Indian firms seek dynamic marketing automation
Increased usage of Internet and mobile media has intensified efforts from public and private enterprises to focus on digital marketing, according to research in India by Frost & Sullivan.
In India, about 60% of companies spent 1 to 10% of their marketing budgets on digital media in 2014, while another 7% spent 30%.
In order to streamline and accelerate processes around digital marketing, enterprises work with Marketing Automation Solutions (MAS) that help automate marketing and sales activities from lead generation and management, content marketing, sales enablement, analytics, and measurement of campaigns.
Frost & Sullivan's 'Marketing Automation Solutions Market: India' report noted that the market earned revenue of US$5.0 million in 2014 and estimates this to grow to US$19.4 million in 2020 at a CAGR of 25%.
The leading market participants in India include Adobe, Capillary Technologies, Oracle, Act-On, LeadSquared, Infusionsoft, CadillusCloud & LeadFormix, Lead Liaison, RR Marketing, among others.
Market participants stand to benefit from the Indian Government's plan to create a Digital India; this resonates across all industries, thereby encouraging companies to explore digital solutions. An intelligent tool like MAS that can help with customer retention through relevant and personalised customer engagement will be widely accepted among end users.
Already, the growth of digital content due to increasing Internet usage has encouraged companies in India to use MAS to drive targeted marketing efforts, reduce go-to-market time of products, and monitor leads efficaciously.
The forthcoming years will see even more marketing professionals adopt these solutions, as the digital user base is highly fragmented by class, age, gender and cultural demographics, and there is no uniform pattern of consumer behavior.
Multi-channel monitoring through tools like MAS is bound to become popular, with strong smartphone penetration and mobile broadband connectivity giving rise to yet another mode of communicating for customers and enterprises. Accordingly, vendors have been developing MAS solutions that cater to the bring-your-own-device trend and enable enterprises to push their campaigns on any device and network at any time.
"As of now, MAS solutions allow enterprises to sift through terabytes of smartphone data, automate the targeting and profiling of prospects, and then deploy tailored campaigns," said Frost & Sullivan Information & Communication Technologies Research Director Vidya Subramanian Nath. "While mobile media-specific MAS with these functionalities will keep end users interested in the near term, sustaining adoption rates in the long term will require the development of unified solutions to implement multimedia strategies."
Moreover, highlighting the ability of MAS solutions to evaluate the success of every campaign and assess the return on investment (ROI) will be important. In a country like India, where budgets are allocated purely on the basis of ROI, raising awareness on the real-time response metrics that can be measured through MAS platforms will be crucial to expand the market for these products.
"Unless the tangible benefits of MAS are evangelized, a section of the end-user market will continue to depend on in-house tools to monitor customer databases and use these alongside their legacy customer relationship management platforms," concluded Nath. "Thus, enterprises and advertising agencies that are still unaware of the true application potential of digital marketing will need to be educated to boost MAS adoption in India."
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