Saturday, November 20, 2010

No Social Media, Back to Basics


Today, everyone is talking about Social Media strategy, hence decided not to talk about the same as of now. The approach of this article is giving less of Gyan and share more of Experience led Digital media insights. As a Digital Enthusiast, have tried to make a comprehensive capsule about the basic rules any Brand Marketer should follow, when a Brand is ready to think of trying this New, Interactive & Dynamic medium (Now it's no more considered to be new). Hence this article may help the Brand marketers to utilize this piece of information in a judicious way and hope they will find it relevant for their Brands.


Healthy Media Investment: Any marketer should have a healthy budget to try out, ranging from INR 3,500,000 to 6,000,000 for a month long digital marketing campaign to be excuted in the Indian subcontinent. This will give the brand a decent exposure as well as reach in the digital space and the budget will also allow to try various permutations and combinations of reaching out to their audience through various relevant touch points. Another point any marketer should always keep in mind is that the media budget allocated will not be wasted at any point of time. This medium being dynamic in nature and accurately measurable, media money not delivering the estimated results, can be optimised with the help of creative changes to achieved the desired results.

Scientific Strategy Planning: The brand team and the agency, which has strong capabilities of working out a brand favourable digital marketing strategy, should be designing a comprehensive strategy to best fit the objectives decided for the brand both in short as well as in the long term. The designed strategy needs to be implemented flawlessly and within the decided time frame. The basics like a Website or a WAP site of the brand should be in place before going live with a digital media campaign.

Digital Friendly Creative: One should not think that this medium is going to work like any other medium, it surely does not due to the dynamic nature of this medium and secondly this medium can be measured accurately to the last point of a dollar or rupee spent. But generally most marketers does the mistake of using the same offline creative assets like the Print or the TV assets for digital media, hence they fail to achieve the desired results. Digital creatives should be more in tune with, what the audience in the digital space is looking out for, like communicating the compelling reason to interact with the brand's marketing stimulus.

Tools for Measurement: Before planning and executing any digital media campaign, one should make sure that the planned campaign can be measured in terms of keeping a track of media deliverables as well as how the response of the campaign is helping the brand in achieving the desired objectives. Say for example one should be able to say by checking the dashboard, how many people became aware of the brand message during the course of the campaign or how many people landed on the brand's website during a month long web campaign. There should be mechanics to track the basics like IP addresses of users, so that one can analyse the authenticity of the clicks generated during the campaign.

Pre and Post Campaign Evaluation: This aspect helps to evaluate the executed campaign in terms of what was planned or estimated as deliverables and results vs what is actually achieved. Experienced digital experts can often over deliver in terms of the planned deliverables and results, this always comes from a scientific digital marketing strategy and media planning approach for any brand, supported by data and consumer insights. Hence it is imperative to know waht the brand stands for and what the target audience is looking from the brand in the digital space.
Happy Reading!!!

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