrip, Flipkart and Myntra are seeing ~15%-20% of the transactions coming through mobile already. If you run a business, it’s the right time to think through a mobile strategy (just building an app won’t do!) and ensure that your customers can transact with you through their mobiles.
Improved User Experiences
In a bid to optimize websites for search engines, many websites had poor user experiences. With refined tastes of the Indian consumers, we are seeing even decade only businesses like Makemytrip.com go in for a fresh and lean User Experience. 2014 will see increased usage of tools like A/B Testing of the website, Heatmaps and consumer studies to get the User Experience right.
Social Media moves from Push to Talk
Many businesses have been using social media like a TV Channel. The story has been - keep pushing messages and spending on Advertisements to get your voice heard. Going forward, brands will need to create content which engages in conversations with users – else, brands can except to get lost in the sea of content being produced online.
Clear ROI on Digital Investments
Many Brands started investing seriously in digital marketing only in 2013. In 2014, brands will expect to see clear ROI for the digital investments. We can expect granular tracking of what’s working and what hasn’t, with a shift to online channels which have a higher ROI.
Would be great to hear from you on which trends you agree with and disagree with – please share your thoughts in the comments.
As per the Indian Brand Equity Foundation report on the Indian Real Estate industry, Real Estate is India’s second largest employment generation sector after agriculture and contributes about 6.3 per cent to India’s gross domestic product (GDP). Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Indian Real Estate is expected to touch US$ 25 billion in the next 10 years from its current US$ 4 billion while the sector’s projected annual revenues is expected to be US$ 180 billion by 2020. This enormous growth potential seems to have lured a good number of startups to the industry.
Web Design and User Experience Perspective:
Most of the startups in the space seem to have invested a lot of time and attention in Web Design and User Experience to differentiate themselves from the bigger and more established players.
Housing.com, for instance, has an excellent interface with the property-search button in the centre. The interface is map-based and all property-search results turn out as places on a map. It also has a Shortlist button enabling the user to shortlist options and come back to them later to take a final call. While they have scored well with their interface, what sets them back is the fact they have yet to garner a large number of listings, leaving the user with very few options to choose from.
PropTiger differentiates itself by providing a portfolio tracking tool which enables the end user to know the status of their property investment in terms of pricing, construction progress, project and locality updates, price trends and market talk, which is intended to help them decide the right time to sell their property.
HomeShikari, a TTK services company started in 2011 and currently operating only for properties in Bangalore, is trying to crack the real estate problem by shunning the brokerage model and embracing complete transparency. HomeShikari too allows the user to search for properties via a map-based interface and has worked on a neat ad-free website with a good user Experience.
RealtyCompass claims to be a consumer centric property portal focused on providing the consumer with the information of every new project in the city. Started in July this year and based out of Chennai with a presence in 4 cities in South India, they are looking to expand rapidly to 10 cities pan-India.
Metroplots, also started out of Chennai in 2009, has witnessed good success in 3 major markets of Chennai, Bangalore and NCR where it currently operates and is on an ambitious expansion spree to 20 more cities. They have a strong online interface which offers investors an array of options to choose from while looking for deals and have also created a proprietary SAAS tool called Sales Desk to enable builders & agents grow their business.
Social Media Strategy Perspective:
All startups in the space have been actively using social media platforms to build their brands and engage and acquire customers in an attempt to revamp the industry.
Facebook seems to be the favorite tool with all startups to interact with their customers and promote their services. Housing.co.in, now Housing.com has over 236,000 likes, Commonfloor over 115,000 while HomeShikari, RealtyCompass and PropTiger have about 25,000, 22,600 and 10,000 each.
Amongst the other platforms, Twitter seems to be used more than the rest with Commonfloor being the most active of this pack with over 6500 Tweets and 3500 followers. Metroplots with over 3000 tweets and Proptiger with over 2800 seem to be catching up.
The use of Google+ and LinkedIn as social media platforms is just beginning to catch up while YouTube as a marketing platform has not been used much by either of these startups, with PropTiger being the lone exception. PropTiger has begun uploading videos of the projects listed with them on YouTube and currently has over 40 videos.
With big players such as Magicbricks and 99acres already established in the space, these startups are taking their Web Design, User Experience and social marketing strategy seriously and working on capturing a big chunk of this growing market.
Are you taking your Web Design, User Experience and Social marketing strategy seriously? Call us for a discussion. in the meantime, read our comprehensive guide for digital marketing for real estate.
In a surprising gesture, Google has rolled out an update for Toolbar PageRank yesterday after a time gap of 10 months. The last update for Toolbar PageRank came in February 2013. The update comes as a surprise for many because Matt Cutts, the head of webspam in Google thought otherwise (two months back) as you can see below. Now, don’t try your luck in searching for that tweet. It’s disappeared for obvious reasons.
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PageRank has improved for a lot of sites including Social Beat’s. Have you checked the PR for your site?
PageRank – In a nutshell
PR is one of the many algorithms that Google uses to rank a website in search results. It tells you how reputable a website is to provide you the most relevant results at the top of the page. PageRank is not the sole algorithm used by Google to refine search results. For example, if you use a PageRank Search Tool to identify PR of websites in search results, you are more likely to see websites with even low PR listed above the ones that have a high PR. This substantiates the fact that Google doesn’t use PR as the only factor to rank websites in search results.
Why your website’s PageRank has not improved?
There are few indications that could explain this. One of the important factors for your PR to improve is that there should be an increase in the number of incoming links pointing to your website from other well established sites. The significance of your incoming links does play a vital role but it could not be the only reason.
The balance between the number of incoming links and outgoing links for your website should be maintained. There is no harm in giving outgoing links from your website, but ensure that they have a good PR. This provides a visibility for your website too and is a good optimization strategy. Hence, if the outgoing links are greater than the number of incoming links to your site, then your PR is likely to see a dip.
Do not chase the PR trends. If you create unique and fresh content for your website and leverage your social media presence, your content will certainly gain visibility. If not sooner, at least in the long run it will.
Click here to know more about Google Toolbar
Anuradha Nair and Sunil Elango from Social Beat attended the GDayX event organized by Google Business Group - Chennai last month. The event which was held in Hindustan University, Padur included inspiring sessions, business presentations, a panel discussion and an unconference on latest trends in digital marketing and internet technologies from various speakers including Sunil Rao, the country head of Google Outreach programs. The conclave had a good mix of entrepreneurs, social media experts, SEO professionals and web developers. Below is a partial list of key takeaways from the day-long conclave.
It’s one of those lazy Sundays. You’re surfing e-commerce sites for those lovely pair of shoes you’ve always wanted. You find them! You can’t resist placing the order. Less than thirty minutes later, you hear that familiar buzzing noise outside your door. You’re overjoyed – you’re shoes have already arrived, drone-delivered. Sounds like a scene from a Science fiction movie? Not really. And, you can go ahead and pinch yourself too, because is this is no dream either. Amazon founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos has revealed yesterday that they are developing a drone-based delivery system called Amazon Prime Air, the goal of which is to get packages into customers’ hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) also known as drones.
As soon as your order is placed, it is packed in record time in one of Amazon’s 96 massive warehouses worldwide, also known as fulfillment centers - each about 1.2 million square feet in area – the size of 20 football fields! These will then be put on a delivery carousel from where they will be picked up by the drones – eight rotor helicopters which Bezos calls an “octocopter." These will then be instructed to deliver at designated GPS co-ordinates. They will be able to deliver within a 10 km radius and safely carry about 5 pounds in weight, which as per Bezos, accounts for about 86 percent of the items Amazon delivers.
This delivery system could account for massive reductions in Carbon emissions by reducing the number of delivery trucks doing the rounds. Further, they use electric motors which make them even greener.
However, for those of you expecting to be drone-delivered your orders tomorrow, Bezos says it will take a few, maybe four or five, years. The project is still on the anvil in Amazon’s next-generation R&D lab and has just about entered the experimental stage. In an interview to CBS’s 60 minutes, Bezos said the company is still working on redundancies and reliabilities and the systems required to ensure that mishaps like the drone landing on somebody’s head while they’re walking around the neighborhood don’t happen. Get a sneak peek of Amazon Prime Air in the video below.
Apart from this, the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations currently prohibit use of drones for commercial purposes. However, these are expected to change when a new set of rules for unmanned aircraft come into place by 2015. Security implications will have to be considered too. But Bezos is optimistic, telling 60 minutes, “Could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it's going to be a lot of fun.”
Amazon is a pioneer in the field of e-commerce and has been the poster boy of e-commerce success ever since its inception almost two decades ago. Known for its innovative ways and attempts to streamline their processes and ensure the best service, this new innovation from the Amazon stable comes as no surprise. Also, coming within just a few days of Operation Blue Virus exposing the misuse of Social Media for nefarious reasons; drones, earlier synonymous with attacks causing death and destruction, now being used to make life easier and more convenient just goes to reiterate the fact that any technological advancement, used correctly, responsibly and ethically can be used to work wonders.
The meeting of Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1995 at Stanford has to be the most historical rendezvous ever in the online world. Technically, the duo has been in business together since 1996 and that makes it 17 years. But then, Google filed its incorporation only in 1998 and they celebrate 15 years today. From being an academic research project (Back Rub) to literally running a monopoly in the internet domain, it has phenomenally come a long way.
In perspective, we explored few fascinating facts about Google in terms of revenue. Google’s revenue in 2012 was roughly US $ 50 billion and it’s ahead of the GDP of 89 individual countries in the world in terms of PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). And also, Google earns 2.7 % of India’s GDP (nominal).
1998: The Google website originally hosted on Stanford University servers.
Evolution of Google’s search page from 1998 to 2013: In the RHS of the image, you could see the empty space without any information in 1998 for the keyword “google.”
This is how a search page in 2013 looks when you type the same keyword “google” – A revolutionary change has happened from auto complete, universal search, instant search, knowledge graph to finally including intelligence features in 2013.
Google’s first doodle for its birthday came in 2002. There’s an interesting fact about when Google has been celebrating its birthdays since 2002.
2002 – Sep 27
2003 – Sep 8
2004 – Sep 7
2005 – Sep 26
2006 - 13 – Sep 27
Do you guys observe a pattern here? We’re not sure if Google uses a specific algorithm to celebrate its birthday every year :) Since Google has finally zeroed in on September 27th as its birthday for the past 8 years, we hope it continues in the future too. Happy Birthday Google :)
South India has been the biggest region for gold consumption in the country for many years now. Purchasing gold continues to be a tradition and is considered as the safest investment for people. Chennai, Coimbatore, Kochi and Thrissur together account for nearly 20 % of the annual gold demand. Jewellers are utilizing this opportunity and expanding their foothold in South by opening more showrooms and leveraging their social media presence to engage with the consumers.
At the moment only Facebook is significantly used to promote new products, to carry out festival contests and to interact with the consumers. Kalyan Jewellers – 209,000 likes, Joyalukkas – 66,000 likes and Jos Alukkas – 51,000 likes are among the largest contributors on Facebook. Even the big players are yet to explore other networking tools like Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, Google Plus and LinkedIN. Gehna with 30+ fans and Malabar Gold with 350+ followers are one of the few jewellers using Google Plus and LinkedIN to build a strong network of customers. Joyalukkas, GRT and Jos Alukkas upload videos (though, not frequently) in their YouTube channels to cater to their 700+ subscribers.
E-Commerce is another area that is picking up with jewelry houses and increasingly we see many showcasing and selling online. Online presence is supporting offline purchasing in a big way , with social media and digital marketing being the greater influencers on customers.
