Digital
Trends to look out for in digital marketing
We, as an industry, are witnessing the upsurge of digital trends and newer technologies YOY. Experiments are being conducted simultaneously to test their effectiveness too, like when the search engine giant Google tested out new approaches (like shopping tab) to enhance customer experience and leverage their buying intent. Even e-commerce players like Amazon have increased priority to the marketplace. PayTM mall and Flipkart also gaining focus on e-commerce marketplace and the trends only seem to be getting better.
The reason behind this: as per reports, digital media spend that stands to be at 12 per cent of complete ad share will inflate to 24 per cent by 2020. And these statistics will be influenced further by the rising smartphone penetration expected to go up to 800 million over the next 10 years. Other involved factors include expansion of artificial intelligence and robotics, customised targeting and a gradual shift from man-made towards automated mediums. The report even suggested that digital advertising would grow to 32 per cent CAGR reaching roughly approximately Rs 19,000 crore by 2020.
So here are the top trends to incorporate into your digital marketing plan in order to make your brand ubiquitous. Before that, one thing more –
Fact: In 2020, the visitor’s patience will decrease further on. 25 per cent of them will most likely abandon their search on your site if it fails to load within a meagre time span of 4 seconds. Therefore, the first and foremost priority for you would be improving the site’s performance for tapping on the below given top trends.
Interacting with individual customers:
Personalisation: The current customer goes to the extent of paying OOT media and music streaming services extra in order to avoid ads. They don’t want to waste even 1 second of their precious time on a generic ad. The solution to this problem is personalised advertising. 90 per cent of target audience has admitted that personalisation held an appeal for them. Even personalised email blasts are found to perform 3X better than their generic counterparts. 2020 will be mostly about getting up close and personal with the target audience.
Private & Customised Messaging: Brands will steadily shift towards the private messaging app. WhatsApp advertising will be one evolution in this direction and similar to WhatsApp other private messaging apps will gain attention too. Even customers are taking their feedback, complaints, queries and appreciations to the DMs of Facebook messenger and Instagram app.
2. Going LIVE & engaging through videos: 2019 was all about videos in the digital marketing arena. So would be 2020. They dominated Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Even a social media video app Tik Tok took the Indian youth segment of Tier 2 & 3 cities by its fascination.
All a testimony to how our audience loves consuming content on video. Seeing this, brands have been increasing their share on digital marketing spends too. Because videos also increase 53X likelihood of getting your website on the first page of search results. And as an improvement on them, the Facebook Live and Instagram Live are where these visitors are spending more of their time. These live videos are watched 3X longer than the videos on the feed because they give the audience an option to ask for information and give feedback in real time.
3. Voice search slowly taking precedence over text search: In 2018, around 28 per cent search queries were being done by voice in India and in the same year, Google revealed that the nation was seeing 270 per cent YOY rise in voice searches.
With Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa already becoming the favourites amongst millennials, digital marketers will need to attune (optimize) their brands’ site for the voice search. The most important change would be involving long-tail keywords to the sites.
4. AR in Social Media: For a long time, VR had hogged all the attention but it is being predicted that soon VR will give way to AR. Digital marketers are already devising strategies around this technology to transform the way brand searches happen and the way a customer experiences these brands.
Even Facebook is heavily invested in AR believing it to be the wave of the future. By feeling truly present, the target audience can interact with the product offerings and make purchases based on this experience. Facebook has started rolling out augmented reality feed ads in order to give advertisers an option to show off their products in new ways. This, as a result, has made online shopping an even more interactive experience for the customers and assisted advertisers in better conversions.
5. AI Everywhere: Several AI features already work in the background of social media platforms. From auto recommendation to image recognition, AI will only work on empowering these social media platforms further.
Whereas on websites, AI & machine learning-powered chatbots have been found making it more comfortable for the visitors to communicate with them. In 2020, smoothening customer service through AI would become a priority.
6. Apps losing the limelight: App bloat, frequent updates, uninstall rates, & increasing app installs fraud on phones might force more consumers & companies to choose PWA options. Services/Products that pass the ‘Toothbrush Test’ (“Must be used at least twice a day”) will be preferred as apps while the rest will stand on shaky ground.
7. ‘Amazon’ the Marketing Channel: Owing to its being the product search starting point and rich customer data, Amazon is only estimated to grow further as a marketing channel of its own. It’s estimated that Google will be putting huge efforts into servicing & increasing the share of its product searches.
8. Catching them on the go: As the audience gets busier and their attention span decreases, more content would be consumed in transit. The omnichannel approach across video sites, social media, OTT players and Digital OOH placements in transit – OLA Play etc will increase. This also spells rapid growth in hyper-locally relevant Digital OOH like at restaurants, malls, railway stations and bus stands.
9. Strong on Social Media: Majority of the marketers think that social media is going to be big as compared to apps or web. It is especially going to be vital for the sake of brand awareness and brand connectivity. And to help the brands achieve these goals, social media channels keep undergoing evolution. New features are constantly added to Instagram, Youtube etc.
One such trend is of shoppable posts, which is becoming a big part of online marketing. Approximately 60 per cent of the Instagram audience says that they discover products of new brands on Instagram. Something to tap in the upcoming year.
(The author is founder & CEO of Hiveminds. The views expressed are their own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)
Digital
GUEST COLUMN: How AI is restructuring distributor and retailer motivation models
From incentives to intelligence, AI is redefining how brands engage channel partners
MUMBAI: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming how brands engage with their most critical yet often overlooked stakeholders: distributors, retailers, and last-mile influencers. For Abhinav Jain, co-founder and CEO of Almonds Ai, this shift marks a fundamental departure from traditional, transaction-led incentive models toward behaviour-driven, data-intelligent ecosystems. In this piece, Jain examines how AI is enabling brands to decode partner motivations, predict engagement patterns, and deliver personalised, scalable experiences—ultimately redefining channel relationships from transactional exchanges to long-term growth partnerships.
Across many sectors, there is increasing recognition that motivating those who bring products to market (distributors, retailers, last-mile influencers) poses a growing challenge.
Brands continue to invest significant marketing and digital resources to consumers, yet in many countries and the vast majority of emerging economies, these types of consumer-focused investment areas have had little impact on ultimate product delivery. Rather, it is still the case that traditional retail continues to make up most products sold.
So why is it that the systems built around motivating these channels have yet to evolve?
For decades, distributor and retailer engagement revolved around static schemes – quarterly targets, volume-based rewards, and occasional trade promotions. These programs were designed around transactions, not behaviour. The assumption was simple: if incentives increase, performance will follow.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, the definition of performance is being challenged.
With the development of artificial intelligence, businesses can move beyond simply creating loyalty based on transactional-based models and toward models built on behaviours, the behaviours of channel partners that are intrinsic to their motivations in engaging with particular brands. As a result, the means by which businesses develop relationships within their distribution network are starting to evolve; thus, ultimately changing how brands interact with those within their distribution network.
Assessing engagement: Transitioning from transactional- to behavioural intelligence
Traditional loyalty systems refer to transactional activity (sales data). Although this data is valuable and important, it only provides a partial view of engagement across the channel partner.
For example, a retailer may have a high frequency of sales of a product, but their lack of engagement with the manufacturer would not reflect that they have true loyalty toward that brand. Conversely, a retailer who actively participates in training programmes, acts as brand advocates, and is engaged in learning with the supplier would exhibit more profound levels of loyalty but would have been invisible based on historical incentive programmes.
Artificial intelligence allows for the identification of behaviours that help to address this gap. Brands are able to use a variety of engagement data points, participate in learning programs, respond to communications, redeem behaviour and track platform use behaviour in order to identify motivation through behaviour.
McKinsey has stated that companies that leverage advanced analytics for their sales and distribution functions can achieve as much as a 15-20 per cent increase in productivity due to increased awareness of their behavioural trends throughout their networks.
This visibility of behavioural patterns within channel ecosystems can be transformational to brands as they can now view how partners engage on their path to purchasing products, instead of just measuring the sales revenue generated by those purchases.
Predicting motivations, not just measuring performance
Possibly, the largest contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to helping brands engage with partners via channel ecosystems is its ability to predict future engagement versus simply measuring past performance.
Traditionally, brands only realised that a partner was disengaged (not likely to purchase products) once their sales performance had already declined. By then, the brand would have to use significant amounts of incentives or aggressive promotional activities to recovery their partner’s engagement level.
AI models can help organisations to detect early signs that a partner is becoming disengaged, such as declining participation in learning modules, declining interaction via the platform, or slower reward redemption rates. These indicators can help organisations to proactively engage with their partners before their sales performance begins to decline.
The practical application of AI and predictive analytics gives brands the ability to re-engage with their partners prior to their sales performance declines. For example, instead of developing and implementing broad-reaching incentive programs that provide a “one size fits all” incentive to all partners in an ecosystem, brands are able to develop targeted, engaging re-engagement programmes. This is how personalisation can be done on a large scale, such as across global distribution and retail networks.
The vast majority of distributor and retailer channels have thousands, if not millions, of individual channel partners. Historically, providing personalisation to such a large number of businesses has not been feasible.
However, with the advent of AI, personalisation at scale is becoming a reality.
Brands can now create tailored engagement journeys for all their partners, based on their partner profiles, through some combination of machine learning models and behavioural segmentation. For example, high-performing distributors might receive higher levels of leadership-based recognition and greater incentives to continue to grow. Emerging retailers, on the other hand, might be supported with training, onboarding rewards, and measurable performance milestones.
The shift towards personalisation of partner engagement echoes the direction that consumer marketing is already moving towards.
According to Salesforce’s report, over 70 per cent of customers expect personalisation in the way that brands engage with them. As such, there is a growing expectation for B2B ecosystems to have these same types of expectations from their channel partners.
Gamification and continuous engagement
AI is also radically changing how brands will engage with their channel partners through the use of gamification.
Many traditional incentive-based contests and leaderboards would spark temporary engagement among their participants, but they struggled to sustain engagement over time. With the use of AI, gamification mechanics are evolving dynamically based on historical and evolving participation patterns by their channel partners.
Challenges, rewards, and recognition structures can be modified continuously in order to sustain engagement with all of a brand’s partner segments. This will provide a greater opportunity to move away from episodic campaigns towards ongoing, continuous engagement experiences.
When channel partners receive motivation as part of their daily business activities through recognition, learning, and tracking their performance, long-term loyalty will be achieved.
Aligning motivation to broader impact
There is a growing trend within the channel ecosystem to integrate sustainability and socially responsible behaviours into the channel partner programmes of brands.
Increasingly, brands are motivating their partners to use sustainable practices in their operations, participate in sustainable practices like sustainability-related knowledge programmes, or promote products that are in line with their sustainability objectives.
Brands can use AI to monitor and measure these types of behaviours and incorporate them into their incentive frameworks so that brands can align their commercial objectives with broader social and environmental outcomes.
A shift in the way brands view their channel partners
AI is having the most significant impact on the way that brands are now viewing their channel partners, as it relates to the underlying philosophy of those fundamental relationships.
For the past several decades, many brands have viewed their channel partners as intermediaries in the supply chain. More and more brands are now beginning to view their channel partners as key ‘partners-in-growth,’ and their actions can have a direct impact on market performance.
In fact, all the channel ecosystems are using behavioural engagement platforms to design new models that reward not just transactional behaviour, but also create continuous engagement journeys for their partners, where their partners can receive recognition for their participation, learning, and continued engagement, thereby reinforcing long-term loyalty to the brand.
The future: Intelligent channel ecosystems
As we consider what the next phase of channel engagement may look like, many believe that it will be based on intelligent ecosystems, using AI to continuously monitor and adjust the engagement strategies used to engage their channel partners, in real time and based on the behaviours of those partners.
For brands operating in complex distribution networks, the ability to perform well will be determined both by whether products are available to their customers, as well as by the enthusiasm, expertise, and loyalty shown from each channel partner that represents the brand each and every day that they are working on behalf of the brand.
While AI clearly does not eliminate the human aspect of a brand’s relationship with its channel partners, it does allow brands to better understand and nurture that relationship.
In markets where the last mile will determine whether a sale is made, how one leverages the intelligence gained by using AI will ultimately be the difference between gaining a new, sustainable competitive advantage versus losing one.
