Looking at Digital media projected to contribute 27.3% to total advertising revenues by 2021 how has the role of the new age ‘Digital’ Marketer evolved? The beauty of Digital is that its trackable at any point in time, you know what you’re doing, how much you’re spending, what are the results of a banner, what copy works, what colors are performing more and so on and so forth. So digital is beautiful. However, as a digital marketer, the key is to look at data more than ever. Everyone know that digital can be measured, but I see not many digital marketers doing the deeper analysis which drives better results for them. Still many people are doing digital as many agencies are suggesting them to do the same, but it needs investment of time & energy to drive the maximum bang for your buck and that’s the direction that Digital Marketer need to move towards. Focus on a lot of experiments, pilots to know what works & what doesn’t, basis the results push the paddle further. That’s one strategy which a digital marketer can follow.
What has been a key success story of MobiKwik in the past few months and it would be interesting to know how was that made possible? Last 12 months have been phenomenal, we’ve never seen a single day as a business when we did lesser than yesterday, we’re booming as a business. Also, with the push on demonetization, the trajectories have changed, we did what we intended to do over 12 months in 2 months flat. There were challenging times but we had put in great efforts as a team to sail through. In marketing, we being an app first company, our key investments were mainly digital as our biggest acquisitions used to come from digital campaigns, from many partner apps, gaming inventories etc. Now the task has totally changed as we’re doing many things which are regional & also right on the markets. Case in point being, we acquired all the petrol pumps to start accepting payments via MobiKwik, it was not easy to get them trained about an e-wallet & then convert users from cash/credit cards to e-wallet as an option to pay. All of that required a change to do more of on-ground marketing and hence the role of marketing changed a lot from digital to on-ground, in-store, regional & targeted. We launched a Whatsapp campaign called “Chipka Do India” where we asked users to onboard their nearby shops to accept payments via MobiKwik & send the picture on Whatsapp, that went viral & we onboarded 7lac+ merchants from that campaign.
What would be one of the biggest trends that you see today in Digital Marketing ecosystem? The biggest trend that I see will be towards personalized experience for users. The more we know our users & start creating a very contextual journey for them, the better will be the return. Also, there is a communication clutter in digital media, banners are floating all around and hence another big trend would be how well you’re communicating & reaching out to your user, so videos are an important channel to explore. The next important channel in the country like ours is to also create local/regional language communication & experience coz as everyone is trying to go into tier-2/3 towns, what we need to realize is that, they’re more and more non English speaking audience and hence a local language ad will perform better targeted to their geography rather than one communication that serves all.
Considering the paradigm shift in the market for connected devices, what would be top 2 tech challenges that you see in the this market? While digital is shifting the paradigm, there are very little tech platforms that are helping in content generation. Content marketing is the way to go, but what content will work where, there’s no tech in that space right now that’s challenge number 1, the other big challenge is digital fraud where many apps, publishers are eating up organic clicks and wrong attributions are spreading and mushrooming everywhere. Hence, tech needs to evolve to analyse trends in such a way that frauds are flagged red and then curbed with data.
What would be few areas in digital marketing MobiKwik is excited to explore? The day we’re able to book all ATL media via digital means along with measuring all of the print, radio spends also on a real dashboard with actionable insights, that’s the path I’d like to move towards. Is there’s something that’s needs to be built for that, I’d be happy to step up & support, but yes, I kicked & excited to explore this piece.
