Rajat Sahu‘s professional background has been in marketing and sales for past 18 years. He is Head Global Marketing, MicroWorld Software Services. His foundation being from sales background, marketing always becomes a query to know how does he make it more effective and help the sales team close more or reach more.
Importance of Digital Marketing
In today’s scenario reaching target audience in right time and right place becomes crucial, and digital marketing plays a pivotal role in making the marketing efforts or messaging reach the right audience using various tools from email marketing to remarketing to target marketing activities on the online space.
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?
Rajat Sahu: Conventional marketing as I would define is more of cluster bombing, where as digital marketing helps you to funnel it to the select target audience. Both are integral to marketing and would coexist I would say. However, in some cases the weigthtage could tilt either side depending on whether you are trying to market a cola or car.
Share about your 3 favorite Integrated Marketing case studies. What did you like most about them?
Rajat Sahu:
- Increasing renewal: After initiating retargeting and product benefit EDM campaign along with our brand campaign and retail branding activity, we got our renewal increased by 37% a product off take from shelves increased by 21% and channel base increased by 18%.
- Using EDM campaign & LinkedIn: We had an extensive campaign done using LinkedIn targeting C-level executive successfully and generated 30 leads with 7 closing within 4 months adding $324,000, this was done using offline CIO events, where the data captured was used to send EDMs (white papers, case studies and special offer for POCs).
According to you, what are the top 3 mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?
Rajat Sahu:
- Facebook for enterprise sales leads
- Website not in sync with social media or digital marketing
- No connect between offline and online marketing plans
Between Agency and In-house, which approach would you recommend for maximum value of Digital Marketing? Why?
Rajat Sahu: I would say there has to be balance based on strategic needs and plan, as some of the specialized works done by agencies or specialist cannot be done in-house. Having said that in-house team for digital marketing is also crucial from timings point of view. As some content and other relevant messaging an be done with less time internally then external agency.
How do you ensure increasing Digital Marketing’s relevance and influence in the organization?
Rajat Sahu: Basic tenet of advertising or marketing is to help increase sales directly or indirectly. In today’s scenario digital marketing gives very tangible results or ROI which is measurable vs the spend. It is more accepted by management faster than the other conventional media or marketing activities due to its nature of deep diving and focused result generation models. Digital marketing is easier to influence the organsiation to increase usage as it gives specific and measurable achievements.
Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?
Rajat Sahu:
- For Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneur’s can reach much more larger audience using digital marketing. They can expand their product or service reach beyond geographical limits, thus helping them make more revenue/
- For Professionals: Digital marketing is going to be an integral part of every business. As today IT becomes the backbone or facilitator for all kind of business be it small or large. In this scenario, professionals need to adopt it as fast possible to stay relevant. Digital marketing helps reach the target market faster, easier and also to know your customer behavior. So professional would only benefit by knowing more about their target segment, much before they meet them face to face.
Specifically marketing and sales professionals need to learn digital marketing, as it helps them lower time to reach the customer and increase customer satisfaction by using various tools such as CRM to BI integrated with digital marketing.
- For Students: As we embrace digital life and move towards a currency less world, the growth opportunities provided by digital marketing is huge. As we grow by each component of digital marketing will evolve in to a specialization in itself, thus making far more opportunities.
What are the top 3-5 skills you look for when hiring a candidate for Digital Marketing profile?
Rajat Sahu:
- A person must be passionate and hungry to learn.
- A person should be good with numbers, statistics and ability to connect the dots.
- The person should also have an inquisitive mind to question the conventional.
- He should be able to keep abreast with changing time and demands of social media.
What is your advice for newbies, who are looking at building a career in Digital Marketing industry?
Rajat Sahu: As said before, digital is going to be the new norm. It is going to be one of the fastest growing career opportunity with huge demand-supply gap. Having said that, it is also important that you are passionate about the way digital works and as mentioned points of skills needed, apart from core skill of digital or social media, an eye for details and deep diving into data is going to be the key for success in digital marketing.
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?
Rajat Sahu: I am a voracious reader and technology evolution is something fascinates me to keep on learning and experimenting with the new. I do visit various blogs on social media, subscribe to tweeter feeds, attend webinar and seminars to keep myself abreast with the latest.
Share the names of 3 people you respect when it comes to Digital Marketing.
Rajat Sahu: There are quite a few but the names from India I would like to say are:
- Mahesh Murthy (www.pinstorm.com)
- Alok Kejriwal (Contest2win)
- Dheeraj Rajaram (MuSigma)
How do you see Digital Media evolving in future? What are the top 3 trends do you foresee for 2016?
Rajat Sahu: As mentioned above digital media is going to further break into specialized areas be it website and its tools, content, SEO, Email Marketing etc, these are going to further developed based on the growing complexities. I would say it is something similar to growing from CRM to Hadoop. A lot of AI and Machine learning would take over to make digital marketing more complex and more segmented.
Would you like to share few words about the work we are doing at Digital Vidya?
Rajat Sahu:
Digital Vidya is doing a great job of bringing high quality training with apt content with leading industry expertise to guide the aspiring digital marketer of tomorrow. I believe Pradeep would have envisioned building a world class training facility to empower people and industry with the highest standard and quality professional to bridge the demand supply gap that is looming largely in the growing digital marketing space.
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 :).
