“Key to selling on social networks is to be social not to sell.” Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, head - ecommerce and chief information officer at Usha International, says, “While everything is social selling, whether offline or online, our brand campaigns on social networking sites are more about engaging customers, educating them about sewing, cooking etc and not so much about selling.”
Sunil Dhingra, Founder and CEO of Jazzmyride.com says, “Key to social selling is to be social not to sell.” Then speaking of how exactly to keep the social marketing budget minimal yet effective, Sunil says, “Even WhatsApp is a good medium because it is free and you can connect with a large community of people. We once had a 1000 orders in one day via WhatsApp messaging campaign targeting shopkeepers.”
Irfan Khan, CMO of #fame Digital and CEO of Blogmint, believes innovative methods like bartering can work, given channel and product fit. For example, X brand and Y brand place each other’s products on the other’s site. “Also keep track of how many brand mentions you get on places like Facebook in addition to being focused on conversion rate”, he said.
Rachit Mathur, VP of growth initiatives at Zimmber believes to make social marketing effective one must spend most of the budget on analysing and understanding whom to target.
Nathasha AR Kumar, founder of VAJOR.com stressed how important quality content is. Without it no amount of budget would ever be effective. “As a bootstrapping company you realize content is the key. Even with a small budget you can do a very good, effective campaign for your target group. We use Facebook and in particular Instagram works especially well.
She also recommends outsourcing content creation at least initially then when you’re more stabilized to do it in-house. “Because no PR firm or any agency will know your brand as well as you do.”
Meanwhile Jayant Kochar, MD of Go Fish Retail Solutions shared one of the first YouTube videos by the Dollar Shave Club. The ad is an example of effective content for marketing online and since YouTube is free it didn’t cost them much. “This was their sole ad, no other money spent on advertisements. There are five Indian companies trying to replicate what they did.” The Dollar Shave Club was recently acquired by Unilever for a billion dollars.
BW Reporters
Regina is a reporter for BW Businessworld. In her previous assignments, she has worked with Independent television Network as a news anchor and reporter in Sri Lanka
