Marketing in the age of digital with Aakash Goyal
Marketing is an integral part of running a thriving business, but it's a field that's continually evolving. Advanced technologies such as AI have revolutionized the industry, making marketing more efficient, customer-focused, and data-driven. To remain competitive in the field, marketers must stay abreast of the latest trends and adapt to new techniques and technologies. Keeping up with these changes is essential for marketers who want to succeed in this dynamic and ever-changing industry.
In this insightful conversation, Pepper talks to Aakash Goyal, AVP - Marketing at GoMechanic about his journey from optimizing a blog during school days to becoming a marketing division head along with some crucial insights on marketing, content, and how the future looks like.
1. Please tell us about your journey.
My journey into the world of SEO and paid marketing began during my school days when I started optimizing a blog. It was a hobby at first, but little did I know that it would pave the way for my future career. As I continued to freelance during college, I became more and more interested in SEO and paid marketing.
It wasn't until I landed an SEO internship at Paytm that I realized this could be a viable career path. Since then, my journey has been nothing short of amazing. I gained valuable experience in paid and intention marketing during my time at Zomato.
At Go Mechanic, I was able to witness a transformation from zero app orders to a whopping 2000 app orders. It has been an incredibly meaningful journey for me, and I am excited to continue growing and learning in the world of digital marketing.
2. As someone who is heading the marketing division, what are your views on marketing?
In my opinion, marketing is closely tied to the value that a product delivers. A product must provide some sort of benefit to its users.
When it comes to Amazon, many people use the platform for its user experience rather than its user interface. Amazon doesn't rely heavily on push notifications or paid marketing, but rather on providing a seamless experience and building trust with its customers. When I order something from Amazon, I trust that the company has a hassle-free returns policy and that my money is safe.
Amazon has built a strong brand and customers trust it. With a strong product in place, marketing can help to further promote it. Without a strong product, marketing would be a waste of resources.
I think marketing goes hand in hand with your product. Ultimately your product needs to deliver some value. People use Amazon not for its user interface but rather for the trust that the platform has built. So, without a strong product, marketing would be a waste of resources.
3. What are your views on the new age marketing tools like Chat GPT or AI written content? Can these AI tools replace humans in the future?
I believe that understanding sarcasm is a difficult task for AI. While AI can provide some suggestions, manual intervention is often required to make the necessary edits. A good example of this is Indigo Airlines.
For instance, a customer puts out a sarcastic tweet to Indigo Airlines saying, “ Thank you Indigo, I have lost my baggage,” and receives a reply stating "Words like this are quite appreciated by us." It shows that AI can sometimes miss the sarcasm in the message. We can't rely solely on AI to understand these nuances.
AI can be used as a catalyst to generate more content, but it cannot be a substitute for manual intervention at this time.
4. As a marketer, what are all the tools that you use daily?
When it comes to keyword research, we primarily use SEMrush. For blogging, our go-to tools are Jetpack and USED. We also use Wordtune for paraphrasing and Grammarly Plus for proofreading. These are the basic tools that we rely on.
5. What are the pain points you see in your day-to-day marketing job?
There are several pain points that I face as a marketer. The first one is justifying the ROI. The first challenge is justifying the return on investment (ROI) of the campaign. Publishing a campaign doesn't always immediately reflect in revenue. It takes time for the impact to be seen on the business's bottom line.
The second pain point is managing the content across all channels. All channels must have the same theme and brand language. For example, if a campaign is focused on a holiday theme like Holi or Diwali, then all channels should align with that theme.
Another challenge is that you can't solely rely on the analytics team. It is important to analyze the data across all channels to understand how they are interacting with each other and which techniques to use to gather data for your marketing efforts. This requires intensive resources and expertise.
Lastly, it is important to keep devising business models that align with the current needs of the business. For instance, during the summer season, pushing AC services might be a good idea, whereas during the monsoon season, offering free wiper blades could be more effective. However, it is important to keep in mind that certain services might have a low transaction size, which could affect the average order value. Hence, it is important to have granularity in decision-making to avoid any adverse impact on the business.
6. If you were given the power to build your dream content marketing platform, what will it look like?
I believe that it would be helpful if there was a tool that allowed me to input a topic and choose a content format from a dropdown menu. For example, I might need a script, essay, or FAQ. The tool should be able to convert my input into any format I require, such as video content or slides, without requiring the use of additional tools like Canva or Open Video, and so on.
It would be great if the tool could also suggest two or three variations for me to choose from, and allow me to adjust the context within a single variation. Occasionally, paraphrasing can lead to mistakes in context, so having a tool that can adjust the context without significantly altering it would be very useful.
Another area where a tool could be helpful is in creating creative and enticing ad copies. While many tools can generate content around specific topics or scripts, ad copies require a unique approach and should be highly persuasive. So, Ad copies can be a challenge, especially for those facing a creative block. If a tool could provide creative and catchy headlines and descriptions for a given topic, it would save a lot of time and effort. The tool should also focus on using interrogative keywords that tend to have higher click-through rates.
7. Since SEO lies in your roots today, if you were to create a dream tool specifically for SEO, what will it look like?
When it comes to SEO tools, I believe Yoast SEO is quite useful, but I wish there was a single tool that could generate keywords for blog posts, and YouTube videos, and even provide hashtags for Instagram. It would be great if this tool could also provide specific keywords for e-commerce, such as Amazon search terms and top-selling products for those specific keyword sets.
Another useful feature would be a schema suggestion tool that can analyze content or competitors' domains to provide recommendations. Additionally, we currently use a mix of tools like Screaming Frog to analyze our and competitors' domains, but it would be great to have a single tool that could do it all.
Overall, it would be amazing to have a single tool that could cover all these areas and make our SEO efforts more efficient.
