Bharat Khatri - Xaxis https://www.xaxis.com The outcome media company Tue, 06 Jul 2021 12:56:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.2 https://www.xaxis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-xaxis-favicon-32x32.png Bharat Khatri - Xaxis https://www.xaxis.com 32 32 Five Ways Marketers Can Up Their Game https://www.xaxis.com/five-ways-marketers-can-up-their-game/ Thu, 02 May 2019 09:00:29 +0000 https://staging.lively-rate.flywheelsites.com/?p=93801
Bharat Khatri headshot
Originally published on AdAge India

The digital age has transformed marketing possibly more than any other business function, through changing customer preferences and the shift in power from the business to the consumer.
Today’s marketers need to focus the business on the customer, but must also understand and drive the marketing technology stack and analytics. They need to be creative leaders through countless channels, all while organising the business behind their revenue growth and innovation agenda.
Here are five ways marketers can up their game.

1. If you’re not accountable, then you’re a cost

Marketing needs not only to show that their activities provide a return on investment (ROI), but must also make a better contribution to the organisation’s strategic goals. Incorporating the company strategy into plans is key in establishing marketing’s value to a business, although it can be a challenge to prove their activity is having an impact, often due to the fragmented nature of digital platforms leading to poor data analysis.

2. Let the data speak

Data and analytics are driving huge shifts in marketing today. Marketers must learn how to leverage data to determine the right strategy. They need to understand what value they’re trying to get from their data – data shouldn’t be an objective, but should be fundamental to marketer efforts.
Reaching the right user at the right time with the appropriate message in the right place and motivating them to an appropriate action presents a major and important challenge for companies. At Xaxis, we have always believed in using a data-droven approach to help brands make their marketing message a welcome occurrence rather than an unwanted intrusion.
In order to meet this challenge, companies need to analyse potential and existing customers’ interests and behaviours and accurately target users based on this information. Data has become the cornerstone of modern marketing.
To get the most from their data and analytics experts, marketers should make additional investments in the tools that support their real-time customer-facing efforts, namely web personalisation, and marketing automation.

3. Package your marketing plan

Marketers need to have a broad insight into the whole of the rest of the business — sales, engineering, finance, etc. They need to understand and internalise the practices and priorities of all those other teams and then package it all together in the marketing plan. To deepen such partnerships, marketing leaders should speak the language of their peers across the C-suite, translating marketing concepts and insights into terms that align them with other stakeholders’ objectives.
Marketing leaders who can do it effectively are better primed to contribute to organisation-wide long- and short-term objectives, as well as to secure the support of the top management team.
To become influential, marketers may need to position their customer insights and goals not as marketing objectives per se but as ways to help their C-suite colleagues reach their own goals.

4. Getting started with AI

AI is the game-changer for marketing today. By handling repetitive and rote functions at massive scale and speed, AI can augment people, elevating marketers to stay focused on the higher level work - the strategies that lead to the business outcomes they want their marketing to achieve.
AI’s most powerful capabilities are unearthed when brand marketers feed in first-party data. Businesses with strong customer touch-points such as retailers, restaurants, and car dealerships tend to have rich data on who their customers are, their buying habits and preferences, their locales, what incentives might motivate them, and more.
The hard work comes in getting hold of it all — from CRM systems, websites, POS databases, frequent shopper cards, and other online and offline sources — normalizing it, and figuring out how to get it to interact properly when mashed together.
Marketers could work with data scientists and engineers to get them to help use data to answer questions, then apply machine learning to better hone in on goals.

5. Have a voice at the table

According to Darell Sansom, CMO AXA UK, “Data is useless without the ability to analyse it and gain insight that lets you talk to the right customers at the right time and makes you more likely to be effective.”
There is therefore an increasing demand for marketing people who not only have all the soft skills, but who can also understand the data, the analytics, and the technology that underpins it all. There is also a growing need for marketing and IT departments to work more collaboratively within a business.
Marketers have to learn how to use data science for their work on a global scale, and they need to position themselves for success, regardless of how accessible data scientists may be on any given day. 91% of senior marketers indicated that customer data was essential to making decisions. With that said, we are undoubtedly seeing the immense value of marketers who know and understand data science. But the question is, how much data know-how is necessary?

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]]> Programmatic Technology is Transforming the Retail Experience https://www.xaxis.com/programmatic-technology-is-transforming-the-retail-experience-2/ Mon, 01 Apr 2019 20:36:34 +0000 http://staging.lively-rate.flywheelsites.com/?p=93264
Bharat Khatri headshot
Originally posted on Exchange4Media

It is well known that India’s retail sector is undergoing rapid transformation. Rising household incomes and easy credit are combining to drive a shift to consumerism. Today, the retail industry accounts for more than 10 per cent of India’s GDP and about 8 per cent of the country’s employment.

By 2020, the retail sector is expected to double in value to US$1.3 trillion, up from the current US$672 billion. E-commerce forms a significant part of this growth - the business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market has been forecast to reach US$700bn by 2020, with business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce reaching US$102bn.

What digital brings to the table for retailers

Digital platforms are fundamentally changing the way many businesses work, as they offer the capability of using data to break through traditional boundaries of function and organisation.

For retailers, digital enables opportunities to acquire new customers, increase footfall, add value through better engagement with their existing customers, reduce operational costs and improve employee motivation. Taken together, these benefits are delivering a positive impact on revenues and margins.

Digital technology is driving the re-imagination of the store of the future. Price and quality are no longer strong enough attractors – the rise of online shopping means retailers must work harder to persuade customers to visit their physical stores, and hold their interest once they’re there.

Digital investment is the recipe for retail success

Rapid advances in digital technology are enabling the creation of memorable and personalised in-store experiences for customers at scale. Consumers unquestionably desire such experiences, and businesses are responding by explicitly designing and promoting them. Digital technologies are helping retailers understand consumer needs, provide greater choice (through visual merchandising for example), and help shoppers decide, via innovations like Virtual Trial Rooms.

In India today, one third of all buyers research online before making a purchase. This behaviour is known as ROPO – research online, purchase offline. Smartphones have ignited internet adoption in our country in all areas of life, including evaluating and researching possible purchases. This makes it all the more important for retailers to invest in the digital medium and engage with customers throughout their purchase journey.

At the same time, digital helps retailers reduce costs, increase loyalty and enhance customer service.
In confirmation of these trends in customer expectations and sector competition, a recent forecast says global spending on retail sector technology will grow 3.6 per cent to reach almost $203.6bn in 2019, with similar growth rates for the next two years.

Programmatic for a better retail experience 

Today’s customers expect their shopping experiences to mirror their personal online world. Data defines their online experience, and they expect personalisation in the communications, products, and services they consume. Thus data, and the technology to exploit it, is crucial in attracting customers through personalising purchase journeys.

The most effective way to leverage the vast quantity of data on consumer behaviour, now available to the retailer, is programmatic advertising.

Programmatic is, after all, about handling massive amounts of data and then using that data to drive real results. That meshes perfectly with Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is about the intelligent handling of these mountains of data to ever-greater effect.  AI is particularly well-suited to help programmatic advertising fulfill its promise and drive real outcomes for brands.

By combining retail data with the existing data sets on online behaviour, programmatic will have access to a much more complete picture of who the consumers are and how they behave online. One key thing it will let us do is know more precisely when a consumer has actually become a customer, or has completed a purchase. It then becomes possible to stop placing ads for the original offer and instead switch to up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Also with the advent of third-party deterministic data sets like telecom use, TV viewership,  purchase habits, insurance and classifieds, programmatic is advancing. By using AI it is able to predict the customer’s purchase cycle – when the next purchase will be made.

Path to purchase In the new world of retail, the complexity of a path to purchase becomes increasingly evident. According to a June 2018 report, a quarter of India’s population were digital shoppers last year - a number forecast to rise to 41.6 per cent by 2022 - and when they visit a physical store, they’re using their smartphones to look up product reviews, compare prices, and find coupons. Theirs is a cross-channel, multi-platform journey built around retail, e-commerce, and mobile-commerce omni-channel experience. And it is programmatic marketing that allows retailers to reach audiences across all these channels with precision.  Categories such as automotive, consumer durables, jewellery, electronics and real estate have to map their consumers’ journey across channels, since most buyers are following the ROPO pattern – so omni-channel engagement is essential, throughout the purchase journey.

Retailers also now have the power to engage with consumers using interactive banners and videos as part of an integrated marketing campaign, through targeted location-based advertising on mobile devices and Digital Out Of Home (DOOH) screens – and measure the impact of such a campaign on store visits. Xaxis Places is a solution for Indian retailers that closes the loop between digital activity and physical store visits.

Xaxis Places

Retailers must learn how to navigate this non-linear, twisting and turning path. The reward for mastering this challenge is access to a consumer who is ready to become a customer, and a customer who is conditioned to become a loyal store and brand supporter, with enhanced lifetime value.

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Outcome Media Report?

We surveyed almost 5,000 marketers across 16 key global markets and unearthed some fascinating insights into how the industry thinks about digital media success measurement and its priorities for this year.

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]]> How do I reach out to a billion people? https://www.xaxis.com/how-do-i-reach-out-to-a-billion-people/ Tue, 04 Dec 2018 10:00:13 +0000 https://staging.lively-rate.flywheelsites.com/?p=90671

This article was originally posted on Afaqs

Is India's consumer audience too big? Too difficult to segment and impact? These are questions that keep local and international brand managers awake at night. But let's look at the reality and how it's changing to the benefit of advertisers and consumers alike.

India continues to be the fastest-growing major economy in the world with an average annual growth rate of 7.2 per cent. The World Bank sees India maintaining this ranking for the next three years (source: LiveMint).
Bharat Khatri

India's growing middle class

What this exceptional growth is producing is a rapidly expanding middle class. A 2016 study found that the middle class more than doubled in size between 2004 and 2012 to 600 million people and the growth shows no signs of slowing down.
Such a burgeoning population, awash with disposable income, presents brands with both opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is obvious - hundreds of millions of consumers ready to open their wallets and catch up with their free-spending cousins in more advanced Western countries.
It is not surprising then, that India is one of the fastest growing advertising markets in the world. And the country's digital advertising market is likely to grow 30 per cent on a year-on-year basis to 12,046 crore rupees in 2018 (source: ET).
Consumers are increasingly finding online ads informative and helpful and advertising on mobile is considered to be innovative and able to convey brand messages clearly.

Internet penetration

The growth in digital advertising is a natural result of the rise in Internet penetration - a key marker of the growing sophistication of India's middle class. There are almost 500 million internet users in India, a figure that is expected to jump to 700 million by 2025, according to a study by Microsoft. This has been driven, largely, by the availability of high-speed connectivity across the country and it is only poised to grow faster.
India is already the world's second-largest telecommunications market. But the Government is not resting on its laurels - it is working to digitally connect the rural and remote regions in the country and has decided a new affordable tariff structure with the principle of - the more you use, the less you pay (source: ibef.org).

The complex market

Thus the opportunity is vast - huge numbers of consumers, right across the country, armed with digital devices, tech-savvy and ready to spend. The challenge, however, lies in the fact that the market is anything but homogenous. At its base are 22 different languages to which must be added the rural-urban divide and six different metropolitan areas, as well as ethnic and cultural differences and fast-changing consumer preferences.

The traditional approach of mass advertising is simply not effective for brand advertisers on a digital platform. The advertiser's objective has always been to capture the maximum number of impressions - quantity over quality - which is why TV and print advertising continue to hog the lion's share of the marketing mix.

Technology helps brands speak to consumers

What this approach overlooks is the incredible opportunity digital presents for brands to directly reach and speak to the whole colourful panoply of India's market. The key that unlocks this potential goldmine is technology and it is the combination of data and algorithms deployed by technology that will enable advertisers to place their brands in front of exactly the right target audience, on the right device.
The technology we are talking about is Artificial Intelligence (AI) - not the Hollywood version that thrilled us with the Terminator and the Matrix, but the power behind our voice-activated assistants, autonomous vehicles and many industrial processes in factories that we never see.
In advertising, AI is being put to work to in a variety of ways to improve effectiveness and here is where we can see the benefits to brands that want to reach a tightly defined audience with precisely relevant messages. It is being used to find and define audiences, refine creative messaging, generate audience personas, and develop bidding strategies that optimise for clients' stated goals.

AI can transform advertising strategy

For now, most advertisers aren't taking advantage of the full capabilities of AI - they are typically deploying it only to achieve simple goals. But AI can do so much more like extract discrete metrics for a given ad's performance. When the many applications of AI are combined and deployed in unison, they can deliver a significant transformation in digital advertising strategy that drives noticeably superior results.
What AI can do, in terms of refining digital strategy, is enhance the focus on the ultimate objective - sales. Traditional media strategies use a variety of metrics to identify target segments and tailor messages to them via medium, platform and screen and, when possible, factor in behaviours and locale.
Audience segments based on such characteristics can be highly effective, but the problem is that they can't reach many potential purchasers who don't meet the standard definitions.

Finding customers, not just segments

By contrast, artificial intelligence algorithms - correctly instructed - can help optimise marketing plans toward better sales metrics. The key insight is that digital media strategies that use AI to identify and locate prospects without bias or assumptions will find customers, not just segments.
The future of digital advertising that addresses every element of India's huge and complex market lies in audience-based buying using software algorithms that analyse context and behaviour online and artificial intelligence tools that optimise the digital media buying process.

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