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22% Indian marketers spending over 50% marketing budget on digital

According to an Adobe report, Indian marketers have shown significant progress in adapting digital marketing resulting in a double digital growth

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“Over 80 per cent of marketers are using analytics and reporting technologies for better understanding. Challenges in terms of finding the right skill sets remain, however, Indian marketers lead the APAC region in terms of their growing confidence in their skill sets,” shared Umang Bedi, Managing Director, Adobe South Asia, while releasing the second annual report on usage of digital by marketers.

“Today digital marketing is a boardroom-level conversation, which means marketers are dealing with the expectation that they can justify the return on investment on marketing budgets and show results,” Bedi added.

e27 takes a look at the scale and effectiveness of the change that gripped the digital fraternity in last 12 months.

Umang Bedi, Managing Director, Adobe South Asia
Umang Bedi, Managing Director, Adobe South Asia

Umang Bedi, Managing Director, Adobe South Asia

Yes!! We can do it
According to APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard 2013 report, brought in association with CMO Council, 100 per cent marketers in India now believe that digital marketing can create competitive advantage for their company, helping them create a more customer centric organization, helping with brand differentiation and building greater customer affinity and attachment (45 per cent). This is a major shift from 2012 when less than 20 per cent believed it to be able to do so. Along with the lack of faith in technology came the lack in confidence wherein organizations felt that digital was not their cup of tea.

Cost-efficiency, effectiveness of these channels and their ability to deliver better ROI is considered the top driver (75 per cent marketers believe so) for the adoption of digital marketing, followed by size and appealing demographics of internet population (72 per cent marketers believe so). Other drivers include ability to better engage and activate audiences, and proliferation, appeal, and capability of mobile devices (60 per cent), followed by better campaign analytics, insight, and accountability; customer preference and digital dependency; social networking and gaming account – 50 per cent.

And the big bucks come in…
Gone are the days when two to five per cent of the marketing mix was saved for digital – SEO to be precise. The report further states that percentage of marketers spending over 50 per cent of their budgets in digital marketing has also increased substantially; from 2 per cent in 2012 to 22 per cent in 2013.

Social has been a clear priority for marketers this fiscal year, followed by increasing and improving paid search and online display advertising; and customer listening, feedback, and community. In terms of spend, 75 per cent of marketers have been allocating their digital marketing funds on websites (content development and performance optimization), SEO and SEM, social and email.

No more convincing
Digital investment initially meant a lot of convincing about RoI, worth of the money spent, etc to seniors who would measure everything in terms of tangible returns. However, the research highlights increase in the number of marketers indicating that the CMO or the dedicated head of marketing is the lead of digital marketing in 2013. Thus, implying significant support to the digital teams.

Read Also: ‘Bring Your Own Device’ say Indian enterprises

However, for 40 per cent of respondents, their digital marketing strategy is developed and executed from global head office and for 20 per cent it is localized and executed in APAC and country level. According to Bedi there is an opportunity for organizations to localize their strategy at a country level.

Still a long way to go
While India has managed to grow almost double in terms of use of digital in their business there are still a couple of barriers that organizations need to cross.

Budget limitations, making a business case for digital marketing spend and developing a comprehensive strategy for Indian markets continue to be a challenge with each of these points rated at 50 per cent. While asking for funding, a marked shift is that more marketers are looking at assessing overall needs and presenting business case. They are increasingly relying on parameters like customer data on digital media consumption preferences and patterns, analytics on generating customer leads more effectively and overall strategic assessment of potential business impact and contributions (50 per cent each). However a good proportion of marketers feel their current ability to measure the value and RoI of their digital marketing spends is “Getting Better” or “Needs Improvement”.

The role of digital in an Indian organization has changed tremendously from an IT person managing office devices and official website to an entire team or outsourced agency that looks after every technicality aspect. And the graphs are bound to keep moving northward next year too.

India vs World
The report terms India as a “matured market” in terms of digital marketing along with Australia and Singapore; and terms China, Korea and Japan as traditional markets. The report says: “Similarly to 2012, mature digital markets like Australia, India and Singapore earn top marks in organizational alignment, marketing mindset and digital readiness while more traditionally focused markets like China and Korea are still struggling to show the value and impact of digital marketing spend. Hong Kong resides in the middle of these two worlds, advancing strategies and cultivating a ready mindset for digital transformation but lacking the talent and budget to actualize the shift.

“Across the board, marketers in Asia Pacific are hopeful for the customer-centric future that digital marketing can bring to their organizations, but they lack the talent to press forward. Agencies, often managed on an ad hoc or project-to-project basis, have not delivered the business-focused results that marketers have been seeking. Yet in-house teams are also struggling to train or hire talent with deep digital knowledge.

“While Asia still lags behind North America in overall digital marketing performance and readiness, the speed at which the gap is closing is significant as marketers keenly understand that there is not time to allow this evolution to move slowly.”

Read Also: The youngest online population is in India; China follows

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