Digital Marketing Trends in India : A Recap Of 2014 [Fear of Panda, Local And ASO]A year is a long time in the parlance of online world. Another action packed year where the digital marketing efforts went all guns blazing across industries. Digital footprint expanded exponentially in India and the evidence is there for all of us to see. From the old time shop keepers coming up with a website to the street smart businessmen selling stuff on whatsapp, we saw the roots of digital marketing going deeper and stronger.2014 was a year where we saw digital marketing take a coaster ride. It was a game changing year with facebook stamping its foot down as a major advertising player. Retargeting, Location Specific Ads, Real Time Bidding, Display, Video Ads everything saw their share of changes compared to 2013 and triggered an ignition for changes expected in 2015.Here is a quick recap for you of high impact changes in digital marketing for the year 2014 specific to India and its influence on businesses.Offline still on the HighOffline marketing continued to rule the roost in the Indian Marketing scenario in spite of fast mobile and internet penetration. This is expected in a country where the internet penetration is still at only 19.19% (source: Internetlivestats) and the majority of the audience are still offline. While the digital advertising spend was able to reach approx $1 billion, traditional advertising spend was still a humongous $5 billion industry. (Source: statistica)Its a proven channel from what we had seen from the major giants who had penetrated the market with TV like makemytrip, jabong, flipkart and in 2014 brands continued to invest a lot in offline branding. Hike, WeChat, Bluestone, Lenskart, Yepme, Pepperfry, Zivame, Freecharge etc and many more entered TV & publishing media.Think Global, Serve Local and Act MobileMobile Advertising saw a rocket growth last year. With over 1 Billion in population and 65% of population under 35 years, India has unrivalled demography for Smartphone manufacturers. The stats from IDC suggests that the smartphone vs feature phone ratio grew at a rapid scale increasing the data accessibility on mobile. About 67% of the urban internet users had access to net on mobile while about 40% of the rural internet users had access to net on mobile. Focus on mobile stayed as a key marketing strategy to cover the width and depth of the market.Content marketing a shift in customer acquisition tacticsContent marketing was a buzzword for 2013. India still lags behind the adoption but in 2014 we saw the industry slowly embracing content marketing. Buying and research behavior of customers changed. It became very important to educate the customers about the value of what they purchase owing to the ever increasing smartness of online customer and the flexibility of the medium to allow thorough research before purchase.For many brands content marketing was no longer an accessory but occupied their core of branding and customer acquisition efforts. Think of the election campaigns of 2014, Urbanladder, Thrillophillia, Google Search [Bet the video ad is still vivid in memory]. Most of the brands expanded their content marketing strategies through Social platforms, videos, pics, infographics and blogs.Social for business is emerging2014 was the year that proved the influence of Social Media in business. Many Indian brands employed in-house social media teams which manage branding, online reputation management, marketing campaigns and constant user engagement.The constant reduction of organic reach on Facebook made their priorities very clear. One can easily see the shift of organic to advertisements on Facebook, social for business became very important for any business. Facebooks announcement of Facebook for work launch and product catalogue advertisements had major influence in the online advertising industry.Even though Facebook was still the most dominant Social Media channel, we saw increasing influence of Twitter, Quora, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn on business throughout the year.Twitter adoption amongst users was under par in India, resulting in twitter advertisement itself not taking off, however brands continue to keep their handles active and are not ignoring it.At the same time penetration of internet and smartphones made the real time reviews about the brands and products possible. Reputation Management was high on the social channels and had an impact on business both positively and negatively; case in point was Flipkarts Billion Day SaleAmplification of Paid AdsOnline spending increased; Facebooks importance towards paid, Twitters move towards buy from feed (sponsored tweet) and growth of shopping ads compared to search ads, was all but an exercise in increasing customer acquisition.Its especially clear on Facebook where average organic reach for business page posts dropped to