Online marketing industry size to touch Rs 2k crore by 2013

As rules of the advertising game change rapidly, online or digital marketing market size in India is estimated to touch close to Rs 2,000 crore in the next two years from a Rs 1,400 crore now, say management experts.

At the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) conference on 'Best Marketing Practices', experts felt that no company could now possibly ignore the power of social networking sites in creating today's brands.

"Apart from search engines like google.com and yahoo.com, the next top sites in India are social networking sites like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter and Linkedin. Facebook users have increased nearly nine folds during last year, and now companies are sitting up and taking notice of the importance of advertising through such websites, especially when it is possible now to do hyper local marketing targeted at specific customer," said Mahesh Murthy, founder Pinstorm, a leading digital marketing firm.

He added that with revenues worth Rs 800 crore, Google India is bigger than any television channel in the country.

It gets 100 million unique users every year in India, of which 70 million are on desktop, while the rest access it through mobile phones.

As online marketing opens up newer avenues and prospects of acquiring new clients, even major banks like HDFC have jumped on to the bandwagon. Soma Sharma, head, liability campaigns, HDFC Bank said that they launch 100 to 200 new online and digital campaigns every month.

"Nearly, 20-25 per cent of our new customers come in through online sources, either they visit our website or through any banner advertisements that we have put up at relevant websites. And if we talk about the quality of these new customers, they are almost two times better compared to those we acquire through offline modes like branches and agents," she added.

The business of buying online railway tickets is worth Rs 5,500 crore in India, while that of airline tickets is close to Rs 12,500 crore.

Experts felt that companies would have to increasingly come up with ways to manage the perception of brands more efficiently, and one has to do that continuously as perceptions and brands today change much faster than they used to.

"Earlier, we had time to test a creative for a soap commercial or campaign for three months, now three months can be the entire product lifecycle," Murthy said. He recalled one mobile handset company's demand of coming up with a creative within a week.

"When we asked for more time, they said they had to go live with the campaign in three weeks and that they would come up with their another handset within eight weeks. So that is all the time they had to sell this particular product," Murthy explains.