Digital Marketing is estimated to grow up to 47.5% by the end of 2016. At this rate, digital is expected to become one-third of all ad-spends in another 4 years and overtake traditional spends in the next 6 years. Since the real estate sector is highly competitive, gaining and maintaining a lead over competition with the right use of the right technology has become imperative for all players in the sector.
On similar lines, Amura Marketing Technologies with its one-of-a-kind ad platform – Sell.Do is a revolutionary marketing & sales automation platform, which has created a stir in the digital marketing and PaaS landscape, especially in the real estate sector. Since its launch, Sell.Do has consistently been growing business for its real estate clients by tracking, managing and accelerating their campaigns, leads and performance.
We got a chance to interact with Mr Ketan Sabnis , Co-founder and Product Head, Amura Marketing Technologies to discuss about the future of digital marketing automation and what Sell.Do has to offer for companies.
Ketan holds a Bachelors in Technology degree in Computer Engineering. A young entrepreneur from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP) in 2009, Ketan has worked on various real-time technology projects with companies like Amazon, Computational Research Labs (CLR) etc. He then went on to join Amura Marketing Technology as a Co-founder and Product Head.
You’ve worked with companies like Amazon. What pushed you to leave the job and start on your own?
I had always been excited about building scalable web products. While interning at Amazon; I had good exposure towards analytics and machine learning as well. The aura around entrepreneurship and the excitement to build ideas and products from scratch, got me into building Amura. Entrepreneurship in an early age has a lot more benefits according to me – you have time to experiment, lesser responsibilities and the passion to work for what you believe is higher. Plus, the opportunity for digital marketing was huge when we started – Amura became a pioneer to bringing in a data driven approach for marketing into India. Success with our automation platform and customer satisfaction kept us going over the years.
Please give a brief about Sell.Do platform. What’s it all about?
Amura Marketing Technologies with its one-of-a-kind platform – Sell.Do is India’s 1st Real Estate Sales & Marketing Automation platform providing services to >150 Clients across India. Sell.Do helps companies manage their leads, sales opportunities, marketing, reports and all type of communications like telephony, SMS and email from a single dashboard. Sell.Do is the only product in India which comes with a Big Data solution to give valuable insights on customer data to a developer. Sell.Do empowers developers to automate their pre-sales, sales & marketing processes & improve efficiencies while delivering excellent customer support at the same time.
Sell.Do has effectively solved many pain points facing the industry today – right from lead loss, data theft to monitoring & managing the sales & sales team’s performance. Sell.Do has helped connecting these dots leveraging technology tools in terms of Cloud Telephony, Email / SMS automation , campaign tracking & pipeline analysis across both online & offline channels. With the help of Big Data solution as part of Sell.Do, a decision maker in an organization can track the entire customer journey right from 1st enquiry till a booking. This gives valuable insights into the successes of a marketing strategy & also corrective steps to be taken for better success.
What were the challenges you faced during the initial days?
Educating clients about benefits of the digital medium was one the early challenges. Friction / Limited use of technology in the real estate industry didn’t help us either and meant we had very limited marketing budgets. With no visibility into the clients sales analytics meant we always faced a pushback saying digital doesn’t work. However, this led us to building a comprehensive sales and marketing automation platform – Sell.Do thereby connecting Sales & Marketing functions.
What are the products and services there for the customers at Sell.Do?
Other products and services at Sell.Do for the customers are as follows:
- Auto Lead capture via all sources – offline + online and mediums. 0% Lead Loss
- Lead Management
- Inbuilt Cloud Telephony with Virtual Tracking numbers including mobile
- Business Process automation via workflow
- Real Estate Business Intelligence.
- SMS & Email tracking
- Inventory Management
- ROI calculation
- Sales Performance
- Strategic Business Consultation – Comes bundled in Free with the product.
What is the core marketing technology capability of Sell.Do? Where does your product fit in vis-a-vis the customer lifecycle?
- Our Advertising Automation manages the digital campaigns thereby improving the touch points with the customers and reducing cost of acquisition by showing relevant ads to the relevant audience at the relevant time.
- Our Landing Pages module – automatic creation of websites – the place where people land after clicking the ad. The product monitors and optimizes the websites in real time based on how the visitor is interacting with the website. The components and the communication are picked up automatically based on what campaign is running (internally it talks with advertising module) so that there is proper connect for the visitor.
- Sales Automation module – it helps in capturing the enquiries from all sources and mediums. Whenever a customer expresses interest – either by filling a web form, calling on a number, sending an sms, raising a request on the property portal, this system tracks it seamlessly. Customers receive welcome auto responders and e-brochures from the system automatically based on business rules.
From a technology perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges that your marketing team faces today?
- At any given point of time, we have around 50+ campaigns running. Dealing with the large amount of campaign data that is being generated on a daily basis becomes an issue.
- Our systems internally help us derive meaningful insights from this vast amount of data, thereby improving our efficiency & performance and help us give the LOWEST Cost per lead to our customers.
What is it that sets Sell.Do apart from other sales & marketing platforms?
The available solutions either work on the marketing side as an automation platform or as a CRM. Also, most upcoming ad tech platforms work with custom audience lists trying to build their own data around audience. Sell.Do, for one, combines sales and marketing data to draw insights – which is found a very few platforms. Secondly, the advertising cloud offering aims to add business intelligence and automate to reduce the time to go live – for digital campaigns. We are building the platform on top of Google, FB and other content marketing platforms (will be adding more custom media over time); which means we are leveraging their algorithms and improving on the campaign setup, creative optimization, and better analytics to optimize ads, media and landing pages.
How you see big data as an asset to SMEs and big enterprises?
- Arecent report by Research and Markets forecasts that the global big data market for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) will grow at a compound annual rate of 43 per cent until 2018. This is for a reason.
- SME’s can get better insights into their customers, their behaviours. This can inturn help them tap into new markets and build their business.
- It can also them get visibilit into their own internal processes and operations and thereby cut un-necessary costs increasing their bottom line.
With marketing strategies, fads constantly changing and evolving how do you qualify Sell.Do as the best platform for customers?
- We, being digital marketers, are always on the lookout for new trends and drive innovations constantly for our marketing clients.
- All our expertise and learning go in our products which help our product customers to leverage the same expertise, best practices and innovations directly without spending time and effort.
How many clients have you till now and what has been your greatest achievement so far?
- We have 150+ clients leverage our sales & marketing platform.
- Our greatest achievement is the way we have transformed Real Estate as a vertical. In the last 6 years we have pioneered Digital as a medium for the entire industry and single handedly brought in Visibility, Measurability and Accountability for their sales and marketing functions.
- We are achieving the same for all the other verticals currently.
In your opinion what are some of the best practices to keep your customers happy?
- Trust – I think is the single most important thing. When you are handling such vast amount of customer data, making sure its safe, secure and establishing the trust factor with your customers is what will make or break you.
- Constantly innovating and staying ahead of the curve is what will increase the customer LTV and their stickiness.
As a sales & marketing platform founder yourself, what other platforms do you think are doing good in the market?
Other platforms which are doing well in the market are Salesforce , Hubspot, Kreato etc.
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