Keeping up with digital

Udayan Bose runs a digital marketing company called Netelixir out of Princeton, NJ, and he is armed with a B Tech degree from IIT Mumbai and an MBA from NMIMS, Mumbai. Udayan started off the beaten path of FMCG marketing by selling paints through the length and breadth of Mumbai suburbs.

As a salesman, he was known as a ‘rainmaker'. Then came a call from an IIT Bombay alumnus urging him to join an online gaming company called iGlobal. Udayan's exposure to online at that time amounted to checking emails about twice a week. Nonetheless, Udayan took the plunge and got down to learning the ropes of the online world-- search, e-marketing, gaming, etc. Search marketing and search-based advertising were still emerging, even Google had not launched its Adwords program then, says Udayan.

Udayan took time off, a soul-searching-sabbatical sorts, to search for the next stop in his life. A maths whiz, Udayan tried to put down his learning into mathematical equations. He even took help from students from one of the NITs (National Institute of Technology) to elaborate and perfect some of his equations. He then took the bold step of sending these to Google in Mountain View, CA. "Since I had written up those equations related to search, I thought I might as well have Google take a look at it and determine its merits, if there were any," says Udayan. In any case, he did not know what to do with those equations.

Surprisingly and almost immediately, he got an email reply asking him to visit Google HQ. Disbelievingly, Udayan checked back with Google whether the invitation was for real or it was Google's polite way of sealing the matter. To his surprise, the invitation was for real.

Udayan reminisces that at Google he met two ladies who would become famous in later years- Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer.

Digital Marketing

In the last ten years, there have been order of magnitude changes in the digital marketing area. Broadly, these changes can be clubbed into three areas:

a) the emergence of new digital platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Google+ and a whole lot of other social media platforms
b) the level of user sophistication has vastly increased; this adds to the complexity of digital marketing
c) the pace at which Google makes changes to its search algorithms, albeit for the benefit of the community, it seems like the digital marketing is changing tires while driving. For example, in the first 10 months of 2012, Google made 72 changes to its search engine optimization to provide a better experience to searchers.

To cope with the challenges of digital marketing, Udayan emphasizes the importance of specialization of specialized training for digital marketers. Even top tier US businesses who moved online more than five years back have a miniscule marketing team, probably one director of e-commerce, supported by maybe one or two people who may be just high school graduates , almost like doing the job of search marketers or maybe social media marketers. There is a big gap of marketers and limited resource focus.

Solving digital marketing challenges requires a pertinent approach. Udayan feels that starting with tactics as people often do, is a recipe for failure. Instead, one has to set goals, set objectives, evaluate and identify strategies, and then decide on appropriate tactics.

Specific digital marketing techniques follow from this model-search and email marketing are the most basic followed by affiliate marketing and social media.

Role of technology

If the challenge of specialized talent is addressed-technology can help scale up operations, visualize data, and what to do with it.

Netelixir offers LXR, a powerful platform that simplifies every task involved in the set-up, management, optimization, and analysis of paid search, Facebook, and comparison shopping engine advertising campaigns. It is an all-in-one intuitive interface, designed for search marketers that helps identify opportunities to help create effective strategies, and implement changes all aided through cross-channel performance analysis. Udayan further stresses that LXR is not a boxed technology.‘Social media channels are very risky
if you don't have a proper strategy and plan'

How are you different from that of a traditional digital marketing agency?

We are quite different because we are going exactly against the concepts that has been worked by the agency and technology providers in US, which till date don't really share the knowledge, we are doing exactly opposite to that. This helps us retaining client in much longer time form. That's the reason, the information clients depends upon has doubled than the industry, because we are very confident of sharing the knowledge.

How are things getting difficult in digital marketing?

If I have to give a personal opinion, one third of the Google revenues, probably again our estimate comes, because the search marketers are inefficient in to how quickly they can manage their Adwords program. They are not making it less expensive they are making it more expensive for you in the longer run.

What's the challenge in social media marketing?
Social media channels are very risky if you don't have a proper strategy plan, because then it has a negative impact. One would need to evolve a carefully integrated strategy with clear metrics to execute successful social media campaigns.

What's your take on the advent of mobile and tablets?

A fourth of all the searches which happens on Google will happen through the mobile devices by end of this year.

That's what our prediction is, because we have been tracking this number. It was about 6% in 2011 holiday season in comparison to 17% from December 5th to December 20th in 2012. We don't really have any doubt that mobile search component will grow to about 25% from December 5th to December 20th 2013.

What's your vision?

One of the things which we are really proud of doing it is bringing in the concept called NetElixir University. We aspire to democratize the digital marketing space through knowledge and expertize sharing. Our goal is to train 10,000 businesses across the globe, on the best practices of search marketing by end of 2014. The practical knowledge gained from our training sessions will help them derive a greater bang for their digital marketing buck.