CHAPTER NO -VI

FINDINGS AND

OBSERVATIONS
This chapter summarises the findings and observations carried out based on the
analysis of data collected through primary and secondary methods. The present
study has analysed the different parameters of marketing practices carried out by
the Online marketers in India which would enable the marketers in framing
effective marketing strategies which would elevate execution to a finer level.
Various statistical tools were employed to analyse the data and the major findings
are presented below:

6.1 DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICAL FINDINGS

1. It has been observed from the present study that 47.5 percent of the
respondent companies have entered recently into online business in past
three to five years, considering the growth of internet users and online
shopping in India.

2. 52.9 percent marketers shifted to online due to the possibility of reaching

out to new markets, 50.7 percent strongly agreed that it is due to the
possibility of an increase in the current customer base and an improvement
in the organisational image. 48.9 percent stated establishing strong market
presence was the primary reason to go online, this implies that the marketers
are aware that the Internet aids them to overcome the geographical
constraints and helps them to build and foster long-term relationship by
improving their organisational image. 24.2 percent stated that the
shortening of supply chain was the primary for them to go online. The
marketers from all the three sectors service, manufacturing and construction
had the same reason for going online.

3. 49.8 percent of the companies undertake online marketing research to

garner more competitive information about the customers, competitors and
about the current marketing trends prevalent. It aids the marketers in
selecting the appropriate platforms and online channels to tap the potential
prospective customers.

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4. A considerable number of respondents 68.5 percent of the companies said
they undertake online marketing research to obtain the customer feedback,
as to what they like/dislike in a product, 55 percent of respondents wanted
to understand the online consumer behaviour, their buying pattern, selection
of social media platforms and influencers that affect the online buying
decision. 46.8 percent undertake online marketing research for competitive
benchmarking and 42.3 percent companies for determining market
segmentation.

5. 94.6 percent of respondents have agreed that the information they generate
through the online research is beneficial for them in designing and
formulating appropriate marketing strategies. Marketers have realized that
careless spending can lead to poor financial results and they have to be
careful and vigilant while framing appropraite marketing strategies.

6. 35.4 percent of the respondent companies spend less than 1% - 3% of their

overall budget in marketing activities.

7. It has been found that 41.3 percent of the respondent company find Social
Media Marketing as a highly effective strategy to enhance the Brand Image
of the Company.

8. 42.2 percent of the respondents highly prefer Social Media Marketing in

order to reach and acquire prospective customers followed by E-mail
marketing (36.8%).

It is observed that once the company gets information about the online customers
the next step is to convert the lead generated into actual sales. 48% of the
companies highly prefer Mobile marketing. It is quite evident that mobile
marketing and social media marketing are very important techniques to convert
the leads into customers. The online sales are driven through mobile marketing as
m-commerce is growing rapidly with high internet connectivity it is easy to entice
the customers.

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9. 47.5 percent of the marketers require less than one month to convert a lead
generated into actual sales.

10. The present research study points out that Newsletter and regular updates
on the companies website and through different social media platforms can
help to retain online customers. 47.6 percent respondents highly prefer
them to constantly feed information to their customers.

11. The success of any Customer Engagement programs can be measured

through different ways, the online marketers must be aware of these
techniques so that they can focus and formulate appropriate strategies to
retain the customers through different consumer engagement programs.
47.5percent of respondents have rated Product reviews as a very highly
effective technique for measuring the success of Customer Engagement
Programs.

12. It is also seen that a Product Related post appears to induce a higher degree
of consumer engagement as measured by volume of comments on the posts,
thereby indicating that organizations should host greater volume of
relational posts. The content attractiveness of the relational posts appears to
strike an emotional chord with the consumer, enticing him to engage with
the organization, thereby showing that corporates can achieve success in
these endeavours.

13. 73.5 percent respondents use social media to leverage business and to
engage customers, this shows the growing importance of social media as an
important marketing strategy to reach the main target audience for
communication and retention.

14. It is observed that 73.5 percent of the respondents spend 1 – 10% of their
marketing budget on social media initiatives.

15. Creation of Brand awareness (62.3%) is the most important objective of

Social Media engagements, followed by generation of Sales leads (56.1%),
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 Customer engagement is the next important objective (43.9%) lastly
Building community advocates was another objective of Social media
engagements.

16. More than half of the respondent companies (51.6%) have answered
positively that they have been able to see an increase in revenue from social
media engagements.

17. It is observed that 44.3% respondents have seen 1- 10% increase in

revenue, 37.4 % have seen 11% -25% increase, 15.7% of respondents have
seen 26%- 50% increase and 2.6% have seen an increase of above 50% of
their revenue from social media engagements through regular updates,
contests, quiz and others. Hence the marketers need to focus more on
formulating strategies on social media platforms to increase their revenues.

18. The research findings pointed that out of 223 respondents, 78.5 percent
marketers prefer Facebook for their social media marketing efforts, as it is
the most popular and commonly used social media site.

19. However there is a quick rise of another social media platform that is
YouTube with 45.3 percent marketers preferring it to for their marketing
efforts. The emphases is changing from “Look & Feel” to “Watch &
Experience”.

20. 83 percent of the respondents have created a mobile app for marketing their
products. This shows that m-commerce is the future trend which is gaining
importance and the marketers must reap this opportunity if they want to
sustain in the virtual world.

21. It is observed that 50.7% of the respondents perceived rapid changing

technology as a major barrier, as they are not able to cope up with the new
technologies that emerge making the old strategies defunct.

22. Sales, Net Profit, Customer Base, OverAll Growth of the Organisation : It
is observed that a sizeable number of companies 58.3% respondents have

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 had an increase (including significant increase) in their sales, 49.3% have
seen an increase in their profits, an 71.3% of the respondent companies have
seen an increase in their Customer Base and 71.7% of the respondent
companies have witnessed Over All Growth of the Organisation as they
were able to expand their business beyond geographical boundaries,
increase the product assortment, and connect directly with their customer
which helped to improve and enhance the overall image of the company.

23. 95.9% of the respondent companies agree that constant growth of Internet
and Mobile users will lead to an increase in Online marketing as the
customers are now well connected 24x7 and are easily accessible if the right
online marketing tool is formulated, thus providing a great opportunity for
marketers to tap them.

6.2 GENERAL OBSERVATIONS

• It is observed that strategies like Social Media Marketing and Content

Marketing is highly effective for Services and Construction sector, whereas
Email marketing is highly effective in Manufacturing sector.

• Social Media Marketing and Multi-Channel Marketing strategy is highly

preferred by Construction & Service sector to acquire new customers. The
marketers from this sector need to focus more on social media platforms to
generate new sales leads.

• It has been observed that there exist a significant relationship between the
number of posts and number of comments which indicates that the volume
of the organizational efforts can stimulate consumer engagement as
represented by the volume of comments on the blogs. An increased
organizational effort in terms of repeated contacts with the consumers
through increased number of posts in a virtual environment can create a
healthier online relationship between organization and consumer by

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 stimulating consumer interest and achieving his participation by inducing
him to comment on the posts hosted by the organization.

• Mobile Marketing is slowly gaining importance, as consumers are using

mobile devices all day long and in various contexts, this provides an
immense opportunity to the marketers to target them in a long stretch of
time during the different phases of the day. 52.2% of all the website traffic
was generated through the mobile phones.

• It is observed that social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube are
very popular, with 2.38 billion (according to techcrunch facebook statistics)
active users worldwide, it provides a great opportunity to marketers to tap
this potential online traffic. 5 billion YouTube videos (YouTube statistics)
are watched daily and hence this is the next most preferred social media
platform.

• Security issues are still one of the major drawbacks in online marketing,
with week cyber laws prevalent, consumers are still hesitant to share their
personal information on internet.

• Delivery of goods to consumer by couriers and postal services is not very

reliable in smaller cities, towns and rural areas.

• Middlemen are still there in online business. Occurrence of new

intermediaries is called re-intermediation. A logical alternative to
disintermediation is re-intermediation which actually points to the shifting
or transfer of the intermediary function rather than the complete elimination
of it. These are e-malls, directory, comparison shopping agents etc.

• Size of the company does matter. It is difficult to say that small and big
size concern has equal footings online. Size means brand, trust and
customer confidence.

• Older traditional firms are taking over as top online retail sites, like recently
Tata motors entered into e-commerce applications.

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 • There has been a rise in the number of companies taking up e-commerce in
the recent past. Major Indian portal sites have also shifted towards e-
commerce instead of depending on advertising revenue.

6.3 MODEL FOR EFFECTIVE IMPLEMENTATION OF ONLINE

MARKETING PRACTICES

Fig 6.1 Model for effective implementation of Online Marketing

Practices

Explanation of the model

Every Online Marketer’s job is to identify the journey its customers are following
in digital world. Based on the understanding of the journey, the marketer casts the
net.

Marketer can either seed a sponsored content (ads) or generate a content which is
related to its customer and promote it via social network apps. Based on the journey
of its customer, online marketer identifies the platforms where it can seed the

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content. As per most surveys the most common online platforms where customers
spend time are, facebook, /twitter , youtube, whatsapp, linkedin and Instagram.

LinkedIn is a social media platform mainly used by Professionals for

B2B marketing communication. Linkedin is for serious business/industry related
talk. The marketers need to create a company profile on LinkedIn and target the
groups through constant updates. From the blog page the customer can land on the
LinkenIn.

Blog. Every marketers needs to create their own landing page or a Blog, the
traffic to their blog can be generated from different platforms, that is through
Facebook, Google – Search Engine or through Google Ads, Twitter, Whatsapp and
through LinkedIn. Blog marketing is very essential to attract the online customer.
The links can also be sent to whatsapp.

Whatsapp is another very powerful and commonly used social media

platform which is used for general messaging and promoting any idea in a simple
way. The marketers can send links on whatsapp group and generate traffic to their
company’s web page, which is called as seed content. The basic strategy is to seed
a content, which means, the content that attracts the customer and builds his
curiosity, to get more information and compels him to click the information and
land him on the web page. The links can be sent on the blogs and on the mobile
phones.

Twitter is gradually gaining momentum, the company must create powerful

trending hashtags to attract the online customer, place ads on twitter and must create
twitter profile to drive online traffic to the company’s web page.

Instagram, is used for visual story telling. Brand awareness ads can be
created on Instagram, Content marketing proves to be very useful on this platform.
The marketers needs to identify the influencers and target them to promote their

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products. Re-marketing techniques can be developed to engage the online
customers through right contents and to retain them.

Mobile Marketing is the central focul of all digital marketing activities,

as customers today are all connected through smartphones, the marketers must
create branded app with product information, digital brochures for all products
should be able to operate through mobile phones.

YouTube can be leverage for teaser videos/ads, brand awareness video

ads are very powerful to attract the online customers, subscription to video ads is
another way to drive the online traffic to the main home page, influencers need to
be identified and targeted, remarketing videos can be developed to highlight the
brand story and re-instill the brand information.

Email marketing is another powerful technique to generate leads and

information about the customers, very useful technique for marketers from
construction and manufacturing sector. Permission marketing to send update
through email is fast trending and very effective. Email marketing can help to
nurture leads and display ads on email plays a very vital role to direct online
customers to the company’s web page.

Facebook is the most powerful social media platform and the marketers
must formulate effective strategies in order to attract, engage and retain online
customers. Techniques like Facebook ads are very cost effective and an important
medium to create brand awareness through attractive images and powerful videos
which should be regularly posted to attract the customers, creation of a facebook
page is essential to boost content based posts. Constant likes should be generated
alongwith facebook groups, remarketing techniques can also be developed on
facebook.

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 Other most powerful tool is search engine. Here the customer, is searching
for certain information which is related to the company offering, through Search
Engine Marketing the customer can be landed directly to the companies home page.
Proper development of Adwords and keywords are extremely important. Search
Engine Optimisation is another technique to improve the listings of the Companies
position and enhance the visibility of its site.

All the above platforms are used to seed content, and make user inquisitive to get
more information, which results in click and lands them on the blog or facebook
page. Once the customer has reached here, they will be treated as “visitors”, who
then needs to be nurtured to convert to leads.

The researcher has developed the above model after a thorough analysis of data for
effective implementation of the different online marketing (digital) practices. Each
of the above platform is powerful, and based on the content and message to be
conveyed, it has to be used effectively.

The model shall be of great help to the marketers who are conducting online
business to attract online traffic and for conversion and retention of online
consumers.

The next chapter covers the suggestions and inferences based on the findings and
draws meaningful conclusions.

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