‘Content engagement through social media is driving success for brands’

The knowledge of social media and video formats have become a holy grail for marketers. The world has evolved towards visual spectrum of content absorption. Talking about the tech and importance of social media and video marketing, e4m Martech Conference had a panel discussion on the topic “How Video and Social Entertainment are Transforming Marketing.”

The panel was chaired by Bharat Khatri, Chief Digital Officer, APAC, Omnicom Media Group and consisted of Francis Rodrigues, SVP- Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, HDFC Life, Amit Midha, Digital Head, Oppo, Anuja Mishra, Chief Marketing Officer, Mamaearth, Dattatray Shivaji Katkar, Sales Director, Brightcove and Saikat Sinha, Head -Digital Marketing and Transformation, Lenovo.

The panel spoke about how the world of videos, content and creators have become an essential for brand performance and the technology involved in making all of this happen.

Anuja Mishra of Mamaearth discussed the importance of content and social media which not only helps the top funnel, but also the bottom funnel of marketing. “While we started out as a D2C organization over six years back, today we are an organization that spreads across online and offline. Our learnings have been tremendous for the use of both social, right across influencers, creators and equally creating the use of video both short format and long format.”

“I definitely say that we’ve seen very strong use case and successes with using relevant video content in terms of driving the full funnel metrices. It’s kind of gotten us a very strong awareness, brand relevance and imagery parameters. Equally, it’s driven conversions as well. So, I am a huge believer of leveraging authentic and relevant content pieces, whether that’s partnering with creators influencers or building your own set of organic content.”

Dattatray Shivaji Katkar talked about how engagement plays a huge role in driving sale. “It’s very important for marketers in today’s era to focus on creating engaging experiences so that you can play a very crucial role in consumer buying cycle. With due respect to all brands, most of the websites today are like a menu card. There is no interactivity nor communication. So, through third parties, we have seen 90% of engagement happens on video compared to 10% on text. So, video is playing very crucial role in today’s era for most of the marketers as well as CMOs against spending a lot of time and energy.”

Francis Rodrigues, SVP- Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, HDFC Life told the panel how they have adapted with the optimization across different social media rules. “Thanks to the big tech around you need to kind of optimize (videos) for them. You have vertical versus horizontal formats. You have in fact even creative guidelines like show the person’s face or the close up of the eyes to start with. Everything that Google and Facebook tells you for creator optimization, we have started doing some of those things.”

Saikat Sinha of Lenovo talked about what technology should be discarded and what will work in the future for brands to correctly use martech for growth. “There are multiple legacy systems which are available with organizations. One of them is SQL database. There are there are database people who fetch the data by putting in filters, send the data to an email agency. I think this entire system, I don’t see this going many years ahead. What will definitely happen is the integration of martech and adtech together, so we call it in different names, but I would say it it’s like marketing cloud, where we have the customer first party data, we know their preferences, and then we target them. So that will only happen when a martech and adtech talk to each other. So, I think that’s the technology that is the future.”

Anuja Mishra of Mamaearth, towards the end of the panel discussion, explained how to use social media and video formats the right way and not to get carried away by technology. “In this whole ocean of content, video, social and tech, I think we as marketers, sometimes get too carried away and excited. With a lot of these new phenomenon coming in and the excitement of using them, we sometimes kind of lose track of the big picture. I think be very clear of what your business objective is and how does that translate into KPIs at every step of the funnel. What’s the consumer journey like and how are you looking to build your brand journey parallelly? And then what is the role of video or social? I just say that what has not changed is to keep your strategies simple and keep it attributable and authentic. So, I just say try out different platforms, social, quick commerce, your own websites and apps, but I think eventually, keep a filter on what’s working. You have to be really, really quick to drop some of those things and ensure that you’re staying the course of strategy.”