Digital Marketing Automation promises great outcomes; more leads, conversions and sales, all with less labour. Automation-using companies have seen their leads and sales grow, delivering sales productivity of 14% and market overhead reductions of 12%. Redirect Focus, Reallocate Budget, Support Customer Interactions and Gather Meaningful Analytics are some of the strategies to integrate digital marketing automation effortlessly into your marketing strategy. In order to address these, Mr. Ram Jalan was our speaker for MentorED, a weekly live 45-minute workshop where industry veterans share their knowledge and experience and discuss topics that are apt and relevant to the start-up and small business fraternity.
‘‘
I have always experienced that marketing is always considered as a cost centre. I think it is high time we consider marketing as a revenue centre, because your reason to exist is itself a cost.
Mr. Ram Jalan has seventeen years of experience as an entrepreneur, marketer, researcher and internet evangelist. He is Co-founder of DINTW, a Marketing Automation and Consumer Neuroscience Lead Digital Company; Executive Director of a hyper local news outfit Ten News; Angel Investor in a B2B Footwear ERP platform. He has served several brands like Emami, Reliance Industries, IMImobile-UK, AskMe-Malaysia, Batelco (Bahrain) and has successfully implemented Digital Transformation Projects at Askme, Wave Group and Omaxe.
In brief, the session had insights on the following:
Reactive Marketing, Database Marketing, Targeting and Segmentation, Trigger Based Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media and Content, Lead Management, Sales Enablement and Business Intelligence
It is all about Customer and Consequences
“Fundamentals of any marketing or any customer outreach revolves around consumer and the consequences.” As Mr. Ram Jalan opined, digital marketing automation has gained momentum in the last several years now and the pandemic has further accelerated the process. A high usage of the internet, rather demanded by adversities brought by the pandemic during the last eighteen months has made it climb slots on the ladder. “There are internet first brands who have generated more than 2000 crore revenue.” Also, there is a paradigm shift Internet pure business with zero fixed costs coupled with low ownership and more subscription approach.
With many changes taking place, it is also a time for a transformation at the organisational front. Thereafter, he listed five different forms of customers and it needs to be streamlined in which category one’s target customers are located.
Thereafter, the mentor elucidated a typical marketing model framework. “I have always experienced that marketing is always considered as a cost centre. I think it is high time we consider marketing as a revenue centre, because your reason to exist is itself a cost. From day one, you are incurring a fixed cost. Therefore, marketing should be considered as a revenue investment.” He further talked about the different stages of marketing from the awareness stage where a brand introduces oneself to the prospective customer mainly registering their presence and offering a solution.
Engagement follows awareness wherein the prospect’s information has to be collected. But that appears difficult without selling a unique or emergency product. But again, to convert the prospect into a subscriber, social media outreach is the way. An advantage that social media automation offers is brand listening which is nothing but a means to know what prospects and customers think about.
‘‘
I always feel that insource and outsource is a great marriage, you should have the right combination of resources inside who are great managers, who can manage people, who can manage partners and run the campaign.
An integrative and consistent approach – Need of the hour
“You will find a common thing across all your marketing outreach strategies that your customer journey should be mapped, then your marketing to sales to customer service should be dating with each other. They should not be working in silos, they should be interacting and then only your marketing to sales to customer service handoff will be smooth, you must have a pricing strategy. Forget those days when we used to say that one size fits all, it does not happen for any e-commerce brand.” Thus, digital marketing has to be an integrated approach with each of the channels generating revenue in unison and not in isolation.
Consistency is vital too. “If you keep switching off and switching on your car frequently, you burn more fuel. It is better to hold on to a constant campaign or a digital marketing outreach rather than switching it on and off.”
Audience Asks
For me, marketing or promotion leads to better reach, But the number of sales is very insignificant. What should I do?
That is a problem that exists. See, I do not know the category of your business, whether it is B2C or B2B. But one thing is for sure, in B2B business, the sales cycle is long. Rather than assessing immediately what is the sales conversion, I think it is very important to assess how my prospect is engaging with the brand. Are the prospects opening your emails regularly? Are the prospects engaging with you on social media, all-in-one marketing plans help you gather that information about whether the person is visiting your website. So, look at those matrices, look at those data points, before you start, try to convert the prospect and that would also see and define your buying journey, the next set of sales.
Can OTT platforms help in reaching marketing goals? Isn’t it too expensive?
OTT is a great platform. I mean, with forty-five to fifty percent of the internet users active today. Going on an OTT platform, whether it is free or paid content, you definitely have your share of eyeballs coming there. I think it is a very good alternative to get pricing, which is very expensive. For a ten second slot, what you pay on OTT, is one tenth of what you pay on television, forget about the Primetime events like IPL, etc. But it is a great platform to start. It is not expensive at all, if you look at the ROI of language.
The mentor is hopeful of the arena as an effective means of client communication that is emerging with an upward thrust. He suggested, “A low resource or trying to impose all marketing activities on one individual or two individuals does not give you optimum performance. I always feel that insource and outsource is a great marriage, you should have the right combination of resources inside who are great managers, who can manage people, who can manage partners and run the campaign.”
Watch the complete video on YouTube to get the complete idea of how to actualise it in your business.
