Introduction: AI-driven ad targeting and chatbots will continue transforming digital marketing. So what should be the focus of young marketers? How should they stride ahead to stay ahead of the time ethically? This week in our column the ‘Industry Innovators’ we have digital marketing expert Jignesh Gohel, Founder of digital marketing agency AdtoRise & Olbuz answering all these questions and more to Senior Journalist Mahima Sharma in an exclusive interaction only at TechThirsty.
Mahima: How has AI impacted the digital marketing landscape?
Jignesh Gohel: AI has a great impact on the marketing landscape where the marketeer is utilising various AI tools in different services of the organisations. Like we are using AI to plan the content outlines quickly in which we use tools like ChatGPT to find some datasets which can improve the content authenticity. Secondly, CTA (Call to action) is the key part when you write the ad copy for search ads or for social media audiences. AI tools help you to generate such call-to-action rich ad copy variations which we use to get better CTA directly result in better ad performance. Thirdly, AI chatbots can be and to a large extent are being utilized to provide automated customer support which reduces human efforts and can improve customer experiences. We are also using Chatbots to generate high-quality leads by integrating them on website / Mobile apps.
Mahima: What are some key challenges marketers have faced in adapting to the new technological era? And how can they overcome these challenges?
Jignesh Gohel: There are several key challenges we face…
- Adapt to new technology: It is always challenging for us to adapt to new technologies as it requires new skill development and implementation.
- Investment in training & Infrastructure: Implementation of AI into marketing requires investment in infrastructure and training of people who will use it for marketing automation.
To my understanding, we can overcome these challenges by adopting certain strategies. I am sharing a few that we have adopted:
- Start small scale: We identify people in an organisation who are interested in learning new things and start with small experiments. Once we start utilising one application, roll out the same into the entire organisation and so on.
- Hire an expert trainer: We also invite experts in specific fields and plan training sessions that covers parts of AI applications covered by our organisation.
- Keep learning: Yes, this one is the most important part of AI integration. You should be open to experimenting with new things even after you face failure. Keep learning plus re-learning and implement it.
Mahima: The rise of artificial intelligence has revolutionised various industries, including marketing. How do you see AI continuing to transform the marketing landscape in the coming years, and what opportunities does it present for businesses?
Jignesh Gohel: We work closely with large businesses with huge ad budgets, especially in D2C fashion e-commerce brand marketing. Here we adapt all AI-driven Google ads targeting they regularly launch to improve the ad’s performances. We have seen results and thus I strongly believe that AI-based ad targeting can improve the ad’s performance and can give better ROI. If we talk about the coming years, I feel that chatbots like Google Bard / ChatGPT will have a great impact on the way users use search engines to find information or product/service recommendations.
Mahima: In a future where AI and automation take over routine marketing tasks, what skills and qualities do you believe will be most valuable for young and upcoming marketing professionals to possess?
Jignesh Gohel: As AI and automation will start to take over routine marketing tasks, I strongly believe that the human touch will always remain crucial here. This can be the best combination – Young and talented minds with high-quality and skilled experience + AI-enabled solutions can boost the overall marketing process and capabilities. I would like to mention a few skills that will help young talent to boost their career in the coming times…
Creativity – As already discussed, AI-enabled ad serving will target the right audience at the right time but if the creatives are designed by considering those target audience, the overall performance can be better.
Common sense – I strongly believe that marketing is an art and you need to understand human emotions and behavior to plan the right strategy for that specific audience.
Data Analysis – Data-driven AI models are already in place and taking crucial marketing decisions for large audiences. If you understand all the different data models, it will help you to plan a data-driven strategy for small, medium and large enterprises.
Apart from these, you must focus on learning communication skills, leadership, presentations, and adapting to new technology/skills.
Mahima: How must a Digital Marketing Agency like yours approach the ethical implications of data collection and usage in the new technological era of marketing? What steps need to be taken to prioritize consumer privacy and trust?
Jignesh Gohel: There are some basic ethics that all organisations must be careful of – people often ignore the basics. But remember to get a business may be easy, but to sustain it longer you need strong ethical considerations.
One needs to be extremely transparent in business practice and disclose all strategies with the client/stakeholder so that both parties are on the same page and establish the ease of doing business.
Secondly, one must always respect the end-user’s or consumer’s data. For example, we don’t store/access clients’ customer / end consumer data with us or do not use any of our property to process the same. I will explain it by example: All accounts that are used to run our client’s ads are created by the client only. We do not use our accounts no matter how long it takes for us to train clients to create all different accounts like Google ads, Google Analytics, Google tag manager, Meda Ads Manager etc. This keeps their data safe and their trust sage in us. And by word of mouth, our business grows. Young entrepreneurs need to keep this in mind, that it might take time, but when trust is established, both the business as well as ROI grow.
Mahima: What is the most valuable lesson you’ve learned during the new technological era after becoming a premier partner with Google? Or what could be your advice to aspiring digital marketers looking to make their mark in this rapidly evolving landscape?
Jignesh Gohel: My first and foremost advice to anyone and everyone has always been to adapt new technology/features. Never hesitate to adopt new technology/features launched by your technology partner. Being a Google premier partner, we get early updates on their various features which they are running into beta.
I will explain this via a real-life example, which will make the readers and young entrepreneurs understand it better. In Nov 2021, Google launched the PMAX campaign type which has now completely replaced their smart shopping campaign types. We adopted this change in their early launch days and started implementing it for our clients’ base. You will be surprised to know that, when they automatically migrate all smart shopping campaigns to PMAX type – we had over a year of experience managing PMAX campaigns and the majority of our clients were already running on PMAX campaign type. This move helped us to stay ahead of our competition.
In short, to stay ahead of the curve one has to keep pace with the technological changes that are happening around you. Whether your organisation is a partner with any technology firm or not, you need to find out which tech will boost your business and your resources and people need to adopt that technology to stay ahead of the curve.
Mahima: In a world where attention spans are decreasing and content (all kinds) overload is a challenge, what strategies do you recommend to capture and maintain audience engagement effectively?
Jignesh Gohel: It’s been 17 years since I am in digital marketing and if you ask me to summarize digital marketing strategy in a single sentence, I would say “Never built/create strategy for search engine but create it for your end users and the search engine will automatically love to rank your content.”
In simple words, generally, we build all our marketing strategies by understanding the target persona (you can call it – the end customer/target audience). I will share an example to showcase how an organisation can do it in the best possible manner. For instance, suppose you are creating content for a client website, sit and brainstorm with the client’s customer support team to understand common questions/support tickets raised by the customer. Create a list of such common queries and build a complete content marketing strategy to answer those questions in the form of content/video or graphics. This will always improve your audience engagement and may improve the conversion rate through those content pages. Certain things are time taking, but the ROI is great when such nuances are considered well.
Mahima: Can you share any insights on the future of marketing attribution models and measuring the effectiveness of omnichannel marketing efforts in an increasingly interconnected digital landscape?
Jignesh Gohel: Marketing attribution is the biggest challenge, especially for businesses utilizing all different channels to promote their product or services. As digital marketing experts, India has experienced that the traditional attribution models like last click or first click are becoming less effective in attributing various touch points of the customer journey. Here we expect to have a better tracking mechanism which helps to track customer journeys from all different devices and marketing channels. For instance, if we talk of the AI driving the landscapes, then we have already implemented the model using GA4 (Google Analytics 4) for the majority of our clients on Shopify, Magento, WordPress and Custom platforms but still, when you are using different marketing channels, you need to understand their tracking mechanisms which over track the data depending upon the method they use. In short, keep pace with the developing technology. Don’t get stuck to one.
About Jignesh Gohel
Jignesh Gohel is a founder and digital marketing head at AdtoRise and OLBUZ, a Google Premier Partner agency which is into full-service digital marketing and mobile app development located in Ahmedabad, India. He possesses over 17 years of experience in the industry and has track records of handling over $250K monthly media spend.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed within this interview are the personal opinions of the protagonist/protagonists. The facts & statistics, the work profile details shared by the protagonist/ protagonists do not reflect the views of TechThirsty or the Journalist. Neither TechThirsty nor the Journalist hold any responsibility or liability for the same.
