Just 8% of Indian brands are considered to operate within the lower end of digital marketing maturity while the rest responsibly manage data and have effective automated media-buying and messaging capabilities, according to new analysis.
These and other insights were shared this week at the annual edition of Google’s Think Platforms, which explored how India, among other countries, has fared on the path to digital marketing maturity.
Compiled by Google and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the report studied 180 brands across ten industries in several regions, including India, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong Japan and Taiwan.
And these brands were measured against four key stages, referred to as nascent, emerging, connected and multi-moment, the Financial Express reported.
Nascent relates to marketing campaigns that mostly use external data and direct buys, with limited linkage to sales. Emerging refers to marketers who make some use of owned data in automated buying, with single-channel optimisation and testing.
The third stage, called connected, are companies that rely on data integrated and activated across digital channels, with demonstrable linkage to ROI or sales proxies.
Finally, multi-moment refers to organisations which optimise dynamic execution across channels throughout the customer journey to achieve business outcomes.
Of the Indian brands surveyed this year, 6% were found to be delivering multi-moment experiences – described as “best-in-class” – and the highest in the region.
Meanwhile, more than 80% of Indian brands occupied the emerging and connected digital maturity tiers, with just 8% operating at the lower end nascent stage.
“It is heartening to see India taking a progressive and a more mature digital approach in marketing, ahead of many brands across APAC, Europe and Latin America,” said Matt Brocklehurst, head of partnerships, publishers and platforms marketing at Google APAC.
“As per the study, India saw the top quartile of brands in terms of maturity report an average of 7% annual incremental revenue and 13% annual cost efficiency,” he added.
The Google/BCG study also looked at the role of first-party data and found that 92% of brands surveyed in India regard first-party data as important to marketing.
Furthermore, Indian brands with higher maturity leveraged first-party data more consistently – with 100% of multi-moment brands and 67% of connected brands saying that their first-party data is mostly or fully embedded in their marketing campaigns. By contrast, only 33% of nascent brands used first-party data in most marketing campaigns somewhat consistently or frequently.
Sourced from Financial Express, Google, BCG; additional content by WARC staff
