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Digital Chai Pe Charcha – Content Marketing Success in 2016

  • Rohit Uttamchandani
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  • 29 February , 2016
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    • 6 min read

The second edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha, held at our office on 27th Feb 2016 received a great response with about 25 participants including entrepreneurs, professionals, digital marketers and social media influencers taking active part in the discussion. The topic of discussion was achieving content marketing success in 2016 and beyond.

As a recap for those who attended the session and for the benefit of those who didn’t, here’s a summary of the key takeaways from the session:

Why Content Marketing is essential:

Content marketing is a key part of any marketing strategy and is known to produce business results, as shown by the Hubspot survey below:

Also, as compared to paid media, it has a more sustained long-term impact:

Source: Neil Patel

Also, with most users being bombarded with ads from a large number of brands and with the use of ad blocking growing at a rapid pace, inbound marketing through valuable content works better and helps reach out to an audience that paid ads would never reach.

“10x Content” is required to make your content stand out:

With over 27 million pieces of content being produced every day, creating content that is good and unique alone doesn’t work. You need to create content which as defined by Rand Fishkin is “Content that is 10 times better than the best result that can currently be found in the search results for a given keyword phrase or topic.”

Creating 10X Content:

Read your audience’s minds:

The key is to find questions that your target audience is looking for answers to and problems they are looking to solve. Tools and platforms that could help you with this research are:

Combine User-focused content with search engine focused content:

Once you find topics that you could create 10x content on you would also need to check if there is a large enough number of users who are searching for content around those topics. This is where Google Keyword Planner comes into play and helps you figure out which topics you should create content on to get large volumes of organic traffic.

Find the most successful content around the topic:

Once you decide on a topic to create content on, you need to research the topic, do a competitive analysis and find the most successful content around it. This can be done by searching for different keyword variations on Google Search to identify top ranked content or by using a tool like Buzzsumo to find the most shared content on the topic.

Make your content better than any other top content out there:

Ensure your content:

  • Is longer, detailed, more thorough
  • Is more up-to-date
  • Contains better visuals – infographics, images, slideshares, videos
  • Has an enhanced User Experience

For more detailed steps on creating 10x content check out our blog on 10 ways to create 10x content. Some examples of what 10x content could possibly look like are listed below:

Content Amplification is Key:

Simply ideating, creating and publishing content does not work anymore and content distribution requires as much, if not more, effort as content creation. Some avenues for content amplification that you could use would be:

  • Promote on Social Networks
  • Use LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads & Promoted Tweets.
  • Notify your email list
  • Respond to questions on Quora, Reddit, comment on blogs, take part in industry forums
  • Leverage the reach of influencers
  • Get featured in industry roundups

You could also check out or blogs on 21 SEO Link Building Techniques for 2016 and the 15 Best Social Bookmarking Websites to promote your content. For other useful content amplification strategies, you can also take a look at our slideshare below:

Q & A from the session:

Some of the questions that came up during the discussion with the answers are listed below as well:

Q: Is content marketing the way forward for SEO as well?

A: The focus of SEO has shifted from just keyword optimization and link building to not only producing quality content that addresses users’ needs but also delivering that content to the user with the best experience possible. Content is now the new SEO and creating 10X content is going to be the way forward in 2016.

Q: How do you measure results from Content Marketing?

A: Three metrics would help measure the impact of your content marketing efforts:

  • The social impact – Shares on social media platforms
  • Organic and Referral Traffic – Number of visitors to the blog from Google Search, Social Media and other referral sites
  • Conversions from the blog – Enquiries generated from your content marketing efforts.

Q: How long do content marketing efforts take to start showing tangible business results?

A: There is only one right answer here and that is – it depends. There are multiple factors that will impact your success timelines like your existing domain authority, the time and effort invested in content creation and promotion and the content promotion budgets, if any. Typically content gets indexed in a few days and you can start getting traffic but time period to get business results can vary from 3-4 months all the way up to even a year. For example, when we started our influencer marketing platform, Influencer.in it took us 4 months before we started getting tangible results in the form of enquiries via our content or via google organic traffic.

Q: What tools can be used to create Infographics when one does not have a design team?

A: Piktochart, Infogram and Canva are good tools to help you craft beautiful infographics

Q: Does post regional language content help content marketing efforts?

A: Yes, translating content to regional languages can help reach out to a newer audience, provided that audience is relevant to your business. Regional language content can also help increasing search traffic to your website, as shown in this article on the growth of regional content as well as this case study by Neil Patel.

Q: How do I know my content is 10x?

A: Whether your content is 10x or not is a little subjective - what may appear 10x to you may not look like 10x to someone else. Nevertheless, below are some validation questions to help you figure out if your content is 10x:

  • Is your content longer, detailed, more thorough and more up-to-date than any other content on the web?
  • Does the content contain better visuals – infographics, images, slideshares, videos?
  • Does your blog have an excellent User Experience?
  • If you were your target audience, would you find this content valuable enough to link to it or share it?

Here’s what some of our participants had to say about the session:

 

 

 

 

 

Those of you who missed the inaugural edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha last month can check out the meeting summary here. You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter or check out the hashtag #DigitalCPC for more details on the next Digital Chai pe Charcha meet.

Are there any digital marketing challenges or problems you face in your organization? Do let us know and we would be happy to include them as discussion topics in upcoming Digital Chai Pe Charcha sessions.


Digital Chai pe Charcha – Digital Marketing for Startups

  • Abhishek Kumar
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  • 9 January , 2016
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    • 6 min read

‘Great Product + Great Marketing = Great Startup’

In Dec 2015, we had an idea of creating a platform and open community for discussing challenges faced in marketing a startup – and this was the birth of “Digital Chai pe Charcha”. It got off to flying start in its first edition at our office on 8th January 2016. With limited promotion, we had a full house with 30 participants. The open discussion threw up interesting questions and insights from the diverse community comprising first-time entrepreneurs, seasoned professionals, digital marketers, journalists, PR professionals to social media influencers.

We discussed 7 broad topics and have summarized them below:

1. Validating Your Product

  • To kick things off,  we first discussed how entrepreneurs can get a quick sense of the market and customers, without spending months on building their product, website or ecommerce store.
  • While we usually recommend Wordpress as the platform for most businesses – this can take anywhere between a few weeks to months to build. The quickest way to start off is to create a landing page for your app, business or store. Tools like Unbounce and Instapage allow you to develop landing pages within a day. They can also be a great medium to understand whether customers would like to take up your product/service and at the same time start building an emailer list. You can even get low cost images from platforms like PhotoConcierge.
  • Another way the digital medium can validate a product is to get feedback via platforms like Product Hunt, BetaList & Inbound.org or survey tools like Get Insights, Survey Monkey. Platforms like GetInsights have an existing audience panel so it helps in getting the survey results quickly. Some participants did raise concerns on the authenticity of these audience panels and in these cases, sending a survey (via Survey Monkey or Google Forms) to your own personal network might be worthwhile.
  • Reach out to your personal network for validation tests. Don’t hesitate in asking for initial feedback as it will help shape your product.

2. Acquiring your First set of Users

  • Leverage your Personal Network in acquiring your first set of customers. Reach out and ask for referrals and test users.
  • LinkedIn, if leveraged properly, can be a great tool for the purpose. The premium LinkedIn account allows In-mails to your potential customers. Moreover, directly targeting relevant customers on Linkedin & Twitter can be very beneficial in not only getting first time users but also getting valuable feedback on your product. If it’s a consumer business even sites like BetaList can help.
  • Offering free trials to induce usage can help in showcasing the value your product adds to your customers. If they like it, then they might want to turn into paying customers. Many SAAS based companies do have a freemium model to cater to this.
  • Contrary to belief, Email Marketing is still very effective. Build a database of email ids, but avoid purchasing databases – it doesn’t work. Effective ways to build your own database can be to have a prominent email/lead collection mechanism on your landing page. You could also use tools like SumoMe, attend networking events and create good content on your website to induce newsletter signups. Platforms like MailChimp can be used for Emailer Marketing and they have integrations with Wordpress, Unbounce or other email collection platforms.
  • Adding a Live Chat feature on the landing page, app or website can also help directly interact with customers and build on to your emailer list. This way you can also find out what questions customers have, before they take up your product/service.
  • Quora is fairly popular in India. Search for people looking for solutions where your product can fit in. Answer questions with backlinks to your product page/website. It will help in the long term.

3. Marketing on a Shoe-String Budget

Startups do not have big pockets for marketing activities. In the face of budget constraints, how can they build a brand and acquire customers? Some ideas discussed were:

  • Create User / Google focused content to help your product get discovered at the right place & time. Long-form content has excellent SEO value as well as drive relevant traffic to your website. If you are interested in understanding the basics of SEO for Startups then do check out this slideshare. There are a bunch of SEO tools as well, which can be of use.
  • Creating Unique & Fresh content is important. Avoid creating duplicate content as you might not get much traction. It would be prudent to instead focus the time and energy on developing content that will be interesting for your users. Amplifying the content is also critical as there are millions of content pieces out there.
  • Plan well ahead of time. Nothing beats strategic planning. Develop a content marketing calendar with different placeholders for blog articles and social media content – this could be around relevant themes e.g. Valentine’s Day, Launch of a Movie etc. You can check out an investment & wealth management company leveraged Star Wars to showcase Investment Lessons from Star Wars. Be interesting, be regular.
  • Some interesting points that came up for discussion like the ideal number of hashtags to use and how to get your social media profiles verified.
  • Digital Advertising, while integral was not discussed as it warranted a separate discussion of its own.

4. Save Time with Free Tools

There is a whole host of tools out there that can be leveraged to help you amplify your marketing efforts. Some tools you can explore are:

  • IFTTT is a useful tool to create automated actions across a wide variety of platforms from Twitter and Facebook, Youtube to Gmail and Instagram. You can use it for different purposes by building your own custom recipes. One useful application can be to create automated twitter lists in area of your interest and track people in your domain. A sample recipe can be – when someone tweets in my area with #Offers hashtag, I add him to my list “OffersNearMe”.
  • Hootsuite can be a one stop solution to schedule and track your social media posts. It saves you the hassle of logging into different accounts every time you want to post. The Instagram post schedule feature was recently launched by Hootsuite and does not have automated posts functionality. For Instagram, Schedugram or Stribr can be a better tool to use.
  • BuzzSumo is the best in-class tool for content research. You can track the best performing content in your industry that will help devise a strong content marketing plan for your brand. It is also useful for tracking influencers in different domains based on geography and interest area.
  • Feedly, It & Twitter Lists can be explored to track curated content. They fetch content in your interest areas and present it on your feed which can be shared on your social media channels.
  • Many other free social media tools are available – you can check out a complete list here.

5. Build an online brand persona but strike a balance vis-à-vis traditional marketing

  • You need to be clear what your startup or product stands for. It will help you in creating the brand persona – this is important for online as well as offline branding for your company.
  • Brainstorm and come up with your brand colors, tone and maintain the uniformity across channels. While this may change over time, uniformity across channels and mediums is critical.
  • Not all of your customers are online hence, traditional marketing is here to stay and would be wise for companies to go for a balanced mix in their marketing budget.

6. Traditional Vs Digital Marketing

  • One of the questions that got asked during the discussion was, how do you split the marketing budgets between traditional and digital mediums. We are already seeing brands spend atleast 15% of their budgets on social media, but in our experience many of the forward looking businesses are going to spend as much as 50% on digital marketing in 2016. This of course depends on the industry and business model as well.
  • You can also see what trends we predict for digital marketing in India in 2016.

7. Track & Measure the results

Here's what some of the participants had to say:

 

 

 

Based on the suggestions from the participants, we are going to make this a monthly initiative with each month having a focused topic. You can check out the hashtag #DigitalCPC for more details on the next Digital Chai pe Charcha meet.

Please feel free to comment below or tweet to us, in case you would like to add to the existing list of pointers for startups. We would love to add them in the article.


What’s brewing at the Social Media Week Mumbai?

  • Lalitha Shukla
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  • 14 November , 2015
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    • 2 min read

What happens when eminent personalities from various industries come together to share their expertise on social media and its aspects? Yes, it is that time of the year! The much awaited Social Media Week is scheduled to happen next week in Mumbai (November 16th to 20th).

Social Media Week hosts conferences across Europe, Australia, North America, South America, Asia & Africa which aim at connecting more than 1 million people and stands to be a powerful source of information that can be instrumental in shaping the future of human connectivity.

Image Courtesy - brandwatch
The Mumbai edition of SMW conference this year will witness an entire week of all things social media. This time it is bigger than ever. Over 73 speakers from different verticals will be there to address and advice the audience on various aspects of social media. Celebrities from the media and communication world like Arnab Goswami, Editor-in-chief, Times Now will be there to deliver their thoughts on how social media is commanding the industry at present. SMW will also have successful marketing professionals like Neha Ahuja, Peter Claridge Eric Edge and many more. Entrepreneurs like Sachin Bhatia, Founder, Truly Madly will also be in the panel of speakers.
As of today, not many events that are focused on digital media/social media take place in India. SMW, one of its kind, does not only help build a platform where there are opportunities to learn and share ideas but also network with fellow social media enthusiasts. Overall, it is going to be a social-media filled week with a lot of idea sharing!
We are looking forward to it. Are you?

You can follow live updates from the SMW Mumbai here.


My Social Beat Internship Journey – Maryna Holubenko

  • Maryna
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  • 28 September , 2015
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    • 4 min read

Having lived in Ukraine all my life, I traveled to India to take up an internship. Through AIESEC, an organization that provides young people global internship and volunteer exchange experiences, I joined Social Beat about five months ago and have had the best experience. Social Beat is a digital marketing company founded in 2012 by two brothers, Vikas Chawla and Suneil Chawla. Although the company is just three years old, it is already one of the leading full-service digital agencies in India with a young, friendly and progressive team.

The company has five teams: Web Development, Design, SEO/Advertising, Social Media and Business Development. I worked in social media and partly in business development. I created content strategies for clients in different verticals including hospitality, real estate, entertainment, healthcare and ecommerce. I attended client events and wrote articles mainly for customers from Chennai. I can say that I’m exploring the city through the brands I handled.

I am the only foreign intern in the company and all the team members are friendly and everyone kept me informed about what the other teams are working on. At Social Beat, we have review meetings every Monday and on Fridays we gather around and chit chat about new trends in the digital marketing sphere. Even as an intern, I had opportunities to express and implement my ideas and the team always had my back. I also got to witness some of the interesting projects that Social Beat has been a part of. With Influencer marketing catching up fast in India, Social Beat has built a platform called Influencer, which will help shape the opinions of your brand using the most influential people amidst your potential customers. Social Beat is one of the pioneers in India, who has created a platform to attract bloggers and successfully offers it as an additional option for clients.

The other project I was part of was the Startup Walk. Startup Walk is a city-wide, open house for technology companies and Social Beat was a host company in it. Participants got the opportunity to check out the spaces, get acquainted with startup culture, meet the founders and get a behind-the-scenes look at the most innovative companies in Chennai. I got to interact and meet CEOs and it was an exciting assignment for me. At Social beat, the philosophy is work hard and party hard and I got to do just that. One of the brightest memories of my internship was the wedding of my boss and Co-Founder Vikas Chawla. As a little surprise, my team and I put together a dance performance. It was a lot of fun during practices and I really enjoyed learning Indian dance.

I also organized a fun activity for my colleagues and peers at Social beat, where I did a photo session and asked them to show five emotions (happiness, anger, surprise, thoughtfulness and craziness) and created a collage. It was really interesting to see how each person expressed different emotions.

I definitely know that I'll miss our office talks, group dinners where everyone shared their food. This has been an incredible experience that took me up to a new step of my professional development, I met wonderful people and discovered incredible India.

Before coming here, I had heard several stories about internships and life in India for foreigners. I knew that I will get some culture shock seeing people sleeping everywhere, surrounded by garbage, crazy traffic on the roads, cows walking on the streets and monkey stealing your things (but there are no monkeys in Chennai and I hardly saw any cows). However, my stint in Chennai was extremely memorable and exciting. I met new people and got to do a lot of things. Along with my boyfriend, I even shot for a couple of movies as a tourist. Hopefully you can all see me in “Iraivi” and “Kabali” even after I leave this beautiful country. People here are really kind and if you are a foreigner visiting India, be ready for lots of photos with Indians who like to grab you and take a selfie with you. So come to India and you will get an opportunity to feel like a star :)


Digital Media & Entrepreneurship in India – MOP Vaishnav College

  • Abhishek Kumar
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  • 4 September , 2015
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    • < 1 min read

This presentation on the topic "Digital Media & Entrepreneurship" is from the talk for students of Department of Media & Communication at MOP Vaishnav College in Chennai, India. It was conducted on 3rd September, 2015. The talk evolved around questions such as

  • What is digital marketing? Is it relevant more than ever before ?
  • What does all the growth in digital mean for the youth of this country?
  • What is influencer marketing? How does it work?

Check out this presentation that to get answers to the above questions & many more!


Our Co-Founder Suneil wins Emerging Entrepreneur Award

  • Nandita Raman
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  • 29 August , 2015
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    • < 1 min read

We are delighted to announce that Social Beat’s Co- Founder Suneil Chawla, received the “Emerging Entrepreneur Award″ from the Sindhi Chamber of Commerce, held on August 28 2015 at The Savera Hotel in Chennai.

Devoted to encourage young and budding entrepreneurs, the Chamber facilitates emerging entrepreneur every year. The 8th edition of the awards was presented by Governor of Tamil Nadu, Dr. K Rosaiah to young and aspiring entrepreneurs. Speaking at the occasion, Suneil said, “It's been an amazing three years and I am humbled to receive an award for our entrepreneurial journey. We have been able to grow only because of the amazing team that we have and I accept this award on behalf of everyone at Social Beat."

Dr K Rossaiah congratulated the recipients and said, “Be it in providing employment, spread of education, establishing industries or promoting trade and commerce, the contribution made by Sindhis is unique and deserves a special mention.”


Content Marketing helps startups connect – Social Beat featured in the Economic Times

  • Suneil Chawla
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  • 17 February , 2015
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    • 2 min read

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

 


Our co-founder Suneil Chawla featured in The Times of India

  • Abhishek Kumar
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  • 28 January , 2015
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    • < 1 min read

Social Beat co-founder Suneil Chawla featured in The Times of India coverage on how companies are leveraging the reach of bloggers and influencers for building their brand visibility online. We have also recently launched our new initiative for Influencer Marketing in India which can be seen at www.influencer.in

 


Our co-founder Vikas Chawla featured in the Business Standard

  • Rohit Uttamchandani
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  • 27 January , 2015
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    • < 1 min read

Social Beat co-founder, Vikas Chawla's article on the advanced ?Facebook? ad techniques to focus on in 2015, featured in the Business Standard.


Social Beat Influencers & Bloggers Meet in Chennai

  • Abhishek Kumar
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  • 18 December , 2014
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    • 3 min read

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.

 


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