Astro

Shashikanth Ramakrishnan is the Head of Digital Analytics and Insights. He has amassed 10 years of experience in driving actionable insights from digital channels and properties. Mr Ramakrishnan has been directly involved in leading digital marketing activities for 5 years.

1. In your opinion, how has the Digital Marketing landscape evolved over the years? What are some of the advantages of the current technological evolution?

These are some of the major changes that I have experienced throughout my time in Digital Marketing.

• Single channel approach to an OMNI channel approach When I first started out in the Digital Marketing space, you only had to identify one channel and be really good at it. Whether it was content marketing, paid ads, referrals, email or social, a single channel was enough to give you a great ROI and exponential growth.

Think about how Dropbox grew. Their growth hacking technique was to offer more storage if you invited more people. That single channel technique was enough to grow them to where they are today.

But if a similar startup was to try this technique now, chances are it won't work for them as well as it did for Dropbox.

Nowadays, you need to be good at all the digital marketing channels (and sometimes even offline channels) to see significant growth and ROI. Popular channels get saturated fast as there are a lot of competitors in the digital marketing space.

Furthermore, an omnichannel approach will ensure your marketing returns won't be hugely effected if there are any algorithm changes on major platforms like Google, Facebook or YouTube.

The omnichannel approach also helps with branding, which as we know plays a major part in any marketing campaign success. Ensuring your product or service is visible in multiple channels will only help to drive more clicks, conversions and customers.

• Organic traffic relevance

In the early days (post 2010), organic traffic was hands down the easiest and most effective channel available. It was easy to rank on a search engine results page by creating keyword relevant content. On social media sites (i.e Facebook), all we had to do was build our following (usually by paying for likes and followers), and any organic posts done thereafter would be readily seen by our followers.

Suffice to say both of these techniques are not feasible any more.

It has gotten a lot more harder and tougher to rank for search engine results. And if you look carefully, it's becoming harder to tell where a paid search ad ends and where the organic results start. Remember the old days where the ads were highlighted in yellow to make it distinct from the organic results. Now the look and feel for both paid and organic results are almost similar.

Its the same on Facebook. Your organic postings will hardly be seen by any of your followers anymore.

If you want to be seen on search engines and social media, your best chance is to now pay for it.

This makes perfect sense, since the majority players (Google and Facebook) have cornered the market, and they will only try to increase their revenue by cross selling and up-selling, therefore making businesses pay if they want to be seen.

  ​Bots and Artificial Intelligence related solutions are a few of the other technological trends shaping the Digital Marketing landscape today  

In regards to advantages of the current technological advancements, one thing that has changed for the better is the advent of data science, data analytics, machine learning and the shift towards a data-driven, consumer centric strategy by most companies. The sheer amount of data collected and curated by technological advancements in data management platforms (and now companies are moving towards customer data platforms) has allowed for more relevant targeting and funnel building thus ensuring the right marketing message is delivered to the right consumer.

2. What according to you are some of the challenges plaguing the Digital Marketing landscape and how can they be effectively mitigated?

I would say the main challenge digital marketers are faced with today is ad fatigue due to non-relevant advertising. Consumers are bombarded with tons of digital ads and marketing campaigns (emails, text etc.) on a daily basis, and its no surprise CTRs and conversion rates are dropping across industries. The boom of e-commerce companies and platforms fighting for attention via marketing campaigns has ironically probably alienated the same consumer they were trying to attract. Think about it, what was the last digital ad which caught your attention? Do you even remember any brand from the digital ads you've seen in the last half hour?

This shift from 3rd party data to 1st party data will play a big role in mitigating this downward trend. Previously the entire digital ad ecosystem was based on 3rd party cookies. With most browsers now blocking 3rd party cookies (Chrome will be the last to do it sometime in 2023), the ecosystem will now have to shift to 1st party data for targeting and positioning.

1st party data (especially from publishers with tons of digital content, e.g news corporations and the like) is a lot more reliable and relevant, as the contextual tagging provided by the publishers is able to classify the consumer in a more correct and thorough way.

Marketers and advertisers will now be able to use 1st party segments for their campaigns, and it has been proven that CTRs and conversion rates from 1st party data are way higher than what you get from 3rd party data.

And since most publishers have their own ad server platforms in place nowadays, its not inconceivable that marketers and advertisers might be able to get more bang for their buck by working directly with major publishers rather than sticking with the current kingpins (Google and Facebook).

3. Which are a few technological trends influencing Digital Marketing today? What are some of the best practices businesses should adopt today to steer ahead of competitors?

Besides 1st party data, another major technological trend influencing Digital Marketing today is the emergence of customer data platforms(CDP), as oppose to the existing data management platforms(DMP). CDPs are tailor made to collect 1st party data from all kinds of sources, be it CRMs, user logins, contest forms, subscriber information, digital content etc. and reorganizes this information to make it easy for marketers to target their buyer personas. This advancement allows marketing teams and management to see at a glance who they should be targeting, what kinds of ROI they can expect, and most importantly it makes it easy for marketers to take action on these segments via the integrated digital marketing channels.

Bots and Artificial Intelligence related solutions are a few of the other technological trends shaping the Digital Marketing landscape today. With automated bots on Twitter and Facebook feeds, companies can now pickup conversations and promote your products and services instantaneously. For example, try replying I would love to have a t-shirt of this to any Twitter post with a picture, and chances are sooner or later you will be shown a Twitter ad with that exact pic on a t-shirt for sale. Bots and AI are a boon to time and resource strapped marketers, and as more and more of these type of solutions become available, it is imperative marketers equip themselves with these platforms so as to cover as much ground as possible in the digital marketing space.

In terms of best practices, I would always advocate for the need to setup marketing funnels instead of relying on individual channels or tactics. Businesses should identify the channels to feed users into their funnel, and work on the tactics needed to increase the succession rate from one step of the funnel to the next. And always try to have a feedback loop for users who drop out of stages in the funnel. For example, you gather users to the top of the funnel thru search ads, organic traffic or social media posts. To move them on to the next step, you employ content marketing techniques (an e-book give away or similar in exchange for contact info). For those who drop off, you collect them as a segment for remarketing via display ads. For those who do give their contact info, you follow up with an email campaign providing more data and information about your service and how it would help out your client.

The tactics might vary, but the focus should always be to create a marketing funnel and moving the user from the top to the bottom.

4. Do you have any advice for industry veterans or budding entrepreneurs from the Digital Marketing space?

Digital marketing is fundamentally all about marketing, just using digital channels. The rules of marketing still apply. Know your target clients, and understand which platforms you most likely to find them. Just because a certain channel works for someone else doesn't necessary mean it will work for you. Also pay attention to conversion rate optimization. Getting users to your website or app is only half the battle. You need to also get them to perform the necessary action you want them to, such as making a purchase or signing up. Leverage A/B and multivariate testing for any and all changes you intend to make. A data-driven mindset and approach will help you a long way towards mastering Digital Marketing.