Adoption of ‘Phygital’ is the need of the hour: Netcore’s Martech Knowledge Exchange

Digital ad spends in India to grow by 30 per cent in 2017; brands would look at a adopting a full-stack marketing automation solution

The line of experts at the event included leading names of the industry such as Pranav Arora, Principal – Accenture; Niranjan Kanade, Chief Business Officer- Accretion Marketing, Netcore Solutions; Dharmesh Sinha, Chief Manager Marketing, Axis Securities; Kunal Sakariya, Head Customer Analytics & Marketing Analytics, Netcore Solutions; Molly Kapoor, Head of Marketing, Birla Sun Life and VeerChand Bothra, CIO, Netcore Solutions.

In his presentation, Niranjan Kanade highlighted that India is currently experiencing a trend of ‘Consumer Parallelism’ where consumers adopt multiple avatars on different platforms during different times of the day. He elucidated upon why attaining an improved customer lifetime value requires an intuitive platform that helps you understand and engage the ever-changing customer.

Kanade added marketing automation is an essential and integral part of accretion marketing strategy of a company. “The digital advertising spends are expected to bounce back and grow at 30 per cent this year after a period of diminished growth curve. This growth in advertising and marketing spends will further fuel the adoption rate of marketing automation in the country as brands would look at a adopting a full-stack marketing automation solution rather than the current module-based approach,” he said. He also mentioned that lack of skills, system complexity, data quality and readiness are the biggest challenges the CMOs have highlighted that has been hindering the implementation of marketing automation solutions.

Giving a crash course the importance of blending marketing and customer analytics, Kunal Sakaria highlighted that transactional, behavioural and demographic data summarisation is important for creating a unified view of the customer.

Echoing Sakaria’s statements, VeerChand Bothra commented, “How do you engage the ever-changing customer? Financial services in India have always had to be sold to the customer; it was never a ‘pull-service’. Therefore, the engagement that a customer has with the brand is not very frequent. Consequently, cross selling a service or product becomes very difficult. Unless the customer is engaged on the right channel, at the right time and with the right type of content, the true customer value always remains a distant dream. A full-stack solution offering a unified view of the customer is as much important as is deriving the right insights from the data using analytics.”

Adding to Bothra’s views, Pranav Arora of Accenture spoke about the growth of the BFSI sector in the recent times as well as the importance of adopting a ‘Phygital’ approach to customer engagement by blending physical and digital to create an ecosystem between the brand and consumer.

Concluding the sessions in her ‘firechat’, Molly Kapoor spoke about the changing customer mindset and the need for companies to adopt marketing technology to be enable to meet up to the expectation and demands of the consumers. She also shared how Birla Sun Life’s has been taking digital strides in this regards by highlighting its SIP Now (Sabse Important Plan) website, which helps understanding the customer journey cycle as well as advising the regular investors as per their financial planning requirements.

Corporate Comm India(CCI Newswire)