Content is fire, social media is gasoline.
With the advent of digital in every field, Digital Marketing is the contemporary tool to increase the perceptibility of your brand at any level you desire. In order to bookmark your place in the ever-changing market, you need to keep yourself up-to-date with the latest developments in digital marketing.
myHQ is a community of 10,000+ entrepreneurs, freelancers, marketers and working professionals. We are building a chain of inspiring coworking spaces and work cafes for people to work out of. As a step towards building an engaging community that has each other’s back, we organise numerous fun-filled and skill development workshops and events, mentorship hours and VC pitch sessions every month. We feel privileged to have had Neeraj Sancheti join us for an AMA session on digital marketing.
Neeraj Sancheti is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kreativ Street, an integrated fast-growing full-stack marketing agency for the digital world. Kreativ Street has served companies like HCL, H&M, Paytm, OYO and Hero among others. Prior to Kreativ Street, Neeraj managed social media and brand strategy at OYO rooms.
Here are a few questions from our AMA to help you become a better digital marketer:
Q. How to start digital marketing for your company?
Some key points from Neeraj:
- A good way to start is by looking at the competition and what your competitors are doing
- Secondly, you need to understand consumer behaviour online
- Then look up for relevant keywords and the volume of those keyword searches in that particular geography and strategize accordingly
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Q. Parameters to keep in mind while setting up a Digital Marketing campaign?
Some key points from Neeraj:
- It is important to understand why you are doing what you are doing, just jumping into digital just because everyone else is doing it won�t necessarily be fruitful to you
- Know your objective, what is it you want to achieve
- Know your target audience, how much time they are spending their time on which platform so that you can strategize accordingly
Q. Should a startup prefer an in-house marketing team or outsource the work to an agency?
- Initially, when some of your marketing activities are at a scale which can be managed internally, you can do in-house marketing.�But a major reason why agencies have been such a success is that they work for multiple brands at the same time. They work towards different objectives and have different budget constraints which give them a lot of understanding of this field.
- When you�re working for a company, your thinking often becomes linear but as an agency, we always meet a lot of people, we have different and fresh ideas and cater to everyone�s needs.
- For example: our agency offers 12 different services. It will never be cost effective for a company to hire 12 different specialists rather than choosing a single agency.
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Q. What are the key elements of a successful Digital Marketing campaign?
Some key points from Neeraj:
- The success of your campaign depends on what you were trying to achieve
- If you were trying to raise awareness, then your reach would be a suitable metric
- If you were trying to achieve a specific number of conversions, then the click-through rate would be a suitable metric
Q. Should a startup be present on every digital platform?
- There is the concept of Path to Purchase which means how a consumer gets to know about your product for the first time as well as during the whole life cycle of purchasing.
- Traditionally, the path to purchase was television, newspapers, radio but today with digital even if you see an advertisement on TV you always go to the internet to know more about that product. That is how the entire path to purchasing has changed
- It is important for any brand to understand that during that Path 2 Purchase what are the various touch points that you need to take care of and accordingly decide whether a 360-degree marketing strategy is required or just digital marketing
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Q. How to do Aggressive marketing?
Some insights from Neeraj:
- First of all, identify what you want to achieve, is it more traffic on your website or is it more conversions for your business or something else
- Secondly, identify your target audience, for example: if it is a watch company know where your audience will buy your watch from, is it your store or an online portal and then feed more money in that platform
- Understand the demographics and psychographics of your audience
- The 2 key platforms today are Instagram and YouTube so create relatable content be it static or a video and then share it on these 2 platforms
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Q. In video making, should one focus more on making relatable content or using VFX?
- Making relatable content is the primary element of a digital marketing campaign
- VFX or not actually depends on your budget
- Recently, there has been a shift from byte size to bit size videos, for example, Samsung is doing 7-minute videos, HP did an ad during Diwali which was very successful as it was quite relatable
Q. How to create viral campaigns?
Here’s what Neeraj has to say about it:
- There is no recipe for a viral campaign
- Its all about creating relatable content and ensuring that the timing of spreading that campaign is right
- After that, some amount of media push is definitely required
- The essence of the matter is to think out of the box but at the same time make relatable content that the audience will love
Q. What kind of content would an audience watch for more than 15 seconds?
Some key points from Neeraj:
- This question also does not have one right answer
- There are all sorts of videos going viral these days, be it a meme video or a music video
- As a brand, you should know what is relevant for your brand and your audience
- Once you�ve made your content, do some research about your audience before putting out your content. This will give you an idea of adding or modifying some content.
Suggested Read:
Q. When and how to move to ATL marketing?
- Honestly, whenever you get your funding
- Brands like urban-ladder, pepper-fry have moved to ATL because they have reached a level where they can cater to a bigger audience
- Mass marketing like television ads, newspaper ads etc. creates a solid buzz around the market but also has a cost attached to it.
- That is why digital is so successful these days because you don�t need an enormous budget for it.
Q. To what extent do vernacular languages affect Digital marketing?
- People have been consuming a lot of information in their own language. Facebook is available in 20-25 languages and so are a lot of other social media platforms. Everyone relates to their vernacular language more than any other language.
- It�s not a new trend, because on Televisions there has been a lot of vernacular content. It�s just that digital is now catching up with this trend.
Q. What are some of the upcoming trends in Digital Marketing?
Some key points from Neeraj:
- First of all videos, they have been there in 2018, 2019 and will be there in 2020
- The rise of SMS (Social Media Stories): Social Media is changing nowadays, especially Instagram. People just open their Insta, check out their stories and then close it. That is Instagram for them these days. The concept of stories was introduced by Snapchat but now every platform has followed this.
- The fallout of fake influencers: Twitter and Instagram have recently deleted a lot of profiles which were bots or fake profiles. While influencer marketing will continue to rise, it will be more about micro-influencers in the coming days
- There has been a shift from �one-to-many� to �one-to-one� communication through the help of Artificial Intelligence. For example, Netflix observes your interests and then shows you relatable content which will be more liked by you.
Q. Which Institute to learn Digital Marketing from?
- There are a lot of institutes that offer a course in digital marketing and there is also a lot of free content on google
- While a course will be of some help to you, practical experience will be much more beneficial.�A lot of things you can only understand when you get into practice.
- If someone gets an opportunity to work with a digital marketing agency it will give you 1st hand experience in digital marketing
Q. Which platform or website do you go to learn about digital marketing?
- I don�t have a go-to platform or website for this but I find most of the stuff on social media pages like facebook, twitter etc.
- There are a lot of research reports that come out every month or every quarter from facebook and google and so on
- There is a lot of material available so it is technically up to you how much do you want to learn? If you want to be a successful digital marketer, then you should do your research daily as a lot of new things are coming out every day in this field
Hope this was helpful for you. Want more details? Watch the full online AMA with Neeraj Sancheti here:
