What would be your preferred set of media buying?

As a brand custodian, what are the top metrics a brand is measured on?

There are a number of metrics that brand health is measured. Brand health is usually tracked every quarter, and sometimes a brand lift study is also carried out by brands to measure the impact of a robust 360-degree multimedia campaign. Brand health is measured across PR, digital, and social media channels and also through primary research channels.

Some of the metrics that a brand is measured on through primary research channels are:

• Top of Mind Awareness

• Net Promoter Score

• Prompted and unprompted brand recall, depending on how new or established your brand is

• Brand Strength

• Purchase Intent Score –  measured on a Lichter scale

• Brand equity

• Digital channels and PR: Sentiment analysis of a brand on social media, Average time spent on site, Share of Voice

Four best practices to reach out to a customer and finally make a sale?

Adopt a full-funnel approach to marketing to ensure mid and long-term goals for the business are being met and you don’t have a short-term, myopic approach to achieving business objectives. Rely on the age-old AIDA model, which in the current age stands for

A (Attention/Awareness)

I (Intent/Interest)

D (Desire)

A (Action)

Do not just look at bottom-funnel goals such as action (conversion). Spend equal time, effort, and resources to work on top and mid-funnel goals such as awareness and interest. Because it’s awareness and interest that builds brand saliency, which then leads to consideration for a product.

• Understand the sales cycle for the product category you operate in and devise a customer engagement plan accordingly. If you, for instance, market a product category that has a sales cycle as long as six months, strategically build a robust customer engagement plan working closely with your CEM team. In a category such as ours, sometimes a purchase decision can take up to six months. We actively work towards keeping the customer engaged for such a long sales cycle through various engagement methods – whether it’s sending them flowers and a card on their birthdays, or inviting them to our special Facebook Live sessions with celebrities and experts, or sending them our monthly magazine.
• When it comes to lead or demand generation, always prioritize quality over quantity. Certain channels such as Facebook may give you great volumes of leads, but the quality may suffer. Increasing the sales funnel needlessly puts pressure on the pre-sales team resulting in lower productivity. Hence, it’s best to engage with channels that may be more expensive as far as cost per lead is concerned, but delivers quality leads.
• And finally, the final sale is always a result of brand promise + product proposition meeting customer’s expectations coupled with the overall experience the consumer has had through the entire lifecycle.  So, it’s important to fine-tune CX at every customer touchpoint starting with communication and advertising to a landing page, pre-sales, and finally sales.

How to generate quality leads in the B2B Segment?

Content plays an extremely crucial role in B2B lead generation and has been identified as the single most effective mode of generating leads. Some of the content marketing avenues that yield qualified leads in B2B businesses include webinars, podcasts, the publication of white papers, blogs, social media content, website content, videos, and, above all email marketing, which has proven to be very effective.

A lot of B2B leads come through channels as well. And the key to generating quality leads is to ensure that your content acts as a lead magnet. This means that your content is so enticing that you are able to get a prospect’s contact details in exchange of the content that the person is downloading from your website and blog. So, it’s important to have a clear CTA on your content pages including blogs.

Social media can be useful in generating quality leads for a B2B business. However, it’s important to get the strategy right. For instance, for a B2B business, it makes more sense to be active on LinkedIn and use that platform for its lead generation campaigns even though it’s a more expensive platform, than, let’s say, Instagram or even Twitter.

The other important thing is to ensure that the right SEO strategy is in place, and landing pages are optimized to ensure people are not bouncing off the pages. The right SEO strategy helps send quality traffic to the website, but the right content strategy will ensure that they stay on the website and engage in the desired action such as filling up a form. Hence, content is key.

Psychology has a role in marketing and branding. Do you agree? Please share some insights on the same. 

A lot of brand building is about perceptions, which is largely governed by the human psyche. This is why, in marketing and brand building, a technique called Perceptual Brand Mapping, plays a key role as it helps brand managers understand how the consumer perceives her brand. – Piali Dasgupta

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The minutest detail such as the brand logo colour, the typeface used in the logo, the kind of ambassadors a brand chooses to associate with, the tone of voice, style of visual and the overall brand personality can play a role in manipulating the human psyche and creating compelling brand imagery in the consumer’s mind on one hand or putting consumers off on the other hand.

An important role of advertising is to increase brand recall and saliency. And that doesn’t happen without deeply understanding consumer psychology. For example, when you look at an iconic tagline such as “Thanda Matlab Coca Cola”, it comes from a keen observation of customer behavior – using the word “Thanda” at a shop when asking for a cool beverage. Coca-Cola increased its market penetration in rural and semi-urban India by 16% back in 2003 through that campaign because it was able to equate “Thanda” with Coca-Cola. Whenever a consumer thought of drinking something cold to quench his thirst, he wanted a Coke. It’s fascinating how a specific word, a tone, or an image can evoke specific emotions and reactions and play a role in persuading a consumer to buy a product. 

Similarly, if you think about colour psychology and the role it plays evoking certain emotions in a consumer’s mind, you will understand why certain brands choose certain colours for the design of their logos. The colour red is known to increase appetite. It’s no surprise then that a lot of food brands use red in their logos.

Why I should choose marketing as a career?

Marketing is one of those rare fields that necessitate the use of both your left and right brains. It is as analytical as it is creative; it’s as much about numbers as it is about big ideas. And if that’s not exciting, I don’t know what is. Marketing truly is about the yin and the yang, and so, if you are someone who’s as much a thinker and ideator as a data miner and number cruncher, this profession is for you.

Marketing also allows you to build brands and become custodians of brands. And this is a truly fulfilling and rewarding experience. It’s almost like being a parent because you are responsible for everything to do with the brand  – from the customer experience to the health of the brand and it’s public image and so on. So you look after it and nurture it just the way you would nurture your own child. Every marketer and brand manager looks at a brand in a similar manner. Marketing is a vast function, and it gives you an exposure to almost every function within an organization because nearly every function is closely intertwined with what Marketing as a function does. Marketing as a function builds brand, which in turn builds brand equity, which results in shareholder value.

So, it’s a crucial role in any organization and hence there are many good reasons for one to choose marketing as a career.