Niraj Singh

Why digital marketing needs strategic planning

by Niraj Singh | Dec 28, 2017 | Digital Marketing

Planning never ever goes waste but ineffective planning can cause a lot of delays and disappointments. Not only do inept strategic plans waste money and time, they also make companies miss precious opportunities to expand and boost performance. What’s more worrying is the danger of damage to credibility.

Why do digital marketing companies in Bangalore need strategic planning?

It is often noticed that every company has some strategic planning in place. But few do it well. Fewer still understand that there should be a concerted and focused effort by the leadership team to bring about an effective strategy that can take the company forward in every sense of the term.

As leaders of organisations sit down to chalk out their strategies, often most are unsure about what they are targeting and whether their plans will bring about the requisite changes in the right areas and functions. As the experts say, guesswork is the first enemy of strategic planning. A more guided approach to strategic planning will involve:

Establishing strategic objectives for specific goals
Listing out the action steps to be taken to achieve these goals
Aligning planning initiatives with overall business strategy
Building a comprehensive strategy document

Planning your strategy
Research has often proved that businesses with a strategic marketing plan in place are more likely to do well in the long term than those that just implement actions impulsively. In traditional offline businesses, strategic marketing planning are usually annual or longer. Ideally, digital marketing companies should follow their lead. Better still, digital marketing companies must have an ongoing long-term plan, say for an year or two, and then shorter roadmaps to introduce new features or adopt new models of delivery.

Approaches to planning for digital marketing
Beyond the day-to-day issues, generally, there are a few time-tested approaches to strategic planning as part of a larger digital marketing plan. These include:

A long-term strategic initiatives plan
An annual digital plan based on the company’s goals
Specific campaign plans and quarterly roadmaps
Editorial and content-specific calendars
Weekly and daily operational to-do lists

Benefits of long-term planning
A long-term strategic plan has many benefits. It enables a digital marketer to be consistent and allocate resources efficiently. A strategic approach makes it easy to launch products on schedule and anticipate changes in the marketplace much ahead of competitors. Some of the major benefits are:

Budget clarity
Better content marketing with time to plan high-quality shareable content throughout the year
Conversion rate optimisation
Furthering relevance through pre-planned marketing automation projects.

Thus, in every way possible, a good strategic plan is a must for successful digital marketing.

Guesswork is the first enemy of strategic planning.

Google analytics for the busy CEO: Here’s what you should know

by Niraj Singh | Jul 20, 2017 | SEO

Marketing is inexorably tied to sales. If as a digital marketer, you are unable to correlate your marketing actions to the actual revenues, all your efforts are simply in vain. This is why even busy entrepreneurs and CEOs understand that keeping track of conversions is vital to growth in the company. Obviously, the most important tool to keep track of sales and conversions is Google Analytics.
There are many ways a website can increase its traffic as well as its conversion but it is vital to figure out the specific metrics that you are trying to better to improve your brand value. This knowledge can be gained only through a thorough understanding of Google Analytics.

What digital marketing companies in Bangalore can do
The first thing that digital marketing companies ought to learn is how to install Google Analytics and understand what they should be tracking every month. Once you track and observe the trends, you need to act on this information and use it as a guide to develop your website strategy. When you proceed in this manner, there will be nothing stopping you from growing your website and increasing your brand recognition.
That said, there are some metrics that are more important than others when it comes to tracking on Google Analytics. Here is a guide.

New or unique visitors – For a digital marketer, it is important to track how a new visitor interacts with the website as compared to a returning one. To improve the experience for first-time visitors, you might have to isolate the conversion rates from customers who are already loyal to your website/brand. This is where your website design gains importance. The more user friendly the website, the lower the bounce rate of first-time visitors. Providing a greater user experience will go a long way in ensuring that the new visitors return.
Interactions on your pages/sessions – There might be several returning visitors to your website who are not converting but it is still useful to monitor their behaviour on your website. This way, you will get a clear picture of what they are seeking and perhaps why they are not yet converting. For example, with the unique visitor page view rates, you can track the time they spent on a particular page, the comments they made etc. Your goal is not just to increase their interaction but also lead them to actual conversion — by determining how they chose to browse through your website.
Average duration of visit – This is the average time a visitor spends on your website. This, of course, has a direct correlation with how relevant your brand/product/service is to your customer and how well the website is able to hold up his interest. By tracking this metric, a digital marketer is able to figure out whether the information provided on the website is adequate or overwhelming, if the call to action is straightforward enough and even if the website navigation is confusing or easy.
Conversion from returning visitor – When you track a returning visitor, you must ask yourself two questions — why is the visitor returning and if he has still not converted, why not and what can be done to convert this time around. By tracking their movements, it is possible to understand how to entice them to convert.
Bounce rate – Minimizing the bounce rate of visitors is one of the primary tasks of digital marketing. But with Google analytics, you can track how and why the bounce rate for your website might be higher. This can be anything from a complicated checkout process to expired deals to poor design or even load times that are high.

These are just the primary metrics that will help you keep your website in good health. But Google analytics is a veritable gold mine of resources for the smart CEO. By utilizing it better you will be able to build your brand, optimize your traffic and ultimately accomplish your goal of maximum conversions.

Paid or organic social media marketing: Which is better and why

by Niraj Singh | May 28, 2017 | Uncategorized

Every digital marketer now knows that social media marketing is mandatory. It does not matter if you are a small business, a large multi-million dollar corporation or a freelancer looking for more work — everyone needs to hop on to the social media bandwagon. In fact, with over 2 billion users, social media is one of the largest markets of the world. But unlike traditional markets, social media changes at supersonic speed. Algorithms are often tweaked, new features are introduced and feed styles changed without much notice.

Social media optimization
In such a scenario, it becomes difficult for the marketer to zoom in on the right kind of marketing strategy to adopt when it comes to social media. To be able to optimize social media for your business, it is necessary to have a clear marketing path ahead. A major part of this decision depends on the marketer’s understanding of paid and organic marketing.

Organic social media marketing is using the free tools provided by the social networks to build a community, interact with it by constantly sharing posts, responding to feedback and customer queries etc. Whereas paid social media marketing involves advertisements or sponsored messages to targeted social network users. The cost depends on the network, the type of ad as well as cost per click (CPC).

What does paid social offer?
With paid social media marketing, evidently, you are investing money in something and expecting better results. The most obvious advantage is that you can define and target a specific section and design your ads keeping in mind their needs and requirements. These are usually customers who already have expressed an interest in your product/service. This also means they are most likely to click on your ad or visit your website.
The paid route is certainly a good way to grab more eyeballs and grow your business in this age of social media clutter. In fact, there is so much noise out there that it is virtually impossible to get noticed through only organic marketing. But on the negative side, it is quite possible that even after paying, you might not get returns — there is no guarantee that you will see more growth or that your ads will get clicks. But this usually happens if you have put up an ad without careful research and planning. Which is why paid social media marketing works best when it is aligned to a larger social media strategy.

Pros and cons of organic social
With organic social media marketing, you have to be patient and invest more time and effort. The results might be slow in coming but eventually they will and what’s more, they will be long-lasting. Precisely why, organic social is as important as paid when it comes to social media. The goal in organic marketing is to attract customers naturally, so that they take the trouble to sign up, interact and eventually buy, of their own accord.
In paid social, ads are set to run for a short period of time but if you put up a link to your quality content and customers like it, it can keep getting shared forever, resulting in leads even years later. But just like paid social, for organic marketing to work at its optimum best, the overall strategy must be planned down to the tiniest detail and the content should be shareable, of high quality and consistent.

Which is better?
It is a fallacy to follow any one kind of marketing. Instead, a strategic combination of both paid and organic marketing is best. Most businesses understand this now and try to incorporate both ways in their digital marketing strategy.

Design Thinking

by Niraj Singh | May 9, 2016 | Uncategorized

Where did design thinking begin? Well, design thinking is much older than the buzzword we coined to signify it. It begins with the architects, the artists, the philosophers and the civil planners of yore, the innovators behind complex design ideas like the drainage system of the Indus Valley Civilization, the Parthenon in Greece, the ethical treatises of Plato or even the intricate irrigation fields of the Egyptians. What has remained unchanged in the eons is the core underlying ethos- the social value of design- as all design is irrevocably social in nature. Here are some keys things to keep in mind when you’re hacking the ancient code.

Step 1 – Empathy

Any social endeavor begins with the human element. It involves identifying the molecules that make up your target audience, getting under their skin and finding out what they value, what they want and how they look at the world. The challenge of the designer lies in synthesizing this within the context of their design. In the movie ‘High Noon’, Gary Cooper’s character fails to get a posse together because of his inability to connect and communicate with the townsfolk in a relatable manner. This results in the townsfolk wishing for his demise and him trudging into against an armed mob completely alone. In short, empathy is everything!

Step 2 – Define

Every cogent work of design requires something of a mission statement to bring clarity and focus to your work. What exactly are you trying to convey? What and who are you addressing? What are you bringing to the table? Sometimes, a problem statement can be condensed to a word, almost a mantra that acts as a guiding principle and other times it might be too complex to condense into a paragraph even. As long as you arrive at the goal you have chalked out for you and your user, how you arrived there hardly matters.

Step 3 – Ideate

What separates design thinking from other empirical forms of thinking is the primacy placed on thinking wide, being obtuse if you must, until you arrive at interesting solutions. The first rule of brainstorming dictates that there are no rules, all ideas are welcome and encouraged. Ideation gives us better answers to our problems, and gives us a better idea of a prototype that can delight it’s users. Thinking creatively, having many voices and solutions helps us conjure up the best product for the user.

Step 4 – Prototype

How does one gauge the reactions of one’s users before the final big reveal? The design thinking process, in all it’s stages poses many nagging questions “Will it work?” or “How will they respond?” or even “Will they even get it at all?”. The best way to allay these fears is to come up with a prototype, a demo or a test model if you will. This can be pretty much anything that he user engages with, which is precisely why the ideation process often gives us interesting ideas for a solid prototype.

Step 5 – Test

Once you have sent out your prototypes, the next natural step is to solicit feedback from you users about their experience interacting with it. The way you choose to do this can even get you closer to your users, making yourself more personable and relatable. As mentioned earlier, it’s all about empathy!