Now that we are approaching a New Year, there is a sudden
rise in number of blogs & articles on ‘changes marketers would see in
digital media in 2015’ or ‘trends & predictions in Social Media for 2015’.
Too much written about more budgets, more data, more innovations, apps,
emerging social platforms and other stuff from the pundits of this medium.
Below are the ‘real’ changes, I as an experienced Digital
Marketer would like to see in the year 2015 from the point of view of brands in
India.
- Worldwide we are experiencing exponential rise in data. It is actually a goldmine but requires deep digging. Only those brands which are able to harness the potential of their present data and turning it into information will rise in the field digital in 2015. Every organization must focus & invest in Business Intelligence units and churn the cream from the milk.
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| Data Mining |
- Analytics has to be center of all digital activities. For all those organizations which are not looking at their website or social or media campaign analytics and still investing in digital for the namesake are just making fool of themselves. This field is growing mahoosive (arggh, me making the use of the recent urban dictionary ‘more massive than massive’) and one has to learn to separate wolves from the sheep in this industry. Info-graphics are boon to brands after they evaluate their analytics and measure it according to various metrics.
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| Analytics is the key of Digital Marketing |
- Integration of activities like SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) + SEM (Search Engine Marketing) + SMM (Social Media Marketing) will prove to be differentiating strategy for brands. All the three should have similar content & keywords to cross sell each other be it your website or social media or paid reach. Till date we were just talking about online offline integration, but now we also see some brands saying ‘we are on Facebook, Twitter and thus we are doing digital’ which is so not complete. It is essential to make full use of all three buckets – Earned, Owned and Paid Media. They are no more separate & brands must tactically use them together.
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| SEO, SEM, SMM Integration |
- Integration of content creation & its delivery – We saw many brands creating wonderful campaigns & innovations in India targeting their specific audience (rare scenario because most of the brand campaigns are directly adapted from west). However these campaigns were thinly spread across social mediums because of the low budgets to market them. In the era where we have the local barbers & multiple fake accounts present on Facebook , brands cannot just depend on organic reach. It has become extremely difficult and more over even FB is pushing paid marketing. Therefore it is very important for brands to allocate sufficient budgets not for campaign creation but its marketing too.
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| Brand Influencer |
- Every organization must listen to its online audience. Identifying promoters & critics and then forming a strategy to leverage the ones who can talk positively about the brands and also slowly converting the negatives towards neutral. This activity should be consistently followed to create online ambassadors & brand influencers.
To sum up, I would love to see amplification of digital media through following:
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| Effective Implementation of Digital Marketing |
