Social Beat held its 1st Digital Leadership Summit

Key Highlights from the Social Beat Digital Leadership Summit 2016:

• Measuring ROI from digital marketing and content marketing are the biggest challenges faced
• Carat Lane tracks 4000 data points in order to measure the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns – says Mithun Sacheti, Founder of Carat Lane
• Lifetime value of the customer is key to understanding ROI from any medium, including digital
• Different digital channels work differently depending on the brands and the right attribution model helps track the results effectively
• Content Marketing is less about marketing and more about content. Brand are allocating as much as 15% of their total marketing budget towards content marketing.

Chennai, 5^th Aug 2016: The 1^st Social Beat Digital Leadership Summit 2016 was a congregation of over 125 CMOs, Brand Heads & CXOs from varied industries. Mithun Sacheti, the Keynote Speaker kick started the Summit and shared insights on how a data driven approach at Carat Lane has helped it acquire customers and build a brand. Carat Lane's internal team analyses over 4000 data points, from across channels, including TV, Retail, Print, Radio and Online Marketing.

Speaking at the event, Mithun Sacheti, Founder Carat Lane said “Digital is going to be key for every business in India. The discovery of products and services is going to happen via digital, through consumption will be omni channel across digital, retail and other channels.” Emphasising on the importance of data and analytics Mithun said “The beauty of digital is that you can analyse and measure everything. It's never too much data to decide your action items. At Carat Lane we analyse over 4000 data points on a monthly basis.”



The keynote session was followed by a panel discussion on Measuring ROI from digital marketing. Moderating the panel, Suneil Chawla, Co-Founder of Social Beat, said “Depending on whether the business has a product which has high search volume or is an impulse purchase, Google or social media will be more effective.” Arasu Shankar from eShakti.com said “Apart from tracking the cost of acquiring a customer, it is important to understand the lifetime value of the customer in order to be able to understand the profitability of the business”.



Peshwa Acharya, CMO of Sterling Holidays speaking at the event said “Digital transformation has already happened from the consumer’s perspective. Now it’s time for brands to wake up to this opportunity. There will be many inflection points, for example, COD in ecommerce. Brands need to anticipate and leverage these inflection points to their advantage.”

The last discussion was around How Content Marketing can work for your brand with two successful brands, Matrimony and Murugappa Group sharing their experiences. Vijaylakshmi D, Senior Associate Vice President at Murugappa Group speaking on their successful content strategy around Madras Song said “Murugappa Group always had a strong connect with the city of Madras and we have had ongoing activities around this. When we looked at how do we connect with today’s generation we decided to use music and video as the medium to create the Madras Song to engage people to share their live for Madras.”. Murugappa Group in fact allocates close to 15% of marketing budget towards content marketing.



Rajasekar KS, GM – Social Media & Content for Matrimony.com speaking on their HappyMarriages content initiative said “Content Marketing is more about content and less about marketing. If you can understand your consumer’s problems and leverage that to build content, then it will strike the right cord with the audience.”

Speaking at the occasion, Vikas Chawla, Co-Founder of Social Beat summarised, “The digital medium is a powerful medium and only creativity is the limit. We hope that the experience sharing by CMOs and Marketing Heads would enable the entire industry to learn and grow their digital presence.”

Thanks to the entire organising team at Social Beat for pulling off the Summit - Kudos to them! And a big thank you to our partners - Zarget, Sublime Factory & Brandwave.