HYDERABAD: In the new Netflix comedy-drama series Emily in Paris, the titular character, played by Lily Collins lands in Paris in order to help revamp the social-media strategy for a luxury French marketing firm. “To build a brand, you must build meaningful social media engagement – it’s not just about the number of followers, it is about content, trust, interest, and engagement,” says Emily. With an already cluttered digital marketing and content developer space and more being added daily, we get some Hyderabadi digital marketers to tell us what it takes to stand out, sustain, and win the internet.
Content should go viral
As a content creator, we understand how important it is for content to go viral. It’s insane just how much content, and how many different content types are out there. It’s worth trying to utilise every type of content to see what works for a campaign. We are an ed-tech start-up supporting offline businesses to grow online. Changes have been clearly evident in the world’s digital behaviour, especially as billions turned to connected devices to help them cope with life and work under lockdown. For many businesses, without an online presence, it has meant a total halt in sales. Meanwhile, businesses that actively utilise the online space for coverage, marketing, sales, and customer relations have realised the importance of optimising their online presence. We used memes, infographics, social media shout-outs, Google Adsense, SEO to increase our traffic and so also conversion rates.
—Mohd Safwan Hussain, 21, CEO; Mohd Abdul Khadar, 20, COO, Evolvin Tech
Lockdown a blessing for online content
The human brain says, reading is hard, and looking is easy, so the best way to grab people’s attention in digital/social media is with creative infographics and videos. We do out of the box thinking for the digital marketing activities to standout in the market. The lockdown has been a blessing in disguise for online content. As most of us spent all the time at home, people explored online media to get relaxed, which gave it a good hype! The reach of online content increased to 70 per cent during the lockdown. We experimented with new content, such as voiceover cooking recipe videos and GIF clipart videos. In the next year, we want to expand our digital and physical presence.
—Kiran Sahoo, 26 and Tushar Kunkupudi, 29, founders, The FoodLush
Right content to reach audience on a particular day
One needs to produce the right content to survive in the ever-growing digital world. We are one of the digital media platforms in Telugu. With 100 YouTube channels including SumanTV, natural healthcare, playing with fashions, SumanTV Mom and Devotional time etc, we have 20 million viewers across 50 countries with viewership from India, the US, Dubai, and Singapore. Picking the right topic and making timely videos is the key. It is important to create quality content, and one must know what kind of content will reach the audience on a particular day. It requires research to understand the trends in demand for content and be able to create useful videos and upload them on time. There is a demand for technology reviews, and videos of personality development and cooking videos these days. The future is digital. It is important to increase the quality of content to continue the growth of YouTube channels.
—Suman, 42, Managing Director, Suman TV Network
Brands need to grow and generate sales online
Digital marketing expenditures have significantly increased over the years. Despite reduced marketing budgets due to the spread of Covid-19, digital marketing channels will dominate, staying in trend. We are a digital advertising company doing creative videos, GIFs, and infoGFX. Most brick-and-mortar events like fairs, flea markets, conferences, workshops, and trade shows scheduled in the second quarter of 2020 have either been canceled or will be online. With that, marketers are seeking other venues to spend their marketing dollars. They need to continue to build their brands and generate the required leads and sales. We did digital advertising for educational institutes during the lockdown. As a start-up, getting clients is easy, but sustaining with that client for a long time is tough. Expanding to all metro cities by this year-end is our future plan and creating new brands with start-ups is our goal.
—Ashok Patnaik, 34, founder and director, Group IAM
Data presented appealingly
Any information that is readable, relevant, fresh, and useful data presented in an appealing way for a reader or viewer on any social media platform is the right content for digital media. Apart from the quality of images, the way we integrate ourselves with the client is what makes us stand out. Due to the lockdown, the only source to learn from is the internet. Learners are in the search of content prompting creators to make content. This has caused a significant impact on digital media content. Since March 2020, I started teaching photography online, conducted online photography contests, and made live sessions on Instagram. The lockdown gave us a chance to rebuild ourselves; we got through all the analytics and calculated the best ways to gain more audience.
—Venkataramana Mallojjala, 41, founder, Photriya Studios
People are always connected
In the age of social media, it is a must for brands and content creators to focus on quality. Dated narratives, badly produced content, and exploitative content marketing techniques are being called out on social media in no time. As such, quality on all fronts is crucial. Since the lockdown began, the trend of people being “always-on” has increased. Time spent on smartphones has inched up to over 4.5 hours a day. People are upgrading their home broadband packs to enable the simultaneous use of multiple devices. Clearly, more content is being consumed. We continue to be bullish on digital content creation. The one challenge that brands and content creators will need to overcome is that of tight budgets. As such, operating lean and passing on benefits to clients is a priority.
Rules for effective digital content
Key themes to be relevant
—Abhishek Saxena, 42, and Shireen Sultana, 40, founder-partners, White Cloud Brands LLP
With physical events closed for the past eight months and all events going online, Hyderabadi digital experts talk about the need for quality digital content — not just videos, but knowledge sharing, advertising and marketing — has increased exponentially
— Tamanna S Mehdi tamanna@newindianexpress.com @tamannamehdi