Spreading Far and Wide

Sairam Vedam,
Asst. Vice-President - Marketing,
Cigniti Technologies

Social media has spread its wings far and wide and touched almost every phase of our lives. This has become a phenomenon today and is, undoubtedly, one of the most sought-after advertising platforms. In a chat with VARINDIA, Sairam Vedam, Asst. Vice-President – Marketing, Cigniti Technologies, gives a deep insight on social media and its multiple advertising facets and usages.

 Over a period of time, how has Social Media helped in business upliftment?

In the case of SMBs, B2C brands using social media marketing the businesses are seeing increased conversion ratios. In the case of enterprises, B2Bs and IT services organizations like Cigniti, it helps surely engage all our internal and external stakeholders, promote thought leadership and build a sense of oneness. Social media helps build brand stickiness. 
 

It helps promote services, products and culture helping prospects, clients and employees understand the brand much better. Word-of-mouth references, Social shares, blogs, video messaging, insightful comments and likes helps gain brand share in the minds of clients and prospects. It increases the brand recall factor if used appropriately. 
 

Also for companies like Cigniti, it helps a great deal in sourcing the right talent, which is very important when it comes to business upliftment. Having the right people on board is half the right job done to build a successful business. Apart from this, platforms like LinkedIn and Quora help us position as thought leaders by taking meaningful positions in terms of providing answers, opinions and insights on various questions that are posted in the areas of outsourcing, software testing and delivery.

It sends a very positive messaging to our external stakeholders demonstrating the leadership in the chosen space. We also engage on Twitter where some of our testing experts follow and share the updates, tweets of known testing thought leaders, famous blogs and updates. 

Following instant updates on twitters for the carefully chosen handles gives us a lot of edge. In fact, recently one of the leading analysts we engage with tweeted about the mention of Cigniti in the report through his tweet before even we asked him. We could retweet the update, the URL to the report the next second!

What percentage of your marketing budget do you invest in Social Media advertising?

During the last six months, we have carefully chosen the channels and social media levers that we intend to promote and talk about us. Leveraging what we could do without spending anything today, we have been able to build a sizeable following for our brand. Today, we spend 2–5% of our advertising budgets on Social media. However, we have been very cautious in terms of our spend ratios on Social Media. We have seen significant gains through promoted posts on Facebook (for hiring) and LinkedIn, Reqcloud, etc. With a carefully drawn Social Media plan, execution of a lot of brand stickiness has been achieved. We plan to spend around 5–10% of our media and advertising budgets.

What benefits have you reaped out of Social Media advertising?

Hiring is an area where we see significant value for money spent using social media.

While it comes to looking for premier talent, we believe social media helps us stay thrifty and yet realize a lot of value with minimal spending. Also our initial efforts, trials make us believe that through targeted and focussed video ads on the linkedIn we can reach out to our potential client decision-makers. It surely helps us make the right noise and attract our prospects with a defined messaging. Key updates regarding partnerships, online press releases on major events related to corporate achievements, carefully chosen messaging around the overall performance of the company in select channels are some other areas we see value in investing in social media.

Which social media platforms do you place your advertisements in?

We have a presence in LinkedIn, Facebook and focussed social hiring platforms/offerings like Reqcloud, Bullhornreach, etc.  We are also quiet heavily focussed on providing, producing more compelling videos on YouTube, Vimeo explaining our offerings, differentiators (IP), thought leadership and value proposition. 

Please cite some differences between Traditional Marketing and Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing offers unparalleled reach for the amount of money to be spent in achieving the same as against using traditional media. Also today's technology helps marketers to draw vital insights regarding the consumer behavioural patterns through interesting analytics from the amount of large data that is generated through social media marketing. This helps marketers to take critical decisions, work out promotions better through social couponing, group saving, group buying and decide related pricing plans, discounts, etc with great speed.  Social media marketing also allows instant, dynamic changes to messaging. This type of instant decision-making is not possible by using traditional marketing. However, the virility of social media can backfire if the messaging intended is not communicated well. Many an example including the recent Twitter-based mishap has proved this time and again.  

Marketers have to be smart in adopting the traditional marketing channels in tune with the audience to reach out. Marketers can still choose the traditional media for conventional corporate updates, strategic announcements and other updates like investor relations etc. However, even here the trend is to use the social media smartly to create an instant engagement, buzz. Though the spend ratios are high compared to the social media, the advances in overall technology at the hands of marketer has resulted in a blur that is fast becoming very thin where you have very less to separate traditional, web, digital, social and, going forward, the mobile. An integrated marketing strategy is the best.

 Moumita Deb Choudhury