Jaydip Sikdar has a long and illustrious marketing career in the technology space. He spent last 15 years leading various marketing functions and delivering substantial business impact for global tech companies including IBM and Adobe. Jaydip started his career in the media & entertainment industry in the creative department and went on to work on a number of memorable advertising campaigns and TV commercials, both in India and in the Middle East. Starting from print and electronic media back in late nineties, he had an opportunity to travel through a transformational journey to a new brave world of digital marketing.Jaydip is an IMT Ghaziabad alumni and has an advanced diploma on Internet Marketing from Harvard University Extension School.
How did you get into Digital Marketing? What interested you in learning Digital Marketing?
Jaydip: In early two thousands, for many enterprises and most SMBs, digital footprints would mean a static HTML website. Many of them just started to realize that a website is as essential as having marketing collaterals. I would take up website designs as freelance projects. These projects got me close to the medium (digital). Once a client is happy they would ask now what? How does anyone discover my website? This got me close to SEO, SEM, Data analytics and other foundational areas of digital marketing.
I think the most exciting part of digital marketing is our ability to target, track, and respond /take desired actions in almost real time basis customer behaviors /needs during a buying journey. And this is just the beginning.
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?
Jaydip: I think the time has come when we need to look at marketing beyond Kotler’s 4Ps. Very few business disciplines have seen such innovations and transformations during the past decade like marketing. Data has emerged as the single most critical factor to success in the digital arena. Digital Marketing has brought in both credibility as well as responsibility to marketers. For the first time marketer has an authoritative seat in the boardroom. This was long due for the marketer fraternity. In my opinion conventional and digital marketing are inseparable. Today they cannot exist without each other. So I don’t see digital marketing is a threat to the future of conventional marketing, but a compliment to strengthen the marketing practice as a whole.
Share about your 3 favorite Digital Marketing case studies. What did you like most about them?
Jaydip:
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Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ social media <video> campaign
This series of video campaign showing the results when women are given the choice to walk through doors marked “beautiful” or “average.” Though Dove’s research finds 96% of women globally don’t choose beautiful to describe themselves, 80% believe that every woman has something about her that is beautiful.
-
McDonald’s lovin’ Super Bowl campaign
McDonald’s ran an ad during the Super Bowl last year letting people know that random customers would be able to pay for burgers with ‘loving gestures’ instead of cash if they ordered at certain times. They had a mix of YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The YouTube Super Bowl ad received eight million views within a week of going live.
-
Lufthansa Airlines
How they are redefining the customer travel experience to deliver personal, contextual service at scale
According to you, what are the top 3 mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?
Jaydip:
- Lack of clear campaign goals
Defining clear goals for your campaign is a mantra to your digital marketing campaign success.
- Underestimating /ignoring the importance of mobile
Mobile is hot and usage of mobile apps is all time high. Mobile accounts for 62 percent of all digital media time and mobile apps account for over 50 percent of that time.
- Not mapped /aligned to customer journey
By identifying and deploying personalization, targeting, journey mapping and data analysis, companies are now able to deliver a customized brand experience that provides value to customers and increase the stickiness.
Between Agencies and In-house, which approach would you recommend for maximum value of Digital Marketing? Why?
Jaydip: Prerequisite to any successful digital marketing program is a strong data driven marketing plan. Your employees understand your customers better than anyone. So when it comes to customer data, rely on internal workforce. Hire and grow a solid team of talents with strategy, digital, mobile, data, campaign, and web marketing skills. I prefer to outsource creatives (design and content) to agency.
Which are your 3 favorite Digital Marketing Tools?
Jaydip: Frankly I am biased to Adobe marketing tools as they are by far the best in their respective areas. We use:
- Adobe Analytics for data analysis and reporting
- Adobe Target for Personalization and optimization
- Adobe Campaign for creating workflows and deploying and tracking all marketing campaigns
- Adobe Social for social listening and monitoring besides scheduling and tracking posts
Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?
Jaydip:
- For Entrepreneurs: Digital marketing can help connect, engage, promote, and interact frugally with their target audience
- For Professionals: Digital is pervasive. Understanding and leveraging the medium is critical to succeed in all professions
- For Students: If you aspire to be a marketing professional, learning digital marketing tools and technologies is an absolute imperative
What are the top 3-5 skills you look for when hiring a candidate for Digital Marketing profile?
Jaydip:
- Digital and Mobile savvy (hands on at industry leading tools and technologies)
- Data analysis…can decode and work with large volume of complicated data sets
- Strong at inbound marketing (content, blog, social media)
- Understand how to optimize and get better ROI on every dollar /rupee spent (PPC and Paid media advertising)
- Strong program /project management with reporting skills
What is your advice for newbies, who are looking at building a career in Digital Marketing industry?
Jaydip: Without a doubt, Digital Marketing is one of the most exciting and sorted after careers in the industry today. Good news is we are still at the beginning of the curve. With the advent of new tools, devices, and technologies, the possibilities are endless. Both the market and the opportunity are huge.
If you are looking to build a career in digital marketing, learn to live and breathe data. It will take you a long way in the digital economy.
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?
Jaydip: I try to do 3 things:
- Spend a lot of time online (Read and watch as much videos as possible)
- Interact /exchange with colleagues /industry peers
- Religiously follow all new developments related to digital marketing solutions within Adobe
I religiously read /follow the following publications /portals:
- http://www.cmo.com
- https://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/
- http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights
- http://techcrunch.com/
- http://www.marketingprofs.com/
- http://blog.hubspot.com/
- https://www.salesforce.com/blog/
- http://cmo.deloitte.com/
- https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/blogs-digital-business-default
- http://blogs.gartner.com/digital-marketing/
- http://www.emarketer.com/
Share the names of 3 people you respect when it comes to Digital Marketing.
Jaydip:
- Avinash Kaushik
- Brian Clark
- Neil Patel
- Mahesh Murthy
How do you see Digital Media evolving in future? What are the top 3 trends do you foresee for 2016?
Jaydip: We are still at the first wave of Digital Marketing. I see the space continuously evolving and becoming more challenging, especially at the wake of ‘Internet of Things’ devices becoming more pervasive. On the other hand, Mobile apps are rising super critical. Messaging apps are the new OS. The top four messaging apps in the world have nearly 3 billion monthly active users and are opened almost five times as much as regular apps. Because users spend so much time in these apps, companies are leveraging the apps to connect with their customers.Mobile digital media time in the US is now significantly higher at 51% compared to desktop (42%). In India, 41% of E-commerce sales comes from Mobile. It is simply huge!!
I see below trends are hot in 2016:
- Virtual reality
- User generated content
- Mobile app driven content consumption + mobile e-commerce
Would you like to share few words about the work we are doing at Digital Vidya?
Jaydip:
I think Digital Vidya has become synonymous with today’s aspiring Digital marketing students and information seekers. It is a great starting point and a massive knowledge hub. The team is completely focused in preparing the next generation of digital marketers and socializing successful use cases and case studies. The impact of which on the industry is profound. I wish all the best to the entire Digital Vidya team!
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 :).
