Let me attempt to give you the blue ocean strategy of getting that
awesome, high paying job which will always be in demand. But first let's
look at what's happening around us in India:
- Most large advertisers have a largely superficial digital marketing practice - strong statement, but more on this later, lest you hold me on this one!
- VC money which is driving a large part of the digital marketing in the country continues to be cheap. It is unfortunate how much money is wasted in bad execution in marketing and user acquisition. While I must not complain for indirectly benefiting enormously by being a prolific online shopper for everything from international holidays to daily groceries (almost a state of hyper-deflation sponsored by the investors), I do feel that this will hamper future investments where investors would be more circumspect.
- The Bubble will burst. Eventually. In some shape or form. Much as I hate to say this, it is inevitable given the blatant disregard shown for investor money by a large number of startups. But I hope I'm wrong.
Coming back to the first point, we pride on Digital being incredibly
measurable, but who's really measuring it end to end? Most branding
campaigns are measured on non-business metrics like visits or engagement
which can easily be faked, and most performance campaigns are measured
by a last click attribution model which would never credit top of the
funnel brand and awareness building activities like display and rich
media campaigns. It's not that marketers don't want to measure the right
metric, but rather it's mostly about the inadequate planning around
stitching the various parts of a launch or campaign for higher synergy.
The classic business imperative to launch immediately often comes at a
huge cost of inefficient marketing as well as a lost opportunity to
learn. Millions are spent each month on digital campaigns by most large
advertisers, but not a fraction of it is spent on building or enhancing
skills. Also, most marketers and that's irrespective of the level, want
to do "high level" stuff and not get down to exploring the power of
today's digital marketing tools and platforms, which can help make
campaigns more precise and marketing more accountable. Hence the average
10% feature utilization of most platforms and tools in the market,
including the most popular ones that almost everyone uses!
It's like buying a Ferrari and then keeping it at home as a show
piece. The lack of good roads is similar in this analogy to the lack of
skilled human resources to drive these digital marketing platforms. But
as investors begin to look at sustainable business models and check the
reckless spending, digital marketers who have hitherto never had the
problem of a limited budget will eventually need to learn to get more
bang for the buck by attempting to have a single view of their customer -
across channels and devices that are online as well as user experiences
which are offline. They will need to have an attribution model that is
all encompassing. In a world where audience data is everything,
marketing will need to have a long term view where every penny spent has
a return at some point and every customer interaction is used to enrich
future experiences.
As marketers venture into establishing these systems and platforms
that are built for the future, they will need people to run the show. As
of now, the bulk of the talent available is proficient only on Adwords,
which has technically been around for more than a decade in the
country. Some of the largest, and most evolved marketers realize this,
and have been looking around for talent in this advanced digital
marketing space - folks who are good at programmatic media buying, using
the abundance of data and analytics available meaningfully to marry the
art and science of digital marketing to truly make advertising useful
for the consumer - showing an ad that helps him/her decide in the
moments that matter. But this talent is very scarce in India.
At Google too, we've been looking for such folks so that we can
handhold the campaigns for some of our clients and lead the digital
ecosystem with cutting edge digital marketing ops, but are unable to
find the right talent who can leverage creative, data and technology to
deliver a superlative campaign. This is a low hanging fruit for anyone
who is passionate about digital marketing, and is looking to build
skills to enhance his/her career prospects. This demand is only going to
increase exponentially in the years to come, as consumers spend more of
their time online and marketers attempt to make their digital practice
more precise and accountable. It's not me who's saying this - according
to a recent, beautiful article by McKinsey titled "How digital marketing operations can transform business", "Marketing operations is certainly not the sexiest part of marketing, but it is becoming the most important one."
So you may ask if these jobs would be high paying? With such scarcity
of good talent across the Digital space, HR will have to get more
strategic and look at newer ways of attracting and retaining talent. In
fact, the HR Head of a well-funded, large e-commerce company had
recently remarked on TV that it is easier to convince investors than to
convince employees to join - that's how scarce good talent is becoming
in the country, and organizations are willing to pay top dollar for the
right skill set. While the amazing way in which Netflix reinvented HR in
this outstanding HBR article
remains largely utopian in the Indian context, job offers in this space
at least would be led by referrals and word of mouth - which always
rewards top performance and good work ethic.
So there you are - if you are passionate about Digital Marketing and technology, and are fond of programming/gaming/puzzles/statistics/math, the future is very bright for you.
Views expressed are personal.
Sources: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/state-digital-marketing-how-get-hottest-job-rahul-ramchandani
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