Social Media Marketing In India

Table of Contents

Social Media Marketing In India

The quick summary of our primary findings:

Marketers place a high value on social media: A significant 90% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.

Measurement and integration are top areas marketers want to master: One-third of all social media marketers want to know how to monitor and measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of social media and integrate their social media activities.
Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media platforms for brands to be present on, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn.
Almost all the brands have their own website; a considerable number of brands also have a mobile website and a mobile app. There is a significant overlap among brands that have apps with those that have a mobile-friendly website, which indicates that these brands are looking at mobile as a separate engagement channel.
Despite the focus on social media, surprisingly, brands still considered the website as the most effective platform for customer engagement, followed by Facebook, mobile sites, Twitter and mobile apps.
Brands are advertising on the web, social and mobile, and driving traffic across channels by cross-linking various platforms to attract users to their digital touch points.
Brands are also looking to create compelling content such as storytelling, contests and “creating strong content capsules where brand and brand purposes are effectively interspersed” to drive users to digital and social media channels.
This also includes publishing content that includes industry trends and other points of interest to their users, as opposed to only product and service-related information.
Instagram has gained immense popularity and is preferred by brands and consumers alike. 60% of the brands we surveyed leverage Instagram as a crucial social media tool.
The report indicates that businesses are using 360° integrated campaigns/omnichannel approaches to marketing, indicating that digital and social media marketing is being integrated with traditional marketing strategies to engage with customers through multiple touch points.
The number of brands spending 16% or more of their marketing budgets on social media has increased over the last few years. Moreover, for the first time in three years, we are seeing some brands specify that they spent more than 31% on social media.
The top three challenges faced for marketing a brand on social media were — sustaining or increasing engagement rates, content creation and measuring effectiveness. These were the same in the last edition, though percentages varied marginally.
The top challenges to attract users to digital touchpoints relate to effectively defining the target group/audience and the lack of dedicated budgets for these channels/advertising.
While brands usually integrate their social media with their web or mobile commerce initiatives through cross-linkages between platforms, surprisingly, not all businesses link their website or app to their social media channels.
Despite the statistics that show referrals from peers being considered trustworthy, 16% of brands still do not allow word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals through social sharing, which means they are not leveraging the benefits of using their user base for WOM marketing.
To gain customer feedback, 88% of respondents conduct social listening; however, only 56% of brands use a listening tool (the most common being Radian6, followed by Meltwater and Sysomos).
While 60% of brands still rely on traditional channels such as call centers and email for Customer Servicing, 60% of brands are also providing Customer Servicing on social media.
Engagement (92%) and social reach (80%) are clear priorities for the majority of the brands surveyed, and 68% of participants also track brand mentions.