We – Geno, Elwinston, Manickarasi and Me (Divi) are at the Strategic Marketing Summit 2011 being held at Bangalore and being already questioned on our business forte – SEO and SMO even before the conference starts. Oh how we wish we had more people in hand to handle the queries of curious businessmen wondering what Submitinme is all about and also inquisitively wondering what the free DVD contains and how it would help their businesses. At the score of 10 business cards already, I think we have done a good job in buying our booth visitors’ attention with our enthusiastic presence. People have been so interested that they are directly inquiring yearly promotion rates (wish our site had its own INR version, did not see this anticipation coming so strong)

Ok, so everyone now settles down for the numero uno speaker Mr. Harish Bijoor and I for one have thoroughly enjoyed listening to this guy. He has shown people here how unrealistic and outdated marketing strategies have come to be now and how the downgrade in the consumers choices and finances has drastically changed the way businesses must be marketed. He pointed out an interesting point that even the countries like US that was the major consumer channel for businesses worldwide is cutting down on meager stuff like the amount of toothpaste used each day. This is where affordable and logical marketing like ours comes in.

Jessica Paul of Paul Writer speaks also about how trends of marketing have changed and how the Internet is slowly becoming the next best thing for Indian audiences.

Break Time – for the delegates but not for us. We are bombarded with booth visitors and just to give you an update on the V card score, this has doubled from the last time into 20 in numbers, so in all in over 3 hours we have convinced 30 businessmen to gain interest in what we at SIM offer. We are seriously missing some of our Submitinme-ites who could have had an upperhand presence in the summit and help us manage our visitors far better.

Post- break a panel of speakers have gathered on stage to have a direct discussion of the conference agenda and trying to cover the questions in most of the inquisitive minds in the room. 4 speakers – Ajay, Vijay, Sekar and Jagannath discussing the marketing trends in the brand, agency, media owner and technology perspective of businesses, respectively.

I have observed something during the present tenure of this conference that many are skeptical about social media marketing. Right now the panel of four speakers have highlighted how social media is a productive marketing strategy. A question did arise on how word of mouth marketing online through social media would also highlight negative aspects of online branding. But the panel wisely respond saying that there are some issues that arise and can hamper the reputation of the brand but these are issues that need to be addressed. With genuine marketing and fast response and a proactive conversation channel with the word of mouth online medium one can control the negative reputation promotion online.

The speakers say that real advertising needs real money, they emphasize on newspaper and media marketing but listeners beg to differ. One comes up with promoting a brand by developing social games.

Our expatriat speaker, Valerie Wagoner comes on stage and asks people to give missed calls to some zip dial toll free number in order to get a live statistic on the type of business people in this room are into. We get a 55% of response on the services category, a 20% on ecommerce and the rest negligible amount comes from retail and good industry. What Valerie is here to talk about is that the ecommerce percentage must be more. Even if you do not fall into the actual definition of ecommerce for marketing your business you must treat your business like one. Well, in conclusion all shes tying to convey is we need to bridge the offline businesses to the online platform, like if someone is buying a product at the point of sale, the information is posted on the Facebook profile using ZipDial. Turns out the ZipDial service was actually behind the Anna Hazare campaign.

Valerie Wagoner on ZipDial helping marketing

ZipDial CEO’s speech follows another panel discussion between speakers – Viswa, Eswara, Prasad to talk on social media influence on marketing. The panel, very unconventionally, starts of with an audience survey as to how many people have watched the YouTube video of ‘Why this kolavari di?’, including me many hands raise. To this the speaker rightfully emphasizes the significance and vast influence of social media. Now they go ahead speaking about the practical demands that people all over the world depend on for informative or promotive content. No one really reads the newspaper these days, they need quick updates on social media sites. Tapping this vast world of the internet is prudent for online business projects that may even be under construction. Starting a conversation on the social media arena helps build the brand. Thi does not mean that one has to pitch the product right away. Eventually, however the brand reputation is kept alive amongst a vast online population and beyond a point it would have a life of its own.

We are ready to roll! Just hours behind the “Strategic Marketing Submit”, Elwinston and Me (Geno Thampi) are adding the final touch for the discussions to be done. The Summit the Summit focuses on issues of great interest to SubmitINme which includes “Social Media Marketing Strategy”, “Mobile Marketing” and the “Cost effective marketing strategies for Startups”. The agenda seems to a lot interesting as the big guns are to talk about Google local, adwords, predictions about mobile marketing, social media marketing and its role in branding etc.

I am gonna be “all ears” during the summit and… of course I’d be blogging the event, as-it-happens in real time. Subscribe to the post and you would be the first to hear the outcome of the “Strategic Marketing Submit 2011”

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Here we are at the venue of The summit and the keynote is expected to be delivered by the Director Sales of Stanadyne India in about 2 minutes. Till then we have the Smart Techie magazine to fiddle around

Great minds work together? Mr. Sundar Balu emphasizes the fact that “Content Engagement” in Internet marketing is the most important strategy that has proven results…..

Googlization with the all new Google+ is about to be discussed a bit later, which has certainly caught my interest. Curiosity is that Mr.Balu has said he has some mind blowing statistics about Google +

Well, here is something new, “It is said that zmot.com has some potential valuable information about internet marketing as a downloadable pdf. We would check that out later”

Balu says “There is a decision making parameter called Zero Moment Of Truth, were the customer or client has already made up his mind on where and what to purchase online. These customers are gained through word of mouth and with a first impression with some other product or some valuable information such as reviews and videos spread online”

The 4 P’s of social media marketing

Participate

Proximity

Permission

Perception

And now guess what, the tea break

The tea break was the really worthy part of the summit. After talking to some of the startup business owners, we understand that active participation in forums, yahoo answers, and targeted banner ads are the most preferred marketing options of the startups to get the word out

According to the panel speaking, the QR code could be a very valuable tool to drive traffic to a website. Let it be a downloadable product or an e-commerce product, sales could be enhanced with the help of implementing and using QR codes for marketing

Well, now we had some time to interact with the discussion panel for social media marketing. And this would be the funniest moment of the entire summit. One of the top gun from the movie industry was the panel speaker and he had insisted a lot about the importance of the tweets and facebook wall updates. For us, these are just parts of social media marketing. However, the panel was talking on the lines that facebook, twitter ans linked are the only 3 social media marketing options. On top of that, according to the posting daily tweets and wall updates could get you enough followers and fans. I was thinking that this daily activity in twitter and facebook would work to get fans only for renowned brands and celebs. What about a startup business? Won’t it be winking at a girl in the dark? Guess what! I asked the same to the panel. And the answer was:

“Keep winking and one day the miracle would happen by showing the light” Isn’t that a funny answer? But the person on the discussion board was serious about it. I was about to raise another question “why waste time on a miracle then?” but there came the lunch break for the rescue of the panel. I did know the answer on how to get natural followers and fans even for the startup businesses. But who shares the secrets

The social media discussion panel ended with a great quote from Jayan Narayanan, of CSS CORP that “Facebook is the second famous word in this planet that starts with F and ends in K”.

Post Coverage

The afternoon session of the summit moved into the most anticipated topic of “Mobile Marketing”. I was quite looking forward to this session because mobile marketing trend is on the rise today and it was Shiv Kumar Mudaliar, Business Head, Uninor delivering the presentation. Here is the complete coverage of the topics discussed

How mobile will change the way we think, interact & engage – in marketing, in social settings, in relationships – Mobile technologies that are shaping this change?

Mobile phones have transformed into much more than just being a gadget used to talk. Mobiles have transformed from being audio to great visual. With the high res screens, people out there value the visual capabilities of the phone more than audio communication. So with mobile phones being used for visual stuff, the opportunities to advertise and market your products/ services is widely open. The improvement of the mobile phone screens and the very easy navigation are the factors shaping the change in mobile marketing.

Mobile marketing technology over the next 5 years

As of now, the spectrum limitations are holding back mobile companies like Uninor from maximizing the effectiveness of the mobile marketing campaigns that needs data transfer. For example, due to the limitations of data transfer in India, it is hard to perform mobile marketing strategies such as in game/ application advertisements. However, the spectrum limitations and the hurdle of unlimited data transfer would be overcome in the next 5 years, giving way to technologies like 4G. This would certainly replace the conventional marketing to a great extend

Mobile TV advertising – a breakthrough for advertisements via the mobile channel?

Mobile TV is gaining popularity each day. In fact with great media capabilities and the ability to produce perfect picture and sound on the move, the conventional television would soon be forgotten. Once the mobile TV blooms, the Mobile TV advertising would be the focus of more than 95% of the businesses. However, Mobile TV advertising has to overcome the limitation of spectrum and data plans.

As a conclusion of the session, the only mobile marketing strategy that holds good for now is text message advertising and prerecorded voice calls.

Post Session Questions
In India, though the mobile phone usage is high, in rural areas, people are still unaware of reading an SMS. So what is the reach of sms advertising?

Shiv Kumar agreed this fact and states; this is where the voice calls come into play. The prerecorded calls would be in local languages covering the rural market while the SMS advertising would be used in rest of the part of the world.
When asked about the success rate of Uninor’s own marketing campaigns, Shiv Kumar doesn’t have a solid answer to support the effectiveness of the campaigns. Most of the consumers consider the SMS ads and the voice calls a nuisance. However, with the data limitations gone, mobile marketing would have a great future. Till then we trust that startups and internet based business should stick to conventional SEO and social media marketing

“According to Shiv Kumar of Uninor, the current situation of the mobile industry is that, we have lots of airplanes and no airports.

Conclusion of the summit had it right. Some of the main points were:

• Listen to the customers to keep the happy. Social media is the best platform to listen and respond to the clients. Never hide negative opinions online, instead, tackle with supportive information and gain more reputation. One pretty example given was “Dell” hiding some of the negative comments instead of resolving it and causing an irreparable damage to their brand online
• Engage, interact and be active in the social media with informative tweets, facebook posts and linkedin groups
• Prepare for mobile marketing option as it is expected to boom in the next 5 years with the spectrum limitations gone.

Join us at “Bangalore Strategic Marketing Summit 2011″ (Sponsored By SubmitINme)

The strategic marketing event at Chennai had its main focus on regular activity in social media sites and social networks along with gaining presence in Google, yahoo and bing. Though the importance of search engine visibility and social media marketing were discussed a lot, there wasn’t much information or discussion of how to dominate the search engines and highlight in the social media. It must be the fact that nobody is ready to share the successful marketing strategies or most of the social media marketing and search engine marketing done today are just because somebody else (competitor) does it. No matter what the fact is, SubmitINme would be sharing all the successful internet marketing strategies and social media marketing solutions at the “Bangalore – Strategic Marketing Summit” on November 26th 2011. Join us at the event to know about dominating the search engine results and building an active presence in social media.