What will Digital Marketing in India look like in 5 Years?

In recent years, digital marketing has become a booming career in India. Mainly because of the whole digitization of India as a country.

This has led to the future of digital marketing in India to become very bright!

Digital India has only introduced a few years ago, but the importance it holds in everyone’s lives now has made it a popular choice of career for beginners as well as for the market leaders.

India is one of the latest and largest growing digital markets globally and the scope for digital marketers here will only get on increasing. By the end of the year 2020, in India, the digital industry will produce more than 20 lakh jobs. It might even increase more than that due to the whole pandemic situation. Businesses have no choice but to take their processes online to keep the business alive.

As per another study in the year 2018, India comprised 483 million internet users, and as digital transformation is going to take place, the numbers will get doubled by 2022 and it is estimated to reach 829 million. This is mainly because of the internet & smartphone penetration increasing so exponentially in the country.

Here are some quick facts:

  • In India, digital advertising has reached the $1 billion mark by the end of the financial year 2016–17.
  • The growth in digital marketing is likely to be at an average of 14% annually.
  • The overall ad share of digital media remains around 12% and it is expected to grow up to 24% by 2020.
  • The largest share of the total digital advertisement spends is made by the search and display ad.
  • The customers of the new generation used to check their smart devices every 9.6 minutes or every 159 times a day.
  • Digital services are accessed by almost 220 million users through their smartphones.

Getting to the main part of this blog post, what will digital marketing in India look like in 5 years?

Well, there are a lot of different things that could happen… But we’re going to list out a few of the things that have the highest chance of becoming a possibility in the near future.

1. Better AI chatbots

There are already a few platforms like Manychat that allow users to build chatbots, but they’re not completely automated. On platforms like Manychat, you have to pre-build “flows” (similar to email automation) of messages to be sent to the customer when they interact in a certain way.

In the future, we could maybe see AI-powered chatbots. People would be able to have direct conversations with these chatbots about a particular product or service from a brand. Not only will it increase sales, but also create a relationship between the consumer and the brand.

Mastercard created a Facebook messenger bot – which uses natural language processing software to decipher what the customer wants and respond as if it were a real person – to automate handling payments:

Artificial intelligence and automating various aspects are the future of digital marketing in India. The fact that robots and machines can do the same or even better work than humans themselves is being taken into consideration. This is eating into the employment levels since 2018.

Many customers prefer interacting with chatbots as they are responsive 24/7, give answers promptly, accurately recall your entire buying history, and never lose patience.

Why wouldn’t you want them?

2. Thinking more about Customer Experience

Today, almost every big or small company is coming up with the best strategies and technologies to woo the audience and turn them into potential customers. But just getting a great product will not help until and unless you do not promote it in the right way.

What matters the most today is customer satisfaction and customer experience.

If you have succeeded in winning over the satisfaction level of the customers, you will be able to spread out the promotion of the brand in a much better way.

The more transparent you are with the customer, the more they appreciate it. Digital marketers keep this in mind and offer options such as user-friendly interface, interactive features, and many others that can keep the viewer tied up to the website.

It is said that the more a visitor spends on a website, the more chances are that the person will turn into a potential customer soon. Thus, working upon the experience of the customers will be the main motto in the future of digital marketing in India.

3. More Video Content

In the coming 5 years in India, video content will be a huge deal... Due to the rise of internet accessibility in the country, people are adopting this new form of communication very quickly.

This is evident from the fact that TikTok had become such a huge sensation in our country. At one point, the majority of TikTok’s downloads were from India.

Video content has become the most popular form of content. The inclusion of live videos, stories, and Instagram TV has helped companies and businesses to generate more and more traffic and attract a wider audience.

Video content is also easier to digest & more interactive than a blog article or an email or some other form of media content. It is also being observed that some marketers are making use of personalized video messaging rather than emails and messages to build stronger customer relationships.

Recent research has proved that online video consumption in India has doubled in the last 2 years to a whopping 3.7 billion videos per month. This mind-boggling growth has been herded by a considerable rise in the number of online video Indian viewers. The future of digital marketing in India will have more and more video content.

4. Augmented Reality

Facebook introduced Spark AR this year for the general public, which allows users on Facebook and Instagram to create filters and upload them online. Other users can then save these and apply them to their stories. Facebook has been seeing a lot of success with the launch of this product and this will probably ‘spark’ AR trends even more.

Google had already rolled out Google Lens which is an image recognition technology that uses the ‘point and shoots’ feature to show fitting search results. These two giants have showcased the diversity in the use of AR and how successful it can be when implemented right, driven by function.

Many other international brands have also started implementing a few AR methods into their marketing and customer experience.

While virtual reality (VR) makes a lot of noise and gets everyone excited with grand sci-fi ideas, AR is much more implementable from a marketing standpoint. Experts predict that AR will continue to outpace VR in terms of market share:

5. Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising means using AI to automate ad buying so you can target more specific audiences. Real-time bidding, for example, is a type of programmatic ad buying.

This automation is much more efficient and fast, which means higher conversions and lower customer acquisition costs.

Facebook is trying to do something similar with its ads platform as well. They’re basically trying to make it more and more AI-powered so that it performs as efficiently as possible… After all, machines don’t make the same mistakes that humans make.

To know more about the Scope of Digital Marketing in India, Watch out the video on YouTube:


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