Is this the end of all digital marketing ?

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ask Kavyaria Show. Today we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. I'm a little low on energy today because of various reasons, but I like to lift up my energy by reading a lot of stuff which is going on on various blogs and now on YouTube and wine. I was reading something by Ganfield, the guy who wrote Chicken Soup for the Soul and he talks about how perceptions change everything. A lot of people ask us and I get questions on my Twitter every single day. Is digital already overexposed? It's not a good industry and too difficult and all of that. So I think Ganfield gives the right answer there when he says that it's how you look at things and you look at problems. You know, any industry, you know, it could be people call some industries sunrise industry, the other sunset industry. But every industry where you have, where the outlook, your outlook is positive, it more or less give you positive feedback and positive return. So the digital is a great platform. It has many channels, it's emerging. If you are somebody who is, you know, you see yourself. Most people don't know their own self, but you know, here are a few points. If you think that you're a go getter, if you think that you can be on a treadmill and never want to get off, choose digital. Because this is, this is a great industry, but it's evolving so bloody fast that you need to be on top of the wall every single day. So if you're ready to be on top of this knowledge based industry, then you can have a lot of careers. You can be a consultant, you can be an execution agency, you can go into different branches, you can go into social media, you can go into reputation management, you can go into web design, you can become a coder or a developer, you can do search engine optimization, you can say I'm a brand manager online. And then you can further break this down. You can say that I will do only weddings. I'm a social media guy who helps in creating traffic, you know, for weddings and you know, put the whole wedding ecosystem together like we do for hospitality clients. So you can say that I grew up for film stars and Personas and a few friends of mine who came from London a few days back and few years back and they started an agency and now they do most of the film work in Bollywood on digital. So digital has got a lot of scope happening. But I would, you know, very strongly suggest do digital for some time and then carve your own niche. You cannot be A master of all trades. You can't, you just can't be an expert everywhere. And even if you think that you should know a little bit of everything, you always risk being compared to the big giant and the big sharks, and there'll always be somebody bigger than you. But if you want to keep your niche, you know, you'd rather be a heart surgeon than a general physician. So people who are looking for something specific for the heart, they would come to a specific surgeon rather than photogender physician for a little bit of everything. So that is my take on that question. The other question that has come on Twitter just today morning was what is happening to Facebook and all of these other mediums? Most of the agencies that come to us, they're always asking for more and more paid money. I mean, what happened to organic? We used to do SEO. We've heard of organic search. And you know, this friend of mine, he has a Facebook page and they've got 30,000 likes which are coming only from organic search. You know what, honestly, whatever your agency or whoever's meeting you is telling you is absolutely correct. Because it has become a paid, paid world. It was a mad bad world. It's become a mad paid world. Because from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to Pinterest, all these channels have to monetize someday, right? They give you this amazing, excellent channel and service to connect everywhere with everyone with all these pictures for free. But high time they start making money. They've got multi billion dollar valuations based on the fact that one day they're able to make money. So let them start making money now. And it's already time has come, they started making money. So the ads on all these channels are getting more and more expensive. However, they're still way cheaper than what a lot of print and all of this used to be and still continues to be. So you should get on to any of these bandwagons. I would suggest Facebook is still especially Facebook video, like the videos we're doing. Do that, spend money, get your right, get the right audience to start doing Facebook ads. Do it for three to five months, consistent campaign, and you'll definitely see results. Internet is definitely not cheap. It is not inexpensive. It is not something that you can grow only organically. In fact, Facebook on its own, just to give you an example, has changed the algorithm. And basically your posts don't go out to more than a few percent in single digits, it just goes out to a few percent. So if you got a thousand friends and you are very proud to have A thousand friends or you have a thousand members on your restaurant page or your personality page. If you are not reaching out to more than 5, 6% or even less, 4% in some cases, then you have no option but to pay and you know, seen and heard by more people. But tell me one thing, if you can spend a few thousand rupees a week and have your videos shown to tens of thousands of people, that is still very inexpensive advertising. You have to, however, keep your audience relevant and that's it, spend money. It's not inexpensive, but it is an amazing ROI. At least 4 to 10 times ROI. If you run your campaigns well. Yes, there you go. I've said it four to ten times roi. If you've done it well, done it consistently, do it in house, do it with an agency, do it with a consultant. But I'm sure that there is somebody who dedicated to your project to understand your business and hopefully comes from a background which is specific to your industry and there are great results to be seen. In most cases I would say that try not to do everything yourself because by the time there is a learning curve for everything, by the time you learn this, the industry evolved according to another level. So doing it yourself is not the best idea. However, you can try wet your feet a little bit and see where you get. Question number three, which is again a very popular question for some of our teams, have helped me chew down the most important questions. One of them is how important is a web design and what all should we do? Should we have a web design and a mobile application and the social media pages and I mean, what all am I going to do? How many digital real estates am I going to create and how many of them am I going to monetize? So the idea is if you're serious about your business and if you know where the world is already headed, go and grab as much digital online real estate as you can. I always say it's like what India was in the mid-90s. It was not very far back where we realized that everything seemed to be for free because then there was a boom and everything is now four times more expensive and in many places untouchable. Too expensive. So that is where I see the digital landscape. If you're an investor in your own business or in the digital business, invest in the right platform and make your presence felt there. Yes, you do not own Facebook, but you own the Facebook page. If you have 2,300,000 people there and you have the right audience that you have 2, 300 captive people where you're giving content to. You can monetize those platforms, you can monetize YouTube, you can monetize vine, you can monetize any of these channels. First you have to have a relevant database. And yes, your website is equally important. There are times when I feel that a website may become very redundant very soon because everything is on your Facebook page, but you know, it's still not happening. It may never happen because the website is always going to have an interactive element which is going to get merged with your social media, your Facebook and your website together and in a clipboard kind of a model, an app without thinking the app. The app is a complete, completely different thing. Is obviously everything is a mobile, mobile, mobile and mobile means anything that you're that is portable. So it could be your tablet, it could be a mini device or mobile accessories. And for those the attention span is less and therefore an app. You get booked onto an app, it's easy to buy, it's a one time return. So definitely if you're in the products industry and if you're doing a lot of stuff, that app really makes sense. You might have your own app or you might have your own app integrated with the third party large sellers. You can also inter for collecting and sending payments. You can basically have payment gateway, third party payment gateways. So everything is possible. You may today choose to take your existing offline business online and have all these digital assets captured. Or you could say that I will make one application and I will integrate gate between third party players and third party payment providers. So what if they take a few percent here and there, but they will expose you to the larger market place. So there's a lot that's happening in the digital world which is very exciting every day in the economic time. On Bloomberg you see a new Facebook billionaire or a billionaire or there are people coming from everywhere. But it's not only about that they have not made it overnight. They failed at four, five different ideas and then they made it. So don't just put in money because somebody's saying it's great. Try your hand, fail a few times. We all know any of you who failed or have had a few successes, they know that you have to fail a few times. So there, that's what I'm saying. Go ahead, fail a few times, find your niche and then you find the right product at the right swing. Like I say, you know, I'm not really a golfer, but I played a few times. You know, it's just the right angle that you hit the ball with at the right swing. And you can, you can feel that. You can feel that you hit the sweet spot when the ball is in the air. So you will know when you got. When you've got everything right and you've hit the sweet spot. So go ahead, try a few shots. You might not get some right, but eventually I'm sure you'll make it. So, yes, yesterday was very exciting. You know, like I again keep saying that the whole world is cricket, cricket, cricket. I can't stop talking about it. I'm not a cricket fan, but I'm a Yuvraj fan. Because I think Yuvraj Singh is awesome. I really, really wish everybody learns from him. The guy. I cannot imagine the feeling of hitting six X's in one over and the whole world being in awe of you. And then the same person has to struggle with a life threatening disease from all these kind of, you know, from that high to this low and then again back to cricket. And yesterday Delhi won.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah. Yuvraj was Great at Delhi. 55 runs. And I guess Sehwag is doing well. He has his own nose. But then he's come up good. He's performed well in two of the matches. We had expectations from uv so he came up yet yesterday? Yes. And yes. Delhi Day Devils did their Punjab 11 and they did win it. It was an exciting time in Delhi.

So that's what you know. So those are the great things about cricket. Because you learn a lot even if you're not a cricket fan. You learn so much about life. These people spend 12, 14, 15 hours. One interview I liked about, in fact one of the Hindustan times summits or whatever. Sourab Ganguly was saying that how difficult it is to, you know, manage teams because everybody in this team is a superstar in their own right. They don't come on time, but they still have to. So captain's role, you know, that's the same in a company. Any of you managing a company know how difficult it is to manage people and ensure everybody is doing the right tasks correctly? So cricket is a great form of not only a great sport but a lot of learning on how people work with people and how a team, you have to have a team spirit to win. My favorite subject of course, Bollywood. And what's happening in the Bollywood world. Vidu Vinh Chopra is coming up with the Broken Horses. It's an American debut from an Indian director. I think that's fabulous. One of the greatest things that he said was, I'm not scared of anything. I'VE always been a fan. I've had a few friends in school who always said we've been fearless. And I've always been a fan of people who said we've been fearless. And I always wanted to be fearless. But you know, I don't think I'm fearless until much later in life. I met a better friend of mine who said it's not the absence of fear, but it's overcoming the fear that makes you courageous. So the absence of fear is almost there. It's not there in anybody. But these guys are fearless and so is Vidhu Vidul Chopra. I really, really respect and give a lot of credit to these people who say that we're not scared. And one of the anecdotes that he gave, he said that one of the things that he does to be fearless as a director and the person in his life, he says, I mean it sounds a little silly but he. But it makes a lot of sense if you look at it deep enough. He says every day after his exercises he does the Shavasana in yoga. We all know what the Shavasana is. Lies down and he imagines that it's the last day of his life and he's dying. And he says if he feels that there are some unspoken or un dealt with issues or things that he has not done, he wants to then start doing it. So he feels himself, he feels it might be the last day of his life and then that sort of makes him fearless and he wants to do a lot of more stuff. So I thought that's a great exercise, great learning. And I wanted to share this in this video of what we learned in an interview that I heard from Vidu Vinod Chopra and Broken Horses should be an awesome movie because this guy, from Munna Bhai to all of these legendary movies that he made, I'm sure he was doing a great job. And you know, he's somebody who changes people's lives, not only makes movies and therefore people respect him. So I'm really looking forward to Broken Horses and I hope you guys watch it too.