Digital marketing may get maximum budgetary allocation in 2023: Prasun Kumar

The start of a new year is seen as bringing in new operational efficiencies, stronger strategies, a far greater emphasis on building deep bonds with various stakeholders and consumers. In keeping with the current market ecosystem, technology and a human approach are seen as going hand in hand.

As 2023 kicks off, Adgully has approached key industry leaders to Crystal Gaze into 2023, as part of our annual Trending Now series, to highlight the major trends and developments that they see dominating the industry in the year ahead.

Prasun Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer, Just Dial, speaks about how digital marketing is increasingly becoming the primary marketing lever, driven by data penetration and usage as well as the overall macro-economic challenges.

Key trends dominating Digital in 2023

As we move into 2023 and beyond, the digital adoption and push is only likely to strengthen further. This will have implications on marketing strategy, which is likely to become even more ROI driven. As a result, digital marketing is likely to get maximum budgetary allocation. Marketers will increasingly be responsible for growing direct digital revenue streams and hence marketing will impact business outcomes more. If there are no fresh major external shocks, the consumer demand is likely to continue to be strong.

Major expectations

We expect the consumer demand to remain strong sans any new macro-economic disruptions. Overall search trends at national as well as hyperlocal levels are expected to show robust growth.

Customers including SMEs and individuals are expected to chase growth and invest aggressively for it. Digitisation of SME ecosystem will gain further momentum and will lead to improved efficiencies and bigger opportunities. More consumers will do more things online leading to expansion of the digital economy.

Key focus areas for Just Dial in 2023

In the year gone by, we had extensive consumer outreach campaigns done via various digital marketing channels. Our performance marketing initiatives got significant boost along with increased intensity of social media campaigns. We also built a lot of brand traction using PR to seed data centric stories across different categories. We had several enhancements driving better consumer experience across our platforms.

We will continue to strengthen our core value proposition with better products and services, delivering superior customer experience.

Rewind 2022

The year 2022 was good through its share of challenges and opportunities. The business recovery post last Covid wave has been strong across categories. We saw substantial increase in search traffic and related activities.

CMOs are increasingly looking at transactions and revenue as core metric and using tools to directly drive them. This brings digital marketing at the forefront in a data first world right from acquiring customers to retaining & building lifetime value with them. With more development around analytics, AI, Metaverse, etc., we should only expect digital marketing to become the core driver of all marketing KPIs.

All wings of digital marketing, be it performance or social media or emails or influencer, etc., have developed rapidly owing to data pool and data strategy initiatives. These are adding substantial value to business outcomes directly and are no longer limited to driving brand or marketing KPIs. This brings them right into board room discussions and hence a part of overall business strategy itself.

Key trends and developments in  2022

Some of the major trends observed were increased digital adoption across categories and players, strong consumer sentiment revival post Omicron wave, growth-oriented campaigns by customers including SMEs and service providers, marketing dollars shifting to more ROI driven media and activities, etc.