The Future of Digital Marketing in India By Deepak Kanakaraju | ResellerClub CloudBazaar

So today we are going to talk about the future of digital marketing in India and very excited to be here very excited to be in Mumbai and today I have a lot of interesting stats which is going to change your perspective of how you see digital marketing in the context of India so before we get started how many of you are here from my email list and from the digital marketing group fantastic glad to see so many people here on my invitation so let's get started so before we get into having a look at digital marketing and the little marketing state in India so don't worry about taking pictures of the screen I will be sharing this presentation on the group and on the email list so before we get started I would like to tell you a little bit about how I got into digital marketing. I think many of you know already but we'll just quickly go through because this also kind of sets the stage for how the digital marketing scenario has been changing in India and how we got here and where we we're so before that small thing how many of you remember this so that's how I got started and 2005 got my first Internet connection which was 506.6 kbps internet dial-up connection and how many of you hear how browsers internet on the dial-up connection pretty much everyone right, fantastic! and those of you who have not heard this sound you know you come from a different era we are like the older generation but yeah so the sound of the internet and that's when I got started I used to browse the Internet used to wake up at 5:00 a.m. because before 6 o clock it's cheaper because you had to pay for the Internet as well as the phone call because the internet came through a local call right so that's how I got started working on Yahoo Messenger hotmail and just being very inquisitive on how this whole thing works fortunately had a Pentium 3 PC at that time which I was using 2006 I created my first HTML website and that was to go ahead and so we will have a video of the entire talk being uploaded on YouTube as well so no need to trouble yourself taking a video I created a website for my dad's construction company called DB builders and learned some basic HTML registered my first domain name on Yahoo, configured the name servers and put up a HTML file and at that time if you remember we had a bunch of scripts where you could go ahead and you know put a script where if you move the mouse the name of the site will follow like a snake so I was playing around with things like that, right now nobody uses that it's very cheesy but you know if it is like Christmas you know you put a script and you have like a snowfall on the website so that's what I was doing at that time 2007 I started trying out affiliate marketing and started making some money.

Tthe first $25 I made was from commission junction and how many of you remember chip and digit magazines many people so I used to buy cheap and rigid magazines more for the CDs and and the free games free trial games it used to give but then one magazine was lying around I was reading and I learnt about Google Adsense for the first time and then I was like oh maybe you can like you know do something online and make money and and that's how it started and at that time my dream was to buy a motor razor phone because that was the iPhone at that time you know I had a Nokia w1 double G row so I thought that if I end up making $300 from Adsense I could buy myself a motorized phone so that's how I started I created a blogspot blog.

I learned about blogs created a blogspot blog signed up for Adsense put my adsense code and I knew that you cannot click on your own ads so I went to different IP addresses you know ask my friends to click ask no clicked it from my school system and everything and obviously it got banned after it reached hundred dollars from that time I was trying to you know make some money online and I got placed in an IT company in Bangalore at that time they gave me an offer for 2.75 lakhs per annum but they did not call me until 2009 2008 I graduated 2008.

I started my first motorcycle blog bike advice Norton and bike advised Wharton I basically installed a wordpress blog signed up for another Google Adsense account on my dad's name put adsense codes and properly started blogging because I had plenty of free time after graduation and until 2009 I I did not have anything to do I was at my home did not have any responsibilities in terms of financial responsibility so I kept blocking I wrote my first article on August 6 2008 you know more than 10 years back now thinking about it so I wrote a find it about article this this was a motorcycle from from my dad's friends showroom.

So I just took a test ride took a picture published an article and that's where that's where proper digital marketing started and that's where I started you know learning digital marketing at that time it was not even called digital marketing it was just called internet marketing the term did not come into the corporate side and as I kept blogging for six months some some traffic started coming in good traffic start coming in.

I put Adsense codes and i was making at least comfortably two hundred three hundred dollars a month from my blog just using Google Adsense. I was ranking for all the keywords for the different motorcycle terms like Royal Enfield 350 CC review and all the review terms I was ranking and since I had a very good online presence I got an invitation from China to visit a motorcycle trade exhibition and this person who is standing next to me she was responsible for inviting journalists from different countries. She invited journalists like the editor-in-chief of motorcycle com from US and big publications across the globe from India I got invited because probably there were other motorcycle publications like auto car bike India but they did not have an online presence and since I had an online presence and since I optimized my blog well for the search engines I got invited and I had a completely sponsored trip to China.

It was an amazing experience the first time I experienced the power of Internet you know going beyond sitting at home and trying to do something and making money and when I got the invitation it was like Chinese character subject line and it said we will provide a roundtrip ticket and and everything and I thought it was spam I almost deleted it but I replied it anyway and and then they sent me the flight tickets and it turned out to be real and I had a wonderful experience in China at a very young age where I also know one pretty much so this is editor-in-chief of motorcycle comm if anyone is into motorcycles you might know him he is very popular on YouTube still till till today he reviews all the Ducati sent BMWs so and then I got opportunity to test ride Chinese motorcycles Chinese food and everything 2011.

I clocked thirteen point seven million page views on my blog 4.4 like unique users on interior and this is just doing nothing kept publishing kept publishing two articles a day three articles a day and just on a wordpress blog nothing else sitting at home I had for you freelance writers as well and all of us used to just keep publishing keep publishing and and we used to get like 20 to 30 thousand sessions on a single day that's how crazy it was 2012 we went to the Auto Expo we got media pass for the Auto Expo and I published an article and I mean I published like 1213 articles on a single day where a lot of new motorcycles were launched and we clocked 46,000 sessions on a single day and till today this is like the highest number I have seen in analytics for one of my own web properties so so the idea and I'm bringing here is that the Internet has kind of gone into an evolution and I had an early mover advantage at that time had a YouTube channel and published published YouTube videos just went to the Auto Expo took videos of motorcycles and just published it on YouTube.

It used to get like you know lakhs off use still today it is getting it is having a lot of subscribers and I ended up selling bike advice in 2012 because I wanted to move on to other things this this blogging journey was very good I got a good offer for an exit I sold to a person in Delhi and I wanted to move on because I at that time the competition started catching up all the offline publications they started having online presence and I was not a registered journalist with like you know you had to be a you have to have a PIB card press Information Bureau card to be a registered journalist I was not a registered journalist and the blogging space started getting too crowded so I thought beyond this it is difficult to grow the site and I was also not able to sell anything on my site directly to my blog readers so I had to advertise other motorcycles on my site.

And the only source of revenue was Google Adsense, it kind of started saturating at around $2,000 a month in revenue with Google Adsense and it did not go beyond that I was not able to grow beyond that and I decided that either I raise money for this site and grow the site or or I had a good offer so I I took the offer and I sold the blog and 2013 I started working as a digital marketer started blogging about digital marketing I started my blog distill the perk which many of you know here twenty thirty to twenty sixteen work with many companies as a digital marketer and 2016 to now I run the digital marketing agency called pixel track and now everything we do has come under the pixel track brand and we have online digital marketing courses so how many of you have subscribe to one of my courses, okay I hope the courses are useful what do you think yes so did a TEDx talk on blogging you should definitely check it out it has almost 200,000 views now and we do digital marketing corporate training we did one for Mercedes Benz recently and these are the clients that we are working with and we have worked with in the past as part of our digital marketing agency please join the learn digital marketing group.

If you have not already so this is a largest digital marketing group in India right now on Facebook just Google learn digital marketing and you would be able to see the group there so so enough of my story I just wanted to give you a short introduction about where I come from and how I got into the digital marketing industry so that you can relate to it and maybe provide a little bit of motivation as well so I'm a civil engineer I am not a techie I am NOT a coder or a programmer and I I took civil engineering because my dad has a construction company but there was not much work and somehow just by trying to make money online trying to make money with blogs I got into the whole digital marketing industry and today there is quite quite good traction but I've completely enjoyed what I have done and the India has come a long way in terms of digital marketing and that's what we are going to have a look at we are going to kind of have like a zoomed out view on digital marketing because today we don't have enough time or we don't have enough bandwidth to talk about adverts Facebook Ads SEO and all those things because that is something I talk about in my blog.

You can read my blog you can check out my courses so I thought instead of going into the nitty gritties of the actual digital marketing thing which is too much talked about what I observed was not many people are talking about the zoomed out view and being almost like an evangelist for Digital Marketing in India it might be surprising to hear it from me but I am also going to talk about traditional marketing and I am going to talk about the reach of digital marketing as a whole from a zoomed out perspective so this is how Digital has evolved in the past ten years 2005 when I got started and when we were in the dial-up era the internet penetration in India was 2.4 percent it's very less you know fewers before 2005 it was as low as 1% so whoever has been on dial-up internet consider yourself very lucky because we were a very small percentage of India who had access to Internet and and we got started from there and today we have come up to Susie's till 2017 we don't have stats for 2018 but let's assume we now have around 40 to 42 percent of the Indian population having internet access and this is a great thing and obviously many players have been a contributing factor to this success including credits to internet companies like BSNL who actually got dial-up internet even to tier to tier 3 cities and today we have Geo and we have a very different telecom industry in India which is much different from all over the globe and because of that we have almost come up to like 40% internet penetration very developed countries european countries have achieved as much as 90 to 95% u.s. has around 85 percent the last time I checked.

So we have still a long way to go and that is that is the idea that we are going to get clarity on today so this is how the Internet access is split you have young men college students contributing to more than 50% of the internet usage at the same time all these statistics looks very nice but we should not get overexcited and and a lot of startups that a lot of investors have got over excited about this whole internet wave in India and even though we say 40% of the Indian population has access to Internet it is much less than that it is one-fifth which actually matters and I will tell you why and when you think about that the opportunity is still still even greater in the next 10 20 years so this will give you some clarity so what is the real size of the market for digital in India is what we are going to have a look at and this is a very interesting statistic I pulled out from a medium article written by a venture capital investor and he kind of did some analysis see what is the real market size out there we say that ok India is a second largest country in the world in terms of population we have a billion people and 40% of the people have internet this is a very high-level stat and sometimes to be honnest it is also a bit misleading.

So India 1 India - India 3 is a categorization to look at India from a different perspective because India is a very different country in most of the countries you have one language throughout the country and India is a country with so many different languages and to connect all of us together and because of the British influence we have learned English and all of you here know English but we actually fall into a very small subset within our country called India one and that is how this particular statistician has categorized it and to get a clearer perspective what we are going to do instead we are going to compare India 1 India - India 3 with different countries so basically think about 3 different countries within India.

Now let us look at India 1 so India 1 has around 23 to 25 million households and if you consider around four to five people in every household the total population of India one is only 110 million which is actually less than 10% of our country's population around 80% of India one lives in tier 1 cities and they can communicate in English they can understand English they can use apps and websites where English is there so the per capita income of this category is around Silex per annum and it's not the minimum it is the average so if you are earning 10 lakhs 20 lakhs per annum and then there are enough people earning like 2 lakhs per annum 1.5 lakhs per annum average is 5 lakhs per annum and the GDP of this segment is 1 trillion dollars and when you look at this segment of India and when you look at what country is similar to that we have Mexico we have 130 million population 1.1 trillion dollars total total GDP and we have nine thousand three hundred dollars per capita income, so most of these startups that you see today including let's say Ola Flipkart Amazon and whoever mostly operates with an English interface and even if you are doing something if you are working in an organization whatever product or service that you are focusing on or if you have your own startup where you are having a product or service you are not actually targeting a country with a population of a billion people and and who have that where there are 400 to 500 million Internet users you are actually targeting only around 100 to 110 million and think about being in making a country like Mexico is where you are because India 2 1 India 3 there is something called the English tax where they don't have English proficiency and you are not able to actually reach that market at all and this clarity is very important to have the right strategy then when we are doing so because people did not get these numbers right early on a lot of investors when the whole internet wave started happening got a little bit overexcited also.

So if you look at Mexico and if you look at India the Mexico's total start-up venture capital market versus India you can imagine that India is obviously over invested in startups and if you can put a number to it how much do you think it is can anyone throw a number anyone like 2 X 3 X Phi X what do you think it is 3 X so it's 22 x imagine India 1 is actually smaller than Mexico but Indian market is 22 times over-invested than Mexico when it comes to start-up venture capital and today over like too much digital India like you know people got too excited so you know my job is to actually you know being an evangelist of digital marketing is not to expand a life you know I want to get back to reality I want to see now how digital is actually operating so when you look at India - India - also has a population of around 100 210 million but here the per capital income is just three thousand dollars and when you look at the most of the India one people eighty percent of this India one population who can communicate proficiently in English basically all of us you know we live in a country within our country and basically all of us live in tier 1 cities probably we can fit ourselves into like the top 10 cities in India and there is a huge amount of population which is supporting this India one who are like our auto alas our security the vegetable vendor outside and a good percentage of them actually fit inside India - so India - has a population of like let's say one not four million but the per capita income average is only around 1.5 to 2 lakhs per annum and here there is a good internet penetration as well where you can see our auto driver he does not know English but he can use an app on his Android phone and he listens to music so actually fall under India to the India to alone.

If you take it as a separate country it is around the size of Philippines when you look at the GDP and the per capita income and then we have the real India the real India where you have one point around 1.1 billion of the population who are not living in tier 1 cities it is more like sub-saharan Africa excluding South Africa with a GDP of 1 trillion and and the per capita income is as low as 80 thousand to 1 lakh average and and that is India 3 so when you look at so this is your typical India to the the India 2 which kind of lies within India 1 and it has a whole different strategy you need to have if you are using digital marketing to reach this market right so when you when you look at India 2 so there are a lot of startups now focusing on India - so for example there is an app called share chat how many of you know share chat very few people probably like less than 10 percent of the people who are sitting here know about share chat but share chat is like whatsapp if you install share chat you can check it out today on your Android or on the app store or on the Play Store download share chat see what it is once you open it.

It's like whatsapp but for non-english speaking population there is no option of English in share jet you can select Hindi Marathi Tamil Malayalam some 20 different languages are available there is an app called ok credit ok credit is a Y Combinator startup and nobody knows about ok credit again this app is focused on India too so what I am saying is that there is this huge huge opportunity in India to that nobody is looking at and when you look at the startups like share chat and ok credit more often than not one of the founders of these startups actually comes from India too and they have done into like you know IITs or I am from a tier 2 city so they understand that market very well and there is still a huge untapped market when it comes to vernacular languages and the non-english population which is India - and this is the growth of Internet users versus mobile internet from 2012 to 2016 so these statistics are a little bit you know ten to twenty percent discrepancy is there from every source but by 2016 there are like 462 million Internet users so let's approximate at 500 million Internet users so here you see there is a huge growth of mobile Internet towards the end because of things like geo and and all the internet access coming in and this orange line that you see orange bar that you see these desktop internet uses.

My approximation is that 20% of the Internet users have desktops approximately hundred million out of the 500 million so anybody who has a desktop computer or a laptop computer mostly would fall under India one category so either anybody here who does not have a desktop or laptop you access Internet only on mobile we have only two people right so pretty much most of us here are categorized into India one we can communicate on English with English and and this is the target market for wherever you are working or whether you are having a startup this is the target market that we are talking about so India is similar to Mexico with metrics that matter for digital and here is a little bit of a zoomed in comparison with India and Mexico you have 110 million and 129 million population number of households is around the same car owner 32 million and 26 million you have a number of credit card users 37 million and 30 million Wi-Fi households 18 18 million and 15 million so so it's very important to understand that if you are having a product or service whom are you really targeting don't think about the total market size as 500 million or a billion people it's not the reality you are targeting a very niche segment which is less than 10% of the population in India english-speaking has laptop or desktop has access to Wi-Fi and even out of that you have only around 30 percent of the people who actually have credit cards so this is what you are actually targeting and as long as you keep these numbers real and whether you throw this numbers in a job interview or whether you throw it to an investor or if you are raising money for your startup  this is as real as it can get so India one will go from Mexico to Brazil around 210 million households in the next decade so a bunch of people who end up learning English who are like right now young who are in college and everyone will kind of come under the india1 category in the next 10 to 20 years but even in the next 10 to 20 years we we will not actually see a total market size of more than 210 million.

If you want to reach the rest of the market you need to go vernacular languages completely you need to actually understand the market go actually into tier 2 cities see who the customer is see what the opportunities are there and that's when you will be able to go ahead and actually penetrate this market like right now when you look at the education market you see there is a lot of vernacular language related courses and things are coming up and you can actually end up creating a billion dollar company not even targeting at India one just go vernacular languages you know there is so much opportunity there and people are not going to learn English overnight you have the market out there and nobody is touching it and it is so surprising that every business owner I know all of you know generally the kind of population we have here everybody is just going ahead and fighting for this very small less than 10 percent India one category and the market is now getting like too competitive to a level where it's actually not even economically profitable to go ahead and try to advertise online the unit economics are not working you know the Flipkart's and violas and the Amazons of the world have basically over invested here that it's difficult to penetrate the market so here we are not even looking at digital marketing we are not even looking at marketing we are actually looking at the market first so if you want to do marketing before you do marketing you need to understand your market and that's what we are doing here so that that's that's one of the things i had as a focus for today.

Where we look at the real market and then we think about marketing how to reach these people how to communicate and then you think about digital marketing like for example share chat has an advertising platform nobody is talking about it in the India one right they have a very heavy advertising platform and a lot of FMCG products and a lot of products are being on platforms like share chat so scope of reaching customers for a digital medium so

let's look at how how do we reach these customers so we have Facebook users so 241 million total Facebook users and out of the 241 million users if you just target india1 around 70 to 80 percent of India 1 you will be able to reach where Facebook then you will be able to reach India 2 and a little bit of India 3 as well so India to mostly has mobile only internet

access and they have a little bit sophisticated mobile something around 10 to 20,000 range for example if you go in and hola to that guy exactly fits under India to but you look at India 3 they have more like feature phones five thousand six thousand rupee Android phones they can still access Facebook right so that is why Facebook has 241 million Internet users there is a stat which says YouTube reaches 80% of the

Internet users in India so we have around 500 million Internet users in India YouTube can reach 400 million of them and when you look at India one around 70 to 80 percent of India 1 you will be able to reach where YouTube but you will be able to reach a lot of other India 2 and India 3 as well but that has to be regional languages not very English if you run YouTube

ads with regional languages you will be able to touch India too and India 3 so Google has 78 percent share in the search engines so so these are the big digital marketing channels you have Facebook you have YouTube and you have Google search and Google Display Network if you use these three channels pretty much the whole possibility of reaching people buy a digital can be covered so quick recap we have 500 million Internet

users hundred million desktop Internet users with Wi-Fi access and English proficiency so YouTube alone can reach 80 million of the hundred million target which is India 1 and Facebook can approximately 70 million of the hundred million India 1 uses so as entrepreneurs and as marketers whenever you are looking at people around you you know you should you should be able to tell India 1 India 2 or India 3 you know now now now

you can't like take that out of your mind you go and look at an auto voila using like you know mobile phone you know hearing music why are being cap and and using hola okay this guy is India too so you will you will hit it to that mindset so now that we have talked about the actual market numbers the actual market size India 1 India - India 3 and if you are

working for a brand as a marketer and if you are trying to reach a larger audience now traditional comes into play and being an evangelist for digital marketer I there was a time where I used to over evangelize digital marketing thinking that traditional marketing will be dead but let me get back to reality and tell you that we have a huge component in traditional marketing as well until what time we have 5 more

minutes ok so let's let us quickly go through some of the some numbers so Times of India has a readership of less than 10 million people which is 3.2 million circulation so every newspaper has around 3 readers so dynamic Gherkin dynamic Baskar and Times of India they are the three major major newspapers you have so this actually reaches a huge percentage of people across India 1 and traditional still we will Vince in terms

of reach for brand awareness out of the 298 million households 198 million has TV so TV is still a major player when it comes to marketing no matter how popular digital gets TV is not going away and around 198 million actually 2018 statistics from one source says it's 170 197 million so if you look at a readership of around 4 to 5 people with for every TV in every household you can actually reach

the whole of the billion population in India just using TV so so now how I am becoming more of a marketer than a digital marketer because that's marketing like when you call yourself digital marketers when you take the term digital marketing you know be more of the marketer than the digital because digitally is just a medium and we still have other mediums like this so when you look at very big brands come

up in no time like Patanjali and a lot of brands come up you know BCCI is having so much traction you know TV is something that you cannot ignore and now if you have seen the recent news Netflix and Amazon Prime is now coming to Tata Sky TV came to Internet now internet is now coming to TV and and soon you will have a possibility where you can buy advertising slots on TV through

digital to reach the India 2 and India 3 population because people will be like switching on their TV through Tata Sky and watching Netflix there so so India is very different you know you can't just think that you know everybody will have internet everybody will know English and we have a billion people and that's how today's startups work right to obtain television channels India so we don't have much time I will quickly go

through the next few slides you can check it on Wikipedia Sun TV is the largest TV network in Asia and it has a viewership of 100 million Digital Marketing is an engagement medium Digital is actually good when you have complex products and services where customer education has to happen otherwise when it comes to FMCG and products which which are more commoditized you actually don't need digital at all to pass on the message and actually

do advertising and marketing if you have FMCG products advertised on TV you don't even need to touch digital and and it pretty much reaches the whole country so that's how that's how it works right so the funnel based digital marketing approach you have awareness interest desire and action we don't have much time to go through it but look up a ID a model on YouTube and you will learn about this thing and this

is how we create proposals for all our clients we put awareness interest desire and action and we put all the digital marketing channels and we basically say that okay for your brand the blog is going to build awareness the email is going to intensify desire and promote action twitter is going to do interest valla thing Instagram and Facebook will do awareness google cannot do awareness because it's not the top of the funnel it's more

like an inbound marketing medium so this is something we have kind of crystallized over time this is like fancy graphs we actually customized it for every client where we say that okay you have an email list you send out an email list to your blog then someone shares it on social media and then they share it on whatsapp so don't get too serious about it you can just put put a bunch of

arrows all over the place and the client will be impressed so this is not very accurate but just put the arrows where you think for that particular client is going to be relevant so how to monetize your DM skills so we have talked about digital marketing you can do freelance digital marketing work get a digital marketing job or you can start a blog make money with affiliate marketing or selling your own products or

services these are the major three ways that you can monetize your digital marketing skill and I I do teach digital marketing around this as well so quick inspiration so this is more engage I got an offer from more engage for 19 lakhs and you can see that I quit in around March and till now the digital marketing manager position is open and that is how much experience digital marketing managers are actually in demand

and you can see if I search digital marketing manager on LinkedIn you have 986 results and and you have so many companies looking for digital marketers huge opportunity 7 to 10 years experience minimum salaries around 15 to 20 lakhs plus and that's how how hot the industry is in India right now so you should definitely take possibility of working somewhere as a digital marketing manager as a no serious thing if you are into

digital marketing I have a free digital marketing course you can go go to learn digital marketing comm and sign up for my course I have an offer for people who are here today so how many of you have already signed up for digital marketing mastery bundle okay we we have so please mail me at the packet pixel track I have a special offer for you for my next product but for the others

who have not signed up for my mastery bundle you can go to bitly slash cloud Bazaar note down the URL and seven courses worth 16,000 you can get it for two triple nine and that is something you can note down bitly slash cloud Bazaar so you also get seven different certifications from me for course completion this is how the certificate looks so note it down and I will see you on the other side.

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