India's Emerging Online Advertising Market Set for a Boom

November 28th, 2011 admin

Online advertising, especially in the form of social media marketing, is set to grow 30-40% in the Indian market this fiscal year, with early adopters of the medium increasing their expenditure and new converts adding to their ranks.

Some telecom brands have doubled their online advertising budgets, while automobile companies have increased it by 20-35% over fiscal 2010-11, executives said. Some consumer products, retail and tyre brands have also started online promotions this year.

Online Advertising Gaining Momentum in India

India has more than 100 million people who use the Internet, around half of which also shop online, according to Google India. There are 22 million subscribers of the social networking website Facebook, according to a 2010 report by Vizisense, which covers the digital media space.

The digital media market, including the Internet, social media and e-commerce, is expected to be worth Rs.1,500 crore this year, said Manish Vij, founder of the digital agency Tyroo Media Private Ltd.

The current size of the online advertising market, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), is Rs.1,100 crore, while the total advertising market is estimated at Rs.25,000 crore.

“Women’s apparel retail brand Biba and tyre brand Bridgestone moved online recently,” said Namrata Balwani, chief operating officer at digital agency Media2win, which handles the accounts of these concerns for their online advertising requirements.

Nitin Chowdhary, business head at digital agency Tyroo Media, said, “Retail brands will be the game changer in online advertising.” He said Tyroo is doing online work for retailer Shoppers Stop.

Banking and financial services and online classifieds were early movers, while sectors such as real estate, education and e-commerce are getting in now, said Nitin Mathur, senior director (marketing) at Yahoo! India.

Max Hegerman, senior vice-president and digital head at JWT India, the advertising agency for Bharti Airtel Ltd, said telecom companies have the biggest digital advertising budgets, with 10% of their total budget spent on online advertising. “With the advent of 3G (third generation mobile communication), it is in their best interest to be online and promote themselves,” he said.

Hegerman said his client list has been growing in the two years he has headed JWT’s digital media space. “The shift is gradual but across the board. Companies spend 5-8% of their marketing budgets online nowadays compared to 3% earlier.”

Online Advertising in Various Sectors

C.V.L. Srinivas, managing director at Starcom Mediavest, said telcos and car makers spend 15-20% of their total budgets online.

Anuradha Agarwal, vice-president (sales and marketing) at Vodafone Essar Ltd, declined to share the company’s digital budget but said it had jumped from 5% to 10%.

“Digital space is a great way to build relationships and engage with customers. Besides, the medium is efficient, effective, non-intrusive and saves time,” she added. The returns are well defined and Vodafone has an online grievance redressal system, where customers can complain or ask questions, Agarwal added.

Auto maker Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, too, has increased digital media expenditure by 20% over the last fiscal, a spokesperson said.

“This is our way of connecting with the net savvy, upwardly mobile youth. Online advertising is also a cost effective approach to marketing,” he said.

When the company launched the Swift model in August, the event was streamed live on Facebook. “We had over 100,000 fans online waiting for the launch,” the spokesperson said.

Vij of Tyroo Media said companies are spending more on digital ads as they realise that prospective buyers are spending more time online and can be better targeted via online advertising.

E-commerce brands are also spending more money on digital media. Tyroo’s parent Smile Group operates two shopping portals, Dealsandyou.com and Fashionandyou.com, which spend 40-50% of their advertising budgets online.

“The pressure to spend on advertising comes from private equity investors who push e-commerce companies to acquire subscribers and increase sales,” Vij said.

The medium, however, continues to face challenges.

Satyajit Sen, chief executive, Zenith Optimedia, the media agency for Honda Siel Cars India Ltd, said television remains the biggest advertising medium. He, however, expects companies to expand the share of online advertising in their marketing budgets to about 35%.

Srinivas of Starcom Mediavest and Chowdhary of Tyroo said getting consumer goods companies interested in online advertising is the biggest challenge.

Once they move in, the flood gates for digital will open, and make for some online advertising and social media marketing campaigns.

Website Design: Looking Good is Just Part of the Picture

November 20th, 2011 admin

The majority of website designers focus wrongly on website designing practices that are shaped towards enhancing the visual experience. This leads to websites that are poorly designed to serve the needs of the visitor or the client. Website design technology may have progressed in the past five years; it is hard to say the same for the actual quality of website design. For all the advancement in technology, the progress is yet to translate into more sensible website design practices.

Website Design: Looking Good is Just Part of the PictureYes, websites designed in the past 5 years certainly look a lot better and have more wow features like impressive effects, stunning graphics and clever videos. But that doesn’t mean as websites they perform any better in satisfying the needs of the visitor or the website owner. In fact very often all these effects, graphics and flash videos while enhancing the visual appeal of the website actually make the website worse in terms of performance. By performance we mean how well the website satisfies the objectives it should have been designed to meet.

When you are looking to have a website designed or redesigned the first thing you need to establish is what are the objectives of the website? The objective is obviously to deliver a pre-promised value to your website visitor; this may range from free information to shopping solutions or paid services of a wide variety. You may in turn derive value from this process either directly in form of a B2C transaction, or in the case ‘free’ websites and blogs, through ads.

What is the purpose of the website design?

Is the purpose to :

1.            Stun visitors with a jaw dropping graphics and effects?

2.            Get good reviews for your website design from other web designers?

3.            Inform and educate visitors?

4.            Attract the right visitors interested in what the website has to offer?

5.            Sell products or services?

6.            Capture leads or subscribers?

If you want evidence of the extent to which website design practioners focus on the visual appeal of the website design rather than functionality, you only have to look at the dozens of websites that showcase what they consider to be good website designs.

These showcase sites for good website design feature 1,000′s of websites submitted by web designers that get reviewed and voted for largely by their peers, or so it would seem. Some, but not all of these showcase websites state what they regard as good website design in their submission guidelines.

Ingredients for Ideal Website Design

An ideal equation for quality website designing is:

Quality Design = Visual + Technical + Creativity

Note here the emphasis is on the visual appearance, technical wiz bangs and the creative merit.

Observation, however, would tell you that web designers focus too much on creating good looking websites that appeal to their peers.

Deciding on what is a good website design also depends on whether you want a website that looks good or one that’s designed for a purpose and to satisfy some clearly defined objectives. If you want a website that does more than just look good then you need to look a bit more closely at the design of your website, because just looking good is never good enough, at least not for me.

We’ll continue to bring you more tips related to website designing and social media marketing, so keep reading!

Social Media Marketing: More Facebook Marketing Myths

November 13th, 2011 admin

In our previous post on social media marketing related Facebook myths, we cleared some commonly held notions about marketing on Facebook. Of course, there are more to be dispelled still, but here’s the thing. With the penetration of social media marketing rising by the day, it’s raining self-Social Media Marketing More Facebook Marketing Mythsacclaimed Facebook marketing gurus nowadays, all of them peddling social media marketing success formulas like door-to-door salesmen. A lot of times, the advice is a variation of the same recycled “join Facebook and talk about your business and invite people to like you page and you’re sorted” line that is typical of these Facebook charlatans. However, there’s more to Facebook marketing, or social media marketing in general, than just that; as you’ve no doubt been discovering over the past few posts on social media marketing.

Now, we’d love to go on about these charlatans, but a bunch of Facebook marketing misconceptions don’t clear themselves. So here goes:

More Facebook Myths#1: My ‘Fans’ are going to love my social media marketing contest for writing the best song for my brand

While it is true, that we all love prizes, brand marketers often become too full of themselves in the assumption that consumers would be able to (or even want to) build a creative piece around their brand. In a perfect world, your fans would be so passionate they’d spend their free time taking photos, recording videos, and generating other content around your brand, thus making for the perfect social media marketing campaign. Unfortunately, out in the real world, few brands ever achieve this level of reverence. The rest of us have to get creative with our social media marketing campaigns. Your fans may not have a picture of your product at the Eiffel Tower, but they do have content to share. All you need to do is make it easy for them. Ask for ideas or opinions and make the submission process simple. That’s how you tap into the content engine that is your fan base.

More Facebook Myths#2: Facebook needs to approve your social media marketing campaign

Not long ago, you had to ask Facebook to approve your promotion’s official rules in advance of launch. To ask approval, you had to have an account executive, costing you $10,000 on Facebook ads. After about six months of uneven enforcement, the policy was reversed for the better. To run a social media marketing campaign on Facebook today, all you have to do is obey Facebook’s promotion guidelines. If you feel to meet that precondition, your campaign will be shut down faster than you can say ‘social media marketing’.

More Facebook Myths#3: The rules don’t apply if I run a contest on my wall

Facebook’s promotion guidelines state that you cannot run a contest or sweepstakes using its native functionality. That means you can’t randomly award concert tickets to someone who likes your wall post. And you can’t run a photo contest in your page’s albums. Facebook wants these promotions run on third-party apps. How real is the risk of being tossed? Refer to Myth #2.

We’ll keep updating you on social media marketing trends in the future, so keep watching this space.

Sensible Measurement: 5 Principles for Social Media Marketing

November 7th, 2011 admin

Social media marketing is nowadays conspicuous by its near-omnipresence. Everybody seems to be doing it, but does that mean they’ll all reap equal benefit of the same? Perhaps, if the mix is right:  it is balanced on effective budget allocation and optimal marketing mix decision making. Social media marketing practitioners have a responsibility to drive the top and bottom lines; ultimately, their endeavors have to result in some tangible, or in some cases even intangible (such as reputation or goodwill enhancement)  benefit.

Sensible Measurement: 5 Principles for Social Media MarketingNascent as the field of social media marketing is, it doesn’t lend itself particularly well to measurement; the disembodied communication, for all its interactive goodness, ensures that. Ultimately, the success of a social media marketing effort depends on how well you can measure your impact and make amends for the future.  So naturally, the call of the hour is in-depth, and accurate web analytic data with which marketers can measure campaign performance and understand the complex social network behaviors of prospects and customers.

Principle #1 – Move to a “viewable impressions” standard and count real exposures online.

Today we count “served impressions” as recorded by ad servers. Often, ad units are not in a viewable space to the end-user or fail to fully load on the screen – potentially resulting in substantial over-counting of impressions. Viewable exposures are increasingly the norm across other media and better address brand marketers’ needs.

Principle #2 – Social Media Marketing must measure success by audience impressions, not gross ad impressions.

Brand marketers target specific audiences. Social media marketing professionals need to understand the quality and number of exposures against their targets – and the respective reach and frequency of such exposures. The existing digital currency makes this extremely difficult. Moreover, the practice of selling ad impressions makes cross-media comparisons extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Principle #3 – Because all ad units are not created equal, we must create a transparent classification system.

Unlike traditional media, which have a limited number of inventory types (e.g., 30-sec spot, full-page back cover), social media marketing has a myriad of units. Making Measurement Make Sense advocates a transparent classification system, adhered to by all publishers. Such a system will enable marketers to identify and spotlight the best offerings for brand building, and for other marketing objectives.

Principle #4 – Determine interactivity “metrics that matter” for brand marketers, to evaluate the contribution of social media marketing to brand building.

Currently, the industry is awash in digital interaction metrics. However, these metrics are not necessarily relevant for brand marketers. Aside from ‘likes’, there are few standards for enabling reliable comparison. The industry must identify and define the specific metrics most valuable to brand marketers and define and implement reliable standards for existing social media marketing metrics.

Principle #5 – Social Media Marketing measurement must become increasingly comparable and integrated with other media.

Measurement solutions must facilitate cross media platform planning, buying and evaluating of marketing and media. This is a substantial issue that hampers analysis and decision making throughout the social media marketing ecosystem.

facebook myths

Common Facebook Myths related to Social Media Marketing

November 1st, 2011 admin

Facebook is a wildly popular social media marketing platform, and yet in many ways, can be termed the wild-wild west of digital marketing. Just as the final frontier of email marketing was conquered in the times gone by, the Facebook social networking platform is being civilized by up-and-coming best practices, upgrading user experience, and Facebook’s own tightening norms for governing social media marketing and promotional campaigns.

In this post, we’ll put examine common misconceptions about social media marketing on Facebook. Read on.

Myth #1: A newly started Social Media Marketing campaign will go ‘viral’ on its own through user and fan communities

If the objective of your social media marketing effort is to “go viral”, Facebook’s objective is to stop that. Before you ask why, just consider what’s so special about going viral. The answer is: as opposed to purchased ad-space campaigns, a viral campaign relies on a variation of the most popular (and free) force in advertising: word of mouth. Essentially, a Facebook page or contest being ‘liked’ and shared on user walls is nothing else but spreading word of mouth. That’s just as may be, the fine folks at Facebook are as mindful of revenue enhancement as you are, and that’s why they WANT you to pay them to drive impressions and engagement through Facebook’s advertising platform. Apart from that, Facebook’s core promise of delivering an uncluttered user experience means that the virality you seek is unlikely to start organically (as it should, ideally). In the initial stages, the ‘viral’ campaigns would have to be artificially driven in order to gather a critical mass of Facebook buzz. Then you can let nature and social media marketing take their course.

Myth #2: A Consumer ‘liking’ my company’s Facebook page is engaging with my brand

Engagement via social media marketing will not happen unless you give your consumers an incentive for showing interest. A single click of the mouse to ‘like’ your page doesn’t get you there, nor does a filled out contact form. Think from a consumer perspective: what’s so exciting about you filling out a form that you’ll tell even your family about it with any degree of enthusiasm? So no, them liking your page can only be the beginning of their exposure to exclusive ‘fan only’ content that can include contests, sweepstakes, or even just fun-facts; things that are ultimately going to earn you some social media marketing brownie points, and actually get the users engaged.

Myth #3: Trolls will overwhelm my social media marketing campaign page

Remember, your users are not truly engaging with your brand if you’re not giving them a voice; the whole beauty of social media marketing is that user feedback cuts through all the layers and filters that exist in conventional marketing feedback methods. Understandably, this also gives some room to the crackpots (or genuinely disgruntled consumers), a reason why many organizations are genuinely scared of allowing consumers an online voice. Understand that people will behave as they do: they’ll share negative opinions, perhaps even call you names, and create a general ruckus. Prepare in advance by having a comprehensive moderation policy framed. Also, if you have a fair degree of standing among consumers (without which trolls are unlikely to waste time over you), for every troll that trashes you, you’ll have loyal consumers springing to you defense. It can be a good idea for your own consumers talk you up in a public forum (such as your Facebook page) that neutral readers may also read: you couldn’t plan a better ad!

We’re not yet done with common Facebook misconceptions. We’ll be back with more on Facebook and its optimal use for social media marketing.

« Older Entries
Twitter Delicious Facebook Digg Stumbleupon Favorites More

  • Featured Video