Key Highlights from the Social Beat Digital Leadership Summit 2016:
Chennai, 5th Aug 2016: The 1st 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.
The fifth edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha was held at our office on 9th July 2016. It received a wonderful response with about 25 participants including entrepreneurs, professionals, digital marketers and social media influencers taking an active part. The topic of discussion was Measuring ROI from Digital Marketing.
Here’s a quick summary of the key takeaways from the session:
There are two types of returns from digital marketing:
1. Tangible Returns:
These are metrics that translate into immediate business results such as Leads, Sales, Registrations and Traffic
2. Intangible Returns :
These are metrics that do not measure immediate business results such as brand awareness, customer engagement, customer satisfaction and brand reputation.
Metrics you measure will depend on your business goals and objectives.
For example, if your objective is lead generation, then you would measure metrics such as Leads/Enquiries Generated, Revenue from Sales, App Installs and Website Traffic.
On the other hand, if your objective is brand awareness, then you would measure metrics like likes/fans/followers, reach, impressions, mentions, social engagement, likes/comments/shares and retweets/reposts.
There are a number of tools available to measure the metrics mentioned above. They could be categorised as web, mobile, and social media analytics tools.
Web Analytics tools:
There are a number of web analytics tools that you could use. You could use Google Analytics to understand details about the volume and quality of your website traffic. Tools like Kissmetrics, help determine advanced analytics on the behaviour of your users.
Mobile App Analytics Tool
For those of you have the mobile app for your business, tools like Mixpanel and Appsflyer help you learn how people use your app. It also helps draw insights from this data to optimize and improve your marketing for better ROI.
Social Media Analytics Tools:
These tools help you analyze the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts by measuring metrics like likes/fans/followers, reach, impressions, mentions, engagement, likes/comments/shares and retweets/reposts. Social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn have inbuilt analytics tools for marketers to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Other advanced analytics tools for social media intelligence include Radian6 and Simply Measured.
Call Tracking:
With the growth in mobile use globally, the number of leads coming through phone calls is increasing rapidly as compared to leads through web forms. In this scenario, it is important to use tools like Knowlarity and Exotel to track call leads effectively and attribute them to the right source.
The simplest way to measure if ROI from a channel would be positive, is by checking if the Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) is greater than the cost of acquiring a customer through that channel.
The table below will help you with a simplified framework to calculate LTV. For more details on LTV calculation, you can read our article on Customer Lifecycle Value vs Cost of Acquisition in E-commerce.
Participants then did this analysis of LTV and cost of acquisition to calculate channel ROI for their businesses. They shared their learnings with the rest of the group. This was followed by an interactive discussion and Q&A session.
Those of you who missed the first four editions of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha can check them out below:
Edition 1 – Challenges Faced In Marketing A Startup
Edition 2 – Content Marketing Success In 2016
Edition 3 - 101 On Digital Advertising For Startups
Edition 4 - How To Use Instagram For Business
You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter! Check out the hashtag #DigitalCPC for more details on the next Digital Chai Pe Charcha meet.
What methodology do you use to calculate ROI from your digital marketing efforts? Do share your method, experience, and learnings in the comments below!
The fourth edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha was held at Karya Space on Saturday, May 28th 2016. The turnout for this event was fantastic with over 60 entrepreneurs, working professionals and social media influencers participating in the session. The topic for this session was all about Instagram and how it could be used to leverage business.
Instagram is a very powerful platform which when used correctly can help brands and business reach out to a niche and specific audience. The customers that brands acquire through Instagram can display strong loyalty towards the product or service.
Here’s the presentation that was discussed during the session
[embed]http://http://www.slideshare.net/socialbeat_ss/how-to-use-instagram-for-your-business[/embed]
It was a very interactive session with the participants sharing their personal experiences with Instagram and asking plenty of questions. Here are few tweets shared by participants about the event.
Here’s a quick recap for those who attended the session and for those who could not make it yet would like to leverage Instagram for their business
While these pointers can help you, like any other platform, Instagram is constantly changing and brands will have to adapt and implement these changes. In fact over the past couple of days, Instagram has rolled out a massive algorithm change due to which you will see posts based on your interests rather than chronological order. The reach due to hashtags will decrease and your followers will be more important than ever.
What has you experience with Instagram been so far? Do share your feedback in the comments!
It was a full house at the Social Media Week, Bangalore this year! A great line up of speakers and interesting mix of panel discussions kept us all hooked to our seats. The event was organized over two days and witnessed some great industry experts share their knowledge and experiences with the crowd. Be it two 18-year-old drop outs building a child-caring app - ‘MyChild’ which is now used in more than 135 countries or a ladysingle-handedlyy fighting against one age-old social stigma – Menstruation by using comic books and social media - It was everything a Social Media Week should be.
The event started on a high note with India’s Ad Guru, Prahlad Kakar’s session on Brand Building Through Story Telling. He took us through a journey we would never forget. Sharing stories from his personal life and experiences captivated the audience. A maestro at storytelling, he gave away some important tips on how to build a brand by telling its story in a manner that makes the brand a hero!
Following Kakar’s session, we had Arnav Ghosh from Blippar India talk about Visual Marketing and Changing Consumer Context. The session addressed the scope of Visual Search and how we’re moving towards a future where Physical reality and augmented reality will blend into one. He was highly lauded for his talk and presentation of Blippar, an app that turns everyday objects into consumer-centric interactions. We will be writing a blog post later this month on how Visual & Voice search are going to change digital marketing forever.
Speaking of Visual and Voice, how can one not mention one of the most interesting sessions on cricket by cricket journalists Prem Panicker, Gaurav Kalra and Bengaluru-based popular Twitter personality Ramesh Srivats. Cricket has not only changed as a game but also how people look at it now and what they have to say about every little aspect. Apart from taking part in debates and writing out blogs, Twitter has become the new medium to express or oppose one’s opinion. Though Twitter is infamous for its social media ‘Wars’, it has also given an option for fans to follow the game through live-tweeting. Ramesh agrees saying, “Discussions on cricket are like everything else on Twitter; part stupid and trolling, part insightful and intelligent.”
There were a couple of more interesting talks on People Intelligence and Monetizing Digital Content by Amartpreet Kaur and Mahesh Narayanan, Saavn respectively. There was a very interesting panel discussion with Ganga Ganapathi, VP, Ogilvy as the moderator and Anshul Chaturvedi, G.M, Wohoo and Anjali Gupta, IBM as panel members discussing on ROE (Return on Engagement). They talked about how digital has become an integral part of marketing strategies for brands and what engagement means to the brands. The three of them shared their views and thoughts on how to measure engagement and the effectiveness of campaigns online. Many a times engagement is a great short term goal before arriving at return on investment (which for many brands is leads, sales, revenue and referrals).
The evening continued on an exciting pitch and witnessed digital expert Kiruba Shankar shared his knowledge on the future of communication and how podcasts play an important role in it. The session was interactive and had a lot of guests sharing their thoughts and ideas. Kiruba himself has multiple podcasts which can be seen here.
Day one of the Social media week ended on an exciting note and anticipation for the second day was higher. Sandy Carter from IBM shared her views on Social Intelligence and how important it is for a marketer to identify negative and positive sentiments. She is responsible for IBM’s worldwide focus on startups and having her kickoff day 2 at the event was an absolute delight. She spoke at length at about how even startups are starting to leverage big data and actionable people intelligence to connect with consumers around the world. She gave an example of Chocolate Jhony who has been able to leverage SnapChat and other social media channels to expand to multiple geographies.
Following Sandy Carter’s sessions were various more interesting sessions on Influencer Marketing, Snapchat and on breaking a taboo through social media. A gripping debate on “The ugly face of influencer marketing” amongst some of the industry experts like Kiruba Shankar, NanditaIyer, Karthik Srinivasan and G.Nivedithwas probably one of the best sessions of the day. There was a lot of discussion on whether influencers should sell their soul by reviewing and writing about topics that they don’t personally use. For example, should a technology blogger partner with a beer brand or a fashion brand. Challenges faced by influencers were also covered and many of these are similar to the Influencer Industry Report we had launched earlier this year.
There was also a stand-up comedy by Satish Perumal whose rib-ticklers cracked up every single soul in the room! His joke of the day had to be - In a city where people are dying because of potholes, the only person who can use a helipad has left the country!
A jolly-good week with people from all walks of life coming together to tell their story on how social media – a medium – is more than just Sharing, Liking or Commenting, was what SMW’16 was all about. While leaving the event with the same enthusiasm was one thing, learning to ‘Tell A Story To Sell Your Brand’ was another insight that we take back to our working desks.
For those who could not make it to the event, here are some key bytes from the sessions from both the days –
“Storytelling is the heart of every communication” – Mr. PrahladKakar
“Visual Marketing is the bridge between the physical and digital worlds” – Arnav Ghosh, Blippar
“Content is always paid for, either the brand pays for it or the users pay directly to consume the content” – Mahesh Narayanan, Saavn
“A brand is the strongest when it is clear about what it has to offer to its customers” – Ganga Ganapathi, VP, Ogilvy
“As the industry matures, most Influencers will have disclosures and be more true to their identity” – Kiruba Shankar
Social media gives you a new kind of surround sound from cricket matches. – PremPanicker
“Social intelligence moves the needle of your social media presence to social business”. – Sandy Carter, IBM
“Occasional trending does not build long-term emotional connect with consumers” – Alokedeep Singh, Titan
For those who attended the event, do share your experiences and highlights in the comments below!
The third edition of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha, held at our office on 23rd April 2016 received a wonderful response with about 25 participants including entrepreneurs, professionals, digital marketers and social media influencers taking active part in the discussion. The topic of discussion, led by Social Beat co-founder Suneil Chawla, was the effective use of digital advertising for customer acquisition and business growth.
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:
Digital Advertising Terminology:
For those who are new to the world of digital advertising, there was a brief introduction to the terms that are used in the space:
Cost per Click (CPC): How much an advertiser pays, on average, for each ad click. CPC is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by the number of clicks generated.
Cost per Mille (Thousand Impressions) (CPM): Metric that shows how much it costs to serve 1,000 ad impressions. Also used as a standard measure for buying display ads, as inventory is generally sold on a CPM basis.
Cost per Lead (CPL): How much an advertiser pays, on average, for each ad click that results in a lead conversion. CPL is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on a campaign by the number of leads generated.
Cost per action (CPA): A pricing method which calculates cost based on the number of times a user takes action based on an ad (conversions).
Click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that results in a click through.
Digital Advertising Industry Benchmarks:
Following a brief discussion on how attendees were using digital advertising for their business, there was a discussion on the CTR, CPC, CPA and CPL benchmarks one can expect to see for different industries, based on the years of experience Social Beat has in the space. The table with the industry benchmarks is below:
Digital Advertising Exercises:
Event attendees then made four teams and brainstormed on a digital advertising exercise – Two teams worked on increasing the number of orders for an ecommerce client while two worked on expanding the business for a retail chain to 100+ stores across two Indian states.
The ecommerce exercise can be downloaded here and the retail chain exercise can be downloaded here.
Key takeaways from the exercises:
Those of you who missed the first two editions of the Digital Chai Pe Charcha can check them out below:
Edition 1 - Challenges faced in marketing a startup
Edition 2 - Content Marketing Success in 2016
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 challenges you face when it comes to digital advertising for your brand? Do let us know in the comments below and we will be happy to help you out.
Social Beat's Rohit Uttamchandani, Head of Digital Advertising & Real Estate was one of the speakers at the Real Estate Digital Marketing Conference in Bangalore on the 22nd March 2016, where he spoke on how real estate companies can leverage content marketing effectively for branding and lead generation. The conference was attended by key decision makers from some of Bangalore's leading real estate companies and included talks on social media marketing, measuring digital campaign ROI, driving sales through personal branding, Internet of Things (IoT) and Virtual Reality.
Rohit's talk focussed on how content marketing, done right, can be a powerful tool to help real estate companies build their brand reputation online as well as generate leads in the long-term. To be successful in real estate content marketing in 2016 and beyond, one has to create content that is not only unique but also ten times better than the best content on that topic, anywhere on the internet. “10x Content” has become the new buzzword amongst advanced content marketers and the session talked about the ideation, creation and amplification of content for real estate with a clear focus on delivering business results. You can view the presentation from the talk below:
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
Check out this presentation that to get answers to the above questions & many more!
Brands/Businesses conduct events with an end goal in mind. Charity & institutional brands would want to raise funds for a specific cause or movement. Conferences/Summits/Conclaves want participants to network and learn, in turn spreading a vision which is believed by a brand. And then there are launch, sporting, or gaming events which brands want people to remember, delivering recognition for talent.
Social media has become an essential part of events and has transcended into a real-time platform to showcase the happenings of an event and build awareness for the brand.
The following are 4 key essential tips that can be followed while providing live social media news feeds for an event:
1. Promoting The Hashtag: Create a unique/synonymous hashtag that can be treated as a signature for your posts, during the event. Use this hashtag in your creative and posts, as a method for your audience to engage with you and other audience throughout the duration/phase of the event. For example: The 2015 edition of the Murugappa Kovai Quotient Quiz which was promoted with the hashtag #MKQ2015, present in every news feed or conversation that happened during the event.
The launch of The Madras Song also stirred up conversations in platforms like Twitter where we trended hashtags like #TheMadrasSongs & #Madras375, which helped us spread the word and prompted people to share the video.
2. Make Your Feeds Entertaining & Engaging: One should make sure that the social media news feeds are catchy, informative, carry the essence of the event and have a strong call-to-action aspect embedded in the post. During the Murugappa Kovai Quotient Quiz, we asked interesting questions inspired by the questions put forth by the quiz-master on the dais.
3. Informing People About What They Are Missing Out On: Giving a glimpse about the happenings of the event is vital. It helps your audience to experience the event even if they are not physically present in the venue. We covered the outdoor activities which took place at the Murugappa Kovai Quotient Quiz, showcasing enthusiastic students who clicked pictures at a photo booth which was placed outside the auditorium.
We were also able to engage with a huge cluster of audience through live feeds at the Global Alumni Meet of Don Bosco, held at Egmore, Chennai.
4. Follow Conversations & Engage With Audience Even After The Event: Live social media news feeds generate a high influx of conversations. A live feed helps create a buzz at the event, prompting the crowd to engage in a conversation. It is very important that these conversations are tracked and addressed. Continuing the conversations with the audience even after the event will build credibility and will boost engagements in the forthcoming events. Our posts for Murugappa, during the Aircel Chennai Open 2015 built conversations that lasted even after the event's closure.
In a dilemma to integrate social media for your events? We highly recommend that you do!
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).
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:
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:
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.
