Ravi Jain co-founded GenY Medium, as a full-service Digital Marketing company. They had the vision to create a Digital Marketing firm which combines the “art side” of marketing and the “science” of digital. Needless to add, as a Co-founder, all of what Ravi does at GenY Medium, revolves around Digital Marketing.
Ravi Jain started his career at Procter and Gamble, Japan – a perfect training ground for marketing professionals. The rigor applied to marketing, innovation in consumer research and its application to brand campaigns at P&G is perhaps at the cutting edge. Post P&G, while working in the founding team at training.com, he got hands-on experience at Digital Marketing. Ravi’s co-founder, Yashwant Kumar, also from P&G has had a similar experience. Their excitement around the digital opportunity led them to start GenY Medium.
How did you get into Digital Marketing? What interested you in learning Digital Marketing?
Ravi Jain: I started appreciating the potential of Digital Marketing during my first stab at entrepreneurship. At training.com, as an entrepreneur, acquiring customers for our e-learning programs with positive unit economics and in a scalable fashion was fundamental. For a boot-strapped startup, digital was the only channel which made sense. Thus began my exposure to and interest in digital.
The ability to target consumers, test advertising across ad-formats and platforms and titrate to get the best results were refreshing than the black-box approach of conventional marketing. Seeing is believing and I saw that digital marketing approaches worked better than the conventional ATL, BTL options I used. That made digital interesting as a channel.
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?
Ravi Jain: As a digital marketing practitioner, I would vouch for the channel, but a relative comparison with conventional marketing would be foolhardy.
From practical experience, the answer to the question is highly contextual. In sectors which are mass market and the product/service has low unit-price, conventional marketing is the most significant lever. From what we have seen working alongside marquee conventional marketing agencies is the following:
- Trust: Conventional marketing is a channel which drives trust (more than digital). By design, only brands with media budgets beyond a certain threshold can be present on ATL channels and therefore consumers infer that being present on conventional media is a sign of being ‘big’ and therefore trustworthy.
- For mass-market categories (such as fashion, FMCG) – the cost of customer acquisition might be significantly lower for conventional marketing than digital.
- Building a brand without using conventional marketing methods is rare. The same cannot be said for digital.
Digital works best to increase access to products (solving the last mile information/access issue. Digital works particularly well for niche segments where the benefits of micro-targeting and personalized messaging are disproportionately higher than conventional marketing. Using the channel to engage the customers, get real time feedback and to augment the touch points beyond what conventional marketing provides helps.
Why do you think it’s important for entrepreneurs, marketing professionals and students to learn Digital Marketing today?
Ravi Jain:
- For Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs usually have budget constraints. To propagate their brand at low cost or organically, it would help them greatly if they learn digital marketing and understand the tactics.
- For Professionals: Digital is here to stay, so it is pertinent that Branding and Marketing professionals upgrade their knowledge so they are able to leverage the benefits of digital marketing.
- For Students: With the Government’s and some of the private sector giants’ push to digitize the Indian economy, some 50-75 lakhs jobs are to be created in this sector. This is just an addition to the already burgeoning volume of digital marketing jobs in the market. According to their aptitude, students can specialize in one or the other component of digital marketing and build a rewarding career.
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?
Ravi Jain:
- Subscriptions to newsletters from marketing platform providers – Oracle, Hubspot, Salesforce amongst others
- Award winners, example following the winners, their entries. Example, CLIO & Shorty Awards
Share the names of 3 people you respect when it comes to Digital Marketing.
Ravi Jain:
- Pradeep Chopra
- Gary Vaynerchuk
Team, Skills and Tools
Share about your 3 favorite Digital Marketing case studies. What did you like most about them?
Ravi Jain:
- Alzheimer’s Awareness: This is an example of how digital is used effectively in an integrated campaign to increase brand awareness and preference by spreading awareness about an issue. The work was done for a leading home health brand.
- Marketing Automation to improve sales productivity: A case study on using automation to significantly increase the number of policies sold/sales team member. This work was done for a leading insurance player in India.
- Content Marketing for Lead-gen: How Content Marketing and technology to personalize the same was used to enhance lead-generation for a B2B player.
(These case studies are available here.)
According to you, what are the top 3 mistakes committed by organizations today in leveraging Digital Marketing?
Ravi Jain:
- Digital and Conventional Marketing teams functioning in silos: Customers lose out to turf battles (lost time and money) and fail to leverage the amplification which comes from doing integrated campaigns vs. stand alone.
- Not having measurements in place. Measurements on # of leads, CPL for performance marketing is not enough. Prior to any campaign being run, we should have a revenue tracking method implemented through use of CRM platforms which tracks revenues from each individual ad type within a platform. Customers not doing this are either wasting their investments or not making enough investments because they don’t know how these could scale the business.
- Role of social & content marketing underappreciated: Companies solely focused on sales optimize the short term but stop investing in long term assets, i.e., brand build. A well thought out and executed social media and content strategy is important. Not doing so implies escalating cost of customer acquisition and vulnerability of losing customers to competition due to lack of strong brand preference.
Between Agency and In-house, which approach would you recommend for the maximum value of Digital Marketing? Why?
Ravi Jain: As an agency, we do see tremendous value in using external support and consultation. Having an agency helps in different ways such as:
- Helps bring in niche expertise when needed. Example when you wish to try newer advertising platforms etc.
- Internal team retention and motivation: A smaller internal team might lead to issues with retention. Smaller units imply reduced opportunities of progression.
- Sounding board. Agencies work across multiple sectors and solve different problems. Solving a problem jointly with an agency can help come up with better solutions because the agency draws in all its experiences across different brands and categories.
Which are your 3 favourite Digital Marketing tools?
Ravi Jain:
- Linkedin Sales Navigator
- Oracle platform products – Eloqua & Responsys
- SEM Rush for SEO
What are the top 3-5 skills you look for when hiring a candidate for Digital Marketing profile?
Ravi Jain:
- Aptitude for quantitative skills and numbers
- Problem solving skills
- Team play, given this is a multi-functional domain bringing analysts, creative, technology and business people together
- Curiosity to learn more. Digital changes every day so this is important
Advice to Aspiring Digital Marketers
What are the top 3-5 skills you look for when hiring a candidate for Digital Marketing profile?
Ravi Jain:
- Aptitude for quantitative skills and numbers
- Problem-solving skills
- Team play, given this is a multi-functional domain bringing analysts, creative, technology and business people together
- Curiosity to learn more. Digital changes every day so this is important
What is your advice for newbies, who are looking at building a career in Digital Marketing industry?
Ravi Jain: My advice to digital career aspirants would be to do the following:
- Pick one niche within digital and learn it deeply.
- Trust hands-on training/internships/learning on the job than theoretical training.
- Read voraciously about trends within digital and advertising technology.
How do you see Digital Media evolving in future? What are the top 3 trends do you foresee for 2018?
Ravi Jain:
- We expect to see a lot more integrated campaigns where digital is fully embedded to provide consumers a brand experience – example, use of AR/VR in brand campaigns.
- Video content as the major content form which works.
- Shakeout of social platforms – Expect Facebook to begin to lose its dominant position and emergence of newer platforms.
- A lot more cross-channel marketing in practice versus today.
Would you like to share few words about the work we are doing at Digital Vidya?
Ravi Jain:
Digital Vidya has built a formidable brand for itself. Its training program is massive serving students not just within the country but overseas, both online and offline. Its founders, Pradeep Chopra and Kapil Nakra, are among the biggest names in India’s digital marketing landscape. Huge respect for the team and great admiration for the talent they are developing for the industry.
To know more about Ravi Jain, you can check out his LinkedIn profile.
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 :).
Great read and he is such a kind guy, i am following him for many years.