Ajeet Bawa is one of the lucky ones who started his career with one of the age most disruptive segment e-commerce and has been associated with it all through working with industry leaders like Flipkart, PayTM, Homeshop18 & Askme in the past, which has given him the advantage to learn and grow with the evolving Industry.
He has led categories, business units and functional teams during these 9 years and got the chance to do most the innovative things in creating new business and developing efficient and robust process to make success come through.
Importance of Digital Marketing
In his current profile, Ajeet is associated with VLCC where his responsibilities span on developing innovative digital marketing strategies and developing brand e-commerce business. To take the organization from conventional marketing to digital marketing has all the scope to use all his experience in developing it. In his present role, Ajeet is working at building product business on the digital platform and e-commerce wherein a lot of new ideas are being adopted making digital marketing more important to his functioning at VLCC.
How did you get into Digital Marketing? What interested you in learning Digital Marketing?
Ajeet Bawa:
- My tenure with PayTM got me involved into digital marketing, Later my role of leading category market & merchandising at Askme Group got me highly involved with DM and practices involved in making it happen.
- The innovation, real-time interaction with your target audience, unlimited freedom to test new ideas, instant results supported by analytics and much more list keeps on adding made me learn and understand a highly evolving digital marketing.
According to you, what are the advantages of conventional marketing over Digital Marketing? Do you think that Digital Marketing is a threat to the future of conventional marketing?
Ajeet Bawa: Convectional marketing has its own set of advantage like reach, ease of understanding and seamless options but with rapidly changing technology phase and burgeoning digitalization is sure to take on conventional marketing stats as per Google Bain report by 2020 there will 170 Mill Shoppers online also of all Online Users 85% will buy online. I wont say Digital marketing is threat but for sure it is the way or a new level of marketing.
Share about your 3 favourite Digital Marketing case studies. What did you like most about them
Ajeet Bawa:
- ITC hotel Digital transformation: very inspiring know how ITC hotels have transformed their web presence and experience they have been able to give to their online users which intern have given huge boost to their business
- Oreo’s Daily Twist: Helps me take ideas
- Dabur’s Digital Transformation For the Modern Indian Women: Gives a good insight how story-telling can be used to interact with your users
According to you, what are the top 3 mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?
Ajeet Bawa:
- Not knowing their Audience/Segment online: Waste of money and resources on the wrong audience
- Wrong perception of Social media marketing: Nil results and impact on their followers mostly brand land of doing much with no targeted results
- Not knowing their own data/analytics: Most companies now days don’t realize the importance of data and how they can leverage them online as they lack right analytics setup and tools to track and derive results out of it.
Between Agency and In-house, which approach would you recommend for maximum value of Digital Marketing? Why?
Ajeet Bawa: I prefer agency model backed by very small and skilled team to drive output, having in-house team can lead to higher cost and lesser output.
How do you ensure increasing Digital Marketing’s relevance and influence in the organization?
Ajeet Bawa: By constantly sharing outputs with all stakeholders and increasing awareness by sharing new ideas and thoughts. Having more inclusive approach.
Which are your 3 favourite Digital Marketing Tools?
Ajeet Bawa:
- Google Analytics
- Adobe Omniture
- Adobe test and target/Experience manager
Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?
Ajeet Bawa:
- For Entrepreneurs: To cope up with very rapidly changing scenario where interaction and reaching the right audience for a company is of highest importance and as I said earlier numbers clearly suggest majority of the audience is now online.
- For Professionals: To enhance their career and remain in the race as conventional marketing is transforming itself into digital led marketing.
- For Students: Acceptability of students who are entering any field will be more if they have the right knowledge of Digital marketing. As the industry is fast changing and looking for talent who is ready to take on the challenge.
What are the top 3-5 skills you look for when hiring a candidate for Digital Marketing profile?
Ajeet Bawa:
- Innovative
- Detailed oriented
- Number driven
- Fast thinker
- Executioner
What is your advice for newbies, who are looking at building a career in Digital Marketing industry?
Ajeet Bawa: When you are learning then learn it by executing no amount of theory will help only constant optimization and innovation will help in this field which will come only from.
Learning this by doing it, read a lot as it’s a very fast innovating field, know and understand the advertising networks in and out.Read,Learn & execute.
How do you stay updated on the latest trends in Digital Marketing? Which are the Digital Marketing resources (i.e. blogs/websites/apps) you visit regularly?
Ajeet Bawa:
- To be constantly updated on trends a read a lot online and watch videos also my constant
- Interaction with multiple agencies give a lot of insights.
- (com.com/google/facebook/adobe blogs, Videos on YouTube, HubSpot, Creative Blog, Smashing magazine etc.
Share the names of 3 people you respect when it comes to Digital Marketing.
Ajeet Bawa:
- Arun Mathew
- Jumin Kamki
How do you see Digital Media evolving in future? What are the top 3 trends do you foresee for 2017?
Ajeet Bawa: Way ahead is digital all studied and trends show by 2020 a major part of marketing spend have to be diverted to digital as Google bain report suggests by 2020 out of 650 mill internet users 38% will be online shoppers in india.
Top three Digital Marketing trends:
- Programmatic marketing/big data.
- Mobile marketing
- Content marketing
Would you like to share few words about the work we are doing at Digital Vidya?
Ajeet Bawa:
It’s a great job Digital Vidya is doing in creating a talent pool of professional from every make of life who are Digitall Marketing experts and taking the industry forward also helping hem enhance their career prospects.
Keep up the good work with your innovative ways of teaching and spreading awareness about digital marketing!
Are you inspired by the opportunity of Digital Marketing? Start your journey by attending our upcoming orientation session on Digital Marketing for Career & Business Growth. It’s online and Free :).
