1.Tell us about your upbringing, and early career days.
I was born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh and did my schooling & graduation, where apart from studies, I developed an unmatched love for Cricket and Football. I moved to Hyderabad in 2007 for doing my MBA in Marketing & Finance from IBS Hyderabad and that’s where entrepreneurial bug hit me hard.
You remember Lehman Brothers fiasco in 2009 and how bad the job market was during that year. Fortunately, I got a job and joined State Bank of Hyderabad on a Credit Analyst Role.
I loved my first job considering my boss was super analytics and supported me when it was required. My roles was about evaluating credit proposals for conglomerates like L&T, Adani, Reliance, Kingfisher Airlines, etc and this phase laid the foundation for my next decade which was full of experience and experimentation.
I had my food business start-up in Hyderabad, started SME Consulting business in Mumbai in 2013, went on to invest in gaming company which got then merged with a renowned businessman of Bollywood.
2. How did you rise to the highest echelons in your career and what advice do you have for our readers?
Everything started with leaving the comfortable job in Public Sector Bank to start my own business. I have learned that if we are not willing to risk the unusual, we will have to settle for the ordinary.
When people were going to Malls on weekends for shopping & entertainment, I was supplying Snacks to Theatres & Multiplexes during 2010-12 when the concept of home delivery were not even there. So the journey has not been very easy if I can say.
With unique experiences in multiple domains like setting up SME Consulting, investing and meeting entrepreneurs, mentors along the way, the mix of everything has really shaped up my journey so far.
I saw rapid rise of digital adoption in 2015, and I started with marketing gaming apps and then went on to manage E-commerce business in my past assignments.
Fast forward, here I am in HDFC Bank, India’s No.1 Private Sector Bank, managing the Performance Marketing under the most agile and data-driven Marketing Unit in the industry.
3. How do you analyse whether your marketing activities reached your intended TG and communicated the right messages?
We at HDFC Bank are driving Omni-Channel campaigns to reach out to our customers through our own website, internal channels and through digital marketing across Facebook, Google, Programmatic and third-Party Publishers.
We have Adobe’s Marketing Suite to help us keep a track of all our full-funnel marketing activities starting with creating Customer Segmentation to managing Creative Performance to optimising basis End Conversions.
With a one-view on Adobe’ Analytics dashboard, we can easily understand the marketing channels contributing towards our business goals, key geographies and how each creative is performing. We also do Brand Lift Study with our partners to measure the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.
4. How do you think marketing will evolve in the future and how are you preparing for that leap?
Marketing has become a different game in last decade where advertising on digital medium is growing by more than 20% y-o-y. Now as a marketer, we are not limited to traditional mediums like TV, Print, Radio, Outdoor anymore.
Digital has proved that it is the future now, and it has become the core medium to reach out to targeted customers in real quick time. Covid-19 has proved to be a boon for digital adoption in India with more consumers adopting digital and downloading apps than ever before. Success story of UPI in India is a true reflection of digital adoption across the nation.
We believe that we need to be present on platforms where our customers are spending time today. Large-form content consumption on OTT platforms has grown tremendously for past year or so during the pandemic, and these platforms offer us to target our first-party data on their platforms which itself opens up an unmatched gateway to serve our existing customers.
5. What would be that one thing that you would do differently now than before?
Use of data insights to drive marketing activities. Data has lot to share if we as a marketer are ready to listen to it.
From Creative making to Landing Page Optimization for end goals, data has been the game changer.
Opportunity to understand the insights on our first party data has changed our marketing in a very big way for the good. Now decisions are purely based on data and not guts anymore.
6. What are your future plans?
I have evolved myself into a T-shaped Marketer with constant improvement in understanding data, design and digital. I keep on upskilling and reskilling myself to ensure that I am ahead of the curve in terms of adopting new technological changes and deploying innovative digital tools.
The aim is to keep on contributing towards the growth of the organisation with data-driven marketing.
7. What are your thoughts for sponsoring ads during IPL? How do brands measure ROI?
IPL has become the biggest playground for brands now and an awesome opportunity for marketers to differentiate from rest.
The number of brands showing interest in IPL has grown tremendously with brands from categories like Financial services, EdTech, Fantasy Sports, Beverages, Telecome and FMCG are always fighting for consumers’ attention.
The biggest advantage IPL offers to its advertisers is the reach it offers. Through Hotstar, today I can reach out to wider base of new customers digitally while also increasing the reach to my existing first party audience.
Every brand has its own set of metrics to assess the ROI, however, the overall impact on brand recall cannot be ignored.
8. Which is your favourite book and why?
My favourite book is ‘Hooked’ by Nir Eyal. The book talks about how successful companies create products which people cannot put down. It talks about the importance of creating habit forming products which bring people back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
For someone who cares about driving customer engagement, it’s a must read for you.
-----
Bio -
Sachin Ramje is a T-shaped Marketer with a love for data, design, and digital marketing. With more than 11 years of experience in startups, banking, consulting, e-commerce, and gaming, Sachin has evolved himself into a professional who can contribute a lot to the growth of any organization. He currently works for HDFC Bank - India's No.1 Private Sector Bank, as a Performance Marketer and is a marketer who is ready to create his own space in the world of data-driven marketing. He is a Manchester United fan since 1995 and a champion FIFA player on Playstation.
){kind=link}
Social