Digital Marketing Strategy & Trends in 2015-Faheem Ahmed at SEMPO Dec 2014
When the organizer @Ezhil Raja of Cognizant asked me if I can speak at SEMPO, I jumped at the idea & said “YES”. (Ezhil & his team put in phenomenal effort to make this a success)
I thought “You don’t want to miss an opportunity to speak in front all the awesome folks there & also learn from the speakers whose work I respect a lot”
When he shared the topic with me, I was like “WHAT??”
“Talk about Digital Marketing Trends & Digital Strategy? And that too at the end of the year? People are going to expect a soothsayer or Guru to predict the digital marketing future for 2015”.
I was considering unfriending Ezhil Raja on Facebook & LinkedIn and all the other platforms that we are connected on. 😉
But seriously, we all know that spotting trends, leave alone predicting them can be a huge challenge.
If you see the period before Social Networking sites, all we had to do to make people notice us throw this digital marketing mix
- Email people – SPAM
- Throw back links & stuff keywords to rank on Page 1 on Google.
- Display banners
- Search Ads
And Voila, our jobs as digital marketers was done. We could go back home early & get a good night’s sleep. OK, maybe not that easy but lot less complex than what it is now.
And then came Mark Zuckerberg; with facebook & a then followed the explosion of a series of other social networking platforms, to mess up the sleep of digital marketers. Not only did they mess up our circadian rhythm but these platforms have sleep deprived half of the world’s population who share more with random strangers than their loved ones sitting next to them
The digital marketing mix today has 100 other things that need to be addressed beyond just email, search & display. Your digital strategy needs to evaluate & pick the ones that are going to work for you.
That is the challenge that faces each one of us if we want to leverage digital marketing for our companies or ourselves.
These speakers did an awesome job of peeling away the many layers of digital marketing & making SEMPO conference in Chennai a grand success.
Subhamoy Das (@subhamoy_das), Head – Corporate Communications at Paypal spoke about the The Power of Stories in Brand Building. A skill that is the need of the hour & he drove home the point really well with examples & tools to use. He also happens to be India’s First Professional Blogger.
Navneet Kaushal (@navneetkaushal), CEO of PageTraffic helped the audience understand “SEO in 2015” He was clearly the crowd favourite. We thoroughly enjoyed this SEO Guru’s session.
Swapna Vijay of YuMe spoke on Video Advertising – Overview & Trends. Helped the audience understand why Video is going to be important
Reema Thakur, Digital Analytics Strategist from Cognizant eloquently explained how Multi-Channel Analytics work.
Ram Manohar Bokkisa (@rambokkisa), Digital Analytics Consultant from Cognizant gave his first talk on Digital Analytics & Tag Management. Clearly going to be a guru & speaker to watch out for in the future.
Multi-channel attribution & modeling continues to be a challenge to digital marketers & hopefully more will be done in 2015
Ashwin Ramesh (@ashwin_ramesh) of Synup did an ‘unconference’ on Local Search with some live case studies. He had other speakers ideate on the fly to help participants. A lively session between Ashwin & the audience
A speaker whose session is at the end of conference & does a great job of holding audience’s attention has my respect. And that was Ramasubramanian Alwarsamy (@2rams) of ThanksYa! He spoke about “Creating Your Personal Brand” His use of Search terminology as an analogy to explain personal branding was delightful.
While I was a speaker talking about digital marketing trends, I learnt plenty from all the speakers of the day. I have made an attempt here by sharing a little from my knowledge but more from experts whose work I admire.
Here is the presentation deck of my talk on Digital Marketing Trends. What to expect in 2015