Awareness and concern about privacy have been steadily increasing and users are actively taking steps to reduce the amount of data they share online. In light of this, most major tech players have also announced/implemented steps to restrict third-party cookies thereby restricting data collections and user tracking on their platforms.

1. Towards a third-party cookie-less world
2. Not entirely a cookie-less world
3. The impact of losing third party cookies
4. What can marketers do in a cookie-less world
5. Will Google Analytics work without cookies?
6. Privacy Sandbox – Google’s response to cookie-less future

Towards a Third Party Cookie-Less World

• Safari and Firefox have been working towards blocking 3rd party cookies since 2013. In 2019, Firefox started blocking all known tracking cookies. In 2021, with the launch of Firefox 86, they brought in Total Cookie Protection that confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site.
• In 2020, Safari started fully blocking 3rd party cookies
• Early 2020, Google announced that within 2 years they will stop support for third-party cookies
• iOS 14.5 and later, will prompt iPhone and iPad users to choose if they would like to share their data with apps that monitor their behavior and share that data with third parties. This necessarily means that iPhone users can now stop advertisers from following their digital lives.

Not Entirely a Cookie-Less World

It is only the third-party cookies that are going to get depreciated – that is cookies that do not belong to the website’s domain you are surfing but the ones that are dropped in your machine by ad servers, trackers, etc. For example, if a user is browsing website example.com – a cookie from that domain is considered a first-party cookie but the Facebook tracking cookie that is dropped on the user’s browser by example.com is considered a third-party cookie.

First-party cookies will still work and with third-party cookies gone, advertisers will have to be more dependent on first-party data. Businesses will now need to have a first-party data strategy that allows them to gather as much information from their own domain as possible and to leverage that data to provide a customized user journey.

I believe businesses are still going to buy or share data from trusted partners but there will be a lot more focus and effort to ensure customer consent is being honored.

The Impact of Losing Third Party Cookies

The impact from the loss of third-party cookies will be felt across the digital marketing ecosystem – the consumers, the advertisers, the ad tech players, all of them. There are two key areas that will be impacted by the loss of third-party cookies – ad targeting and measurement.

For Consumers

• Consumers will have more control over the data they share with businesses
• They are likely to see more irrelevant ads, as advertisers will not be able to personalize ( except for the ones who have first-party data)

For Ad Tech Players

• Ad Tech players will need to change their standard tactics of collecting user data on advertiser’s websites for performance tracking and targeting. In their current state, these functionalities are third-party cookie-dependent
• Ad tech players will lose their ability to target people at an individual level
• DSPs will now need to rethink their positioning which typically emphasizes the availability of differentiated use of third-party data for targeting, against the huge first-party audience data that Google or FB has

For Advertisers

• The end of third-party cookies will lead to fewer opportunities for ad personalization
• Behavioral targeting and Ad retargeting will have a serious impact
• The loss of cross-platform frequency capping could result in ad fatigue/oversaturation for the audience.
• Most third-party audiences (data collected via third-party cookies) will diminish in size due to cookie expiry, and eventually be too small to use.

Analytics & Measurement

• Marketing KPI’s will be severely affected, for example, with third-party cookies gone, most view-through conversion data will disappear for your display campaigns
• Cross channel attribution, Multi-touch attribution, Audience reporting will get impacted

What Can Marketers Do in a Cookie-Less World

1. Improve First-Party Data Collection

Now that third-party cookies are no longer going to be available, as an advertiser, you will be primarily dependent on first-party data. Establish proper and thorough data capturing mechanisms that are compliant and get data about users who have already engaged with your brand. Building up first-party data takes time, and to use the data effectively across most platforms you will need a certain volume – so get started!

2. Recheck and Refine Cookie Consent Management

With GDPR and CCPA in play, most websites today already have some sort of cookie consent management system. It’s time you take a closer look at that and if you are one of the very few who don’t have a cookie consent management system, you should get one in place right away. This is important to make sure your first-party data is fully compliant with regulations and future-proof. Make this an opportunity to increase trust with your website visitors, clearly communicating to them about how you process and protect their data

3. Leverage Second Party Data from Media Giants and Publishers

Media giants like Google and Facebook will continue to provide aggregated audience data on their advertising/media buying platforms. While losing third-party cookie data will hurt them a bit in terms of tracking, targeting, and ability to retarget, they will still continue to have a lot of audience data through all the logged-in users across their platforms and products. This is rich audience data available for free – don’t undermine it.

Most of the major publishers also have their own first-party data that you as an advertiser can use in case of direct buys or private auctions on programmatic platforms.

4. Third-Party Cookies Are Gone – Third-Party Data Might Still Be There

As we get used to not having third-party cookies, it doesn’t necessarily mean that third-party data is lost forever. There are cleaner ways to collect third-party data – there are already firms like Experian, VisualDNA, etc who collect and build third-party audience data without the use of cookies. I strongly believe we will see a lot of innovative offerings in that space.

5. Rethink your web analytics/measurement setup

In a cookie-less world, ad performance measurement is going to get far more complicated than where it is – even in the current setup it is not perfect. The loss of third-party cookies will add to the problem in several ways including cross-device tracking and attribution. Refer to the section below on how Google Analytics is getting ready for the cookie-less world.

6. Take a closer look at your MarTech stack

Your current Martech stack might have several tools that are reliant on third-party cookies – figure out what happens when the cookies are gone, how are your Martech partners getting ready for the cookie-less world?

Recheck on your data ownership, ensure you have full control of your data, not just in terms of usage but also in terms of access and portability, so if you happen to change any of your tools or agency, you are not losing your hard-earned first-party data.

Will Google Analytics Work Without Cookies?

Google Analytics is the most widely-used web analytics application across the world with almost 70% market share and I thought this is probably one of the basic questions most marketers would have in mind.

Today Google Analytics works by setting cookies on a user’s browser when they visit a website that uses the platform. The loss of third-party cookies definitely poses a challenge to Google Analytics, but Google has already addressed this.

GA4 was introduced as a completely new solution focussed on privacy, that can work with or without cookies. Google plans to fill in data gaps in GA4 using machine learning and statistical modeling as the world becomes more and more cookie-less.

While GA4 is the default option offered by Google today, Universal Analytics is still available and Google recommends running both in parallel. GA4 might fill in some gaps in user behavior that are caused by users not accepting cookies.

Also, another way to keep using Universal Analytics is to do a server-side implementation of Google Analytics, where the analytics cookies are served from your own domain (subdomain), thereby making them first-party cookies.

In a server-side setup, you necessarily create an endpoint in a server environment that you own, which acts as a sort of a proxy between the hits sent from browsers and devices and the actual endpoints to which the hits are collected. For the ones more technically inclined, please review this article by the amazing Simo Ahava.

Privacy Sandbox – Google’s Response to Cookieless Future

Google has now created the Privacy Sandbox and pitching it as a solution for ad targeting and tracking as it goes on to kill the third-party cookies on Chrome. In a cookieless world, Google’s Privacy Sandbox will replace cookies with web browser APIs and these will set the standards for ad targeting and measurement while also helping with ad fraud prevention. The APIs will provide aggregate data on attribution and conversion that could be valuable. Google’s Privacy Sandbox will rely on anonymized signals within a person’s Chrome browser. While the world is still waiting to get access to Privacy Sandbox and get a feel of it, here are a few APIs that are likely to have the most impact in the ad tech world –

FLoC or Federated Learning of Cohorts

This definitely piqued the interest of the advertisers. FLoC will rely on the browsing habits of groups of similar people (cohorts) which will then be used in Google’s ad platforms for advertisers to use for Interest-based targeting. The idea of FLoC relies on placing individuals in large groups of users with similar browsing histories so the advertisers are able to target based on the interest, without compromising on the individual’s privacy.

Topics

While it started with FLoC, Google has now stopped FLoC and has declared that it is the Topics API that will enable interest-based ad serving. The topics API does three things – maps websites to the topic of interest, calculates the top topics for a user based on their recent browsing history, provides an API to share topics currently of interest to the user, so they can be shown ads as per their interest You can find more here.

Attribution Reporting / Conversion Measurement

The conversion measurement API would allow advertisers to measure ad click conversion and ad performance without third-party cookies. However, it is to be seen how it pans out for more complex situations like multi-touch attribution or if an advertiser is working with multiple reporting partners.

Trust Tokens

This API could be extremely powerful in preventing ad fraud. The Trust Token API allows a website to pass on a limited amount of information about the user without breaching the user’s privacy, which is then used by other websites to validate if the user is a real one or a bot. Simply put, once a website identifies a user to be trustworthy based on their activity (completion of a transaction, long-term account usage, etc), they issue a token to the user’s web browser. When the user accesses another website, it can then check the web browser for tokens from an issuer it trusts, and then redeem tokens as necessary.

While the Privacy Sandbox looks like an exciting and promising solution, it is not until the end of this year or early 2023 that it will be available for users. Here you can see a full timeline for the project. With the involvement of the WWW Consortium, this Privacy Sandbox could lead to open web standards that could be adopted by other browsers. It would also be interesting to see if Google would restrict its own ad products to the same aggregated user data in the Privacy Sandbox or if Google platforms get privileged access to more granular user data.

The loss of third-party cookies is sure to bring in major disruption to the current digital marketing/advertising ecosystem. It is going to take its own time for the turmoil to settle and for the ecosystem to stabilize considering all the changes that are going to come across ad products, targeting, and measurement. As marketers, let’s get ready to adjust our strategies, rethink our playbooks, reevaluate our channels and measurement as we get used to emerging standards of consumer privacy norms.

Here’s to a new beginning in the cookieless world!

The post Marketing in a Cookie-Less World – Are You Ready? appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I recently came across a report on “State of Spend” – an analysis of B2B marketing investment in this new normal with data from several enterprise marketing teams. This marketing investment benchmark report has been put together by Allocadia based on actual data on how their B2B clients have been investing their marketing budgets in this current market scenario. Here are some interesting facts from the report –

An Overall Cut in Marketing Budget

56% of the companies surveyed lost more than 10% of their over marketing budget.

15% lost more than 30% of their program spend

Events – The Biggest Loser

Not really a surprise here.

Event spend plummeted by 46% from Q1 to Q2 of 2020.

There’s an 85% correlation between decreases in event spend and decreases in overall marketing spend, meaning every time a marketing team saw a cut in the overall budget, chances are that the event budget took the largest cut.

However, when looking at the forecasted spends, it seems marketers have not given up on events completely.

From Q2 to Q3 there is a 24% increase in forecasted event spend.

This could be because we are hopeful of things getting normal or marketers are doubling down on virtual and hybrid events, webinars etc. (If you are looking for a good webinar platform, check out Demio, a really user-friendly and value for money webinar platform with advanced features)

Digital Advertising Sees the Upside

As events spend decreased, digital programs and advertising saw a clear increase in spending.

28% of the companies had a more than 30% increase in ad spend Q1 Vs Q2.

There’s also a huge increase in forecasted ad spend for all sizes of companies from Q2 to Q3. Quiet possible that companies used Q2 to test new channels and advertising programs and use Q3 to scale the ones that perform.

Want to find out how your competitors are spending on ads? Try this!

Demand Gen Programs Get More Budget Compared to Brand Campaigns

During a pandemic situation it is normal to think that brands will spend more money on awareness so that when the market is ready to buy, they have a strong brand recall with the buyers. However, in reality, brands cut down on their awareness spend and PR initiatives while increasing spend and focus on demand gen activities.

Demand Programs Increase More than 20% while Awareness Programs Drop

Overall, direct marketing increased from Q1 to Q2 by 23%

This clearly indicates that brands are renewing their focus on expanded email nurture programs, telemarketing initiatives, ABM efforts, and other demand gen programs.

Content Marketing Programs See an Increase in Spend

As marketers, particularly B2B brands continue to spend more on their demand gen programs, content marketing gets a shot in the arm.

Overall there was a 12% increase in content marketing spend from Q1 to Q2, with a further 8% increase forecasted for Q3

39% of companies had more than a 20% increase in their content marketing spend.

The growth in content marketing can probably be directly attributed to the growth in demand programs and digital advertising.

This year is indeed different and while these numbers are interesting I don’t think these can serve as a benchmark for the post-COVID world. Some of these trends will likely continue while others will turn on their head as the situation gets back to normal. If you are interested in more details, you can download and read the full report on Allocadia’s website.

Allocadia provides best-in-class money management capabilities for marketers and gives them the confidence to know where to invest their next dollar. Its award-winning marketing performance management platform enables marketers to plan strategically, invest with purpose, measure the performance of their activities, and ultimately maximize marketing’s impact on the business.

The post The Impact of COVID-19 on B2B Marketing Budget appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

One of the key challenges of being a digital marketing professional is to keep your self updated with the ever-changing landscape and probably one of the most enjoyable ways of doing this is to attend some industry conference with great speakers.

While I have attended marketing events across the world, this year SEMRush has brought an awesome event to India. The SEMRush Marketing Show is scheduled for 5th of December in Bangalore and you get to listen to some top industry experts like Larry Kim, Purna Virji and Aleyda Solis.

And of course, besides the content, this is also a great opportunity to network with fellow marketers. If you have not registered for the event yet, you can do it here.

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As marketers, we collect enormous data about every individual user / prospect through sophisticated CRMs, marketing automation and analytics systems. Consequentially GDPR will have tremendous impact on how marketing processes run and in many cases will need significant overhaul of entire marketing function. We have created this simple GDPR Checklist for Marketers which will help understand the requirements and be compliant.

Click image for larger view

Click image for larger view

GDPR Checklist for Marketers

Start with Privacy Policy

Review and update your existing privacy policy. Ensure –

• It is concise, transparent, easily accessible and written in plain language
• It provides a clear overview of how you will use the data
• Provide the identity and contact details of the data controller and   data protection officer
• Clearly identify all third-parties who have access to the data

Review existing contact database

• Check if the existing database is completely opt-in and if the opt-in consent has been recorded
• You need to re-confirm opt-in for emails where
  • contacts are sourced from third-parties
  • No opt-ins are recorded
  • unspecific opt-in
  • No opt-in for certain ways you wish to use the data

Get opt-in from existing subscribers

• It is advisable to run a campaign to get opt-in from existing subscribers and record them
• This might require a series of emails and the opt-in rate is typically very low, unless your existing list is already a solid opt-in
• Make sure your opt-in email clearly mentions how you will use the data
• If user do not opt-in it is advisable to delete the users from your database

Review all website forms

• Forms are the primary point of data collection on any website and you need to ensure your forms have the relevant explicit opt-in mechanisms, for collecting new user information
• Ensure opt-in consent is recorded explicitly for each purpose for which you want to use the data.

Get your sales team onboard

• In most cases it is your sales team that reaches out to your customers that the marketing team collects
• Educate your sales team on the implication of GDPR. You can reach out to a user only for the purpose he has given the consent.
• So if a user has subscribed to your newsletter while downloading a whitepaper – he has not consented to receive emails/calls from your sales team.
• Establish a process to record consent for contacts your sales team sources from trade-shows and other channels

Review third-party data sharing

• Review all third-parties who has access to your data. Do they need access to all of it? What do they use it for? Revioke access where possible.
• For all external partners / vendors who access your data, confirm that they are GDPR compliant, ask them on what they are doing to ensure compliance
• if you are using Google analytics, anonymize IP addresses and ensure you are not collecting or sending any PII to Google

Audit and sign-off from legal

• Document everything that you have done to be GDPR compliant.
• Ask your legal team/counsel to conduct a thorough audit of all your marketing assets and processes and sign off on it
• While involving legal is expensive, the fines involved are way heavier, so better be safe than sorry.

This is a basic step by step guide that will help your marketing function to be ready for GDPR compliance, however, this is not legal advise, nor is this exhaustive. It is advisable to go through GDPR – www.eugdpr.org in details and understand the full extent of this regulation and take professional legal advise where needed.

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THE KEY TRENDS

• Growth in Marketing spend has stalled after three consecutive years of growth. In 2016, marketing spend was at its peak at 12.1% of company revenue, which came down to 11.3% in 2017
• Martech Spend has fallen by 15%. CMO’s are reconsidering last year’s high spending commitment and how to manage technology effectively.
• Two-Third of CMO’s plan to increase their spend on Digital Marketing, while traditional marketing faces budget cuts.
• Over 50% of the overall marketing budget is spent on Services and Labor and CMOs are constantly struggling to balance between in-house and agency resources.

Marketing Budget Starts to Recede

Unlike the last three years, where marketing budget has consistently increased YoY, this year marketing budget decreased to 11.3% from last year’s 12.1% of total company revenue in 2016; though there has been exceptions to this, as in the case of extra-large businesses.Gartner attributes this cut mostly to changes in macro-environmental conditions, both politicalas well as environmental, that has impacted business results overaall and consequnetially their appetite for marketing spend.

Half of CMO’s Lack Financial Muscle

47% of the CMO’s use basic budgeting techniques likel rolling out this year’s budget onto next year or incrementally applying a percentage increase or decrease on last year’s budget. Marketing budgets should be grounded based on returns they will deliver to the business. It is observed CMO’s with P&L responsibilities get nearly 50% higher marketing budgets.

RETENTION OVER ACQUISITION

CMO’s are focussing budget on retaining existing customer and outspending customer acquisition by a ratio of 2-1.

We all know that it requires a lot more effort to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. And that is clearly reflected in the marketing budget allocation. CMOs’ budgets have become heavily skewed toward retention, with retention budgets dwarfing acquisition budgets by a ratio of 2-to-1.

CMO’s of course need to justify this spend against the profitability generated from existing customers. Also, not all customers are equally profitable, hence the spend has to be monitored and managed, not to allocate budgets for the wrong customers. It is also important to allocate a reasonable budget towards new customer acquisition in respect to long term growth and revenue pipeline.

MONEY ON ANALYTICS

Marketing analytics gets the greatest share of marketing budget at 9.2%

CMO’s are willing to open up their purse strings for analytics. Analytics moved up from it’s last year’s position 4, behind website, digital commerce and digital advertising to be the No.1 area of spending. This is definitely in alignment with the greater focus on making the most of their marketing budget and focussing the right customers.

DIGITAL GETS MORE MONEY

No surprises here really, two-thirds of the CMO’s surveyed are planning to increase investment in digital advertising, while traditional media investments see a cut-down. Besides the changing media consumption pattern among customers, measurability is one of the key factor that is adding to the CMO’s intent to invest more in digital advertising.

MARTECH SPEND DECREASES BY 15%

Martech still commands 22% of a CMO’s budget, however, it is a significant drop from 27% that was marked for Martech last year. In general, a reduction in overall marketing budget has contributed to this reduction but to top it up, acquisition and management of technology has been a challenge for most CMO’s. Continuous pressure from CFO’s and CIO’s has been mounting on CMO’s and they will need to improve their Martech capabilities in order to reclaim their martech budget.

INHOUSE VS AGENCY : MAINTAINING THE BALANCE

Labor cost and services constitute more than half ( 53%) the marketing budget, with 25% spent on services and 27% on labor. Of late there has been a trend towards building inhouse teams, particularly for strategically important roles and agencies and third parties are playing more of a supportive role in the marketing organization.

MARKETING INNOVATION REMAINS A SPENDING PRIORITY

Though there is an overall drop in marketing budget, marketing innovation secures a 10% of the total marketing budget. On top of that 23% of the CMO’s surveyed, now have a fixed annual innovation budget. The continued commitment to innovation at the time of an overall budget cut, clearly shows the commitment to balance the value marketing can deliver in future against the performance it delivers today.

The post 8 Prominent Trends from Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

This morning I was speaking at the Digital Fest, Hyderabad and my topic was Digital Marketing Framework & Hacking Beyond It. I used Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics and showed how it can be used as an activity framework for Digital Marketing and the “Hacking Beyond it” was more interesting, as it had real case studies on how digital marketing can get to an all new level with creativity and out of the box thinking.

Enough said, the deck is given below, if you would want to view or download

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Come Together. Get Inspired. Be Remarkable

And we did. We were. And we aim to be.

Inbound 2014, was phenomenal, just as most of us expected it to be.

First off, kudos to Inbound for accomplishing the remarkable feat of drastic growth from when it first started out in 2010 with an attendance of just 1300 to over 10,000 attendees this year, that arrived from over 50 countries around the world! This exponential growth points ever so clearly at the rising inbound movement among organizations and marketing agencies around the world.

If you were unable to attend Inbound 2014, the folks over there have been nice enough to put most of the slide decks on their website. Check them out here as well as on the Inbound website.

Inbound, at its core, is all about transforming existing pushy, profit-oriented processes to an unequivocal focus on people– employees, prospects and customers.

In this post, I just wanted to share my top 5 key takeaways from the event- concepts, ideas and strategies that really resonated with me and all the various touch points that need transformation and a fresh mindset to truly deliver value

1.) TRANSFORM YOUR LEADERSHIP

One of Inbound’s most profound takeaways came from Simon Sinek who opened with a powerful keynote – “Leaders Eat Last,” an Incredible Tale by Simon Sinek- on the responsibility of leadership. A few insights from Simon’s keynote:

• “We are social animals and we respond to the environments we are in.  This is especially true in the workplace. When we trust people we are with, we trust that the work will get done.”
• “Have a standard that you hire better than you in your functional area – A players hire A+ players
• Great leaders would sacrifice the numbers to save the people. When push comes to shove, numbers never come to your rescue – people do.
• Leaders are for the people; the people are responsible for the numbers.

2.) TRANSFORM YOUR CONTENT

• It goes without saying, that content is the foundation of the Inbound methodology. And as one would expect, several of the sessions- whether they were about SEO, social media, email marketing or blogging- all lay heavy emphasis on the underlying concept of Think, Teach, Help.

A few highlights on what qualifies as great content:

• Build content that helps your audience do something – content that equips your buyer succeed in something and encourages actions that make the community better
• Content that provides recipes that help others do business with our without your great product.
• Engage customers with what they want to talk about, not what you are interested in talking about
• Initially, it was thought that for a company to excel in Inbound, it has to master the craft of ‘thought leadership.’ But the status quo has changed. As Chris Brogan suggested, shift your focus from being a leader to being a helper.

3.) TRANSFORM THE WAY YOU DO SALES

• Hook sales activity with useful, valuable, relevant content. But always provide value, whether or not your prospects buy. For instance, if you are offering a free webinar and you offer a discount on a paid webinar that you plan to have the following week where you can delve into more detail – make sure that the free webinar is of true value to your audience as well!
• 80% sales come from between 5-11^th contact with that person. Now, more than ever, it is important to engage in warm and personable sales
• Help buyers reach their level of ownership. Get buyers to love you!
• Hubspot announced its move into the CRM space with much gusto. The company officially launched a CRM solution that is built on the same database as its marketing platform. Sidekick, a sales acceleration tool (and a new and improved version of HubSpot’s Signals tool), was also introduced. Both the new Hubspot CRM and Sidekick have singular focus- Inbound sales, which means that now you can conduct prospect research, understand context, learn your prospect’s social media activity and personalize every single interaction and the entire consumer buying process.
• Inbound is no longer just something that marketing does—it’s an approach that that penetrates all customer touch points.
• David Meerman Scott advises, “Instead of selling, you educate and inform.”

4.) TRANSFORM THE ART OF SOCIAL SELLING

• While several B2Bs are now starting to see that social media is a crucial aspect of their marketing endeavors, and not just a nice-to-have option, social selling is more than just making perfunctory posts on twitter, linkedin and facebook.
• Socially surround the folks/networks your buyer trusts. People buy from people that they know, like & trust.
• Create engaging content – that which people can and want to share with their communities.
• Scott Monty, EVP Strategy at SWIFT communications quoted Cicero, “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts” and emphasized the important of speaking in a tone that will resonate with your buyer personas.
• Despite all the intelligence, techniques and technology, social selling comes down to building authentic relationships with potential buyers that are grounded in truly delivering value and resolving pain points.

5.) TRANSFORM YOUR BUSINESS

Malcolm Gladwell’s amazing keynote David & Goliath: The power of the underdog revolved around Why Being ‘Disagreeable’ Can Help You Transform an Industry.I want to highlight a few points he made, that I personally thought, were incredibly wise:

• Successful transformations reframe the problem that makes the solution possible. They erase existing boundaries and start from scratch. Seemingly small innovation can revolutionize industries when we look for new solutions to old problems
• It’s simply not enough to have great ideas, focus, and disincline; you also need to be the kind of person who will tune out the naysayers and follow through on your revolutionizing ideas. Once other entrepreneurs open themselves up to new ideas, ignore the noise and get to working, they, too, can transform industries.
• The most successful entrepreneurs not only have courage and imagination, they also have a sense of urgency. They’re not willing to wait. They have a burning desire to get something done. It was the same kind of urgency Jobs’ had. The Apple co-founder visited Xerox PARC, where they had been working on a mouse-controlled computer for years, according to Gladwell. After Jobs saw the innovation, he immediately returned to his office and pushed his team to make the first Macintosh and then he went to an industrial designer and had a mouse built to accompany it at a much cheaper price than XEROX.

“Remarkable results rarely come from avoiding risk. You must try new things.” –  Dharmesh Shah

All of these bold, inspiring talks served as hefty reminder that in order to see a change in our teams, our organizations or something as large scale as the world, the change must start within us.

There has to be a revolution in the way we approach marketing. The challenge for marketers today is to be aware of context and the concerns of their audience. The modern day buyer has immense power on how and when they will engage with a company. More often than not, they are not affected and influenced by blatant advertising messages. The only way to truly set your brand apart and to survive amidst fierce competition is by understanding the modern buyers’ buying habits and personalizing your marketing as well as sales efforts to reach out and connect with them.

Author bio:
Ankita is an Inbound Marketer and tech enthusiast, with a passion for channelizing content into creative marketing and communications solutions for SMBs. She currently works at coMakeIT, where she is tasked with delivering real business results through a unique content strategy.

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The last weekend Kolkata experienced a first of its kind event in Social Media for Photographers – a two day event, organized by a very young and passionate group of photographers. The event saw an ensemble of some of the most well known photographers in India and though not a photographer, I was invited to speak at the event to give a talk on Personal Branding for Photographers in Social media. There were a couple other sessions related to branding and digital marketing by two of my good friends Suprit Patra and Aji Issac Mathew. It was indeed a good experience to share the platform with this guys as well as some of the eminent photographers like Hari Menon, Soumya Shankar Ghosal, Neelutpal Das.

The presentation on personal branding though oriented towards photographers, contains certain basic principles that are applicable for anyone and everyone looking to focus on personal branding. Of course without the live narration the content might not be as appealing as it is meant to be, but I am sure you will find some interesting stuff to pick up from this.

A big “Thank You” to Anirban and his team for organizing such a fantastic event. I am sure the momentum will continue and we will see a lot more of this initiatives happening in Kolkata.

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Linkedin has recently invited me to publish on their platform and my first article on Linkedin talks in depth on Why Copying your Competitor’s Website is a Bad Idea . Do leave your thoughts in the comments section.

The post Why Copying your Competitor’s Website is a Bad Idea appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

• Asians r rebuilding internet. Cricket searches surpass baseball. Google at #adtechin. pic.twitter.com/nRCfRTXL3a – @deepalinaair
• Asian developers lead Google play for app revenues! @ktemsamani #adtechIN – @Naina
• WOOHOO!!! By end of #2014 #india will have more #Internet users than #US @adtechindia #adtechin -@kushalsanghvi
• #India has the widest gender gap in the digital ecosystem compared to anywhere in the world #adtechIN – @Amit_tripathis
• The fight is about 3 billion mobile phones, 2 billion television sets, 1 billion PCs, the answer is out!! @adtechindia #adtechIN – @kushalshanghvi
• This will be the future, “wearable barcodes” #adtechIN Shiv clearly believes this is where the world is headed. pic.twitter.com/YKbdMHHYZ6 – @rammohantweets
• Clients should make friends with the folks @ their agencies to achieve success. Sam Singh, @GSK #adtechIN – @tweetStrategic
• 55% of affluent Indians access the internet on mobile at least once per hour. #adtechIN – @Naina
• As per BBC, 55% of affluent Indians access the internet (news?) on mobile at least once per hour. #adtechIN – @Vishal1Mehra
• 50% time spent on mobile is work related usage. #adtechIN – @naina
• Device in your pocket or hand right now is your primary device of work yeilding max productivity #adtechIN says Tom VP Strategy BBC – @Nehaagarwal85
• 31% of the consumers prefer mobile devices to desktops. 56% in case of India – @TomKBowman #adtechIN – @ARMDigital
• @TomKBowman from bbc and Shivakumar from @PepsiIndia agree. Desktop is dead #adtechIN – @iwjdb
• Brand mobile advertising is effective for all, but most significantly for affluent consumers. @TomKBowman #adtechIN – @Naina
• Mr. @TomKBowman, VP, BBC, says “46% of affluent’s who use their phones for business spend over 50% of their time on the internet” #adtechIN -@AdtechIndia
• If you have a brand which wants to target affluent customers (who doesn’t), you need to get on mobile now #adtechin pic.twitter.com/AXBHKV4lfj – @vishal1mehra
• #mobile advertising 4 times more effective than desktop, amongst affluent consumers – Tom Bowman, BBC, #adtechin – @Aparna1420
• @nehaagarwal85: Neilson planning to come up with metrics to evaluate TV & Digital together! Interesting! #adtechIN“courtesy bluefins tech – @thapargaurav
• By 2023 indian ecommerce industry should be $56bn currently at $16bn says #RaghuVenkatraman head digital #Nielson #adtechIN -@Nehaagarwal85
• The average Indian online shopper is a 34 year South Indian male per Raghu @adtechindia #adtechIN but hope for women! – @Reet_tweet
• 40% of new online shoppers are women. In India. @cacophonix1984 #adtechIN -@naina
• 67% online shoppers shop at least once a month – Neilsen #adtechIn – @Bokul
• 44% online shoppers in India buy from the apparel & footwear category. @cacophonix1984 #adtechIN – @Naina
• Tech Travel Fashion are leaders categories in the ecommerce industry #adtechIN #RaghuVenkatraman @Nielsen -@NehaAgarwal85
• 20 to 25 percent of ecommerce transactions happen from mobile devices in india – Raghu V from @NielsenIndia #adtechIN – @ShilpiDPathak
• 30% of all conversations about e-commerce happen in Tier 2 and 3 cities in India. #adtechIN – @AnkitaAshesh
• 21% users look for brand or purchase the product on mobile devices ” #adtechIN @adtechindia -@Logic_digital
• Engagement on Social media impacts sales of category on Ecommerce immensely & #flipkart leads engagement says #Raghu @Nielsen #adtechIN -@Nehaagarwal85
• @Flipkart engages most audience, @amazon has the highest positive sentiments. Industry Insights based on #BigData! #adtechIN – @Adtechindia
• On average, Indians spend 2.5 hours per day on their smartphone. @cacophonix1984 #adtechIN -@naina
• Flipkart is most accessed mobile shopping app, followed by snapdeal, eBay, Amazon, olx, quikr. – Nielsen #adtechIn -@Bokul
• #adtechin Apps usgae is higher than m. websites says Raghu from Nielson.. why isnt Google showing apps in search results first? Google? – @psmahajan
• Content should never be truly branded if you want it to fly high #AdtechIn – @ShilpiDPathak
• Content marketing is not a user manual of the cloud,it’s like building bridges across multiple touch points.”Says,@priyajayaraman #adtechIN – @adtechindia
• Listen to your customers, Talk Later! A mantra every brand should follow”, do you agree with @priyajayaraman over this? #adtechIN – @adtechindia
• #Content is the language of the people today as it’s happening #AdtechIn – @ShilpiDPathak
• Content doesn’t always mean to start a conversation. It’s a lot about being a part of it.”Says, @priyajayaraman, Your views? #adtechIN -Adtechindia
• #adtechIN @adtechindia Video Marketing would be the clear focus for 2014, however it is yet be exploited. Its more of TV on digital now. – @maruti_indoria
• You cannot just create and upload content, it is also about spending some money to make it reach says #Archana VP Media Airtel #adtechIN – @nehaAgarwal85
• Whom will brands choose to create videos Shekhar Kapur or Ogilvy? @kushalsanghvi is pointing some interesting questions! #adtechIN -@swapdp
• Publishers are becoming brands in India – Mr. Bird (Savoo) #adtechIN @adtechindia -@logic_digital
• Your content gotta be in the ‘popular culture’ – Atit, HUL #adtechIn -@aakancksha
• #adtechin #ContentMarketing #Conversations #Engagement #Objectives all three are important for creating #greatcontent – @mohitjo
• Getting the right content is easy but it’ll only work if you get the right distribution via Atit Mehta, Unilever #adtechIN – @sanchitajohri
• Video content production is easy, biggest challenge is distribution #adtechin -@denharsh
• Content should be more #conversational rather than #promotional. #adtechIN – @tweetStrategic
• Should you use UGC as part of strategy @kushalsanghvi asks #Atit head media Unilever answers yes but there are challenge in that #adtechIN – @NehaAgarwal85
• Will we have OVC/IVC rather than TVC soon #bishwajit VW says Yes #Archana #reliance says No bec of internet penetration #adtechIN – @nehaagarwal85
• I think brands are still not able to use # usergeneratedcontent for their benefit . They are just sitting on the gold mine . #AdtechIn -@ShilpiDPathak
• These #MischievousCookie from @Oreo @OreoIndia are so kool with sensor motor setup. Check it out #AdtechIN https://vine.co/v/MMZhDO3Dtbe – @honeytech
• Critical, Relevancy and Contextual- three pillar of good content and shall not be missed out! @Sanjay_Tripathy, Head, @HDFCLIFE #adtechIN – @adtechindia
• U don’t need large marketing teams, u need agencies with strong content capabilities… @Sanjay_Tripathy #adtechIN – @Amit_Tripathis
• “If your engagement ratio is getting higher, your customer is getting educated about your product”,Says, @Sanjay_Tripathy at #adtechIN – @adtechindia
• Start with content. Move to engagement. Business vl come. Starting with Commerce on Social is recipe for failure @Sanjay_Tripathy #adtechIN -@Amit_Tripathis
• Nobody is bothered about measuring analytics on TV. Should be within industry practices to include them in the pitch!” Atit Mehta #adtechIN – @Adtechindia
• Video marketing in regional languages will accelerate the video spending for big companies ” : Atit Mehta #adtechIN @adtechindia – @logic_digital
• Consumer is the King as well as the Queen and she has a voice now!” states Atit Mehta, Unilever at #adtechIN – @adtechindia
• Content helps you build brands, thats how brand gets visibility.” says, Mr. Samar Verma, CEO & Founder, Fork Media #adtechIN – @adtechindia

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