A digital marketer's viewpoint

Finally got myself to update this and write another post. If you’re someone who is working or even interested in digital marketing and/or technology I would urge you to read my posts, if you’re not then please close this page and continue doing something that really interests you. The reason I urge people to read my posts is to help others, you and me learn and discuss our views and opinions as digital marketing is such a dynamic platform and something that was a new innovation yesterday would be a redundant activity today.

Something about me – I’ve been a digital marketer for over 6 years now but I can proudly say that I still don’t know everything, you might wonder that’s a weird thing to be proud off but I feel that if someone believes that they know everything there could be to know about digital marketing then they would end up shutting themselves to new technologies and innovations. I’m currently working with the Mahindra group and have previously worked with Indiabulls, there is a lot I have learnt from these companies and in accordance with the agencies I have worked along the way.

Today we are in a country that seems to be a pro SME market and that’s where comparatively cheaper channels of marketing would help grow companies, in addition analysis and tracking have become even more important considering the kind of understanding people have and the ability to track every penny spent. The one channel that does manages to check both the above mentioned boxes, is digital. Any business, new or old, small or large have been focusing a lot more of their spends on digital marketing and this has just been growing YoY. That brings us to question, “Will offline channels become completely obsolete in the near future?”. Honestly I don’t believe so, even though most start-ups and smaller businesses are going the complete digital route but at some point any consumer would need some-kind-off human intervention in the buying cycle. Let’s take the Ubers and the Olas of the world, even though their entire platform is based on technology, they too still need a backend support system to initially train their drivers and obviously a human intervention at times when our drivers are rude, we need a refund on our cancelled trips, etc. Another great example would be Amazon, when they started off operations it was pretty much a blue ocean for them but a few years later even they are finding it necessary to open a brick and mortar store.

As per my understanding companies this year have moved up their digital spends marginally and are currently averaging at around 20 – 25% of their overall marketing spends across industries, these spends are divided into 2 major buckets, which is mainly lead generation and brand awareness or I like to call it performance and engagement. Sadly, a large portion of companies focus most of their budgets on lead generation. Have the days of creating a brand, increasing brand recall, converting customers to advocates, and the likes become irrelevant for these brands? Would a user invest a certain amount in a financial services product without knowing the brand, would a user sign up to a website or app without even knowing about it, would a customer buy a flat without knowing the authenticity of a builder, I guess the answer to most of these questions would be “No!”. Companies will sooner than later realize their strategy and at some point would have to alter their bifurcation of spends, I hope.

In continuation, lead generation channels are largely Google Adwords, Social Media ads (mainly Facebook), Emailers and SMSes, Aggregators among a few other smaller ones on the other side of things to promote brand awareness we have Display banners, Content marketing, Programmatic buying, ORM (Online reputation management) and Video Marketing among a few others. Google and Facebook hold the maximum percentage of spends by companies and on an average it accounts to as high as 60%, with the all the other channels just accounting for 40%. My next few articles would be individually focusing on each of these channels and my views and take on it. 

A Bugdroid bit an apple against a background of tiles (Mobile operating systems)

The market for mobile phones is huge and very obviously that directly makes the market for mobile operating systems also huge. With several players already in the market and others trying to get in with an attempt to penetrate this market, on most occasions smaller players end up failing or get bought out by larger players. Android has managed to capture a large portion of the smartphone market share at 84.4%, followed by Apple’s iOS at 11.7% and Windows Phone operating system at 2.9%, as of Q3, 2014 (IDC, 2014). All the major players are trying to eat into Android’s Market share and on the other hand Android is trying to capture the remaining 15.6%. Smartphone users consists of almost 40% (1.75 billion) of the total mobile market of 4.55 billions users.

Android became market leaders in 2010, overtaking Symbian OS that was developed and run by Nokia. Most of the mobile phones in the early 2000s ran on Symbian OS, until companies started to shift to other operating systems and for me, this is one of the major reasons for Nokia’s downfall as well. Nokia completely believed in their operating system and did not not shift from their outdated operating system like most of the others or massively change Symbian OS as they believed they were invincible until Android was developed and backed by one of the largest companies in the world, Google. Since 2010, Goggle has never looked back and has constantly kept increasing its market share, with most of the mobile companies shifting to Android as their preferred operating system. The android operating system caters extremely well to all its clients, especially the ones that need a large amount of software backing to their massive hardware technological developments like Samsung and HTC. Keeping in mind that Samsung plans on launching and running their own operating system (Tizen) on all their devices, the paradigm shift is going to be interesting as Samsung is the leading smartphone mobile phone provider in the world with 23.7% market share of the total smartphone mobile phone industry and 28% market share of android devices.

Apple’s IOS was developed and released in 2007, around the same time as Android. It’s a known fact that IOS is only available to Apple phones, unlike all its other competitors and from the looks of it I don’t think that’s ever going to change. IOS has never managed to become world market leaders and if they keeping playing the same game that they have been playing, it doesn't seem like its ever going happen. Apple believes in targeting only the rich and the upper middle class with their phones in the highest price-range segment, making the phone a “status symbol”. On their best day, Apple has only 5 varieties of phones that a user can purchase and the major difference between those phones would be the thickness and the speed, with a few additional features like Touch ID and Apple pay. Without a doubt IOS is the most user friendly and seamless operating system, but the baggage that comes along is too much including an extremely hefty price and I don’t think the world is ready yet for curved phones.

The Windows operating system, that mainly runs on Windows Phones (formerly known as Nokia) and my personal favourite. Very obviously I use a Windows Phone, and am extremely proud of it but shockingly have to keep justifying the reason to other people. On most occasions the debate ends at the Windows Phones’ app store, without even moving on to talk about its user interface, camera or Mix radio. The Windows’ operating system provides an extremely easy user interface with some great features, like free latest downloadable music. Even though I'm a huge believer in Windows Phones, I'm not blind. The Windows phone operating system does have a few issues besides its widely spoken lack of applications, the tendency of freezing/hanging that is also an added feature on most Android devices, but that barely exists on the iPhone. Now getting to the main reason for the lack of belief people have in the Windows phone operating system, “limited applications”, the Windows phone app store has more than 300,000 application that accounts to one fourth of the applications on IOS or the Google play store but its growing and improving at an extremely fast pace and plan on reaching a respectable position very soon

When comparing all the three major operating systems, the android operating system is not the most user friendly and could take a few days or for some a few weeks to figure it out but for a very few after shifting to a new phone, unlike the IOS and windows phone operating systems. But again, one of the main reasons being, excessive functionality on a phone, which is always a good thing. Siri that was introduced in 2011 with the iPhone 4S, one of the first and most successful personal assistant on a mobile phone device is massively losing out to Google Now and Cortana. The iPhone was known for its almost lifelike application buttons on its user interface, which lost its way massively after iOS7. Introduction of iOS 7 and iOS 8 brought a lot of colour to the user interface instead of actual enhancement like the most recent Android lollipop and the Windows phone 8.1.

To conclude, I feel Android needs to make their UI a little more user friendly and try to work out a similar user experience across all mobile phone price segments, while Apple needs to stop focusing completely on the looks and move a little towards functionality and make Apple as the company it used to be, I don't think I can stand another keynote with Tim Cook saying, “One more thing.. the slimmest and fastest iPhone till date”. Windows is going down the right part with the windows phone, especially now with the hardware sector under its control as well, I think they should focus on making sure they have a device that seamlessly works and also wirelessly connects with other devices over platforms like Miracast or Airplay and very obviously improve their applications and sign in more developers for those application fanatics.

Digital Marketing - Fighting its way to the top

A platform that has created a completely new horizon for companies to sell and market their products. The concept of Marketing has been around for more than a century and for most part of it, the conventional method has been used. With an experience in digital marketing for all most 5 years, I have noticed that still the off-line “main-stream” method is preferred. Most of the marketing budget allocation at many major companies are still assigned to print, media, outdoor, site branding, television and the likes, giving an extremely small share of the marketing budget to digital marketing in most cases. Though, in the last few years the growth has been increasing in the digital space.

The concept of digital marketing sprung in 1990s and early 2000s, with Google playing a massive role in it, which was then followed by several social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. The Mobile sector too has started playing an important role in the development of this platform, mainly through mobile applications and games. Several websites are running in large profits due to help of online marketing. Google search engine has approximately 11.94 billion monthly searches, World-wide email users stand at approximately 2.5 billion, Youtube has approximately 1 billion monthly unique visitors, Facebook alone has a reach of 1.23 billion monthly users and Linkedin and Twitter put together have more than 500 million users. Keeping in mind that a large sum of these users overlap, but these numbers are still extremely large enough, with an incremental increase in percentage every year.

Nowadays it has become extremely important for a company to set up a website, one of the first things a company does while starting up and a consumer while purchasing. To reach a website easily is an extremely difficult task for a company to achieve unless the url (uniform resource locator) is known by the user or the website/company has an extremely unique name. To make this possible a company would have to optimize their website on Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine, Google is the most preferred search engine. SEO (Search engine optimization) needs to be done to a website that highlights keywords and relevance to match what the user is looking for. This could be achieved through meta tags and accurate data. A constant check on the viewer-ship and traffic of your website could be managed by a tool called Google analytics, which could help you improve the performance, speed and other parameters of your website.

The issue is that the process does not end here, a company that needs to sell or advertise its products need to do so with the help of SEM (Search engine marketing) a concept that displays ads according to the keywords typed by the users, SEM is a complicated process since many people want to promote their products and the space to do so is limited, hence a daily bid is placed based on the popularity of the keyword on the day. Adwords by Google assists the seller with this task. Other options of advertising includes social media and email ads, with a direct focus on the company’s target audience judging by the profile information,  website ads (for example: an airline providing website, advertising about hotels) and direct search engine ads that have tie ups with several websites to display advertisements.

Another important part of digital marketing and the negative of its fast pace growth, is that customers are becoming smarter. They would like to review the product before purchasing it, hence they most often than not do their research through consumer forum websites and blogging sites, especially if the ticket price of the product is substantially high for the consumer. Hence companies need to work on a term called “reputation management” to nullify the bad comments if any and prove their product worth the buy in the eyes of consumers.

Several digital marketing agencies perform all these tasks on daily basis for several companies to assist carry out their process in a smooth manner. The paradigm shift from off-line to online marketing is slowly but gradually taking over the market and the way products are advertised and sold. 

64% of the world – We are connected!

Let’s imagine a kilogram of weight in our pocket, I tried it and it felt extremely awkward. That was the approximate weight of the first wireless mobile phone developed on 3^rd April 1973, but the positives were that it built a massive platform to open several avenues in massive mobile technology enhancements to always stay wirelessly connected to people around the globe. Today, we have approximately 64% of the world using mobile phones for several purposes, right from the basic usage of making calls to constantly monitoring your heart rate. The mobile phone has become an extremely integral part of our lives, so much so that I am a Nomophobic, and weirdly don’t mind it at all.

Reminiscing the time when pixelated black text on a 96 by 65 pixel screen with a green back-light that alternately worked as a lethal attacking device or for some as a device that enhanced their sexual desire due to its unnecessarily high vibrations that notified an incoming call or a message. Major changes in technology have enabled us now to answer a call without physically answering it. The perpetual need of a mobile phone have led to several brands venturing into this market, with Nokia, Alcatel Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola, Blackberry, Xiaomi among others changing hands in dominating the mobile phone markets in various countries. Technology development in the mobile industry has been extremely quick, a company like blackberry that once managed to sell 15 million handsets and a must have device for most mobile users in one quarter of 2009 to becoming a social joke just 4 years later.

The cannibalistic war for the top spot is always on, and this is not restricted to only the companies that produce these products but for most consumers as well. Every consumer has a set perspective and belief of their device he/she owns. For me as a consumer and a technology buff with a strong opinion, I would blatantly state that I'm a huge Nokia/Windows Phone believer. With phones like the HTC one, Samsung S5 and the Nexus series, it’s hard to hold my ground and in spite of all the major competition I foresee Windows Phones to dominate the market again, with its mobile-first, cloud-first strategy among other major developments, over the next couple of years. Some might point out that I have left out the unintentional flexible screened IPhone 6 and IPhone 6 plus, the reason being from my point of view, apple have started focusing way too much on the design and less on the functionality on their devices.

Getting in and getting out of the hardware phone market is an extremely difficult task, but Google managed this well. Google faced a lot of criticism due to its more than $9.5 billion loss while changing hands from Motorola to Lenovo, but many people ignored the fact that Google managed to earn approximately 17,000 patents, 7,500 applications, a large cash pile and a large amount in deferred tax assets from Motorola and with technology moving faster than light, patents possibly hold way more future value than running a hardware mobile business. This has just helped in increasing the patents battle between Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and Google.

What can we expect from our mobile phones in the future? Surely not just a champagne coloured phone with minor performance improvements. We are surely looking at concepts like modular phones by phonebloks, intentionally flexible screen phones by Samsung, transparent phones by polytron technologies among many others. Sorry Ethan Hunt and Tony Stark, we are catching up faster than expected.

Life minus the ease

The word "ease" has a completely different meaning all together today, for me ease directly corresponds to technology and its enhancements. To start off with something as simple as, without it today I would be probably clacking away on a typewriter and post which that piece of paper would be lost within all the pile of trash without any kind of circulation. The inception of technology, one of the biggest gifts to mankind without which we would certainly be incomplete. A person today can be judged by mainly three things, the amount of money he/she makes, the place where he/she stays and his/her internet speed.

Technology as defined, is something that makes life convenient with the application of scientific knowledge. Let’s try and imagine a regular working day without it. To start off our day waking up/ stage 1, we most certainly would have to rely on family members who are possibly dreamless sleepers or insomniacs to personally wake us up (minus alarm clock). Getting ready/stage 2, without a sense of time, seems like a certainly easy task for most (minus a watch). Using the public transport/stage 3, this is a little tricky to analyse if buses/trains/monorails could be considered as mainstream technology, even if we don’t consider them as main stream technology, their back-end systems surely are and so are the back-end systems for the punishment lights. The easiest and quickest solution to get you to your destination would be animal slavery, due to derailed trains and bashed up buses  due to lack of communication and sync (minus public transport). Reaching work in the worst possible state, only to know that the day has just begun. Running around to meet people personally and waiting for telegraphs/posts to hopefully arrive (minus outlook). Lack of knowledge on the current happenings in the city, which means death or being robbed is always on the table (minus the internet). After a long day of torture, returning home to an over populated house of your cranky, angry, demanding and playful children (minus entertainment systems).

For me the minor inclusions of technology makes or breaks my day. For example staying in a city, where the weather is very unpredictable, a small automated reminder by Siri, Cortana or the likes to carry my jacket would immensely change my day for the better. Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get – Forest Gump. A statement apt for a life without technology.

Sometimes the things that are easily attainable, shouldn't be taken for granted.