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!
Social Beat is delighted to bring on board David Appasamy to head Brand and Strategy for the company. He will be working closely with the core team to achieve the company’s vision of being amongst the top 10 digital agencies in India by 2018.
Speaking on the appointment, Co-Founder Suneil Chawla said, "We not only share the same Alma Mater, IIM Ahmedabad, but also a shared vision of leveraging the digital medium to deliver business results to the brands and companies we work with. We look forward to David driving strategy and growth along with a focus on key client acquisition". David comes with over 35 years in companies like ITC Ltd, Mudra DDB and Sify Technologies covering Business Strategy, Brand & Marketing Management, Digital Marketing and Audience Engagement.
Talking about his new role, David stated, "The Internet, and what it represents for companies as a medium for business and marketing, has always been my passion. I am delighted to be part of a start-up that is firmly established and recognised, and excited to focus on growth strategies and the Social Beat brand as a Digital Marketing specialist."
Co-Founder, Vikas Chawla said “We see David playing a key role in mentoring the core team that the company has built over the last 4 years. As we move towards the next phase of growth, nurturing talent and expanding across the country and globally is going to be key. We are delighted to have David be part of this journey.”
In the past, David has served on the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) advising the UN Secretary General on Internet Governance in 2010 and 2011. He was Co-Chair, International Chamber of Commerce’s Task Force on Internet & Telecoms Infrastructure & Services from 2006 to 2011. He is currently a member of the Executive Committee of the IIM Ahmedabad Chennai Chapter focusing on making it a vibrant, inclusive and rewarding experience for alumni members. David is also involved in multiple social activities including Roofs for the Roofless and the Appasamy Trust focused on self-employment and education.
About Social Beat
Founded in 2012, Social Beat is South India's leading digital agency which helps companies build their brand and get business results via the digital medium.
Social Beat is a certified Google Partner and a trusted online expert with offices in Chennai & Bangalore. The 40 member team offers integrated digital marketing solutions including website development, app development, user experience consulting, social media marketing, content marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, digital advertising & influencer marketing. Social Beat has two digital products - the first is an influencer marketing platform, Influencer.in and the around user-generated content called Rewardify.
With focus verticals of real estate, e-commerce, healthcare & B2B, they have over 100 clients including Citibank, Saint Gobain, Murugappa Group, Akbar Travels, Sterling Holidays, PN Gadgil, Musafir.com, Casa Grande, Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes Hospitals, Sterling Holidays, Chain, Olympia Group, Raintree Hotels, Forum Mall, India Home Health Care, Sulekha.com, Cambridge English & JVC Headphones amongst others.
In recognition of its excellent performance and contribution to the field of digital marketing, Social Beat’s co-founder Suneil Chawla was awarded the Best Digital Marketing Professional by CMO Council 2014 and the Outstanding Digital Person Of the Year award at the Digital Marketing Conclave & Awards 2014 conducted by Think Media Inc and VIT University Business School.
Website: https://www.socialbeat.in/
Media Contact: Vikas Chawla, team@socialbeat.in / 044-42065648
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!
That’s a summary of our journey in Chennai and we are proud to add another milestone in that journey – the launch of our new branch office in Bangalore.
We are now among the leading end-to-end Digital Marketing Partners in South India, offering the entire gamut of digital marketing services that include Website and App Development, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Digital Advertising and Influencer Marketing.
Our ROI-driven approach to digital marketing has helped us consistently deliver business results for clients across sectors including real estate, finance, e-commerce, start-ups, retail, FMCG and healthcare. We have partnered with over 100 clients including Citibank, Saint Gobain, Akbar Travels, Murugappa Group, Forum Mall, Urban Clap, Casa Grande, Dr. Mohan’s Diabetes Chain, Raintree Hotels, India Home Health Care, Sulekha.com, Cambridge English, JVC Headphones amongst others.
Here are our social media mavens busy at work at the Bangalore office!
With a strong result-oriented team and a proven track record, we look forward to delighting clients in Namma Bengaluru. Feel free to reach out to us at team@socialbeat.in or drop by at our office.
Our Bangalore Address: Social Beat, 22, 15th Cross Rd, Sector 4, HSR layout, Bengaluru, Karnataka – 560102
On 4th April, I stepped into Social Beat's office with a lot of excitement and curiosity. The excitement because it was my first internship experience in a digital marketing firm and curiosity because I didn't know what to expect. But well, it was worth the curiosity I'd say!
Although I had a fair knowledge of digital marketing (thanks to my Undergraduate), I didn't know the process behind the whole scenario. Facebook post was just a post until I came here. Never did I know so much planning goes behind each and every published content. Leave the content, even each and every word. The execution part was the only thing I could see from outside not knowing that an entire team dedicatedly works for it. Now I know a Facebook post is more than a post!
The best thing about Social Beat is that you get all the freedom to put in your creative brain and work on your ideas. There is no restriction in the depth that one can go in creating and bringing up new things in work. In fact, we even have ‘Idea Adda’ sessions every Thursday where the entire team sits to discuss on new ideas and brainstorm on it. It is a great platform to show innovation in the work! The entire team sticks really well and no one was hesitant to clear any doubts that I had even if it was silly! They were all more than welcoming to help me anytime with any work even when it was not delegated by them. To bring in the team closer, Social Beat has ‘Chit-Chat’ sessions every Friday where we interact and try doing something out of our work. They even had something new by trying out a market survey in Express Avenue, luckily in the time I interned.
This experience has let me learn and experience a lot of things. Firstly, it brushed up my writing skills. Though I write blogs, it was all personal and only here I learned the art of writing for a brand. I had successfully completed few blogs for clients. Secondly, creativity. I was not aware that I can be this creative until I researched and thought about campaigns for clients. Thanks to my guide, Lalitha for the huge support! Thirdly, work culture. As I mentioned how good the work culture is, it is a great thing that my first work happened here. As they say, few drops make the ocean, I can’t put into words what all little things I got out of the whole experience, but the effect and importance of those are huge!
Social Beat is a great place to work. The way the work flows to deliver good results is something I learned the most. The people I worked with personally were one of the kindest to not just help me out in work but also made sure I liked what I was doing. After two months of one awesome experience I had, I would definitely miss the place. Be it the sudden meetings, the team lunches, review calls, client experiences, everything will be missed.
Thanks, Social Beat.
After having worked in a service based MNC with more than 2 lakh employees, coming to social Beat for an internship was refreshingly different. The biggest advantage is that you get to know everyone that you work with. The work becomes easier when you know them in person. The best part is that you know the reason why you are doing a particular task, especially compared to the state where you come to office to do a particular set of specific functions assigned. In that case, you only care about certain part of the workflow.
From a student’s perspective, this was a huge learning experience for me. For a person like me who thought that digital marketing is all about Facebook posts likes and comments, this stint changed my opinion completely. My learning curve is exponential. Hence, the takeaway is huge. As they say, the best way to learn it is by doing it. Now I realize that campaign design, website optimization, content marketing, influencer marketing, SEO, adwords, proposal making, branding, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are more than what it meets the eye. These 8 weeks of internship has given me a sound platform to develop and research further in this field.
The work culture is the finest. This is because everyone takes ownership. No one puts a limit to your freedom and method of thinking. You are given the freedom to work on your idea. You have the room to make mistakes and learn from them. You have the room to keep your individuality intact without compromising on what the client wants. I could easily see that everyone is aware of the work-flow or the entire cycle of client servicing. There is no room to tell others that I belong to social media department and hence I do not know how it works in business development or the designing side.
Realizing that there is a huge scope for self-improvement is one of the greatest qualities of an individual. Maintaining the hunger for one’s own passion is a great skill, which enables you to grow. Both the above-mentioned quality and skills are inherent in Social Beat. This organization looks for improvement in the existing process and the focus is not just on numbers.
The weekly review meetings, the Friday chit-chats and the brand building activity -‘Digital chai pe charcha’ are extremely good trends, which the company has started and is the backbone of the organization. I wish everyone had their birthday on a working day. Warm celebration in the presence of the entire organization is indeed a memory worth freezing in your mind.
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to Suneil and Vikas for their guidance and support. Anuradha, for being the best mentor I could ever have. Lalitha, Allan, Aishwarya, Krithika, Roshni, Abhishek, Subramaniyam, Ravi, David, Panisa and Vimal for their inputs and love.
Rohit, Nandita, Kruthika and Priya for the Saturday lunches. Mohan, Karthi, Purushothaman, Hari, Pournima, Bindhya and Shobhana for their warmth.
On 29th April, a Friday, instead of our usual chit-chat sessions (conducted every Friday to share knowledge & learning from varied spheres of life), we did something different! The entire team received a new plan wherein we were all assigned a unique task!
Being in the digital marketing industry, we are usually immersed in technology. We rarely go out and meet the real consumers whom we target on digital platforms – the consumers to whom we build awareness and drive sales for our clients. It was the time that we went & understood these consumers better. So we headed to one of the largest malls in Chennai, Express Avenue in the hope of meeting such consumers.
The whole idea behind the session was to interact with people and find out the awareness of whether they are aware of the digital platforms and that they are being targeted with advertisements day in & out. The entire team of Social Beat was split into teams of two each. Half of the teams were targeting people to find out about their knowledge in the area of digital advertising. The other half had a client for each team and decided to find out the consumer awareness of the brand. The main objective was to conduct a survey amongst the audience we target through online mediums on a daily basis and this was a first time for us! The exercise lasted for about two hours. The teams garnered a lot of knowledgeable outcomes by the end of the day. “A face to face survey helped us analyze and gauge the reactions of people when they were answering the questions asked”, said Kruthika, our social-media specialist which tells how different was it from a usual online feedback and survey we take.
Our survey on Digital marketing involved asking the following questions to people:
• Do you click on ads on Facebook?
• Do you know what Google ads are and if yes, have you clicked on one?
• Do you pay attention to banner ads?
• Do you use an Adblocker?
• What was the last thing you bought online?
• Do you prefer shopping from websites or mobile apps?
The insights were pretty surprising as most of the people did not even know what Facebook and Google advertisements were or how they looked like. “We had a mixed experience meeting people. On one hand, it was great to talk to them and get insights. But on the other hand, most of them did not know anything about being targeted online via advertisements”, said Bindhya and Natasha. While that was the case with people not aware of ads online, they do pay attention to banner ads but only for informational purpose and the consumers claim not to click on display ads, but that's contrary to our experience where we receive meaningful leads and sales from Display advertising.
Coming to social media & Facebook ads, people are not aware of it because they do not know the difference between an organic post and an ad on their news feed. Fewer people who were aware of Facebook ads admit clicking on them only if it is attractive enough. Most of the people we met do not use an Adblocker on their browsers.
We also did a dipstick survey on whether the consumers are aware of our clients’ brands. Throughout the survey, the digital marketing experts at Social Beat were able to meet consumers, understand the reach of the brands (that we handle) and understand the competition in different industries. Many shoppers also highlighted that some of them still do not trust online brands (possibly biased by the fact that we were surveying these individuals in a mall). Word of mouth still plays a bigger role in influencing people so there is a lot of scope for Influencer marketing.
At the end of two hours, the activity was insightful and left us with an understanding that digital marketing has a long way to go!
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.
With 3 interns joining us in a trot in early April (two from the Loyola Institute of Business Administration and one from Symbiosis, Pune - more about this later!), it was time for the team to head to our favourite south indian food joint! With the team growing in size, Menaka in Hotel Palmgrove was one of the only places that could accommodate us at short notice. While it was a hot day (& continues to be), it was a cool afternoon for us! After consuming tonnes of rice, sambar, ice cream & whole lot more, combined with the heat it was tough to work but we still made it beat till the end of the day.
More updates from the interns will follow shortly!
