Rajat Garg did his MS at Stanford followed by working at Amazon in their Affiliate Marketing team. This exposed him to the world of automated and scalable digital marketing methods using tools that were not widely known. After leaving Amazon, he worked with a startup in US and then moved to India to start SocialAppsHQ and then, Shimply.com.
Digital Vidya: Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?
Rajat: If you look at the pattern of information and content flow, much of it has moved online from various offline mediums. Companies creating this content will have to leverage digital marketing to attract users to consume their content. It’s still in a nascent stage in India with companies trying to figure out the possible impact and looking for right partners to explore this with. So, for students, this makes an ideal industry given the unique combination of learning opportunities, lack of good talent, lots of new job opportunities and of course an opportunity to make a serious impact.
Digital Vidya: According to you, what are the top mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?
Rajat: For Shimply.com, we spent over 6-7 months just on building technology stack and bringing sellers on board. This delayed lot of our digital marketing activities and the impact of it are being felt now given the urgency to drive sales. We wish we had started sooner.
Digital Vidya: You led ‘The First 30 Days Of A Mobile App’ Webinar for Digital Vidya’s community. How was your experience in leading the Webinar?
Rajat: I liked Q&A quite a bit. It exposed me to the way builders are thinking and the stage at which most people are. For entrepreneurs out there, there is a huge opportunity enabling people in building their mobile apps and helping them to market it right.
Digital Vidya: Please share top 5-7 takeaways from the Webinar you would like to share with our community?
Rajat: Some of the key takeaways are:-
- Mobile app updates are hard so build a better product first
- First 30 days will determine the downloads you will see organically in future months, so allocate your advertising spend appropriately
- Pick keywords that matter – put them in title and description, design an awesome logo.
Digital Vidya: Do you have any suggestions for us to further increase the value of our Digital Marketing Webinars for our community?
Rajat: We should probably add focused groups for case studies where we dissect marketing strategy of a company. If we can shed light on the thinking process, assumptions and validations that company went through in deciding that strategy, it will be useful for others to figure out their own. Also, we can pick up a particular site/app based on audience input and give specific input to improve the desired metrics.
Digital Vidya: Would you like to share few words about the work we are doing at Digital Vidya?
Rajat:
With apps on mobile and other device ecosystem opening up, everybody is feeling the lack of depth most marketers have in these new domains. We need companies like Digital Vidya to step in and fill that void. I can safely say that your webinars and other courses are definitely helping marketers attain the right talent for opportunities ahead.
