There are some reports, which say that brands in India are investing up to one-third of their marketing budgets to digital marketing. This is the claim of a new study. According to this, measuring return on investment still remains a challenge.
In the Digital Marketing Industry Report 2016, the finding appeared from the digital marketing agency Social Beat. It was based on a survey of 376 chief marketing officers and marketing heads, who represent a range of industry sectors throughout India.
As per the study, 87% of brands use digital marketing techniques in the present scenario. Among them, 38% percent allocate one-third of their budget to this channel, which has been reported by IndianTelevision.com. A “360-degree approach” is provided by the addition of televisions and print.
Sunil Chawla, the cofounder of Social Beat noted “Around 10% of brands surveyed spend more than Rs. 1 crore annually on digital marketing while around 50% spend more than Rs. 6 Lakhs annually … and 20% of brands plan to increase their digital marketing spends by 25% in the next financial year”.
It appears that marketers will use digital prominently for driving short-term business objectives. Vikash Chawla, cofounder of Social Beat said, “While brand awareness and lead generation/sales seem to be the primary goals set by the CMOs, digital marketing is increasingly being leveraged for customer engagement (46%) and customer service (35%) too.”
He further added, “Most of the CMOs that took the survey felt that there is a lot of scope for improvement in quality lead generation, result tracking, and creative campaigns.”
The biggest challenge has emerged for digital marketers, who were using engagement, sales/leads, and mentions as the metrics to track the success of their campaigns. The current forecast of Warc for Indian digital ad expenditure in 2016 (because of revised next month) stands at ₹50.9bn, which is a 40.8% rise from 2015.
The major techniques used in digital marketing are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content marketing, email marketing, and Social Media Optimization (SMO). In SEO, the visibility of a website is increased over the search engines through various techniques. The techniques include content posting, PPT submission, link building, and a lot more. In Email Marketing, the marketing is done by sending bulk emails to different corporations and individuals. There are some companies, which sell email addresses to other firms, and it also has become an industry in the present scenario.
The other process in digital marketing is social media optimization or SMO. In social media optimization, the websites are promoted over social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Moreover, the promotion is done over the video websites also such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo. On social media websites, posts are added in the form of images, videos, links, and written texts. The posts are further shared by other users over their profiles, pages, and groups on these websites. The videos with descriptions on the video hosting websites are also shared on many of the websites, which is also a major source of promotion.
