Digital Marketing Summit at IIIT, Hyderabad

The morning of 29th September held promise for me, for I was to attend the Digital Marketing Summit being held at IIIT Hyderabad. Conducted by IDONESEO, the summit saw the presence of at least 60 delegates and had 5 eminent speakers to address the eager crowd about the current trends in the Digital Marketing space. The experts invited to speak at the summit were Vipul Taneja, Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury, Raghavendra Satish Peri, Gayathri Choda and Munaz Anjum.

After a short introductory note, the event started off  with an interesting briefing on Landing Pages by speaker Vipul Taneja. Quoting Steve Jobs, “Design is how it works, not what it looks like or feels”, Vipul detailed the elements of a good Landing Page, the purpose and the action plan for building good landing pages. He gave the examples of websites such as DropBox and Crazy Egg, which have ideal landing pages with not much clutter and very simple designs.

Vipul’s mantra: “Less is good.”

Raghavendra Satish Peri, fondly known to everyone as Raghava, addressed the audience with his touching comment, “You have to answer me guys, I can’t see you” and went on to demonstrate how we can design our web pages to be more inclusive and accessible to the specially abled users. He also managed to answer user queries on digital marketing, proving that a specially abled person can be as good as a marketer as any other individual, if not better.

Saptarshi Roy Chaudhury waved his magic wand of content marketing, detailing the elements of content marketing. With content creation and  distribution being the two pillars of content marketing, Rishi shared with us some interesting statistics on content marketing. According to him, around 90% of marketers are doing content marketing, 25% of marketing budgets are spent on content marketing and apparently, according to eMarketer, a total of 118.4 billion dollars will be spent on content marketing in 2013. He also spoke about how to convert users and website visitors from Prospects into Leads and leads into opportunities. Salient features of good content include exceptional, credible, fun and unique.

Munaz Anjum spoke about changing search technologies and writing for the customer rather than the search engines.

Gayathri Choda was very emphatic on how analytics can change the way we look at content marketing. With keyword analysis through tools such as Google Trends, one can put numbers to results of digital marketing, which, as individuals in this field, we all know how important they are. An interesting tip from Gayathri was, “to identify the negative keywords and do SEO for them.” She also spoke of A/B testing and multi-variant testing.

The meet was quite a success.

The last one hour was allotted for Q&A session, during which, the audience asked speakers how they could market their products, brief content vs. verbose content, search engine keywords packed into a website or a website written for the customer, and lastly, single page website vs. many page websites.

To catch up on more pictures from the summit, do login to Facebook and check out the Fan Page of organizers IDONESEO.