Category: MarTech

Why Is It Important For Digital Marketing Agencies To Have Deep Tech Capabilities Going Forward?

September 24, 2020

There are lots of areas where digital (or any) marketing agencies can leverage technology to complement their offering. 1) Create unique marketing automation journeys on top of existing open-source products, and have full creative control of the user experience/user journey. 2) Integrating Growth / MarTech Tools (like CRM, A/B Testing, Helpdesk, etc.) properly to ensure that the campaign benefits are multiplied. 3) Websites (along with mini-sites, landing pages) are getting more complex. You should be able to take care of site security, issues like a progressive web app (PWA), site speed optimization, or simply making the website mobile friendly – that too within the constraints of the given content management system (CMS). And besides this, the marketing (design and messaging) needs to be tweaked, optimized, and well-integrated into these frameworks to get the desired result. 4) Build digital assets (often digital tools, e.g. – simple and free cloud-based payroll tool to build an audience for an HR consulting company) that engage the audience and deliver value to create a lasting impact. It is proven that in content marketing, “functional tools” are much more effective and have a longer shelf life, referral, and recall than thought leadership or curated content. 5) Build deeper and contextual (to the business and industry) web analytics layer on top of traditional analytics data to mine insights and act upon them (E.g. when you see traffic increase on a website, what is the actual quality-weighted improvement of traffic from different sources, by different campaigns). At times, you have to pull data from different sources to mash-up and derive composite analytics. Such deeper insights help derive business metrics from generally available vanity metrics. Most importantly, to achieve great results, you need a combination of both the right brain (creative) and left brain (logical thinking) to come together. It just changes the perspective. The challenges which most brands owners face are endless communication loop between agencies (creative+marketing, and tech) when these functions are being performed by two different agencies with different working style. What are your options: 1) Build – The best option. However, you need to manage two opposite personality types in one team, which is not an easy job. It’s disciplined vs. creative, methodical vs. inspirational, geek vs. bohemian. My intent is not to generalize, but highlight the difference in team personality at a broader level. 2) Buy – Acquire a small tech company to fulfill the requirements. Good solution, but cultural integration can be a challenge, and you can gravitate to the same problem that you can have when you build a team in long term. 3) Partner – Do a tightly integrated partnership with a tech agency and dry-run the working relationship on smaller projects or internal hobby projects! 4) Outsource – Find tech firms online or through reference and outsource the tech side to them. This is interesting and valuable leverage that any digital marketing agency ought to build, to stay ahead in the hyper-competitive market of building long term relationships. What are your views on this? It will be a pleasure to know your views, and discuss and learn from you!

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15 Actionable Insights From Our Webinar On Digital Marketing Mistakes in 2018

January 11, 2019

We collaborated with DigitalMarketingUniversity.com to organise an insightful session with Aji Issac Mathew, CEO | Indus Net TechShu on the topic “Mistakes that may have hurt your Digital Marketing Campaigns in 2018”. We listed down 15 actionable insights from the session, these tips will definitely help business owners, marketing managers and even people who are into execution. Visit our Facebook page to get access to the entire session video. You can also take a look at the Aji’s presentation on SlideShare. Tip#1: Businesses need to first define the purpose of hiring a #DigitalMarketing agency before investing.   Tip#2: Don’t judge an agency based on your past working experience with a different agency, dynamics change!   Tip#3: Develop a yearlong roadmap in terms of execution and review every quarter.   Tip#4: Identify people responsible for short and long term success and keep a track on the progress.   Tip#5: Don’t invest all the budget on branding, keep part of it for the follow-up campaign to support sales.   Tip#6: Don’t take decisions based on opinions, it should be backed by competition data, complementary products, markets, trends and customer behaviour.   Tip#7: Keep a track of your marketing campaigns every week and brainstorm with the execution team to optimise it at all levels – design, copy, audience selection, channels and budget.   Tip#8: Team structure is key for the best results in #DigitalMarketing   Tip#9: If you are confused in terms of choosing the right channel. Invest the budget in all primary channels and check where you get the best results. Based on the output, plan the budget accordingly going forward.   Tip#10: Spend time in positioning your product/service for the identified customer segment. While you do this, involve your operations team as they have more insights from the real customer data.   Tip#11: Talk about the vision and what the company stands for in front of the customers. Digital allows you to connect with your customers at every juncture.   Tip#12: Invest in the market/channel which is giving you the best results, however, keep experimenting with other channels and see if tweaking the communication is adding value. Tip#13: Don’t create “global content” for the “local audience”. Develop the messaging based on the need of the customer, also in 2019 focus less on creating fresh content but more on consolidating content.   Tip#14: Facebook is a great platform for B2B lead generation, however combining the behaviour with interest always give good results.   Tip#15: Desktop is more popular when it comes to B2B customers, however for B2C it is observed that more visits come from Mobile. Bonus Tip   Digital Marketing University recently announced a Digital Marketing Strategy course for business owners and marketing professionals in India. If you wish to know more about the outcomes you may expect from the course, click here.

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Growing Potential of Voice Search and Its Implication for Your Business

October 10, 2018

A ComScore estimate recently suggested that by 2020, 50% of searches will be voice-based. To further support that claim, 40% of adults already used voice-based search back in 2016. By the end of 2018, it is not really about why you should implement voice search, but how quickly you can do it. Web browsing is more personalized than ever, and Google has been at the forefront of bringing individualized web browsing experience to its users, including an emphasis on voice search. Google’s Voice Search has necessitated businesses to take voice search seriously and to implement it as quickly as possible. In this article, let us take a look at the implications of voice search on businesses and what you can do it stay ahead in the race. A growing number of people use voice search to find businesses By 2020, the number of people who will use voice search in the US will shoot to 21.4 million, according to Activate. Unfortunately, most businesses are not prepared for the increasing number of voice queries. Business implications: Technologies such as Siri and Google Voice Search learn to recognize keywords and voice commands by using natural language processing. Over time, these technologies learn users’ unique characteristics of voice, how they speak, their behavioral patterns, and even browsing interests. Businesses that are not ready to handle these hyper-personalized voice-based search queries will lose out in the long term. What you should do: Audit your current strategy and ensure that you focus on long-tailed keyword phrases most-likely used by your target audience. Brainstorm new keyword targets, and try to provide the best answer for each possible query. People type keywords but speak out conversational keywords While people type keywords to look for information on browsers, the way they search via voice is different. Search queries tend to be more conversational, and entire sentences or questions are spoken out during voice search. Business implications: Voice search reflects how people really speak a certain language. Their queries tend to reflect real-life usage of a language and thus, keywords tend to be conversational and long-tail+. Long-tail+ indicates that long-tail keywords need to be optimized for conversational queries. Older keywords that are shorter will not be acceptable for voice search optimization. What you should do: Your keyword strategy should be conversational and should mimic the way people talk in real life. Imagine scenarios in which people might search for services and products your business might offer. Document and record queries that your customer service representatives frequently encounter when they speak to customers. Shortlist long-tail+ key phrases and create content pages that focus on these shortlisted key phrases. Increasing requests for specific information As Siri, Google Voice Search and other tools get smarter, people will continue to seek specific information via voice search. Generic web content will not rank very highly in voice search results. Business implications: As discussed above, people tend to speak out sentences or ask questions in a conversational manner when they search for information. Specificity of search queries will render previous content and SEO strategies quite redundant. What you should do: Optimize your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page to reflect long tail and conversational keyword phrases. Natural sounding questions and answers on your FAQ page will tackle hyper-specific queries better. Apply correct schemas and use structured data markup to optimize your web content for voice search devices. Voice search is contributing to queries in the vernacular tongue Most voice searches tend to be local in nature, such as “Where to get the best coffee in Wickham” In addition, local search in vernacular languages other than English will constitute a large number of search queries. Business implication: If you do not optimize your content for local search queries, and if you do not take vernacular languages into account, you may lose out on a number of voice search queries. Most web users will tend to speak English in their vernacular accent or dialect, and they may even use languages other than English, depending on where your business is located. What you should do: Ensure that you claim your Google My Business listing, and enter your phone number, business hours, address, and business description. This helps in your business showing up when someone makes a voice search query. Secondly, optimize your content to suit local languages and dialects, and focus on local SEO. Voice searches mostly come from mobile devices While people prefer to type on their laptops or desktops, they tend to speak to their mobile devices, thanks to improved voice recognition technology. Google Assistant is currently available on more than 400 million devices, most of which are mobile. Business implications: Not being prepared for voice queries emanating from mobile devices can have real consequences on a business’ revenue. If your business is not mobile-optimized, and if the content is not optimized for voice queries, you may lose out on traffic arriving from mobile devices via voice search. What you should do: To begin with, make sure that your website is mobile responsive, and optimize your website for mobile queries. Improve overall user experience on mobile browsers such as fixing slow loading pages, making sure that videos can be played in full-screen when a user holds their smartphone horizontally and reducing the number of interstitials. A few points to remember Voice search is getting more popular than ever, and businesses need to change their current SEO strategy to include voice search. It is important to remember that voice queries tend to be conversational in nature and employ natural language. As the use of natural language results in more specific queries, optimizing FAQ pages with long-tailed keywords is important. In addition, voice search tends to be local and vernacular in nature, which necessitates local SEO, and content optimized for local visitors. Finally, it helps to optimize websites for a rich mobile experience as most voice searches come from mobile devices. If you need assistance implementing voice search strategies, contact us today.

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How Data Influences Media and Marketing Today

September 27, 2018

Market research has always been the basic tool to design and develop strategies and campaigns. However, traditional market research consumes a lot of time and requires special skills to process and analyze and to derive insights. Marketing campaigns in the past weren’t accurate because market samples did not truly represent a population, and both advertising and marketing strategies weren’t quite accurate. Campaign failures and losses can be tied down to incorrect insight or partial insight into a market’s needs and demands. In addition, most marketing agencies depended on print and TV to disperse marketing messages until the recent past. Digital media changed all that and democratized the process of marketing and advertising, while contemporary data techniques have taken digital marketing to the next level. Thankfully, newer data analytics techniques have not only reduced marketers efforts to crunch data but have also ushered in a new era in which marketing campaigns are highly personalized, scalable and democratic. In this article, let us take a look at how data has influenced media and marketing, and how there has been a complete paradigm shift. Integration of tools Software integration has led to richer insights and predictions, as there is a larger sample of data to analyze. Cloud-based solutions have helped companies to implement affordable integration solutions across departments. Integration has also brought together disparate software solutions such as CRM, ERP, and HRMS which help businesses to access more detailed data and predict outcomes accurately even on the go. Current marketing and advertising initiatives depend on such an integrated approach to make the correct move. An increasing number of agencies use MarTech solutions to predict better campaign outcomes, and this is possible because of modern data analytics. MarTech consists of marketing automation tools such as Marketo, HubSpot, MailChimp, SalesForce, and Insightly. It also includes data and intelligence tools such as FullContact, Cloudinary, Decibel, among many others. In addition, predictive analysis tools help us make better predictions and foresee campaigns even before campaigns are launched. This allows us to have defined outcomes in mind. Some of the most important predictive analysis tools used today are Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning Studio, SAP Predictive Analytics Software, IBM Predictive Insights, among many others.  These tools can be integrated with each other, or with other enterprise software solutions for richer insights. Personalized marketing and advertising Earlier, personalized marketing was a challenge and a number of efforts never yielded the desired results. However, thanks to social media, it is easier to curate customers and people with specific interests and capture their sentiments easily. All this data can now be crunched and analyzed for better insight, leading to highly specific marketing and advertising campaigns. There are a number of marketing automation tools that help you personalize advertising. HubSpot and MailChimp can be used by both small and medium-sized businesses to personalize campaigns, while Marketo is a value addition for larger organizations. All these tools use data to take personalization to the next level. In addition, you can use Google Optimize 360, which helps you create custom segmented customer experiences. Forbes also listed Clearbit, Kickbox, Quickmail, Buzzstream, and other tools in its list of tools that help personalize marketing and advertising. In short, these tools help to gain better insight about customers and market, which helps personalize marketing and ad campaigns even at the micro level. The advent of MarTech and AdTech In the last couple of years, technologies that assist in automating and turbocharging marketing and advertising processes have been given the terms of MarTech and AdTech. Both these technologies have helped thousands of agencies to provide better campaign results, automate most marketing processes, and process data in a useful manner. The advent of MarTech and AdTech has also resulted in marketing Big Data. Various market-related data is constantly added to Big Data, and data analytics continue to derive richer insights. Most importantly, MarTech tools like GetResponse, Autopilot, iContactPro can be integrated with ERP and CRM for more coherent insight. After all, both frontend and backend need to be in sync with marketing campaigns for the message to reach effectively to the right audience. It is important to note that while marketing technology tools can up your data game, it is really up to you how to use the insight your derive. For example, integrating a digital asset management (DAM) with Adobe Creative Cloud can provide insights into how designers influence the marketing process. Or, you can choose to integrate Oracle Eloqua with an ERP like Sage 100 ERP or SAP Business One to better understand how order processing trends can improve future campaigns. Data helps launch hybrid and omnichannel marketing campaigns Most marketing campaigns tend to take a hybrid approach, combining online with offline. A survey conducted by Vistaprint Digital showed that 29% of businesses ignore either offline or online marketing practices, favoring one practice more than the other. However, a hybrid approach that uses both the practices is always more beneficial. Some of the ways you can use data analytics to spur offline marketing success are by analyzing QR code usage, proximity marketing using Bluetooth technology, and tracking URLs and web traffic generated from offline visits to actual stores. Using data analytics to track these behaviors will help to launch more cohesive omnichannel marketing campaigns, which bring an integrated shopping experience to customers. Facebook and Google have come up with tools which help advertisers to understand the effect of online advertising on offline sales. They can predict and track online to offline conversions. Data is here to stay for the long haul As you can see, data tools have changed the game when it comes to marketing and utilizing media tools. While we are no longer reliant on traditional media platforms, and digital platforms have long become mainstream, data analytics has ensured that digital marketing will continue in a forward path in the months to come. All these trends will help agencies to develop and implement marketing and ad campaigns quickly across digital media platforms. Dissemination of marketing communication

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Digital Success Summit: Learning to Achieve Digital Success in India

August 8, 2018

Digital adoption in India has been phenomenal, and the rate at which emerging technologies are embraced by Indian businesses is equally impressive. Part of the reason why the Indian market is more amenable to digital adoption is the fact that it is the hub of software development and outsourcing since the early 1990s. From those early days of information boom to today’s Blockchain development and mobile eCommerce, India has come a long way and is much ahead of other nations. Yet, digital adoption needs to take place at the grassroots level and most Indian businesses today have not exploited the infrastructure and services available to them to bring their products and services to the global market. There are some important reasons why Indian businesses in general, have not adopted technology to boost their ROI, unlike their tech counterparts who offer technology-related services and products to a global clientele. While the Indian eCommerce industry is growing at a rapid pace, regular businesses, stores, and enterprises are still treading slowly when compared with global peers. This unique dichotomy exists not only in India, but also in other emerging countries where a certain tech-savvy section of the business community adopts digital, while the rest of the business and enterprise community does not make use of the facilities, services, and infrastructure readily available to them. Why are Indian businesses slower in digital adoption? To the casual observer, India seems like the hub of all software and technology related activities. After all, India serves as both the backend and frontend of the world’s technology-based economy. Yet, in its own backyard, businesses are slower in adopting a technology, and a closer inspection will reveal that most small and medium businesses in India’s hinterland are simply not made use of the digital tools available to them easily. This is mostly because : Non-availability of information Much of India is rural, and even in the larger cities, business owners do not have information related to digital technologies available to help boost their businesses. There aren’t many outreach programs for business owners to refresh them about the latest technologies such as IoT, artificial intelligence, Blockchain, or even various facets of cloud computing and automation. The result is, businesses still use outdated marketing techniques, spend more money and time on campaigns that do not fetch the results they seek, and traffic that simply doesn’t convert. Inaccessible services and products While Indian tech companies virtually run much of the global economy, back home, businesses do not have access to services and products available to their international peers. Businesses have still not adopted eCommerce technologies, many still use manual methods in place of automated solutions, and advanced conversion rate optimization techniques, etc. are still unheard of. Making existing digital facilities available to Indian businesses is crucial to digital adoption in India. Both cloud infrastructure and marketing automation solutions are widely available for international businesses, but yet out of reach for most Indian businesses simply because they are not easily accessible. Lack of guidance and support While there are several technical consultants in larger cities of India, the consulting guidance and support available to businesses are not adequate. There simply isn’t a cohesive network of technology service providers dedicated to bringing digital solutions to Indian businesses. Regional digital summits are crucial in helping raise awareness about facilities and infrastructure available to businesses of various statures to lunge forward. Regular summits can help businesses to not only understand the products and services available to help them adopt digital solutions but also to scale quickly. Absence of digital-first culture While lack of information and inaccessibility of digital solutions can be blamed for slower adoption among Indian businesses, there is also an absence of digital-first culture among many businesses. Many businesses still hold on to legacy systems and operations which are not relevant anymore. these methods, tools, and technologies simply hold them back, while their competitors who adopt newer tools and methods achieve success quickly. With this in mind, there need to be more digital events, summits, and conferences which normalize digital adoption among the Indian business community. The Digital Success Summit, 2018 It is with all these reasons in mind that the Digital Success Summit has been organized. The summit brings together a variety of speakers, keynote presenters, and workshops to participating businesses and entrepreneurs, to help them adopt digital solutions quickly and efficiently. The Digital Success Summit 2018 will be held in Kolkata, West Bengal, on the 10th of August. The summit will help business owners to adopt the most useful digital strategies to achieve success and growth. The conference will help businesses to Understand how the internet works and is governed Choosing the right domain name for your business Understanding what cloud computing is all about, and which cloud hosting to choose If you should get a mobile app developed or not Use marketing automation and marketing KPIs to drive more sales Maximize online leads to sales conversion rate Learn how to create viral content and engage in influencer marketing Choosing the right CMS for your website, and using conversion rate optimization (CRO) tricks Using paid marketing to drive eCommerce transactions and creating trust using personal branding How to bring a digital culture shift in organizations, and making sure that every business is safe from cyber attacks Understanding IoT and analytics The Digital Success Summit has been specifically organized to help Indian businesses to overcome the hurdles in adopting digital solutions, and get past their cultural barriers to embrace a brave new world which will lead them along the path of competitive edge, global success and business efficiency. From digital infrastructure to media and advertising, and from business enhancing catalysts to KPIs and analytics, the summit has got all things digital covered for businesses to achieve success.  

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Why Marketing Automation Matters for Your Business

July 19, 2018

If you are late to the party, marketing automation is a force to reckon with and is the fuel that is driving small and medium-sized agencies and businesses to compete with the top players in the industry. Marketing automation helps a small team to put its marketing strategy on steroids, and use Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to automate both basic and complex marketing tasks to achieve stellar heights. There are a number of software tools and cloud solutions that help businesses to automate various marketing functions, right from understanding a target market to capturing lead-related data and nurturing long-term customers. While implementing a thorough marketing strategy used to be expensive and time-consuming, it is now accessible even to the smallest of companies thanks to SaaS subscription models. SaaS solutions provide efficient, affordable, and accessible marketing tools on different subscription models. Both big and small businesses have begun to use these SaaS marketing tools to automate various marketing functions, and have begun to see exemplary results. Regardless of the size and nature of your business, the axiomatic truth is, you need marketing automation. To explain why marketing automation matters so much for your business, we have listed 7 reasons. Let us take a look at each of them briefly. Understand your market better Most businesses fail to achieve traction because their marketing strategy is not in touch with the actual realities of the market they are targeting. This is only possible when campaigns are tied around behavioral and demographic variables that are often easy to miss. Marketing automation tools provide rich insights into the market in question and help businesses to design campaigns that are effective. When you subscribe to a MarTech solution, you will be able to compete with large businesses who probably have better resources to conduct market research. Market research can get quite tedious and expensive for those who do not have the resources to carry out large market research campaigns, Data analytics, combined with marketing automation tools can help you to arrive at marketing predictions that are useful and effective, at a fraction of the cost. MarTech is increasingly being used to conduct market research by a large number of companies and is encouraging a metrics-driven culture. Curate high-quality leads New GDPR rules and privacy-related restrictions have severely curtailed most businesses’ ability to capture high-quality leads. Yet, the new developments are positive in nature when assessed objectively. Marketing automation tools can now quickly detect and predict which of your web visitors are going to be hour leads, and which of them will convert to customers. Data analytics and marketing automation tools can be integrated and programmed in such a way that you automate the curation of high-quality leads. There’re a number of tools already available to help you automate both lead generation, and filtering of those leads. However, partnering with an agency which will help you to integrate data analytics with marketing automation tools will help you curate a list of high-quality leads. After all, communicating with high-quality leads, even if they are fewer in numbers, is a better sales strategy than coming up with a digital marketing strategy that involves targeting an exponentially higher number of users. Shortlist the best distribution channels Once you have the list of leads generated and curated automatically, you will also need to assess how you should communicate with them. This decision was earlier left to managers or staff who used their own methods (both objective and subjective) to list the preferred distribution channels. Unfortunately, this is not an effective strategy and is mired with loopholes. Inbound marketing can easily be automated, and a digital marketing strategy should be built around actual facts and figures related to which platforms, social media tools, and channels your target users prefer to use. As such, a strategy that involves marketing automation and data analytics will reveal the cold hard facts about where to reach your target audience, and how best to communicate with them. Use marketing automation to choose the best distribution and communication channels, and to base this choice on insight derived from data analytics. Understand different buyer personas To engage in successful marketing, you need to understand your target audience at an intimate level. This is only possible when the most minute of their behaviours are statistically analyzed. Automating the process of studying user behavior will help you to group them under various buyer personas. Right from what they tweet to how they respond to certain images or news feeds, you can predict exactly how you should develop your marketing strategy to win them over. As consumers tend to be a diverse group, you can develop different marketing campaigns for different buyer personas. Understanding personas are closely linked to creating winning digital content as well. Automating the process of collecting information and using data analytics to process this information helps you to arrive at useful insights related to different personas. Use this insight to create a successful agile marketing strategy. Take personalization to the next level There is a misconception that automation implies lack of personal touch. Any Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT) will tell you that automation, in fact, enhances more personal communication. Automating content distribution and basing content creation on various buyer personas help you to personalize all communication at the micro-level. For example, MarTech products can help you to target communication individually, based on various tastes, quirks, behavioral patterns, personal details, etc. While content distribution and communication can be automated, you can use your free time and man-hours to enhance customer interactions and build valuable relationships. Creating a more personal approach used to be expensive and required hiring more in-house staff. Automating such a personal approach will reduce the need for hiring more employees, and will help you build more meaningful relationships with your customers. Save time and money For most small and medium businesses, marketing is the single most expensive business process. Not only does it cost money, it also requires time and effort, all of

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