Why Every Company Should Hire an In-house Digital Marketing Expert

 We all know the story of ‘Seven blind men and an Elephant’ as an excellent fable of how personally attached perspectives can deceit us from the bigger picture; the reality. Your brand’s digital strategy can end up being another similar story, unless if you act soon to appoint a qualified enough person to manage this bigger realities surrounding your brand.

When digital marketing is new to a company, they tend to be in a state of uncertainty about where to put their digital ad money they set aside in the annual marketing communications budgets. They know digital is important, they know social is growing, and they’ve heard that search marketing can be really effective. Yet still, most companies will not have a faintest of a clue on where to begin their journey on digital and social media marketing.

This uncertainty opens up a loophole in your entire approach to digital marketing, leaving other organizations (who always in the look for how to grow their business) and self-proclaimed experts to sneak in and exploit your ‘fear of being left out in the digital party’.

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Cheapest Android Phones in Sri Lanka – 2013 Updated Version

About year and half ago, I wrote a blog post about cheapest Android smartphones in Sri Lankan market at that time. I received a good response for that post, and still it is one of the most popular posts on my blog. I noticed, the models and prices I’ve listed in that post were bit outdated as of now, so I decided to put together another list of cheapest Android phone models in Sri Lankan market.

Criteria
Last time I took “Priced below Rs.35,000” as the sole criteria for being “cheap”. This time too, I will keep that criteria but will add another qualifier this time. The new qualifying criteria is, only the Android models with Android 4.0+ (ICS or higher) will be included in this list. The reason is, there are whole lot of cheap Android phones circulating in the market, under Rs.15,000/- but most of them are with older versions of Android like Gingerbread or Honeycomb.

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Re-Targeting Your Customers on Facebook and Google Display Network

Image Credit lexity.com

Remarketing (or Re-Targeting) is the hot topic among digital marketers now days. If you haven’t heard about remarketing before, it’s the simple idea of delivering a customized advertisement at a visitor to your website. This usually happens targeting them on 3rd party websites they visit.

Let’s take this example. You visit Agoda.com website looking for Hotels in Singapore, and you exit the site after seeing couple of hotels in Singapore city. The next day you visit a different website, you will suddenly realize Agoda has targeted you an ad with “Hot deals in Sigapore”. How do they do this? They are using this ad delivery technique called ‘retargeting’.

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Education 2.0 – How Sri Lankan Universities Can Best Use Technology in Education

Suranga Connecting From Sydney

Yesterday, I had the opportunity of being the coordinator of what could be the first ever live web-based lecture at the faculty of management, of the Sri Jayawardenepura University (I may be wrong to say this is the first, but you are free to correct me in the comments section). It was a live lecture on the topic Search Engine Marketing, conducted by Suranga Pryashantha, (currently based in Sydney Australia). For about one and half hours, Suranga delivered his lecture over a Webinar connection, and at the end of the session a direct Q&A session was conducted, with students posting their questions at Suranga over a Facebook group and Suranga responding to the questions directly on the webinar.

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Fake Accounts on Facebook - Does it Really Matter?

In several client meetings I’ve attended, and occasionally at some social media workshops and conferences, I’m hearing this common sentiment of ‘fake Facebook Profiles’ over and over again. Many marketing professionals raise their eyebrows first, when they hear that there are 1.5 Facebook users in Sri Lanka, and their next reaction is denial. “No… that cannot be… Maybe most of them are just fake accounts”.

I’ve noticed, in many occasions I deliver lectures or webinars on this topics, one of the most popular questions asked is “now, what percentage of those Facebook accounts are actually real?”.

While I agree on the fact that there can be a certain percentage of fake or inactive accounts within that 1.5million count, but my point is this isn’t the right question to ask! Come on… You know the number is 1.5 million, you know it’s going to grow at least by another 500,000 accounts within next 8 months. So, why waste time by trying to perfect your data?

Let’s say that there are a certain percentage of fake profiles on Facebook, but you wouldn’t say it’s 50% or at least even 30%, right? How many of us are questioning the TV reach statistics published by various market research firms, before we make decisions to spend millions on those TV channels? Any brand manager (and their seniors) in Sri Lanka will easily approve a media budget of over 5 Million rupees, without any hesitation, solely just dependent on ‘estimated’ ratings and reach statistics published by these research agencies. So why we are so worried about 7% or 10% fake accounts on Facebook when it comes to a decision of spending even less than 1% of the amount you spend on TV?

Forget about the silly questions of fake accounts vs. real accounts, but here are some of the important questions you need to ask yourself before spending even a rupee on Facebook.

1. Can I really reach my target audience on Facebook?

or, am I going on Facebook just because everyone else is doing so?

2. Do I have a clear call to action for my campaign?

Unlike your TV campaign, Facebook ads won’t just build passive awareness. People can actively engage with your ad. So, what do you offer them to engage with?

3. How am I going to re-engage them?

Do you have a compelling Facebook page with attractive content to keep your fans coming back? If you have, you don’t have to go for another paid ad campaign next time, to reach them (or at least you will have to spend less than 50% of your original budget).

If you don’t have clear answers for above three questions, it doesn't even matter even if 100% of the Facebook accounts are real. The money you are going to spend on Facebook ads will simply go down the drain, and you wouldn't even notice a difference between putting that money into your TV budget or to Facebook.