Interview with Digital Marketing Expert – Mr. Raj Kishor

Digital Marketing has seen a massive change in recent times. This change is owed to the internet, search engines, social media platforms and more importantly, the experts who understand the nitty gritty of this medium and use it to maximize growth. Today we have with us one such individual with us who has had an interesting journey from studying Chemistry at Kanpur university to doing an MBA from DY Patil university to being a Co-founder at Stealth Startup. An Instructor, a Keywords Research Expert, SEO & Analytics Practitioner, a Data

Q1. Can you tell us more about your journey and why did you choose this field?

Answer: It started in 2008 when I got to know the word marketing. My brother did MBA during that time only I heard the word marketing existed in this era. So that was the school time where I did explorations of that particular domain. When I was in 12 standard, I was working on a technology innovation startup. It was with my friends. From there I got to know that I have to build something, a website caught. I require a website to approach to the people for selling and marketing those innovations. From there my journey started.

The first website which I launched in 2014, 15, 16 basically that was of e-commerce based platform. From that stuff, i got into terminology digital marketing. During that time, my studies were going on and with startups and studies, I chose studies. Study didn’t seemed to be that much interesting, so i shifted to digital marketing. In my startups, I learned all the stuff about digital marketing. From their my journey began, and by now i have co-founded 3-4 companies. 2-3 are dumbed and 2-3 are still running.

Q2.What according to you are the key skills required to become a successful Digital Marketing professional?

Answer: To become a successful digital marketer, you should know your customer. The first thing you need to know is who is your buyer persona, and whatever business you are in. If you know your customer, that will be your biggest point. Secondly, your communication skills. Most importantly, what are you going to communicate with your audience to a particular customer who is unaware of your product or service. Thirdly, your approaching content. What you are going to provide, must be what is he looking for. And that content should be creative and as per his requirement. If you can provide that, you will excel.

Next thing is haver an expertise in paid marketing, organic marketing and analytics. You should have the knowledge of these , but get expertise in one of the domain. That makes you special out of the box from the crowd. These skills are going to boost you in successful digital marketing.

Q3.Can you please tell us about the trending Digital Marketing techniques used these days?

Answer: The trending topic in digital marketing is Artificial intelligence. It is booming around like now in each and every field. AI in digital marketing is a good gift you could consider. That everything is going to be under the algorithms. The first one is AI. Second one is metaverse. It is comprised of AR & BR which is augmented reality and virtual reality. This is also going to boom out that how your virtual reality in the digital platform and augmented reality which is physically but in the form of visual. How it is going to boom out.

The third one is NFTs. It’s non-fungible tokens. It is going to have a role in digital marketing. The next one is crypto. Crypto is going to give some support and boost digital marketing in upcoming years. The next one is marketing automation. It is currently on the hype. That is what particular businesses in adopting, platforms that are optimizing. Because currently, many companies are not hiring multiple employees for a single task. It is something which automation works it out. It is like single automation multiple tasks have been executed.

Another one is influencer marketing. It is also going to boom and support digital marketing. The next one to be considered is Omni channel marketing. It is something of great stuff to get into, WhatsApp marketing and so on. These top ones are going to emerge rapidly in digital marketing in the coming generations.

Q4.Which performance metrics are marketing organizations using right now to measure the success of a campaign?

Answer: For campaigns whatever the running is might be paid or might be organic. So every platform has its own metrics to measure so we call it KPI, which is a key performance indicator. So on paid marketing, you can call it a CTR( create through rate), which is going to accumulate what results in you are getting with your paid apps. The next one is CPC( cost per click), what click you are going to get paid on each and every lead/ traffic. You can call as click-hits in the organic number of traffic, visitors, sessions, durations in your website and, any more are there. In social media, it is maximum followers, and maximum engagement, these are all metrics which are measured for the campaigns running. Whether they are paid or social media marketing.

Q5.With more than two-thirds of digital ad spend now going to Facebook and Google, optimization on these platforms is becoming ever more important. What is an ideal strategy for maximum ROI?

Answer: Coming to Facebook and Google ads like over the years of starting a business, they are directly approaching ads. The reason is they want to scale their product services very soon. Due to that Google & Facebook ads are generating maximum ROI with the organizations having their own startups. So for getting maximum ROI, for the business owner, I would suggest going for organic marketing, Whatever SEO is going to help you out. The reason is, that when you will have an organic marketing strategy like SEO, and social media marketing optimization if you are having app store optimization, it will provide you with value.

In paid apps, it is something like that what consumers require, you give in. That’s the only pipeline which is going to last and be fulfilled. But in organic marketing, it is something like the continuation of what users are asking and what you are providing. If you are a valuable provider/ centric through organic marketing, that will lead to you maximum skill for a long tenure. You can get a good ROI from there and could get to know how your audience is performing and whether you should select paid apps or not.

But on initial levels, you should start with organic marketing. This is because your visibility should also be there on google search. That yes, if you are getting paid, traffics are generated. But when somebody searches out, nearly 65% of the population direct purchase after seeing ads. They first go to multiple platforms to know if the product benefits and provides value.

Q6.After Facebook changed its parent company’s name to Meta in October 2021, the metaverse came to the attention of marketers. Can you please tell us more about this?

Answer: Nearly, 3-4 years back, I was teaching students. There were 14-15 students in my training. In that period, I predicted, in the upcoming 4-5 years it is something going to be amazing that, whatever e-commerce platform and website-based business will make consumers feel them in the store in reality. Where you are purchasing, entertaining, or enjoying. Metaverse is also cumulative of AR & VR. So AR is something more of a real-world but is digital which is taken by multiple software.

So they are software-driven environments or a world multiple things would take place in the digital world. We are not going to be a part of the actual world, our digital views of the face, and content. This is going to play a major role in upcoming business. Depends on how it is utilized. Coming to VR, is something which is virtual reality that you might have played games. AR & VR are going to be cumulative and play a big role in each and every type of business. It could be pharma, medical, defense, education, and many more.

Q7.Smart campaigns in Google Ads have been introduced to simplify the complex process of managing Google Ads for small businesses. How do these Smart campaigns work?

Answer: So smart campaigns have been set up for those businesses which are not able to scale their business by keeping any in-house market team or giving somebody else to market their product or services. So smart campaigns run with the principle of massive learning. What it does is, whenever you run your campaign, it will reach the relevant customer and will convert to your customer. It depends on your conversion, and how you are product, or service is. But it will provide you with something for relevant users only.

Whosoever relevant users are in the business, it is going to help you to reach out to them for a particular campaign strategy, i.e. smart campaign.

Q8.How have core updates impacted the organic visibility of businesses?

Answer: For the last 6-7 months, I am also facing the same issue with my website which has been the fluctuating of rankings are there but now it is smooth. There might be reasons which came to my notice. That is the loading of your website, if your website loading time is more, then users don’t have that much of time that they will stay, including me. Even you have noticed that whenever you visit any website what do we do if it takes more than 15-20 seconds? we skip out to another website. The consumer doesn’t like your website if he doesn’t get what he wants at a specific time. That’s how it’s getting affected.

Second thing, whatever call to action button or internal linking you are having on your website must be responsive. If it’s not then the customer will redirect to somewhere else for what he is looking for. So if it happens, consumers will skip your website which will affect your website ranking.

Thirdly, whatever content you are providing to your consumer are they ready to consume that in a good way or not? If they are, then yes you are going to get good search results as well as searching visibility on a SERP page. So these 3 things could play the role in core updates. Many organizations are trying to overcome these 3 things and few of them already did.

Q9. How do you stay updated with the latest Digital Marketing trends?

If I talk about how to get updates, then I read blogs a lot. I am very much interested in reading blogs because I don’t want to miss out on anything. So it’s my habit to get maximum blogs and case studies. These 2 things are my main objectives. Thirdly, I never miss google updates. Being a digital marketer you must consider updates on daily bases and not monthly or yearly. If you are missing something today, you are going to face it the next day or even the next moment. You should keep yourself updated with digital platforms and digital media.

I am also a part of a lot of communities that have nearly 25-30 years of experience. They provide their own learnings as well. Today we conduct meetings and deliver our thought processes.

Q10. What advice would you give to freshers who wish to prepare for the field of Digital Marketing?

Answer: For this, I have a big thing to say don’t get influenced by social media platforms. If anybody is influencing you that join digital marketing you will be paid highly, don’t listen to them. Because in this digital era, you must get into that apply if you are not passionate about your interest, then don’t jump in it. It is not for those who just want to earn. It is a search field. You will have to research, learn, and execute each and every day. So it is something like you have to get good interest and passion to be updated and get into this domain.