An Interview With – Jignesh Gohel, Founder & Marketing Head – OLBUZ

 Jignesh Gohel is an Entrepreneur, digital marketing consultant and Google adwords certified professional specializes in eCommerce business marketing. He is closely working in digital marketing industry since 2006 and having vast experience working with small, medium and large businesses to promote their brands and products online. He is the founder of OLBUZ – IT agency based in Ahmedabad & The India – unique travel community place featuring unexplored places in India.

How did you get into Digital Marketing? What interested you in learning Digital Marketing?

Jignesh: My career in digital marketing industry started in 2006 and it was the biggest coincidence of my life. Being a computer engineer with first class marks from Sardar Patel University, I also dreamed for lucrative job as a software developer. During my first campus interview, I got placement in one UK based online pharmacy as a trainee and I accepted this offer just to start my professional career. This was the turning point for my professional career from where I learned about digital marketing.

In 2013, I left my full-time job to start my own Startup called OLBUZ; an IT agency specialized in digital marketing, mobile application & web development services. OLBUZ is a Google AdWords partner since last two years and managing medium to large enterprise accounts since last two year.

I really love working in digital marketing industry which has grown a lot in last couple of years. It encourages me to keep learning and experimenting advance marketing techniques and this is the most thrilling part of this industry.

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?

Jignesh: Conventional marketing & digital marketing are very different at many points. Both have their own advantages and disadvantages. But I must admit that; digital marketing is more advance way to promote any brand with all advanced features that can control spending, reach, and offers insight to take a precise future decision. Paid marketing tools like Google Adwords, Bing etc allows us to start an advertisement campaign within few minutes and they only charge when your target audience click or see your ads. This is not possible in conventional marketing where you are paying for publishing no matter whether your target audiences view your ads or not.

I don’t see digital marketing as a biggest threat but it will definitely impact the market share of conventional marketing in the future. I see conventional marketing as a support channel of digital marketing or a vice versa. The combination used effectively can result in better output for any marketing campaign.

Share about your 3 favorite Digital Marketing case studies. What did you like most about them?

Jignesh: 

• Tour Operator: When client approach me to look into their online presence, the website was badly affected by Google panda updates back in 2013. They lost over 90% of leads being generated from organic traffic and asked me to look into the situation to regain the lost business. It’s been 3 years we are working on their website and we not only recovered their traffic but also improved their business by over 400%.

See below screenshot of traffic:

• Medical Supplies Store (eCommerce website): This is one of the leading ecommerce medical supply store and an established brand in USA. They were migrating their ecommerce website with over 100K of pages including products and knowledge section from their current CMS to Magento. The challenge was to make this transition without losing organic & paid traffic at any cost.

We prepared transition guidelines for a developer which was divided into various steps and by end of each step, we keep monitoring the progress. Within 1 month, the entire migration was done successfully and the website started receiving their organic rankings and traffic within next couple of days.

Upon completion of this migration, we optimized entire Google AdWords & Bing ads account with over 50K ad groups and Google shopping campaign. Within one year, the Google AdWords business was doubled with the same spending and Bing ads business was improved by 200% by keeping the cost per conversion even lower than Google Adwords.

According to you, what are the top 3 mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?

Jignesh: 

• Same Strategy: I have seen many organizations implementing same strategy for all clients. This is one of the biggest mistakes as each business has different marketing goal and targeting audiences from different geo locations. One need to understand target persona first and should accordingly create the marketing plan.
• User experience: Mobile traffic has been increased a lot in last couple of years. I strongly recommend having responsive website compatible with all mobile browsers. I have seen many PPC accounts complaining about poor conversion rate without studying landing page experience of the users. Better user experience is very important part in conversion rate optimization and can result in better ROI.
• Avoid using tools: Tools are the best weapons of Digital Marketers which helps us to ease our task in better ways.

Which are your 3 favorite Digital Marketing Tools?

Jignesh:It will be difficult to answer this question as I am allowed to name only 3 tools where as there are many tools I have been using in my daily work. Here are my 3 favorite tools:

• SEMRush
• Google Keyword planner
• SocialPilot

Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?

Jignesh: 

• For Entrepreneurs: Knowledge of digital marketing will help entrepreneur to utilize the online marketing platform to promote their business / products from early stage.  I have seen many startups smartly utilizing this knowledge to enhance their business. In contrary, many are still spending lot of money in conventional way of promoting their business. There is huge opportunity for any business to acquire more customers with the help of digital marketing.
• For Professionals: Digital marketing is not only for businesses but also professionals can get benefitted by sharing their experience with the help of blog or social media. Knowledge of digital marketing will be added advantage to promote an individual brand that will also boost your professional career.
• For Students: Knowledge of digital marketing will help students in their academic research and publishing. They can start utilizing social media and internet to enhance their knowledge from the early stage.

What are the top 3-5 skills you look for when hiring a candidate for Digital Marketing profile?

Jignesh: 

• Good communication skill
• Understanding of search business (i.e how search engine works – technically)
• Command on research, analysis and understanding of user behavior
• Understanding of basic web technologies like HTML, Javascript etc.
• Fluent in analytics and data interpretation

What is your advice for newbies, who are looking at building a career in Digital Marketing industry?

Jignesh: 

Command on communication is the key to succeed in digital marketing. You should be able to connect with your target audiences by spreading right information at right time. Never run behind rankings but focus on generating relevant traffic to your website and you will see the success.

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?

Jignesh: To stay updated with latest trends, I regularly visit below websites:

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/
• https://moz.com/blog
• https://www.seroundtable.com/
• http://www.ppchero.com/ & https://www.en.advertisercommunity.com/

Apart from these, I regularly participate in local events, twitter chat, Google+ hangouts and do different experiment on my own web properties.

Share the names of 3 people you respect when it comes to Digital Marketing.

Jignesh:

• Neil Patel
• Avinash Kaushik
• Brian Dean
• Rand Fishkin

How do you see Digital Media evolving in future? What are the top 3 trends do you foresee for 2016?

Jignesh: Digital marketing is one of the most emerging fields these days and I have seen lot of changes in last 9 years. We will see lot of improvement in personalized search, mobile and wearable devices and IOT (internet of things). Search result will be more personalized and quality will be improved. Marketers will have to understand user behavior of mobile & wearable devices and will have to mold the strategy accordingly.

Would you like to share few words about the work we are doing at Digital Vidya?

Jignesh: First of all, congratulations to Digital Vidya team on successfully completion of 6 amazing years and wishing you great success ahead.

No need to say that, Digital Vidya is India’s number #1 digital marketing learning space offering amazing and insightful courses in this field. I personally like the diversified courses Digital Vidya offers which are unique and as per current industry needs.

Keep rocking!

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 :).