The Interskale blog

In recent months, the news about the Indian economy has been not so great. Several sectors are witnessing a slowdown.

When the economy is sluggish or when there is hyper-competiton and your company performance is affected, what do you do?

In such cases, the business strategy usually is to try get a better return from every rupee or dollar invested.

In digital marketing, there are several ways to improve the ROI of every marketing dollar. Here are six.

1. Website enquiries

Srengthen i.e. improve the company or product or brand website. In particular, if you are a B2B business, you can attract high quality organic traffic and generate quality prospects through your website.

Strengthening the website means improving the content, visual design (look), UI (user interface) and tech performance of the website. This could mean making incremental improvements to the existing site or making a new one. The absolute cost of doing this is low, making this one of the best digital investments that you can make.

2. E-commerce business

Most organizations have – for several reasons – only made half-hearted attempts at e-commerce or neglected this totally. If you are a B2C company with an established brand or a differentiated product, e-commerce can be an important retail channel. In our experience, B2C businesses can generate 10 to 15% of their total sales from e-commerce.

This can be through marketplaces such as Amazon but is best done through one’s own e-commerce website.

3. Hyper-targeted display ads

Google’s display ads platform, Google Display Network (GDN) and it’s video ads platform, You Tube Ads, have in the last one year or so, significantly improved their capabilities. Through machine learning, these platforms are able to identify audiences who are currently planning to buy or who are actively researching a given product or service. Campaigns using this targeting are called in-market campaigns.

In-market campaigns as well as another similar type called custom intent campaigns result in a very efficient use of every ad dollar.

Large digital advertisers can benefit by trying out programmatic advertising, where there is automated real time bidding for each ad impression served.

4. Mining existing customers: Email marketing, SMS and CRM

Targeting existing and lapsed customers through email and SMS campaigns is a great way to get them to buy again. The prerequisite for this is maintaining a customer database and (preferably) the use of a CRM software to run the email and SMS campaign.

In our experience, most organizations are currently not doing this.

5. Low cost brand advertising

Continued brand advertising even in a downturn is a practice perfected by experienced marketers such as P & G. When good times return, it gives the advertised brand a real advantage over brands that pulled out their ads.

The question is: when times are bad, how can any brand afford to advertise ? The answer: digital ads. An ad platform like Facebook Ads has

– high reach

– campaign tools that enable control the frequency of the ads

– a choice of various creative units, such as video, carousel and Instagram (part of Facebook) ads

– low absolute cost and low cost per ad impression

The typical costs being got today on Facebook Ads are 1 Paisa (INR 0.01) per ad impression. Therefore, brands with an audience size of say 10 million can create a good impact with a total ad budget of less than INR 1 million.

During a crunch situation, brands which are regular advertisers can move a larger part of their ad budgets from press or TV to digital. And smaller brands, which do not currently invest in advertising, can keep up the business momentum through a first-time brand campaign on Facebook.

6. Exports enquiries

A great feature of the Internet is it’s global reach. If you have never taken a look at the Google Analytics data of your website, please do so. You will be surprised at the number of countries your website gets traffic from.

Again, if you have had a website for some time, you may have received at least one ‘alliancing’ enquiry or one business enquiry from a location that that you did not quite expect.

Most organization in India have neglected or only partly explored international opportunities. And when the domestic market is down, going international is important.

With digital marketing, it’s easy to go international. Campaigns can be run targeting almost any country. Every B2B organization can aim to get international customers and every organization, whether B2B or B2C, can aim to get international business partners.

These then are six useful ways that digital marketing can help your organization during a downturn.

This post could just as well have been titled “The real value added by digital marketing”.

The questions this posts seek to answer are:

Q1. What is it about digital marketing that gives it an edge over other marketing media and methods?

Q2 What is the maximum benefit that can any organization can get from digital marketing ?

Answer to Q1.
In a previous blog post, we listed ten reasons why organizations should prefer digital marketing over other marketing methods.  Three reasons in particular give this medium a killer edge. Here they are.

1. Digital marketing has very strong TARGETING capabilities. One can reach niche audiences best suited for one’s product or service in many unique and efficient ways and that too reach such audiences all over the world.

2. The second advantage that is uniquely digital is ENGAGEMENT. The variety and depth of engagement possible – starting from social engagement (likes, shares and follows) and going all the way to re-targeting, getting leads and online sales – is not seen in any other media.

3. The third unique advantage is MEASURABILITY. Digital is the most measurable medium in history. Each view and interaction of an ad can be tracked and counted. Ad platforms can even track whether an individual has fully or only partly seen a digital ad.

Thus, digital provides Measurable Engagement across Targeted audiences, MET for short.

Note that we are not saying digital is the only marketing that should be done, rather we are simply pointing out it’s USP.

Answer to Q2.
When we consider that
(i) the Targeted audiences in digital marketing are usually also large in size  (ii) the Engagement includes sales and business leads (enquiries) and
(iii) for a given marketing objective, the absolute costs in digital are lower than the costs in offline media, the MET advantage gets further multiplied.

At Interskale, we believe that the careful and methodical application of digital marketing enables organizations to grow their business month on month, year on year. Therefore the answer to the question “What’s the maximum benefit that can be got from digital marketing?” is simply ‘Business Growth’.

Unfortunately, in digital marketing, very often the discussions on outcomes are only about the number of impressions or clicks. But today digital marketing has the power to directly improve awareness, lead pipelines, sales and brand perception.

The key role of any organization’s marketing head or Chief Marketing Officer is to deliver growth in unit volumes and revenues and deliver an increase in market share. And to make this happen, digital marketing is increasingly the most effective method she or he has available.

Why are we so confident that digital marketing can lead to robust business growth?

At Interskale, we have ourselves used digital marketing to get solid business growth for our clients.

And importantly, digital marketing has some very important champions driving it’s use. Some of the world’s marquee companies, such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo, derive a lion’s share of their revenues from digital advertising.

E.g.Google Ads contributes to about 85% of the total Alphabet (Google parent company) revenues. It is thus all-important for Google to make Google Ads more and more useful to advertisers. New features and capabilities are indeed frequently added. And – we don’t have an exact number but – we estimate that hundreds of highly talented engineers are assigned exclusively to Google Ads to make this happen.

Agencies like Interskale then harness these ad platforms for the benefit of their client organizations.

While innovation is happening in digital advertising – and more is to come – most organizations have yet to fully exploit its existing potential. In digital marketing, the best ROI is yet to come.