<b>Alokananda Chakraborty:</b> Make digital work harder

Three ways to improve your digital marketing strategy in 2015

Over the last couple of years or so, much of the debate in marketing has revolved around "digital" and how best to leverage it. The conversation has moved lately to the fragmentation of the digital platform and how it has complicated the task for everyone in the chain - from brand custodians at corporations to creative heads in agencies.

Is media management any more difficult today than it was even before?

If I have got it right, every type of media - print, television, radio, outdoor, telephone, internet - has followed the same path: innovation, experimentation, adoption, commercialisation and fragmentation, setting off the whole cycle of innovation all over again. Many want to view digital as something different, with completely unique rules to play by. Not really. It's still just about people trying to communicate, the facilitator being technology. Indeed, each one of these media platforms have evolved using technology. Radio has moved from AM to FM. Television in India has grown from Doordarshan to the Zee-Star-Sony troika to many hundreds. Telephones from fixed lines to the hand. The internet got all of us on to the desktop and now to the smartphone. But the essential task remains the same: getting large numbers of the right people to hear your message.

If you think of it this way, it is easy to figure out ways to make your digital marketing strategy more effective. Start by taking three basic steps.

• Develop metrics to pin the motivations behind consumer behaviour. In today's world, marketers and ad agencies have greater revenue responsibilities than ever before. One area where brands really need to improve is analytics. Mind you, there is a lot of data moving in from all directions. As I have argued in this column before, information is easy to get, what is relatively difficult is culling what experts call actionable insights from them.

Brands must understand not only where visitors go - be it on their websites or in their showrooms - but what brought them there in the first place and why. Again, metrics for sentiment analysis will not cut it. They need to develop metrics to understand digital influences and motivations behind consumers' behaviours, online or offline.

• Think about experience, know what to measure. Experience is probably the most tricky aspect of a business to manage. More and more, we see the challenges that brands face as being driven by deficits in the end customer experience they deliver. On the other hand, it's probably the single-most important factor in acquiring and retaining customers. And the first step here is to have an adaptive interface.

Last year, tablet sales in India grew 56.4 per cent to 4.14 million units. Smartphone sales in India are expected to reach 80.57 million units by the end of this year, says research firm IDC. It is absolutely imperative that your business has an optimised website that detects the user's browser and device and accommodates automatically. And I don't mean any m.url.com website that only has a handful of pages.

You will soon realise it's worth all the time and money to build an optimised website that allows users to access all your content via whatever device they carry. The conversion rates, some marketers say, for tablets are higher than those on the smartphones - there are myriad reasons, but that's a different story - so adaptability is even more key for e-commerce websites. For local businesses, ensuring that your website is easily located via mobile devices means greater visibility for your business online, cost-effective lead generation and, therefore, better prospects of sale.

• Work at preference-driven personalisation. Despite the clamour surrounding privacy, if consumers trust the brand and see value, they will opt in and share detailed preference information in exchange for the marketer's promise to deliver tailor-made offers. This reframes data privacy concerns into a context of valuable quid pro quo. Both the consumer and the marketer stand to gain from this exchange. Marketers have found that such preference-driven information exchange can drive 25-30 per cent increases in revenue. For the consumer, it's simply less wastage.

Research shows that nearly 70 per cent of our marketers don't have a defined digital marketing plan - either separate or integrated into their overall marketing strategy. They are also "marketing in the moment" without looking beyond the current quarter or campaigns. You can certainly do better with a longer-term road map.