Today we will witness history in making when BJP Hardliner Hindutva leader, Yogi Adityanath will take oath as head of state. He would head first BJP government in Uttar Pradesh in 15 years.
The 44-year-old saffron-clad Yogi of the Gorakhpur mutth is a firebrand hindu leader.
It is told that Five-term MP from Gorakhpur and a hardline Hindutva leader Adityanath was a unanimous choice of the party’s 312 MLAs and that Adityanath himself asked for the two deputies – Keshav Prasad Maurya, and Dinesh Sharma.
The beauty of these three candidates is that none of them incidentally is an elected member of the UP Assembly. They represent three different strong caste base in UP – OBC, Brahmins, and Thakurs.
I see this as master stroke by Modi and Amit Shah. A precursor to 2019 election. The team UP is the brand ambassador of the brand Modi. A statement made bold and clear to the citizens of UP and India. We all will witness rhe impact of the bold decision. The fate of Modi in all future elections will also be based on the decision the team UP makes.
In my views lot is riding on these three individuals – Dinesh Sharma, keshav prasad Morya, and Yogi Adiyanath.
Dinesh Sharma has been Lucknow Mayor, wonderful organization builder and administrator. He is a professor in the commerce department at University of Lucknow.
It is said that He is a sincere and quiet worker. He is also admired by both Hindus and Muslims in the state capital. He is probably the only soft-spoken, friendly, good-natured face among the leadership.
He is Brahmin face of the UP government. UP is, probably, the only state in India where Brahmins have vote share in double digits. The Brahmins vote share in UP is excess of 12 percent and this move to my knowledge is to consolidate the Brahmin vote bank.
Keshav Prasad Maurya, BJP state chief, is relatively young, energetic, and organization builder. He is also RSS karyakarta.
In my views appointment of a RSS karykarta as deputy CM will send a positive message to RSS cadre. The cadre with this move will feel happy, hopeful and engaged.
It is also said that Maurya was once a chaiwallah and a newspaper vendor before he joined the RSS. He just not come from the humble background but also is the face of OBC in UP which collectively controls 40 percent vote share. Maurya as deputy CM will also make the OBCs of the UP happy and hopeful.
Yogi Adityanath is Hardliner Hindutva leader, and is known for his strong pro-Hindu views. The Yogi is mathematics graduate, which probably gives us comfort that yogi’s views will not only be just religious but will have some element of analytics and reasoning into it.
He is just 44 and have been elected 5 times as MP from Gorakhpur. He also has image of always approachable and helpful to the citizens of Gorakhpur.
Yogi will help BJP polarize the vote bank and consolidate the hindu votebank. Moreover, he will also help attract the strong SP Yadav vote bank. He will also attract Thakur vote bank.
In my views Yogi with help of Triple-Talak will also attract women Muslim vote bank.
The team UP is designed to win election 2019 as BJP has got itself a Thakur candidate and a strong Hindu face -Adityanath, RSS Pracharak and an OBC candidate – Maurya and a Brahmin face Dinesh Sharma as the face of its government in the state.
These three candidates will help BJP increase vote share in UP but the team have to work hard and demonstrate that they have not deviated from the development agenda. As of now, we can only hope that Team UP will be focused on the development and not on polarizing voters and popular-religious activities.
For all those who don’t believe in team UP, remember we as of now have no other option but to believe what Adityanath promised. He promised to follow Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas’ agenda, and strive for “good governance”.
TV Channels, and newspapers for long have been perceived as strategic for political communications, and for voters’ decision making processes but in recent times, Internet and mobile has changed the dynamics of political communication, political campaigns and party management processes drastically.
In recent times the impact of digital marketing in the political campaigns have also increased as the engagement level of voter on web and mobile devices have increased over years. This change has happened as the smart phones, tablets and laptops have penetrated both, urban and rural space. Moreover, politicians and political parties have experienced that mobile is very effective communication device in the media dark markets. It will not be wrong to say that smartphones, tablets, and laptops are the most important and powerful screen that connects and provides platforms to engage voters and politicians.
In my opinion, politicians and political parties have start seeing traditional media as a mode of entertainment. Moreover, for them it is no more relevant as it used to be a decade back. I am not saying that TV Channels, and newspapers have completely lost its relevance. It is still relevant and help political parties influence voters and form opinion but the relevance of new media such as web presence, blogs, social media, news portals and aggregators, mobile campaign, influencers engagement, bloggers outreach program has increased.
Traditional media is not seen as the preferred tool to win voters and serve the purpose of politicians and political parties.
New age media is seen as a rich source of information. Moreover, the digital ecosystem is effectively used to manage and keep voter’s attention. Ubiquitous reach is one of the exciting part of the digital marketing. It has also made it easier for political campaigns to reach target audience at a lesser cost compared to that of traditional marketing and that is why New Age campaigns ‐ digital marketing, mobile marketing, and social media have already become a key communication tool in political strategies. In recent past we have seen major success of online political campaigns be it Obama, Modi, or any other global powerful politician, their success can be attributed to a successful new age campaign.
The success of global leaders like Obama, Trump, Modi, etc. can be attributed to new age campaigns.
The Digital Marketing Journey
The success of global leaders like Obama, Trump, Modi, etc. can be attributed to new age campaigns. The first big digital marketing success was Obama campaign. Though the Obama campaign was first global success the first Indian success of political digital marketing was Modi Campaign.
The Obama campaign became successful not once but twice in a row. In my views, the dynamics of the Obama Campaign was different from the dynamics of the Modi Campaign. The influencing factors viz. geography, demography, internet and mobile penetration were different in both campaigns but one thing which was common in these campaigns were treatment of the campaign. I believe each campaign is different and we need to find our own parameters to influence and engage voters.
The journey of designing a successful new age communication is not easy. For a campaign to be successful, online presence of political party and politician must be thoroughly planned. In my views, and in simple terms, an effective online presence means being where your audience is in the digitally connected world. There are many ways to do this, such as web presence, blogs, social media profiles, social media engagement with influencers and voters, owning and co‐owning content spaces, and interaction on third‐party channels, etc. The effective online presence is not enough to win the game of political digital marketing, but definitely is the first step towards the success of the voters and politicians engagement.
An effective online presence means being where your audience is in the digitally connected world.
It is important to focus on the empowerment of voters. Indian voters now have seamless access to news, and information required to become active participants in the country’s democratic process. Moreover, we are witnessing vibrant and connected voters who are demanding explanations for all the acts of the political party, politicians and government and also advising political parties, politicians and government. It makes engagement with voters the most important element in the political communication. The issue of how to proceed further in order to achieve high level of engagement with the public can be addressed by answering several questions:
Is the Political party and Politician ready to engage on the new age media platforms?
Are they ready to change with changing media dynamics?
Is there a willingness to interact with the public on the new age media platforms?
Are they prepared to deal with criticism on the new age media platforms?
Do they have time to devote to what is created on the new age media platforms?
At first the answers of the above questions will help digital marketer understand the seriousness of the political party, or candidate towards digital marketing journey. It will also help digital marketer structure the digital marketing campaign based on the level of seriousness and engagement of the political party, or candidate. Once digital marketers have the understanding of the interest level of politicians and political parties in the digital marketing campaign and the level of engagement they want on the digital marketing platforms, designing a successful digital marketing campaign roadmap becomes easy.
Digital natives are the biggest influencers and their interest needs to be taken into consideration when developing digital political campaigns.
The digital marketers also need to understand that there are millions of voters – native digital voters who have developed a certain digital sense that helps them filter information better and faster. Digital natives are the biggest influencers and their interest needs to be taken into consideration when developing digital political campaigns. It is important to monitor behaviour of the digital natives on web, mobile, and social media on real time. The objectives of campaign monitoring initiative can be classified in following activities: Identifying influencers, identifying the voters who are in favour and voters who are against the political party or politician, creating relationships with voters and influencers, managing grassroots mobilization initiatives, crisis management, obtaining insights for content engagement, interaction and engagement with fans and followers, conversations with candidates, politician, and spokesperson of the party, evaluating for strategic information. The campaign monitoring helps us understand the voters’ sentiment and hence helps us design the political communication.
A successful digital marketing campaign can help us identify the individual who will cast vote for the candidate.
The engagement of the voters, social listening, and analysis of their sentiments is most important element in the success of campaign. We all know that digital marketing is mostly engagement driven and provide us with huge data for analytics. The data which we get form the digital marketing campaign can be mapped with historic data on voting habits and other relevant parameters to get sentiment analysis. The result of the sentiment analysis is used to define the course of political communication.
It is an established fact that the race of communication can only be won by mastering the art and science of content development and dissemination. The organizations across the globe are working hard to win the arts and science of content development and dissemination with very strong focus on digital communication.
Organization to win the digital communication war is amalgamating search, social and content into their digital marketing strategies. They are busy developing the content maturity model in order to streamline the communication plan and process for the organization. In my views, communication consultants, content experts, and digital marketing evangelists are trying to figure out how to make this transition as a stepwise journey across a series of maturity phases.
Organizations across the globe is trying their best to win the race. This race is not only about core issues viz., Revenue, Operations, Productivity, Innovation, Human Resources Index, but also about issues like marketing, communication, etc.
The content maturity model is not developed by accident. Content maturity model provides – insights on a company’s current content marketing plan, design the content road-map, optimization strategy for better content road-map, etc. In my views a well-defined content marketing maturity model helps businesses establish where they are and how can they reach the desired destination – where they need to go.
To capitalize on a content maturity model, communication experts must first identify at which stage of content maturity model they fall. Then, they can figure out what must be done to move up the value chain.
Soul Searching is the first step of content maturity model. In this step, organization or brand define their features, offerings, basic communication statement, etc. In this stage brand owners decide brand promise and start establishing relationship with audiences. Mostly in this stage the communication is more monologue than dialogue.
As this is the initial stage of content maturity model the focus is on status quo. Most often content is created because it is basic or necessary and not good to do things. The activities at this stage includes – website content, press releases, social media presence and content seeding, web site content update when products and services are launched and occasional blog post. In a few organizations, we can also witness that dedicated resources are allocated for the content marketing efforts.
At times, some experimentation with brand centric blogging, social networks engagement, and search engine optimization work focus on promotion, distribution of brand messaging are also done for visibility and engagement. At the stage of Soul Searching, marketers are not looking beyond the basics of content marketing. They are mostly satisfied with their efforts until they start to see competitors overcoming them on all media channels – earned, owned and shared media.
Once organization has clearly defined and documented their capabilities, they tend to move to next stage of maturity – storytelling. At this stage the Storytellers takes the simple architecture of literature to a meaningful and engaging story. They convert their product attributes, and value propositions into storylines for deeper brand engagement.
Marketers, with the help of storytellers focus on growing their footprint on the web, increase their engagement on social media with specific story line. The increase in engagement with brand however, do not always indicate an increase in leads and sales. At this stage content is developed according to defined customer segments and their information needs.
Storytelling help marketers start the journey of investigation into more specific opportunities from the customer point of view and shows empathy to the buyer journey.
Organizations at this stage of content maturity journey, start focusing on dedicated and specialized team. They see the need of dedicated resources to produce content for search engine optimization and social media optimization. At this stage, processes and tools are used to make the content ideation, creation, management, optimization, distribution, and measurement efficient and effective.
In the next stage of content maturity, marketers work on differentiating the product with strong point of view that sets them apart from the competition. The best content marketers have brands that stand for a higher purpose.
Differentiation help marketer reveal a rich vein for storytelling.
The storytelling is taken to the next level of customization and sophistication at this level. Marketers develop distinct customer segments, and customize the communication for each customer segment. At the stage of Differentiation, content is mature and optimized as per characteristics and information needs. Marketers also focus on content planning and monitoring, and focus on answering specific customer queries as they move through the sales cycle.
At this stage, we also witness that content is optimized for search and social media discovery and promoted through multiple channels. Moreover, building connections though social networks and use of influencers relationships is a key component for content promotion.
Now that content marketing process for the organization is maturing and communication team has started developing content with brand guidelines, customer segments, and the sales cycle. The content marketers are ready to take the content marketing journey to the next level of maturity. The next phase of content maturity reaches beyond the rhetoric and focuses on changing the prevalent buying criteria in respective market. The prime goal of marketing experts here is to get customers to think about a problem, and a solution – differently. This is the stage when marketers start working on category creation.
The best Category Creators combine product and service innovation with effective content marketing that helps bridge the consumers’ imagination gap.
At this stage of content maturity marketers start focusing on the creating category specific content, and growing social communities. In order to develop a meaningful connection with community, buyers and the brand, marketers start to tap into emotional appeals in their content. At this stage, storytelling once again help marketers in maturing content marketing beyond features and benefits and incredible usefulness means connecting with customers on an emotional level. The difference in storytelling at this stage is that the users at times, become part of the story telling in form of brand advocate, influencers, or a character who is role-playing.
This stage also witness customer’s growth as brand authority and subject matter experts from a brand advocate, or influencer. It is observed that most companies are satisfied with the growth rates in community, engagement, customer acquisition and revenue at this stage and they don’t want to graduate to the next level. But the growth hungry organization, who want to establish themselves as the authority in the industry work on the process to evolve their publishing capabilities and keep evolving the content marketing process. The ultimate phase of content maturity is Thought Leadership. Brands at this stage deliver more value, engage emotionally and demonstrably walk their talk. Thought leadership is attained by achieving excellence along the three dimensions: product, content and operations.
Achieving and mastering the content maturity model is not an easy task. In my views one must take the first step with all honesty and commitment and follow the basic steps of success: At first, it is important for the communication experts to identify organization’s current position on the maturity model. Once it is clear to the communication experts as to where the organization stands in the maturity curve, the next step is to determine the technology that will help bring organization at desired level and continue to form ideas for developing technology bundles. It is also important to break down the isolation, build relationships, and find opportunities of engagement so that all stake holders can work together as team. The communication head also needs to establish goals in order to reach successive levels.
As we know that importance of digital marketing is growing. This growth is a global phenomenon, not a local one. In fact, the geography which are still developing their local digital marketing expertise are witnessing huge opportunity in digital marketing and are aggressively working towards unlocking the potential. The ability to adopt new digital marketing tools, and exploring digital innovation into marketing and communication strategies has now become more critical than ever!
Globally there are a lot of aspiring marketers in general and digital marketers in particular are looking for a strategy that is near to perfect if not absolute perfect.
The process of adding up the sum of all digital activities both on internet and mobile doesn’t make a Digital Marketing Strategy.
We have observed that every brand big or small has fallen head over heels on strengthening their brand awareness, engagement, and reputation. The focus is also on lead generation as most of the marketers believe that digital marketing is the potent tool to generate qualified leads. I believe that most of the digital marketing experts who have experience in both B2B and B2C Sectors in various industries such as Banking, Healthcare, Retail, Real-estate, Ecommerce, Manufacturing, etc. would agree that use of digital marketing, and optimization of innovation in digital media into marketing and communication strategies is now more critical than ever. It helps strengthen brand’s visibility, and reputation.
Digital marketing strategy is the series of actions that help brand achieve desired goal(s) using online, or mobile marketing. The term ‘strategy’ to most of us might seem intimidating, few might even argue that why do we need digital marketing strategy when we are doing absolutely fine with our digital marketing exercise. A detailed look into the marketing plan of most of the brands will help us understand that they equate digital marketing with having a web presence and basic search engine optimization. In my view, digital marketing is not just having a web presence and basic search engine optimization, it is way beyond these basic activities. In-fact the definition of web presence and search engine optimization has also evolved over time.
It might sound to most of the digital marketers that digital marketing strategy is something very complex but building an effective digital strategy is not a complex exercise. It is just a plan of action to achieve a desired goal, or set of goals. It is important for digital marketers to understand that in an ever-evolving digital landscape, success in business can often depend on what brands do or don’t do in terms of marketing. It is also important to evaluate how marketers are executing digital marketing, and what tools they are using to evaluate the performance.
Digital Marketing Strategy Journey
It can be both an exciting and challenging act to figure out where to start the journey of digital marketing and, more importantly, what activity will have the biggest impact on business. In my view, digital marketing starts with web presence, and include host of other activities which help individual visit the website and engage with the brand. The core activities of digital marketing include, content marketing, search engine optimization, social media optimization, managing the mix bag of paid ads, influencer marketing, analytics, etc.
This journey of digital marketing is function of scale of your business, objective of the digital marketing activities, engagement level of the target group, and investment in the digital marketing plan. The digital marketing strategy might involve multiple goals but a well-defined, clutter free and simple way of thinking about strategy can help brand meet objectives.
A campaign that runs over the course of a couple of years doesn’t make it a digital marketing strategy
I believe, the question which we need to answer is how to build the ultimate digital marketing strategy? Is there a definitive approach to build a successful digital marketing strategy?
In my views, it is very easy to confuse your digital strategy with your digital marketing campaigns. Digital Strategy is the series of actions you take to help you achieve your overarching marketing goal. The process of adding up the sum of all digital activities both on the internet and mobile doesn’t make a Digital Marketing Strategy. Marketers need to embrace digital innovation and seize the opportunities it provides for marketing and communications on both platform – internet and mobile. Digital Marketing Campaigns are the building blocks or actions within your strategy that move you towards meeting that goal.
Perfecting Digital Marketing Strategy
For any good strategy, it is important to know what we want to achieve from the exercise. The digital marketing strategy is no exception. In the case of digital marketing strategy, we should also know “What should a perfect digital marketing strategy entail? “Hence, before we move ahead, it is important for us to answer a few basic questions (a sample list of questions):
Why should digital marketing ever be used for your brand?
Is increase in awareness among audience one of the key takeaway of the digital strategy?
Do marketers care about increase in site visits, leads and sales?
Are CXOs demanding the gain in market share?
Is building brand awareness, engagement, and reputation the key to all digital marketing efforts?
The reasons of designing a digital marketing strategy can be one the above-mentioned reasons or may be combination of them. Irrespective of the scenario, the approach to design digital marketing for the organization and brand will change with the changing requirements but the basic will remain same.
For any good strategy, it is important to know what we want to achieve from the exercise.
I believe creating a perfect digital marketing strategy for brand, marketers need to perfect following components of Digital Marketing Strategy Framework – Situation Analysis, Objective setting, Strategy, Implementation and Analytics.
Situational analysis is the root analysis that has to be made for the answers to the very basic question Where is the brand right now? The situation analysis provides answer to the basic but important questions viz. industry and competitor analysis, customer insight. It helps to identify where we stand as a brand and what we need to do to win the digital marketing race.
The outcome of situation analysis helps us set the objective of digital marketing. The objective can be defined as one to understand the customer acquisition process, understand customer retention targets, set customer satisfaction targets, define positive sentiments metric, customer’s engagement metric, metrics of brand reach. The objective setting of brand can be sum total of one or all of the above-mentioned objectives
Strategy is the third stage of the Digital Marketing Strategy Framework. It highlights how and which actions marketers should perform to attain the set objectives. This is the stage where you perform segmentation, target and positioning based on customer profile. The evolved organization also plans of creating a digital marketing culture and content marketing culture at this stage. The digital marketing strategy is a function of what has to be done and how it has to be done to engage and attract target audience
The sub section of strategy is the tactics stage. The tactics decides which special tools of digital marketing – Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Email Marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, etc. to use for the success of campaign. Tactics is the stage that breaks the big picture of strategy into smaller details. Tactics also ensures that we provide the right details before we implement the specific part of big strategy. Tactics is also an intermediate state between implementation and strategy. Implementation requires us to define a few basic elements before taking the campaign live. These basic elements also become the KPIs of the campaign and help us in campaign analytics.
It is important to define the metrics which is used to monitor campaign performance – web analytics, user experience review, customer engagement, customer satisfaction, conversion rate optimization, etc. These performance indicators also help us decide which special tools of digital marketing to focus on – Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, etc. for the success of campaign.
From our decade of experience we want digital marketers to understand strategy first and then only learn the technical skills of digital marketing. A digital marketer with only technical skills and no understanding of how to apply them, won’t be equipped to manage and execute on client projects. A lack of strategy is a common problem we are seeing in the digital industry
– Neil Pursey, Founder of Webgrowth
If we are following the Digital Marketing Strategy Framework – Situation Analysis, Objective setting, Strategy, Implementation and Analytics to the core we also realize that a digital marketing strategy is based on the three basic principles of marketing strategy: how to differentiate a business from its competitors, how to target the message to the right audience, and how to communicate that difference.
In the last few years we have observed that there is a marked shift in consumer preferences towards digital media consumption as compared to traditional forms of media – television, print press, and radio. Digital media has not only gained importance as preferred choice of media consumption but also has gained on time share. Globally, people are spending more time each day on digital rather than traditional forms of media. Moreover, we have also witnessed that the digital media consumption pattern is also shifting from desktop to laptop and tablet and now to mobile. It will not be wrong to say that we are fast moving towards the mobile lead digital economy.
Global advertising expenditure across all platforms will grow 4.1% in 2016, reaching $537 billion. – A survey by ZenithOptimedia.
The increasing popularity of digital media has provided for a paradigm shift in the global advertising spends. Marketers are following the changing trend and increasingly allocating their budget to digital mediums – search ads, display ads, social media, email marketing, and others. According to Technavio Market Research global digital advertising spend is growing at a CAGR of around 9 percent. Yet another report from Juniper Research suggest that the digital marketing spend is set to grow to $285billion by 2020. This new numbers suggest that by 2020 the digital spend would nearly double the current estimated spend of $160bn for year 2016.
The growth of digital advertising in India is also attractive and in my views, it has huge unlocked potential. According to the ‘Digital Advertising in India’ report, jointly published by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, the online ad market will reach INR 70.44 billion by December 2016. The report also suggest that digital advertising spends is close to 12 per cent of total advertisement spends in India and it is growing at CAGR of 35 percent.
We all understand that this consumption shifts towards digital and social media has impacted customer’s mindset and is forcing advertisers to focus on the new platform – search ads, display ads, social media, email marketing, and others. According to CII-KPMG reports, digital advertising in the country is expected to cross the INR 255 billion mark in 2020, growing at a CAGR of 33.5 per cent.
Digital advertising spends close to 12 per cent of total advertisement spends in India – IAMAI and IMRB International report
In the last few years we have observed that there is a significant increase in content consumption on social media platforms. Much of this digital market’s growth both globally and in India can be attributed to the fact that these platforms are interactive and engaging for users. Since the customer engagement rate of these campaigns is relatively higher than the traditional media, advertisers are rapidly adopting it to increase customer base.
In line with global trends, the Indian consumer is increasingly consuming the content on digital platforms. Over years, increasing internet penetration, mobile device proliferation and availability of language content in all formats has helped fuel the use of digital platforms. The easy availability of mobile devices, improved networks, data connectivity, access to internet, and application development ecosystem has also helped increase the digital consumption as one can consume desired content anytime, anywhere. This growth in internet usages is seen both in rural and urban India. It is observed that social media and entertainment viz. music, and video, games, general search, and emails are the attractions of Indian mobile internet users.
Indian digital advertisement spends outperformed expectations in 2015 and is expected to cross INR 255 billion in 2020, states FICCI-KPMG Report 2016
In India, the smartphone penetration has changed the digital content consumption behaviour. The content consumption in urban, and rural India is now being driven by smartphones. This has led to increase in mobile advertisement spends which has reflected a significant growth. According to FICCI-KPMG Report 2016, mobile advertising spends in 2015, were estimated to be at INR 9 billion, is now expected to grow at a CAGR of 62.5 percent to reach INR 102.1 billion by 2020.https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/key/rnm7xsjqtcsgoy
Digital advertisement spend per capita in India still continues to significantly low in comparison to the top five spenders – U.S., China, Japan, Germany and U.K. According to the current growth assumptions, India is expected to be about 0.6 percent of global digital spend in 2015 indicating significant headroom for growth.
