SSKOCHI – August 2015 Edition

Why Digital Marketing?

• India is rapidly getting plugged to the Internet with a sweeping 32% growth rate from just last year. With more new broadband connections and wide distribution of mobile phone coverage has made India the 2^nd largest Internet users in the world with 320 million users.
• Because of today’s global scope of business and easy accessibility to the global audience.
• Also due to the low cost per user and the low overall cost and the marketing leverage has very little to do with the size of your budget.

Sessions:

The event was loaded with enthusiastic and very engaging audience with many startups and aspiring entrepreneurs and few employees of companies in Infopark.

Session 1: ‘Digital Marketing for Your Startup’ by Krishna Kumar, GreenPepper Digital 

Krishna Kumar is the Co-founder and CEO of GreenPepper.  GreenPepper Digital is into Internet marketing since 2007 and along with other services like HR consulting.

Before it would take around 10 years for a company to build a reputation but with the Growth Hacking technique any startup can grow 10x and build a strong brand.  E.g. compare TATA or Birla, to a startup like flipkart, which could build a popular brand in just 1.5 years.

Krishna Kumar ‘s experiences calls for much more disciplined and focussed digital marketing rather than random and impulsive approach. One of the most common mistakes made by the Product Mangers, Sales Team or CEOs is betting on 10 different platforms and running after all new trends. Digital Marketing Strategy is very important and calls for a well-structured thought process.

Few strategic Tips:

• First and most important thing in Digital Marketing is to have a Website
• Build your Story

1. Have much more understanding of what really you want.
2. Understand your very Targeted and very niche customer segment
3. What is your need to reach out
4. What is the story you want to tell to people.

Without a story there is no up scope of reaching out to people because you have to connect emotionally with you target audience.

• Have  a clean minimalistic good Visual Design
• Leverage all your Employees to become brand ambassadors and to evangelise your company’s story
• Schedule your activities using tools like Twuffer, Future Tweets and Facebook post scheduler. Evening is the best time in India, where most users are active in Fb. don’t over spend time consider the trade-off because usually only 2% of persons may see your campaign in fb.
• Use any of the several cost-effective cloud based market automation tools for lead generation.
• Ad campaigning  – Tools For Ads Targeting : Google Adwords Display Select , Facebook Lookalike Audiences

Session 2: Entrepreneur of the month – Rosh Cherian, Cognicor

Rosh Cherian is the CTO and Co-Founder of CogniCor Technologies.  He has around 20 years of experience in developing commercial software products for large enterprises in Europe and India. He has worked in software architecting, development and deployment roles with Telefonica, HP, Agilent and Honeywell.

Cognicor’s Story

Cognicor has built the world’s 1st automated resolution system for enterprises using patented Artificial Intelligence for handling customer queries, complaints and tech support issues. Cognicor is able to save operational cost of the Enterprise’s huge volume of complaints and leave low customer churn.

He and his wife started this company in Barcelona, Spain, where they stayed for last 10 years.  His wife has a PhD in AI and with 6 US patents.  They got this idea when they were in an airport and had to wait for a long time to get customer support. This company was started in 2012 and is a spin off from Spain’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. In the last 3 years they have received numerous awards and one notable award is the “Most Innovative European Startup” by the European Commission.

Session 3: Panel Discussion – Trends in Digital Marketing

Panelists:

1. Anand Subramanian, Digital Marketing Lead, Fingent Corp
2. Anoob Isaac, CEO and founder, For You Group

Creator of famous WhatsApp broadcast channel – “HelloKochi”

1. Abid Omar,  CEO and founder, Vebblabs

WhatsApp Broadcast Channel is the new Marketing tool with assured reach compared to Facebook’s 7% organic reach.

LinkedIn Group is the best place to build targeted customer profiles for B2B.

For targeting young audience like 18 years old – Instagram and Fb is a good option. Sharing offers with hashtags in Instagram is a very effective method.

Organic reach of a business page in Facebook feed has reduced than earlier times. FB has restricted the reach using new algorithms based on the user’s previous interaction on the page and friends engagement.

HootSuite is an all in One Social Media management tool. It helps you to manage all your social accounts under one roof and it helps to promote your article on social media with single click.

PostPlanner will help you to create post for facebook, twitter etc.  You can schedule and automatically post content to fb.  It will also generate lot of relavent images, content and trending related topics.

HubSpot is an inbound marketing software platform that helps companies attracts visitors, convert leads, and close customers. HubSpot software includes all the tools (like email, website, seo, marketing automation, landing pages, analytics, social media and blogging) you need to do inbound marketing in one platform.

Sidekick is email analytics and tracking service. It helps to get live notifications when someone opens or clicks on one of your emails.  It helps you to know when, how many times, where, and from what device they opened your email. Sidekick also shows you powerful information about your contacts right in your inbox.  It helps you to see a contact’s professional history, where they live, mutual contacts, email history etc.

Felicitation

All the event speakers were awarded in traditional SS kochi style – potted plants

Thank you 

Mittu, Zhooyi Communications (a brand agency), for anchoring the event and for making the great visuals for the banners.

Infopark for providing the state of the art well facilitated convention centre with control room, AC, projectors, etc.

And all the volunteers – Yadu, Shaheen, Radesh (Nibodha Technologies), Ramesh (Netvarth Technologies), Nivin, Shreyans.

Compiled By

Ajoe

Headstart Kochi Volunteer.