2021 has seen Sri Lanka’s understanding of technology and the online world bloom beyond imagination. We must have seen at least five years of digital progress crammed into one.
Businesses faced huge challenges last year, losing physical access to customers over about three months. Digital marketing transformed from simply another form of marketing to a saving grace. In this new landscape, ICT (information and communications technology) services and digital strategy company CreativeHub has become a major player in helping businesses meet their goals and reach customers digitally.
The Morning Brunch spoke to CreativeHub Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Irosha de Silva on how both entrepreneurs and established businesses can make the most of their online presence and engage with customers digitally.
Tell us a bit about CreativeHub and what they do.
Simply put, CreativeHub is a total end-to-end digital consultant. We’re like a marriage between a software company and a data-driven management agency. We also work with augmented reality and virtual reality as well.
What we do is look at companies from a branding standpoint, and support with designing websites, developing apps, and enterprise resource planning. We also do data-driven digital marketing, creating solutions that can deliver results like e-commerce conversions.
We’ve been working with several brands, both internationally and locally, including Hayleys, David Pieris Group of Companies, Laugfs Holdings, and Expolanka Holdings.
Why do you think it is important for businesses to focus on digital marketing?
More and more businesses are going digital now, especially with Covid-19. Our digital interaction has been boosted like never before. Screen times have increased, and more and more businesses are looking at getting on or building e-commerce platforms. The digital side of technology has benefited quite a lot with the Covid-19 situation.
Looking at digital marketing, pre-pandemic, the only focus on digital marketing was related to social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, but this is really not the case; digital marketing has a big spectrum to it. The approach that CreativeHub takes to digital marketing is quite holistic.
Take a brand, for instance, the first thing you need to look at is how good their digital presence is, what people see when they Google the brand, how their website communicates the products or services they’re selling, and what the purpose of the brand is. After that comes the social media aspect.
With social media and platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn (which, by the way, is very popular in Sri Lanka), brands need to think about how they’re going to get target audiences engaged – how to get their attention on these platforms and keep it through the user’s whole journey up until the point they decide to purchase that product or service.
Understanding the importance of this user journey is crucial in digital marketing. Take a handbag brand, for example, when you start the brand, no one knows about it, so when building a digital marketing strategy, it’s important to think about the perspective of the end customer – how they will interact with the brand online and use this perspective to create brand awareness and engage with the customer. You need to ask questions like how you’re going to get them to sign up for a newsletter or download a mobile app, how you’re going to get customers to read more and more about the bag.
There are other marketing strategies that can also be used to control the journey from initial engagement to making a purchase, especially digitally, with applications like augmented reality, where customers can see projections of products through an app. You can also create a virtual shopping experience through virtual reality, where customers can virtually walk through a showroom. This was a strategy we used with United Motors when they had a lack of people visiting their showroom, as a means of taking the showroom to the customer.
The broader aspects of digital marketing are often not realised, but more and more business, not just locally, but worldwide, are looking at digital marketing broadly.
What advice would you give to entrepreneurs starting to market their products digitally?
I would tell them they need to think big. Sri Lanka is a small market, and whatever service or product you are marketing, you need to think global. Sri Lanka can be a pilot market, but you need to think global, and digital marketing allows you to get your message and product out to the whole world.
This global thinking is something that people in Sri Lanka don’t tend to do. They tend to think of the short term and only in a local context, but if you think big and think global, there’s a much larger start-up ecosystem that entrepreneurs can get into.
CreativeHub frequently rebrands to have more impact in the online space. Why is rebranding important and how does CreativeHub go about it?
With rebranding, some of the companies we work with in terms of digital strategy have been around for more than 50 years, and when you look at those brands, they give out a traditional look and feel that doesn’t quite appeal to the youthful crowd and the international market. Through rebranding, we can take these brands global, and for that approach, the brand needs to have that international look and feel.
When we look at rebranding, we look at how to position the brand in a modern way at an international level and build up marketing strategies on top of that to hold people’s attention. People’s attention spans online are getting less and less by the day. Brands need to keep up with that short time span and impress. This is why it’s important to speak about the “why” of a brand. More and more brands are moving from profit-driven mentalities to purpose-driven mentalities, to focus on why they exist as a brand and what values are important to them.
Many companies in Sri Lanka know what they do, but not why they do it, and when rebranding, it’s important to include that missing aspect.
What are your thoughts on digital marketing and the pandemic?
Our business has grown five times over mid-pandemic because businesses are looking into going digital like never before. They’re thinking about completely changing their strategy towards a completely online approach or a mixed approach. The eyes of decision-makers have shifted from running on traditional models for the longest time to taking a digital approach because the need has been created.
Before Covid-19, we were digitally far behind the rest of the world, but now, since a lot of people are thinking about it, the momentum is there and there is a lot of potential for impact for companies who are into providing digital services.
