Vinay Tamboli on how digital transformation is changing the face of marketing

Independent digital marketing transformation group LS Digital recently launched an end-to-end transformation service – DigiVerse – that helps companies optimise and streamline their digital marketing operations. DigiVerse, a cloud-based offering with a user-friendly UI, lets businesses plan, execute, and track campaigns with greater efficiency, and seamless partner communication at lower costs while achieving increased ROI. It can be set up on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure with the added flexibility to integrate with various online platforms including in-house Lead Management Systems (LMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems.

Performing as a fully integrated marketing platform that brings all data into one central location, DigiVerse makes it easy for C-suite executives and marketing managers to access the information they need to make strategic decisions. DigiVerse also offers data visualisation and process optimisation features to help businesses make informed decisions and improve returns on their digital marketing.

Commenting on the launch, Vinay Tamboli, Senior VP (Products, Analytics and Consulting), LS Digital, said, “DigiVerse is designed with an experience of serving over

500 clients in different verticals for the sole purpose of making digital marketing operations management more efficient and effective for businesses of all sizes.” In this interaction with Adgully, Vinay Tamboli speaks about digital transformation taking place in marketing, predictive analysis, creating data lakes, and more.

How do you view the digital transformation taking place in the industry? What does the road ahead look like and how will the very function of marketing change in the future?

According to experts in the field, there are actually three ways that transmission might take place. One is that you are fundamentally altering how you conduct business. For instance, we used to have radio taxis in the past, but today we have Uber and Ola. That represents a total overhaul of the company. The second issue is that they don’t actually mean what they say when they say you should provide a completely exceptional customer experience. Examples of this include some hotels, such as yachts in the US, and locations where they actually monitor customer behaviour before providing that kind of service, such as when you enter the room. It’s entirely the extraordinary customer experience that you actually get from them since they are like the vending machine, just bringing you what they know you want. They also know what kind of temperature you prefer in the room and what kind of TV channels you desire. The third thing they claim is that if you change an organisation’s operations, you may find that you were previously conducting the same business, but that your methods have since changed completely.

So, these are the various ways that automation is actually happening. Now, as we are going forward, tech like AI and ML will also get embedded into all these three aspects. At DigiVerse, we aim to increase the operational efficiency of these transformations. If you look at the various horizontals of the businesses – it could be your purchase or billing sections or the customer service sections – all those very horizontals have actually used some kind of technology to transform them.

If you look at digital marketing as a horizontal – it started with website building, and then you have the SEO. You then have various other platforms coming in like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Then you have affiliate marketing, analytics, creative and so on. For all these you have multiple agencies. Now, imagine if there is a large brand that has multiple products, working with multiple agencies for branding, performance, creative, SEO – coordinating with all those things becomes extremely challenging and a lot of time goes into the coordination part instead of actually improving the productivity or focusing on the strategy. DigiVerse addresses these issues.

With the growing digital marketing transformation, what kind of new challenges are brands and marketers faced with?

Transformation is actually happening in all the places. There are two kinds of brands – one is a digital-first kind of brand and the other is a traditional enterprise. For traditional brands, digital is one of the channels. For the digital-first brand, they understand data and are leveraging it to engage with their customers better. For the traditional brands, it will be a key challenge to actually embrace the new technology and then also maintain an edge over their New Age competitors, who are digital-first.

DigiVerse can help the traditional brands as they do not have any platform to transform or collected data.

How can DigiVerse help new age marketers manage their multiple tasks across multiple platforms?

DigiVerse helps organisations deal with scenarios wherein there are multiple products, multiple services and multiple agencies by helping cut down on the coordination time so that they can focus more on the strategy part.

For example, they can create the media plans and actually track those media plans and get real-time numbers. They can streamline the processes to DigiVerse and get the consultant’s view of their data and focus on their project management through that. Based in the marketing data, they can actually create predictive analytics.

How does DigiVerse arrive at its predictive analysis and provide AI-driven insights?

In order to do the predictive analytics, you must have the data in one place – that is what we call the ‘data lake’. Currently, all the conversations between the brands and their agencies and partners are actually happening through emails and through Excel sheets. Therefore, the data is completely scattered. there. So, the first thing that needs to be dome is to have that data in one place and only then you can run the predictive analytics on that. DigiVerse helps brands get that data in one place. Once we have that data in one place, we can start doing the predictions.