Virginia Sharma is the Vice-President of Marketing, Communications and Corporate Citizenship for IBM India/South Asia. She has been with IBM 12+ years in various global and regional roles, including Asia Pacific and North America, with IBM Software Group. Most recently, she was awarded the Indy’s “Marcom professional of the Year” award in the IT and Software Category by CMO Council and CMO Asia.  Virginia is also an active member of various CMO advisory councils in India and also speaks regularly at various IT and digital marketing conferences. Virginia has moved from New York, NY to Mumbai with her husband in June 2009. In an exclusive conversation with AlooTechie, Virginia Sharma discusses IBM’s digital marketing strategies for India and South Asia.

How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile figure in IBM’s plans to reach out to consumers?

Digital, specifically Internet has become an intrinsic part of our marketing mix because it gives us the ability to customize different messages to different audiences through the customer lifecycle (pre and post purchase) and get better ROI from our campaigns.  This is important for three reasons. First, IBM is in the enterprise B2B space and we have custom solutions for different industries and company sizes.  Second, while the decision maker is still the CIO in most cases, in the last few years we have seen an increasingly actively role played by line of business leaders and process owners like the CFO and CMO in defining the requirements and evaluating the solutions.  Third, our sales cycle is long because our clients seek a lot of education of on offerings and best practices before they make a decision so we need to provide quick access to different types of information at different stages of the sales cycle to ensure the client is successful. This even includes post sales communication.

We are just starting to leverage mobile to reach our audiences primarily through mobile apps and because we have a high degree of smart phone penetration in other target audience, who are on the go.  We also recognize the potential for mobile for employee engagement, since over 70 per cent of our employee base is Gen Y and IBMers are a critical constituency for us as brand advocates.  An interesting trend is that social media has further empowered users to seamlessly merge their online activities across mobile and web platforms. So a client will see and ad and then send an SMS for more information or tweet some feedback immediately. This presents enormous opportunities as well as challenges to because we have to make sure we are accounting for clients responding to traditional campaigns through the digital medium and our campaigns can handle the increased velocity in responses.  

People are speaking about mobile being a great medium for brand communication, but still, very less amounts are spent on the particular medium. What is your take on this?

You are right. People are talking about mobile a lot. In fact, IBM recently conducted a Global CMO Study in 2011 and 83 percent of the participating CMOs from India want to leverage mobile applications as technology enablers for their marketing strategy. However, there are a few barriers to adoption. Mobile is still a relatively a new medium and is evolving at a rapid pace, and affordable smart phone headsets have only become available recently. In addition, mobiles are the primary communication devices for interpersonal communication. Brand communication does not always seamlessly fit in the scope of interpersonal communication. The challenge is in creating the need where the consumer will want to use his/her mobile to receive communication from the brand. If that value can be created, mobiles can be very effective.

At IBM, we see great potential in mobile. It forms part of our overall communication mix and we invest in it based on relevance of the medium. We have some great stories of leveraging mobile for brand communication.  One such initiative was the launch of the IBM’s Global CIO Study. In India we developed a mobile app which was enabled via Bluetooth at airports and allowed people to download a copy of the report. We saw over 4000 downloads on the study just by adding mobile to our marketing mix. We are launching the same for CMOs in November 2011 with a lot more functionality – a complete one stop shop for a CMO.

Internet is said to be a measurable medium. What is your take on this? Have we overdone the measurement quotient and made this medium hard to understand for the brand marketers?

We don’t think so. The fact that Internet is such a measurable medium makes it easier for marketers and brand managers to understand it. However, given the pace at which this medium, and hence measurement metrics, is evolving brand managers will need to keep themselves at pace with this change.

Measurement is extremely important, and that is case for us at IBM too. Determining ROI is crucial to making marketing investment decisions. Nearly two-thirds of CMOs participating in IBM’s 2011 Global CMO Study think that return on marketing investment will be the primary measure of their effectiveness by 2015. At the end of the day marketing ROI justifies our ability to go back and ask for more budgets.

We therefore use various metrics and co-relate them to suit our needs. Simple metrics such as ‘reach’ are also taking a whole new dimension for us. With business expanding into new territories, 'qualified reach' is going to matter a great deal in the coming times and similarly so with all other metrics. Using our tools like IBM Unica NetInsights, we are able to effectively measure the success of our online campaigns.

In your category, performance based online advertisements works the best. With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

Performance based advertisement is largely connected to ROI. When it comes to the digital medium, while efforts are on to qualify data which directly links online spends to online ROI, it is still not an exact science. Marketers and vendors are both experimenting in a new medium to find that exact linkage.

While our focus on performance-based online marketing continues at IBM, we use the full potential of digital to communicate to and engage and influence our audiences. India is among the top global markets in terms of video content consumption on the internet. In January alone if we go by reports 30.1 million Indians watched videos online. At IBM we are extremely active on visual brand building exercises which exploit this medium, not just globally but at a local level as well.

In India we have some great success stories using video content where we have seen a CTR as high as 15 per cent while using video-based display campaigns. We have also seen a steep increase in the engagement rates in programs such as CxO Dialogues which uses videos as the primary form of content.

How do you see your brand leveraging display advertisements on internet?

Display on the Internet is an integral part of our overall digital media strategy, and invariably display advertising forms part of most digital campaigns we run. We will continue to look at interesting, interactive and engaging formats.

How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India?

Social media is important not only for IBM, but for all marketers across the globe. It allows us to create conversations, and cultivate two-way relationships with our audience. It also helps us ‘listen’ to what our constituents are saying, and thereby become more receptive and responsive. Today, CMOs across the globe feel somewhat more prepared to manage social media – though their level of anxiety is still high. CMOs are unclear how social media is going to change things specific to their organization – but they anticipate the change will be significant.

In India, the growth rate of social media is astonishing. Nielsen data show that of the 580 odd million mobile users, 240 million access social media from their phones. More than 57 million consumers are willing to receive brand related news on social channels while 10 million are aware of brand presence on social media. 37 million consumers read online reviews and 15 million of them do it through social media searches. These are all extremely relevant figures.

The fundamental requirement for IBM as a brand is to understand how we can leverage this data and its associated analytics and build a social experience for the brand, which engages people. Peer advocacy and creation of relevancy are the two most critical elements of social media as a marketing engine. It is more about experience and interest than about incessant status updates. More than promoting, the emphasis is on using social media to engage, to tell credible stories, to interact and to help customers in experiencing the brand. This can only be done through creation of social content and conversation, which is relevant from an interest point of view than a promotional point of view.

So far we have experimented very successfully with social media. Not only do we see it as an effective tool to build our brand but also as a great medium to demonstrate our focus on customer service. We have taken a huge initiative to enable subject matter experts to build their social presence and have a meaningful connect with our customers/prospects/partners.

Which according to you have been some of the most exciting online campaigns that the company has initiated for its brand so far?

In India we have done several fantastic campaigns and all of them were exciting and challenging in their own way. Digital marketing is far more targeted and segmented across categories and some of the best online campaigns that we have undertaken have squarely focused on reaching out exclusively to a specific target set of audience, be it a CXO or an influential blogger or a specific community, to target an industry. The aim has been to build on our core proposition and to elaborate on solutions that IBM can provide to help tackle industry problems.