Five Questions on Digital Marketing to Pradeep Chopra, CEO, Digital Vidya
Among the pioneers of Digital Marketing, Pradeep has been part of the Internet Industry since 2000. He has been a serial entrepreneur for last 17 years and is currently a Co-founder & CEO of Digital Vidya, a leading Digital Marketing and Big Data & Data Analytics training company.
A graduate of IIT Delhi and a recipient of Adobe Content100, Pradeep is one of the most sought after international speakers on Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship. He’s a tweet away @PradeepChopra.
1. You have been associated with the digital industry since 2000. Which according to you are the most amazing milestones you may have witnessed over the years?
Interesting question. Looking back, I would like to share following milestones I’ve seen in the digital marketing industry:
- Rise of Paid Online Advertising: We started our journey in the world of digital media by accidentally touching the power of SEO in our first venture, Whizlabs Software, way back in Jan 2001. While Google AdWords was launched in the year 2000, we saw it gaining popularity in 2002-2003 only. Likewise, Facebook Advertising started gaining popularity in 2009 and grew significantly over last few years.
- Birth of Social Media Marketing: I spoke at Search Engine Strategies (SES) in US in 2007 on Career Opportunities in Digital Marketing industry. I heard the name Facebook for the first time at the conference. In 2009, we started our journey at Digital Vidya by launching a 2-day Social Media Marketing workshop.
- SEO gaining back its Importance: Thanks to online businesses, SEO (and other digital marketing channels) regained their importance.
- Integration of Digital into overall Marketing: When digital marketing started growing, there were too many questions about its future and continuous comparison between digital marketing and traditional marketing. Now, it’s clear that digital marketing is an integral part of marketing and its share will continue to grow in the foreseeable future.
- Acceleration through Mobile: Given Mobile is the key reason for adoption of internet, it’s also the fuel, which has contributed to the growth of digital marketing. This trend is expected to continue in future.
- Role of Technology: While we’ve always been using tools to improve the effectiveness of digital marketing, the true potential of technology for digital marketing has become real in the recent past only.
2. Digital Marketing is a domain that needs a hands-on & delve-deeper approach to really get a hang of it. How does your online course or workshops on the same equip CXOs formulate digital marketing strategies?
Digital Marketing is a vast and one of the most dynamic fields. For any one who wants to become (and remain) successful in digital marketing, focusing on developing skills (vs. acquiring knowledge) and staying abreast of latest developments is the key. In other words, one should always remain a student of digital marketing.
The main focus of our digital marketing certification programs is to ensure that our participants, who include professionals (including CXOs), entrepreneurs and students, develop relevant skills across various areas of digital marketing such as SEO, SEM, Social Media Marketing, Inbound Marketing and Web Analytics. The integration of various digital marketing channels, tools and industry case studies ensures that our participants are able conceptualize and execute successful digital marketing strategies.
3. There are too many predictions on digital trends for 2018 doing the rounds. Which three of them, according to you, should matter most to Indian marketers?
In my view, while one can’t ignore the importance of paid advertisement and organic search, Indian marketers should focus on following 3 aspects of digital marketing in 2018:
- Content Marketing
- Mobile Focus
- Marketing Automation
At the same time, embracing newer developments such as Voice Search, Artificial Intelligence will have to be part of this ever-evolving journey.
4. Threats to the digital industry if any and your workarounds?
I don’t see any outside threat to the digital marketing industry. Since I foresee even faster and bigger changes in the digital marketing industry, becoming complacent and not adapting to the changes are the biggest threats.
Remember, consider yourself a student of digital marketing for entire career.
5. You run a massive training program in India and overseas, offline and online.Please share some of your biggest challenges and how you address them?
As I shared earlier, we started our journey in digital marketing education in 2009 with a 2-day Social Media Marketing workshop and we successfully organized over 200 such workshops including outside India. In 2013, we faced significant slowdown and it forced us to rethink about our role in digital marketing education.
We realized that while we’re earlier answering the question ‘Why Social Media Marketing?’ through our Social Media Marketing workshops. There was a need to answer ‘How Digital Marketing?’. To adapt to this change, we changed our focus from Social Media Marketing workshop to Digital Marketing course.
For all the benefits of instructor-led, online medium, we launched a digital marketing certification course in an online format in 2013. As of March 2018, we feel proud to have contributed to the success of 30,000+ professionals, entrepreneurs and students, who’ve been trained by us.
On the other hand, we’ve contributed to the success of over 250 organizations through customized in-house digital marketing training programs. Here also, we’ve seen significant shift in terms of organizations’ requirements to customize the training programs.
As an organization also, we would like to remain committed to the student of digital marketing industry.
