Social Web 3.0, a digital marketing conclave was organised by Madras Management Association on 23rd November at Hotel My Fortune, Chennai. The event was attended by industry bigwigs such as Maneesha Khanna, Director of Marketing, PepsiCo and Bhaskar Ramesh, Head of Industries – FMCG, Google India amongst the other notable ones.
The event started with an insightful keynote address by Hari Menon, CO-Founder & CEO, Big Basket on digital influence and analytics-driven future, which set the stage for the rest of the day. Vikas Chawla, Co-Founder & CEO of Social Beat spoke about how content & influencer marketing is changing the social media game. It was an interactive session with a series of questions on how brands can leverage content marketing to achieve business goals and what would be the ideal advertising-marketing mix.
Here are some insights on Content and Influencer Marketing discussed during the session:
If Content is king, there are too many kings out there.
Here are some tips to stand-out and leverage on relevant content to achieve business goals.
Influencer marketing is becoming an integral part of marketing budgets and here's why:
Digital media endorsement by an influencer can work wonders for your brand, only if you pick the right one.
Here are some metrics you need to consider before choosing the influencers for your campaign.
The next session was a case study by Maneesha Khanna, on #CrashTheIPL campaign that involved consumer generated video content. The idea behind this talk was to understand how videos have become the way forward for FMCG brands to easily connect with the audience. The success of #CrashTheIPL campaign could be contributed to the strong cross channel promotion - yet another game changer in the advertising space. Hence, brand managers should also explore highly integrated digital + TV campaigns, as both of these channels are here to stay.
Apart from these expert sessions and case studies, there were also discussions on various trending topics in the digital & social space. Social Media 3.0 also witnessed a bunch of digital enthusiasts who actively participated in Twitter & Instagram contests conducted during the event.
Were you a part of this digital media conclave and have more stories to tell?
Write to us about your experience in the ‘Comments’ section.
Every marketing expert knows the importance of content marketing. It is a great way to engage with customers and to provide them with knowledge. Creating content that is both relevant and valuable to its target audience is at the very heart of effective content marketing. With the growth of mobile and internet in India, every town and village in India has access to Internet. Thanks to this internet revolution, most of the target audience can be found speaking another language apart from English. So how are you going to address this problem? Our solution is a multi-lingual content strategy.
English is, of course, most commonly used language online not just in the world but also in India. However, Google data shows 94% growth rate for Hindi content consumption. Keeping this in mind global brands has started focusing on regional language as art of their strategy. A year ago, Facebook users were flabbergasted to see the login page in Hindi script. This was followed by US based visual discovery tool Pinterest launching a Hindi version, allowing users in India to use the translated version.Today, Google supports languages such as Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil among others.With 127 million Internet users in India consuming content in local language, all global social media sites have realized the fact that they if they don’t go local in India they might soon lose relevance. Catering to the internet users in tier II and III towns, Google is now focusing to expand usage of its products like Google maps in vernacular languages, especially Hindi.
Of the literate 74%, only 10% read English while the rest consume content in the vernacular medium. Remaining 66% are literate in their local languages. According to a latest study conducted by Internet and Mobile Association of India and IMRB International, regional content availability can boost the growth of Internet in India by 24%. There are more than 70,000 newspapers printed in India and around 90% are either printed in Hindi or other vernacular languages. Realizing the importance of regional content, Indian app developers are also recognizing the need for local app distribution platforms. International app stores do not lend themselves to the easy discovery of highly India-specific regional content.
Yourstory.com, one of India’s leading platform for entrepreneurs and promoting the entrepreneurial ecosystem, recently included separate sections for regional content.
The website also offers content in 10 other languages including Marathi, Telugu and Bengali.
Their regional content strategy has taken off well and has received positive response from the audience. As you can see, the Hindi article has 650 shares and the Tamil content has over 200 shares. The website is updating their regional language pages everyday with interesting articles.
So if you are convinced that regional content marketing is important, here are a few things to consider.
It’s easy to ignore other languages if one dominant language makes up the majority. While English does make for the majority, there is a section that only consumes content in a regional language and this section could be your most important target audience. An English creative gets 0.1% to 0.15% Click Through Ratio (CTR), while a language creative can get 0.4-0.5% CTR. So if a language content and creative has a change to drive more traffic to your product or website, why not concentrate more on it?
When you market your brand in a regional language, it appeals to the emotional quotient of the audience. So localization of content should be an integral part of the creation process. For instance, McDonald’s involves its international teams at an early stage of product development, ensuring it can adapt their most effective marketing strategies to each individual culture where its campaigns are rolled out. Its in-country translation and localization teams ensure that the content strikes the right note in each country.
Your ultimate goal of participating in social media is likely to drive traffic back to your website so you can convert those visitors into leads. Without pitching brands directly, content marketing looks at generating relevant content that educates and creates awareness among customers. It has become an important marketing avenue for the fund-crunched startups to compete with the bigger brands. But it is very important that your content is unique and engaging for your customers. Duplicate or low-quality content can prove to be counter-productive. Once your regional content is up and running, the next step is to ensure that it reaches your target audience. There are many content amplification techniques that can help you promote your content to a large audience. The content strategy needs to be integrated with your social media marketing. It can be key to engaging consumers and many brands are successfully adopting this for their overseas marketing efforts. This video tells you why adopting a multilingual strategy is the only way to connect with the next billion Internet users in India.
Have a particular interest that you are extremely passionate about? Then blogging is the perfect way to start exploring your interest. Blogging is a hobby or a way to build your brand. It is a powerful tool, which can be a great PR for you and your brand. A blog is a simple, easy-to-use platform for connecting with and sharing timely and relevant information with customers. It’s your direct communication channel.
From an online journal at 1,000 words per post to a simple 140-character Twitter feed, blogging has taken center stage largely because of how useful it has proven itself to be in almost all areas of business. If successful, blogging can be a good way to make money and a full time career path as well. However, before we start talking about making a career out of it, the first step is to determine a topic of interest and set up the blog.
To set up your blog hardly takes 30 minutes. If you are planning to start the blog, then here the various top blogging platforms that you can use.
If you are planning to build a website in the near future, you might be confused on which platform to use. While there is a whole bunch of content management systems (CMS) in the market, you might want to use the platform that allows you to do it without worrying too much about the technical aspects like coding.
In simple terms, a Content Management System is a software tool that allows you to create, edit, publish and manage web content. The main objective of a CMS is to provide an intuitive interface to manage your content on the web.
There are many good content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal; and they are all fantastic. But choosing one among them can be difficult because you do not know if the website is suited for the needs of your website. The server can sometimes be a challenge in having an effective CMS and we usually recommend the Linux based servers being provided by Bluehost or Amazon Web Services.
This article shall make you aware of the different aspects of the Top-5 Content Management Systems in the market and help you make an informed decision.
Homepage: www.wordpress.org
One of the world’s most popular content management systems, Wordpress started out as a blogging platform, but has grown and advanced significantly over the years. Based on PHP & MySQL, Wordpress is used by almost 23% of the top 10 million websites around the world. Examples of Wordpress websites are Social Beat, ithought, etc.
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Homepage: www.drupal.org
Drupal is the 2nd most popular PHP-based content management system. It’s a powerful, developer friendly platform that can be easily used for building complex websites. In the latest releases, database management modules have been added that allow managing SQL operations without writing SQL queries. Many big companies like General Electric, Time Warner and Sony Music, are using Drupal.
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Homepage: www.joomla.org
Joomla is quite often, an intermediate choice between Wordpress and Drupal, having the power of a Drupal website and at the same time managing the user-friendly nature of a Wordpress website. Joomla has a lot of plug-ins and themes available to choose from, so you can easily customize your website based on your requirements. It’s suitable for creating back-end networks for a wide range of purposes like inventory control and reservation systems to online commerce websites.
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Website: www.silverstripe.org
SilverStripe is another open source content management system, best serving the needs of developers slightly comfortable with coding. Built on an object-oriented framework called Sapphire, it has multiple platform modules allowing it to support a content formats like blogs as well as forums / communities. SilverStripe code is bound together through independent frameworks; thus providing it the capability to support any CSS Style Sheets and HTML codes.
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Website: www.textpattern.com
A highly flexible content management system, TextPattern is a free, PHP based CMS that is more often skipped when looking at the top CMSs for websites. It leverages Textile to quickly convert plain text to XHTML, making it user-friendly for beginners.
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“In digital marketing, if you stop learning, you die!” For all those who work, think & breathe digital, this holds true. Digital Marketing is a dynamic, ever-evolving and fast space. This space is so rapid that each day brings along a new lesson, a new idea, and a new angle. The best part is there is always scope for more learning, henceforth, improvisation. And for a digital marketer, the learning curve never ceases to be.
Here’s a compilation of a few learning sources from around the world that can help you stay up-to-date with the digital media trends -
1.Moz – Search Engine Optimization can often seem like a trailing game for marketers who don’t have the amenity of a dedicated search engine team. In a cut-throat competitive scenario, SEO techniques and great content often become the shining knights in armors and it is required for the marketers to keep themselves updated with the ins and outs of the SEO ranking. Moz blog is one such explicit resource that helps to brush up on topics that underlie many routine activities involved in the digital practice. The blog encompasses everything related to content marketing, search engine optimization, latest updates by Google, responsive design, and building communities. Whiteboard Friday blogs are something my team and I look forward to since there is plenty to take away from Rand Fishkin's juicy insights on interesting SEO & Content Marketing topics every week!
2. Convince & Convert – The name says it all! Their blog section is more like a splendid guide to digital marketing and they definitely help in improving social media and content marketing strategies because of all the abundant data which is based on audits, strategic marketing plans, guidelines for content and social media marketing. The best part about the blogs that are shared is that they are entirely focused on helping businesses grow online. Topics like "How to get heard in a noisy world" , "5 simple tweaks to optimize your form conversion" , "How to turn B2B prospects into customers" etc. explore the whole wide area of the digital space to the online marketers and help them understand what could be done better to gain conversions.
3. QuickSprout – Founded by Neil Patel, one of the top 10 online marketers in the world the blog offers all that can be instrumental in revenue growth. Neil is a web analytics and conversion expert and also the co-founder of Crazy Egg, Hello Bar and KISSmetrics. The blog has a lavish range of case studies loaded with interesting web insights, all focused towards manifold increment in web traffic and conversions. Here's one for reference which we found extremely interesting -
4. Social Media Examiner – One of my all-time favorite posts from this social media focused blog forum would be the one which is titled “26 Creative Ways to Publish Social Media Updates”. The reason being that brands struggle to produce innovative content for social media and this article displays 26 different ways one can approach storytelling on social media. Social Media Examiner is an excellent content source for outstanding tactical coverage of all things social media from Mike Stelzner and his brilliant team.
5. Hubspot – The inbound marketing blog showcases anything and everything related to marketing and sales. The articles delve into precise how-to-topics and the trends that hover in the industry. When you are looking for specific marketing solutions/answers and are looking to adopt new ideas and practices, stop by hubspot! We recently came across a blog from Hubstop "How to Grow your E-mail List by Running a Contest" and tried applying the key points to one of our campaigns whose main aim was to build engagement whilst compile a brand new subscriber database and guess what? It works!
6. Content Marketing Institute – This is the dynamo of content marketing industry. The multi-author editorial team delivers informative content and tactful insights daily for the advanced content marketers around the globe.
The above featured blogs showcase how content marketing can do so much more than just getting people interested in reading your content. We believe that great content eventually leads to business generation and the kind of insights available from Content Marketing Institute helps us think through our content strategy and improvise it on a regular affair.
7. Search Engine Land – Owned by Danny Sullivan, a leading SEO expert in the online marketing space, this is the best venue to grasp in-depth information about SEO, SEM and social media. As digital marketers, we indulge in a lot of advertising online through social media channels and Google. But the key lies in constantly improving and optimizing the ads to get conversions at the best possible prices. Search Engine Land offers information in abundance that revolves around how Google works and search engine marketing. Some of the popular blogs are as follows.
8. JeffBulas.com – Jeff Bullas is a blogging prodigy and a social media marketing genius. All his blogs are about ‘everything social media’ and e-mail marketing and have straight-forward approach of sharing information that can be extremely viable in driving the businesses towards an optimum visibility online. He was titled by Linkedin as a “Top Social Media Expert You Need To Know” and he has also made it to the Forbes’ Top 40 Social Marketing List. Some of his most interesting blogs are around how visual media works best for tapping your audiences and why is it necessary to be visually appealing on digital media.
9. Simply Measured – It is pretty simple with the kind of information Simply Measured has in store for the readers. Strong information backed with data insights and powerful social analytics is what the blog provides which is required by businesses to help them grow.
The type of information and content available at Simply Measured helps us stay updated on what's new in the online space and how it could be beneficial to us. For online marketers to understand how a new discovery can be used to it's full potential to build leads and the brand, there is no other venue better than this one.
10. Audience Bloom – Audience Bloom is a hub for data and content that is productive in nature. The content has great in depth information about various social media and SEO tools that can be extremely helpful in staying up to date with the digital trends.
The reason why my team and I go gaga over the posts shared by Audience Bloom is because apart from the usual digital mantras, they also cover topics that are realistic in nature and help digital marketers as individuals in expanding their knowledge horizon. I as a social media manager, of course have some favorites like the ones mentioned below -
11. Youtube Google Business Channel – A splendid forum for knowledge sharing and google insights in the form of video blogs makes it more interesting for the viewers. The blog contains multiple videos about how Google functions and tools that can helpful in leveraging Google products.
What could be better than watching videos and accumulating knowledge? A couple of recommended videos would be "Promoting App Installs With Ad Words" and "Online Branding - Win Customers In a Moment".
12. Campaign Asia – Campaign Asia is an authoritative voice of media that showcases and highlights the emerging trends in the digital world.
Stay up to date with the giant marketing trends and do what's best to stay ahead of the race in the digital world with the help of these tidbits. We are on it! If there are other blogs that you follow please do share them with us!
For Spidey fans a trivia which says Andrew Garfield admitted to shedding tears the first time he wore the Spiderman costume shooting for The Amazing Spiderman, could be priceless. And for a startup that sells super hero merchandise, this exclusive trivia on their interactive blog could mean serious business. Stories told through videos and blogs are taking the place of advertisements for several startups that are using content to engage with customers.
"Every industry has a story to tell, if they look hard enough. And people continue to love interesting narrative," said Lakshmanan Narayan, founder of Chennai-based Unmetric, a social media intelligence platform whose company has been serving clients like Toyota, American Airlines and Lowe's. Most startups working in the online space find content-based marketing or content marketing as a medium to connect to the customer and prefer it over direct marketing. Without pitching brands directly, content marketing looks at generating relevant content that educates and creates awareness among customers.
"Content marketing allows us to engage the customers better by sharing information that is useful for them," said Rishi Khaithan, cofounder of BuildMyEvent, a Mumbai-based platform, which connects its customers to venues for their events. It also provides platforms for its vendors to connect with the customers via their blog instead of individual marketing.
"Startups don't have the money to compete with the big names," said Vikas Chawla of Social Beat, a Chennai-based digital agency delivering social media marketing and ecommerce consulting. "They have to do things in a different way either around the product or around content. Content marketing helps them to do that."
"People get sick of ads," says Pradeep Rajadas of Sociall.in, a Chennai-based social media marketing company . "Diversity keeps you engaged. So you have to start spinning stories to which customers can connect to and through which you can promote your brand," he added. Sociall has developed and marketed content for city-based real estate companies, focusing on the lifestyle, neighbourhood, appreciation of land and so on. The company has also produced content around "investment opportunities" in technology productivity hacks from tech, ROI from your latest smartphone purchase and so on for a gadget retailer.
This article was originally published in the Economic times
Recently, I conducted a workshop on Digital Marketing for Startups in India as part of the Weekend Ventures #StartupLounge. The workshop focused on the digital marketing methods that can help startups in building their brand & in getting results (in terms of app downloads, ecommerce sales or lead generation).
Importance of Granular Targeting in Social Media
For e-commerce companies, social media is a critical channel for driving sales. While Google and the display network is an effective medium to reach the target audience, social media networks, especially Facebook are being used to target the right consumers having relevant interests. While it’s important to engage with the audience within Facebook, we have found it to be more effective to drive traffic via Facebook Ads directly to the website or landing page and track results there.
For example, Planet Superheroes, which is into Superhero Merchandise has used FB to segment users who like specific superheroes and are online spenders in India. So superman t-shirt ads are targeted to users who like Superman and fit into the age & location demographic relevant to the brand. This level of granular targeting is possible only in social media. Moreover, organic posts are not enough anymore owing to the recent policy changes for Facebook Pages. This means advertising on Facebook and other channels becomes essential. With the advanced features of Facebook companies can even target their existing customers, friends of their customers and even audiences having similar interests and demographics to their existing customers.
Most importantly, the return on investment is measurable to the last rupee using analytics and conversion tracking tools. This also makes digital marketing more transparent in constantly improving the cost of acquisition for ecommerce brands.
Other Social Media Platforms that e-commerce companies can leverage
Social Media has been crucial to the brand building of e-commerce companies. Not just Facebook but even Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest have enabled even smaller startups find a niche in the crowded e-commerce space. The younger generation is more inclined to using Instagram and Whatsapp and brands are starting to experiment with these networks depending on their target segment. Even usage of pinterest and professional network, Linkedin have grown remarkable and depending on the audience being targetted, different ecommerce companies are using different channels. An interesting case in scenario is Cherrytin, a premium e-gifting destination which has used Instagram & youtube to showcase the premiumness and fun identify of the brand and thereby driving sales in the long run.
We see Whatsapp, Instagram and YouTube playing a pivotal role in the growth of ecommerce brands as the younger generation is adapting to these platforms even faster than they adapted Facebook.
Increased focus on Conversion Rate Optimisation
With tools like Zarget, CrazyEgg and even Google Analytics allowing data points to help improve sales, revenue and conversions, this is going to be a focus area for every ecommerce company.
Focussed not just on social media metrics, but on business results
Till 2013 social media analytics was focussed on social media metrics like reach, impressions, page likes, post likes, number of retweets. It was only in 2014, that there was a focus on measuring business results (online orders, lead generation, sign ups etc). This trend is likely to get more entrenched in 2015, with even small businesses focussing on achieving their business goals via the digital medium. With free tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, brands can now track how many leads or online sales or signups they had and as to which digital medium helped them get these results.
For example, for some of our ecommerce companies close to 30% of revenue comes from Facebook and upto 5% from emailer campaigns. Moreover, we are able to identify which ads contributed to the revenue and leads. While it’s important to engage with the audience within Facebook, we have found it to be more effective to drive traffic via Facebook Ads directly to the website or landing page and track results there.
So it’s no longer going to be just about acquiring fans or engaging with the community, but about how the brand is being built and what results are achieved.
Using CRM to build a single view of the customer
Retailers, E-commerce sites and larger enterprises have started initiatives to integrate offline data with data from multiple online channels including website, emailer campaigns, Facebook, Instagram and other social media channels. Powerful CRM tools are going to enable brands to build a single view of the customer and to see what kind of targeting communication can be given to them. Around the world, tools like Marketo, Act-On & Sailthru have been doing this at an enterprise level but in 2015 such tools will become more accessible to small and medium enterprises even in India.
Focus on consumer insights to serve the right ads to the right people
Machine Learning Analytics & Automation will help brands focus on granular consumer insights and allow for right ads reach the right people. Tools like FanPlayr & Gigya already have powerful & intelligent tools to enable this and these are going to get more sophisticated over time.
For example, Planet Superheroes, which is into Superhero Merchandise has used FB to segment users who like specific superheroes and are online spenders in India. So superman t-shirt ads are targeted to users who like Superman and fit into the age & location demographic relevant to the brand. This level of granular targeting is possible only in social media.
Content creation based on analytics
Social media listening tools and content analysis is starting to happen where brands can predict what kind of content will help in engaging with their audience. Brands like Red Bull have kept content at the core of the digital strategy and that’s the approach many brands are starting to take.
According to a recent Adobe survey, more than 50% of businesses spend less than 5% of their marketing budgets on optimizing the campaigns. Though it is important for all businesses, it becomes critical in case of an ecommerce business. When an ecommerce business spends more than 90% of the marketing budget to drive visitors to their website, isn’t it really important to make the most out of these visitors coming on to your website.
