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The Human Touch in Digital Marketing

Touch is the first sense we acquire and is the secret weapon in many a successful relationship.

These days people are on information overload, and if they don’t believe you are trying to solve their problems, make their lives easier, or add value, then your marketing efforts are fruitless.

There are more digital marketing tools than one might need. Get into one of the Facebook groups and in less than 24 hours, you would have a huge list of tools that might take you more than this life to check out.

As marketing technology becomes sophisticated and powerful, more and more digital marketers are increasingly becoming dependent on AI & ML based tools that attempt to “connect” us with our customers.

However all it takes it a strategic change in the way one approaches any digital activity.

If one focuses their marketing on the customer, rather than the technology, you are immediately building meaningful relationships that last longer and stronger.

Next time you decide to do a digital marketing campaign, focus on these three questions:

How well do you know your customers?
How can you connect with their needs and solve them?
How can you establish trust in an overcrowded digital world?

If you would like to know more how you can leverage the power of digital to reach your target customers, talk to us

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Love or Arranged – What’s your Digital Strategy?

A marriage is a long term relationship and a long-term commitment between two individuals. One typically steps into it if they truly love that person and want to spend the rest of the life with that person.

You must be wondering what on earth digital marketing and marriage have got to do with each other and how they are related?

In many ways, digital marketing is also a long-term commitment between two parties – client and the medium of digital marketing.

Let’s first understand the differences between the love marriage and arranged marriage.

A love marriage typically consists of the following steps:

Meet the person – Love does not blossom without meeting somebody.
Talk to the person – This is more about knowing the person and understanding them better.
Fall in Love – Once you have understood all that there is to and you find compatibility, you either fall in love or part ways.
Propose – After you have come to a conclusion that you are in love with that individual you need to tell them. This is where you propose to them and make it known that you are truly, madly and deeply in love with them.
Wait for acceptance – Sometimes the waiting time maybe a lot shorter while at times it can take a long time.
Validation from friends – Once the person has accepted your proposal, out of the blue 4 friends will pop up and they will share their views and thoughts on you. Only after you are validated by them, the relationship starts to move.
Relationship maintenance – This is the most crucial part for any couple in love. During this time one gets to know the partner in-depth – their likes, dislikes, their feelings, emotions etc.
Meeting the parents – Once everything else is sorted, the crucial step is getting the parents approval. In many cases, a lot of lovers have dropped their future plans after not getting the approval from the respective parents. Obviously we are going to assume the parents have given the go-ahead.
Marriage – Finally, when all else is done and dusted, the love converts into marriage.

So, it takes an average of 9 steps for a love marriage to work out properly. There could be some scenarios where the number of steps can be shorter or maybe longer.

If you look at the steps for arranged marriage it is quite simple.

We share our likes/dislikes and the preferences with the parents / friends / well-wishers.
We then sit back and relax while they do the bulk of the work for us.
- Finding a girl
- Deciding if it suits our needs
- Doing all necessary due diligence.
Once a suitable match is found, they arrange for a meeting.
All one needs to do is show up, discuss and then if everything looks fine, agree on the marriage.

You must be wondering how this has got anything to do with digital marketing.

The love marriage scenario is when you decide to do digital marketing by yourself. You understand the need to do digital marketing and are willing to spend the time and effort needed to succeed at it.

An arranged marriage scenario is one where you do not want to spend the time but know the importance and need for it, so you outsource it an experienced agency who has your best interest in mind and is willing to help you succeed in the digital space.

There is no right or wrong way.

Both the approaches have their own merits and de-merits. What matters the most is that any chosen approach ultimately leads to the end goal that is already decided – in terms of marriage: getting the right groom or bride, in terms of digital marketing: achieving brand awareness, leads, sales, visibility, web traffic etc.

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It’s Not Just Content, But Optimized Content That Wins!

INDUSTRY: HR / TRAINING

BACKGROUND:

This client is a leading soft skills training company specializing in niche trainings like POSH, Inclusion and Diversity related workshops and other learning workshops. They work with clients across India.

REQUIREMENT/CHALLENGES:

The client is a leader in the D&I space and work extensively with corporates in educating them on various D&I aspects including anti-sexual harassment. They also publish many informative and educative articles and were quite good on the content meter. However, despite the quantum and high quality of the articles, they were unable to drive readers to their website.

CLIENT’S INITIAL REACTION:

Initially, when the client approached us, they were very skeptical about any SEO or paid advertisements due to a few bad experiences in the past. They now wanted a solution that would increase the traction on their website and find more readers.

APPROACH:

Before providing a solution, we audited the website first using the WCA method and shared the findings with the CEO and management explaining to them the problem in detail and the solution that could help them attain the desired goal.

Once the management understood our approach & the current situation, they agreed to sign up for our proposed SEO campaign for a period of 3 months.

SOLUTION:

As Step 1, we first fixed all the issues found during our audit using the WCA method.

Step 2 was to suggest content improvisations. Though the client published regular articles, they weren’t optimized to be SEO and search friendly. We suggested that they re-write the content a bit for SEO keeping it readable and friendly.

Within 30 days of doing this, the website’s organic SEO traffic improved by 67%. In the stipulated 3-month period, the client’s website saw a 47% increase in organic SEO traffic and an overall 30% increase in traffic to the website.

RESULTS SUMMARY:

67% – INCREASE IN ORGANIC TRAFFIC IN 30 DAYS
47% – AVERAGE ORGANIC TRAFFIC INCREASE IN 90 DAYS

If you would like to know how such a strategy can increase your SEO traffic, click here to get in touch with us

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Does Your Team Share Your Business Vision?

Does your team share your vision? How well equipped are you as a leader in understanding your role in achieving that vision?

Every leader and business owner have a vision of who they want to be, what they want their business to achieve and how they want to conduct their business. This vision could be the destination for a few or could be the starting point of a bigger goal for some. Many leaders do an excellent job of communicating this to their team such that the entire team is truly aligned to THE objective.

Somewhere along the way, many organizations begin falling short of their objectives and the vision starts to look like an unattainable goal. For a well-oiled team and level headed leadership, this would be time to go back to the drawing board and identify the root causes for the lag. But for many others, this would just result in a chaotic time where short term actions take over actual precedence and begins to create a facade over the real goal.

As a company Wild Creek has constantly been learning from others and evolving and we have had the privilege and opportunity of working with several wonderful leaders who have set aspirational goals for themselves and the organization(s) they lead. Whilst in some instances, the brilliant leader and his/her team forged through and successfully attained their goals, in a few others the entire vision process was completely muddled down the ladder leading to chaos, with no clarity for why someone was doing something.

In Wild Creek, we have always taken pride in ourselves as being a digital partner for companies and over time, our experience has taught us to always dig deeper into the business to understand the company’s goals and objectives before accepting any project. One of my experiences showed me how crucial leadership vision communication is and the responsibility of the leader, which ironically begins only after sharing the vision with his/her team.

Instance: Where communication plays a critical role in determining performance

In the early part of 2019, Wild Creek was contracted to be a digital partner for a prominent learning and development company. The company was a market leader for several years, however over time, they had dropped down in their rankings. Unlike many of their competitors, this company was a late entrant to marketing in the digital space. Nevertheless, they tackled the bull by the horns and set up a dedicated 4-member team to build their digital visibility. Despite quite a bit of investment and effort, they failed to see any progress. This is when Wild Creek came into the picture to front-end their digital operations. Once we were aboard, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work – to understand what was going on.

As with all instances, the first thing that we did was to identify and understand the company’s vision. The next thing was to go through the plan of action the digital team had created. What we found was very surprising – the plan of action had no co-relation to the vision and had no means to reach there. After digging some more, we understood that while the leadership team had some very lofty aspirations, they fundamentally failed in communicating that to the team members and also failed to help them understand and connect with the vision. We closed the above project by designing a strong strategy in line with the vision, that would now be executed by the dedicated team with much more gusto and clarity than before.

Unless team members understand and internalize where the organization is heading, how it plans to go there and how it should be positioned, no amount of competence, investment and effort would take the company there, especially in the digital space. Therefore, it is not just the competence of the employees that’s to be questioned always, sometimes, it goes a bit higher too!

Clearly, defining a vision and communicating it with the team is one aspect. However, ensuring that as a leader understanding the role in effectively getting the organization to achieve that goal is a big challenge that no one seems to have understood just yet.

I would like to end this with this wonderful quote by Babe Ruth that summarizes it all:

“The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.” – Babe Ruth

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Bridging the Gap between Academia and Real World

I was a back bencher in my school/college days and I would have been the last person to get in front of a group of people to tell/explain something, so something like teaching was unimaginable. However when the opportunity arose last year, I took it up as a challenge. I decided to take charge of my biggest fear of Public Speaking and decided to tackle the metaphoric bull by its horns. However, at the same time I was very worried about how I would add value to some very eager, young and impressionable minds.

Thankfully I had a few people who believed in me and gave me all the encouragement to get going.

Right from day one I wanted to do things differently. With nearly 16+ years of practical experience and working with multiple clients in the digital marketing arena, I wanted to combine my 15+ years of experience working with several clients in the digital & social media marketing arena, I wanted to club both – practice and theory – aspects of the subject. Reflecting back on my student days, I had hated lectures then. In today’s learners, lectures are still hated, nothing’s changed. Adding value is what i wanted to do and fortunately I was able to do a bit more than just teaching the subject.

Nearly all of my classes this semester consisted of 75% practical and 25% theory. The theoretical parts were mandatory elements to lay the foundation and the practical sessions were primarily aimed towards getting the students acquainted with real-time applications and results apart from complementing the theoretical learning. The goal was to bridge the gap between curriculum and real time business application.

For instance, when it came to social media, there is hardly anyone who is not aware of some of the platforms. The most important differentiator was to help them understand what to post, why to post and when to post.

Giving them the real life scenario exposure while still confined to the 4 walls was a big challenge. But all the challenges that i had faced with my clients were converted to practical problems which, when combined with the curriculum, gave way to some interesting practical exercises.

I am a self-taught digital strategist. What I have learnt is all by practically applying my knowledge and not by memorizing a course material. When you do things, you come face to face with not just the problem but also become aware of what it takes to get it working.

Thankfully, the students in the last two semesters were more than willing to be part of this way of teaching and they were more enthusiastic about the practical way of teaching.

Student Feedback

Teaching is fun & interesting if you decide to make it fun & interesting especially when the intent is to make the learner truly understand and connect with the subject.

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A Structured ORM Strategy Helps a Company Move from Negative Reviews to 200% Increase in Sales

Client Industry : Jewelry

Overview

Client G is a Precious Metals and Gems dealer based out of California. In spite of best quality products, their reputation was beginning to decline because of the false reviews posted by the competitors, which directly affected the sales. Wild Creek worked to restore their credibility in the business and thereby increase sales.

Challenges Identified

Effective usage of social media to create brand awareness was not in place. Whenever someone searched for their business, negative reviews topped the results. The ratings had begun to dip drastically.

Solutions Implemented

Wild Creek took complete control of their website and digital presence. Firstly, we started tracking and monitoring the opinions posted every day. We interpreted and evaluated the collected data to decide on how to act further. Managing a brand’s reputation is a continuous and cyclical process. So, we devised a strategy and gave out a 12-month action plan. Our focus was to try and negate all the bad reviews and create a positive vibe about the brand by providing dilution & counterpoint, suppression of negative comments, and protection from future problems. We implemented SEO based content and advised on cross-linking.

Results achieved

After working on the areas of content planning, reputation strategy, search engine marketing, and social media for the next nine months, the negative reviews had completely disappeared from the first ten pages of the search results and increased sales by 200 %.

Metrics

Sales increase: 200%
Project duration – 9 months
Credibility – Increased

If you would like to know how such a strategy can drive your sales, click here to get in touch with us

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A Global Company Sees 300% Revenue Increase at 50% Lower Advertisement Costs

Overview

Client P* is a 120-year old company and is one of India’s largest conglomerate. Their health & wellness brand is among the top names in the segment. For some of the products that were recent launches, the sales were only 200 units per month despite spending more than Rs.15 Lakhs on digital media month-on-month. Wild Creek designed a customized campaign strategy that targeted towards increasing sales which also eventually led to a reduction in the advertisement spend.

Challenges Identified:

The health & wellness products were sold only in the online marketplace and did not any presence in the offline shelves. The product’s visibility was less, and the purchase behaviour of the customers who visited the product was very low.

Solutions Implemented:

We did a complete audit of the practices that were already in place. Based on the thorough research on keywords, competitions and audience, we devised a strategy using Google Ad Words.

The campaign was strategized in such way that the focus was on potential customers and influencing their purchase behaviour.

Results Achieved:

Within 30 days, traffic increased multi-fold and sales skyrocketed to 500 units per month, touching close to 750 units in the succeeding months. Client P’s cost of investment for digital marketing dropped sharply by 50%.

RESULTS SUMMARY

Sales: Increased from 200 to 500 and peaked at 750 and continued to average around this number.
Increase in sales: 3.5X
Cost reduction: 50%
Duration for 1^stlevel of impact: 30 days

NOTES:

The whole strategy and consumer behaviour were supported by a strong product that delivered value.
Unless certain amount of brand building activity is done, driving sales through digital medium alone will not generate results. In this case, the client had a strong brand value and credibility and therefore, accelerating their digital presence became a bit easier.

If you would like to know how such a strategy can drive your sales, click here to get in touch with us

*Client names are undisclosed for confidentiality purposes.

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An Educational Institution Received 3X Applications with Just 25% of their Total Marketing Budget

Overview:

Client I, a ten-year-old premier educational institution spread across India, is ranked amongst the Top 20 colleges in the country. They offer a Post Graduate Programme in Business Management for working professionals in the middle managerial positions, who seek to boost their career prospects. Over the past years, their marketing strategy for admission adopted the traditional methodology of print advertisements in leading print media. The advertising spends averaged around ₹50 Lakhs.

Until they came to Wild Creek, they hadn’t tried digital campaigning of any kind. We focused on helping them understand the efficiency of digital ads, which could reduce the cost of investment, yet generate more leads than traditional methods.

Challenges Identified:

The full-page newspaper ads had colossal visibility and it was reaching the masses too. However, it wasn’t necessary to reach the whole crowd of people other than the desired audience. They simply had no option but to spend lakhs of rupees on that.

Solutions Implemented:

Wild Creek showed them the digital way of exposure to focused prospects for a fraction of what the big newspaper networks charged. Our suggestion to them was to invest only 1/4th of their total budget in the digital campaign. We designed a landing page and worked on content-driven digital advertising campaign that was executed using Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. We identified and partnered with a few of the renowned professors who could be influencers to attract potential customers.

Results Achieved:

Over a period of 90 days, we were able to drive 17000+ visitors to the page, generating 400 leads that converted to 100+ sales. Out of 40 available seats in the programme, 32 were filled through the leads generated online.

Summary:

Campaign duration: 90 days
Visitors attracted: 17000 +
Leads generated: 400
ROI: 80% admission through digital campaign.

Notes:

The advantage of digital ads is the ability to quantify its reach.
Metrics like reach count, response help the organization take an informed decision to know if a particular ad worked or not.
Metrics can help calculate ROI. In this case, the organization got a return of 80%
It is not just digital ads that did the work, it is a combination of content and all the groundwork that was done in the past that established the brand’s authority and credibility.

If you are curious to know how targeted ads can enable your online sales, click here to get in touch with us.

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How 400% Traffic Increase in Web Traffic Led to a 250% Rise in Revenue

Overview and Background:

Client S, a famous South Indian movie portal featuring movie news, trailers, and reviews, approached Wild Creek during mid-2016. Driving more traffic to the website and the inability to compete with the big brands in the same sector were the two primary challenges faced by them. Advertisements on the site were the major source of revenue; hence, their objective was to gain more visitors per day. We focused on the root cause of the issues rather than just working on ad campaigns.

Challenges Identified:

Poorly constructed and unoptimized conditions of the website were identified as underlying issues that need to be addressed first. The targeted audience were netizens from South India and the US in the age group of 15 to 45 years, who mostly used a mobile phone to watch and read movie-related content; but the architecture did not support mobile responsiveness. These challenges were holding the site back from its fullest potential that resulted in the lack of visibility and ranking in the search engines.

Solutions Implemented:

One of the first things we did was to help them realize that a well-thought-out content strategy is a must to boost the organic traffic of the website. This would be a long-term solution vs. an ad-driven strategy which would invariably be short term.

Given the objectives that needed to be met, Wild Creek followed an extensive and methodical process from start to finish. We built an SEO friendly architecture with a CSS based design for mobile responsiveness.

To set Client S apart from the competitors, we worked to transform the content. We identified long-tail keywords that had reasonably good search volumes and low competition and accordingly streamlined the content. We guided their internal team on the strategies to be followed to keep up the performance in the following months.

Results Achieved:

We were able to scale the site beyond the limitations of the previous system. Over a period of 6 months, page visits skyrocketed to 1,25,000 per day, which directly had an impressive impact by recording a maximum of 250% increase in the revenue.

RESULTS SUMMARY:

Project duration: 6 months
Page Visits: 400% increase
Revenue: 250% increase
The SEO architecture & methodology adopted in 2016 continues to drive traffic even today.

Notes:

Content driven strategy provides long term results.
SEO is a long-term strategy that needs a minimum of 6 months to begin showing results

If you would like to know how this strategy can help your business, do talk to us.

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Is your “After Sales” stronger than your Sales?

The success of a company is not just dependent on its ability to convert leads into sales, it’s the after sales process that becomes more critical in building a brand reputation. A strong digital strategy for visibility and marketing rides on credibility of the brand.

At Wild Creek, we follow a process called the Feasibility analysis where we understand the company/brand and identify if they have the necessary systems and capabilities in place to manage the inflows and leads resulting from the digital efforts. We learnt how crucial these systems are in one of our experiences with a client. If a company is not equipped enough to handle the project and close it with a happy client, it doesn’t matter how successful your current digital campaign is, you would invariably end up spending more on multiple such campaigns. And by being equipped, it not just refers to competence or skills, softer aspects such as attitude, the depth of involvement in work and also an internalization of the goals and vision of the company.

Sometime at the end of 2018, we began working with a software company that wanted to generate leads and increase their pace of client acquisition. After working with them for a few months, we noticed certain aspects that were not fully supporting the digital activities.

Situation: They were facing an exodus of clients who were moving to their competition despite our client providing a good deal and noteworthy execution. The company’s leadership was quite strong and had recently made major changes in the business model in line with their vision. The CEO of the company had ensured that the vision was communicated to all and that they understood the company’s need of the hour. After having understood the goals and objectives of the company, Wild Creek was able to devise a strategy that generated high quality leads, with a high conversion rate. However, over time, the company was still unhappy as the exodus continued, despite a strong sales team signing up high quality clients and having a high percentage of conversion of the leads generated through the digital medium.

Due to the strong relations that we had built with the team, we noticed in some of the routine client meetings, that the post sales team handling project executions, delivery and client relations were constantly under pressure causing them to slacken in certain aspects. Despite initially having understood the business visions and goals, with pressure came poor attitude that clearly set aside the vision and brought onto the table short sightedness and apathy. The situation began treading dangerous waters, taking the company away from their vision, while the leadership put on a defensive stance and refused to acknowledge or understand the shortcomings of the team, resulting in a breakdown of the goals right in the middle.

Our Learning:
It was during this real time situation that we realized that it is not enough to just have strong sales teams or digital marketing efforts to bring in clients, it is also imperative that the execution teams that build and maintain client relations, are capable enough to see through delivery and put a smile on their clients’ face. Furthermore, our experience also highlighted the importance of viewing things objectively in the business, as an entrepreneur, to be open to identify internal break downs and set them on the right course of action before it is too late.

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