Ankitha Bhuniya, holds an MBA in Marketing & Analytics from Great Lakes Institute of Management, and has worked as a Marketing & Communications Campaign Manager and Marketing Analyst at various top companies.
In a recent interaction with Women Entrepreneur India, Ankita shares her insights on digital marketing in today’s business landscape, key tech disruptions and many other interesting aspects. Below are the excerpts from the conversation.
What is the role of automation and artificial intelligence in today's digital marketing initiatives?
Today, while there is a lot of data that is available online, you need to know which data can be automated and used to gather meaningful insights. As a result, AI is playing a strategic role - be it marketing or any other area. On a company level, you have a huge customer base that is available. Thus, it is imperative to know your customers before you formulate your marketing strategies. Data plays the role of an enabler in this regard, wherein you can leverage data analytics and AI tools to analyze the customer data and derive meaningful insights that enable an accurate decision making for the company. Automation can help the companies understand the customer journey with the product/service and figure out where the customers are dropping off. This helps them in the decision making of the communications that can be sent to the customers at various touchpoints to bring them back to make a purchase with them.
Suggest of few KPIs and metrics that enable businesses to ascertain the success of their digital marketing campaign.
KPIs can be divided into three parts: business metrics, customer metrics, brand metrics. Whenever you launch a digital marketing strategy, there are certain problem statements that are hindering the business. Hence, business metrics is the first and foremost KPI that companies should consider because no matter what marketing campaign you design, it is the conversions or the final business outcomes that determine the success of the campaign. Also, this must include factors such as the total revenue generated as a resultant of this strategy, the incremental revenue generated after the marketing campaign, and many others. If you're a product company, you can also look at the quantity acceleration that you have in your product sales, along with the average basket value for each customer. For customer metrics: Customer acquisition is another critical KPI in this regard, wherein companies must identify the total number of new customers that have been onboarded because of the marketing campaign, CAC or Cost of Acquisition of the customers, ROAS (Return on the Ad Spends) of the investments that the company has made in terms of digital marketing channels to get these new customers. The companies must also pay close attention to the level of their existing customer base that has been activated due to the campaign.
Lastly the companies should look into the branding metrics like the brand awareness among the customers for which the organizations can conduct customer surveys to understand better on this regard.
How are data and analytics enhancing the efficiency of digital marketing strategies?
Today, marketing is not something that can be based on just instincts; it must be mandatorily based on the combination of both data and human instincts. For instance, today if I wish to compare between offline and online channels to check which has worked better for communicating a message to the audience then I need to measure the data from both the sources and have insights derived from that data to conclude that the strategy has worked out and take decisions for future strategies. Customer segmentation plays a pivotal role in enhancing the efficacy of digital marketing strategies. Precise knowledge of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) enables targeted approaches in digital marketing, ensuring that campaigns are tailored to specific customer profiles. Conducting a Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) analysis on customer purchases further refines marketing strategies. This analysis facilitates the personalization of campaigns by understanding individual buying behaviors. These insights help the marketers effectively implement cross-selling or up-selling tactics to maximize customer engagement and satisfaction.
Customer segmentation is one thing which can help improve the efficiency of the digital marketing strategy. Today if we have an idea about the (CLV)customer lifetime value of a customer then we can target the customers through our digital marketing strategies more accurately. The RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) analysis of purchases made by a customer can help us personalize the marketing campaigns, understand their buying behavior to cross sell or upsell products. Today, whatever we do in terms of digital marketing needs to be very data-driven, which is possible by leveraging historical data to derive insights and accordingly predicting future customer behavior to devise strategic marketing campaigns for your company that resonate with your audience.
Briefly explain ways in which marketing professionals can adapt their digital marketing strategies for different demographics.
If we divide our country into four regions for reference (North, South, East & West), customers across each of these regions behave differently. Even though we as a country are united, at a micro level, the behaviors of customers vary significantly across each region. So when you launch a digital marketing campaign, you have to be region-specific in all aspects and ensure to localize the campaigns as per the corresponding region’s culture and sentiments. As a result, it is paramount for every organization to do a thorough market research done for each region, understand the customer dynamics there and accordingly tailor their campaigns to have maximum impact. In addition to tailoring strategies to different geographical regions, marketers should also focus on customizing content according to gender and age demographics. Currently, there is a surge in popular colors and language trends for the Gen Z audience, and incorporating these elements into communication can enhance relatability with customers.
In the rapidly changing digital landscape, how can we ensure that the team is adaptable and can quickly pivot strategies when needed?
The business world today is changing at a very quick pace. As a result, organizations are forced to chalk-out business strategies in such a way that they are flexible to be easily tweaked whenever the need arises in the future. Thus, it is important for the businesses to build a team that is ready to embrace change and have an 'Always Open to Learning' mindset. The businesses should also have an agile project management methodology to help the teammates have flexible approaches to work, conduct scenario planning analysis which would prepare the teammates for potential changes.
(The views expressed in the article belong solely to the author and are not representative of their respective organization.)
