Social Beat - Digital Marketing Insights 2017

Notion Press

Old No. 38, New No. 6

McNichols Road, Chetpet

Chennai - 600 031

First Published by Notion Press 2017

Copyright Social Beat 2017

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN 978-1-947429-58-1

This book has been published with all efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. However, the author and the publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

No part of this book may be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Digital advertising spends in India has grown at an estimated 30% in 2016 and this growth is expected to further increase in 2017. This is because digital marketing has driven phenomenal results for companies and become a part of the media mix.

As one of Indias leading digital marketing agencies, we are happy to have been part of this growth and to have leveraged digital media to drive results for our clients. Some of the business results achieved for our clients include:

• 4X increase in organic traffic using advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing techniques.
• Over 300 crore worth of sales in a quarter for a single client through integrated digital marketing efforts.
• Clients are achieving 55% of overall sales through digital marketing, while spending only 25% of the marketing budget on digital campaigns.

This book deals with the different aspects of digital marketing and how it can be leveraged to grow a brand, grow sales as well as revenue through the medium. It will also take you through the digital marketing trends in 2017 and insights from key areas of digital marketing: Social Media, Content, Video, SEO, Digital Advertising, Mobile App marketing and User Experience Design.

The book has been written and compiled by our team of digital marketing experts Suneil Chawla, Vikas Chawla, Abhishek Kumar, Rohit Uttamchandani, Anuradha Nair, Purushothaman K, Panisa Shah, Pooja Patil, Lalitha Shukla, Farida Bharmal, Allan William Moses, Nandita Raman, Roshni D Chhabria, Syed Ali Faizaan, Bindhya VC, Akshita Wadhwa, Sneha Balasubramaniyan, Ayesha Rafeeq, Parvathi Sridharan, Pournima Balasubramanian and Boobalakrishnan.

All the insights shared in this book wouldnt be possible without the amazing support of our clients who have pushed us to achieve higher goals and constantly raise the bar. To all our clients a big thank you.

We trust you will find this compilation insightful. If you have any feedback or suggestions, we would love to hear from you at . Happy reading!

With another year gone by, new technology, tools and trends have emerged in digital marketing. Keeping this in mind, we have put together eight key trends that you should watch out for in 2017.

Mobile UX will be a key focus area

With over 70% of Facebook usage and more than 50% of Google searches happening via mobile, its already a big focus area. We are going to see brands invest a lot more in the mobile user experience, especially when it comes to speed. Google has already launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Facebook is growing its Instant Articles feature. Google is also pushing the Progressive Web Apps (PWA) framework to enable websites to give their users an app-like experience via the browser.

Less is more when it comes to content

Brands often believe that more content is always better, but with millions of content pieces and social media posts going out every day, the truth is quite the opposite. 2017 is going to see a sharp trend towards brands focusing on high value content, which is engaging and far more personalized. With voice search growing in scale (currently at 20% of mobile searches in the USA) many of our digital activities are going to be conversational. This is another reason why content needs to be unique and stand out from the competition. Google also tends to pick more structured and detailed content for their Answer Box , which comes above the regular search results.

Everyone can run digital marketing at scale with automation and machine learning

With automation and machine learning playing a large role in advertising this year, we will see even smaller brands adapting programmatic advertising. With platforms like Double Click by Google, a lot of elements in digital marketing will continue being automated. Google has also launched responsive display advertising that allows brands to run ads of multiple sizes without having a design team. YouTube is also launching a feature to allow automated product showcases below videos, wherein machine learning would determine which product it is, rather than the brand manually having to tag the videos which showcase their products.

Regional language content will grow multifold in adoption

The last time Google reported data on this, it showcased that Hindi content was growing faster than English content and this is likely to grow even further in 2017. With Netflix, Amazon Prime and others spearheading video content in multiple languages, we are also going to see written and visual content growing in regional languages, especially Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Bengali. Facebook has also launched an auto-translate feature for all the brand pages. Though nascent, it is bound to improve this year.

Even small brands will leverage the video medium

Building the brand is key and what better way to achieve that than through videos? It has never been easier to create videos with the help of free and low-cost tools. As per statistics by Facebook, users watch an average of 100 million hours of video every day and most of these are on their mobile devices. Facebook has made it even easier with its Facebook Live feature, which is a very engaging tool, especially for the entertainment, fashion and hospitality industries.

Digital ad attribution will continue to be a grey area

Both for online and offline results, attribution remains a grey area. While there have been many initiatives launched and with many others in the pipeline, most restaurants, retailers and offline stores find it difficult to attribute walk-ins and business results to the digital medium. Facebook and Google Maps have been improving their proximity data to understand if users are at a specific location and encourage them to review the location. Google is also in early stage testing of beacons to allow for better attribution but its still about two years away from mass adoption.

Consolidation in the social media networks

Brands have always found it difficult to be active on multiple social media networks and we do expect some consolidation. Twitter has been in talks of selling out. As platforms evolve and mature, we will see brands also focusing on select platforms that make sense usually a maximum of two or three platforms.

Virtual Reality will not take us over by storm, not just yet at least

There has been a lot of talk around virtual reality devices, including the launch of the Daydream by Google. While the experience it provides is phenomenal, it is not going to be main stream yet. While the cost of devices is getting lower, the adoption of these rather bulky devices is still limited to a select few tech-savvy individuals, at least in India.