Saikat Bose on Marketing Industry’s Evolution & Best Tools From His 18 Yrs of Experience
Marketing is an ever-evolving industry, and keeping up with the latest trends and techniques is essential for success. As technology advances, new platforms emerge, and consumer behaviors shift, marketers must continually adapt their strategies to stay ahead.
In a recent interview, Saikat Bose, Associate Vice President of Head SEO at Infoedge India Ltd shared his insights on how he has adapted to the shifting landscape of the marketing industry and offered invaluable tips for those digital marketers looking to thrive in this dynamic realm.
Let’s dive in!
1. When and how marketing happened to you?
It’s an interesting story to start with. I was doing my computer application degree at a college in India. So we were doing very basic stuff like Java. To be very honest, I found that boring. Even today, my batchmates know I was that person who didn’t move into the IT industry despite being from this background.
I used Google very frequently, and then, during my college days, computers were rare. I was one of the lucky people who had a desktop and college LAN. People would flock to my room to use the internet for half an hour. When I started digging into it, and found I could get some material on Google for research for my projects. That’s when it started. I wondered how it came up with quality research, so I thought of trying it.
I don’t remember at which restaurant, but one gentleman in Canada asked if there was a person who could understand technology and algorithm and help assist him in some project. I didn’t know it was SEO, but I was interested, so I initiated a call at that time.
I had to go to the internet cafe as it was blocked on the intranet. Among all the interruptions, my willingness to work, or whatever it was, he really liked me for my effort in whatever it was, and he chose me. I learned a lot through the projects he got at his level as a consultant in the US, and I replicated whatever he asked me.
I just asked the question “WHY,” which was the best and most basic learning I got.
Then I moved on to create something of my own, and I wanted to know which restaurant was good and bad while I was in college. I wanted a cheap restaurant with quality food close to my hostel.
I tried doing it at scale and pitched it to certain people, and they liked it as well. Internet penetration was not that great in India back then. Nor was the use of digital currencies and credit cards. So restaurant owners were hesitant to give menu and rate cards.
Around Sep 2007, I started it; the next year recession came, and we needed funds as my balance was really low. So I decided to try out corporate. Make My Trip also happened as a coincidence. I joined Make My Trip in March, stayed there, and spent a considerable amount of time, i.e., nine years, and now I am here. It’s been about 18 years of experience in the marketing space since I started in September 2004.
2. You must have seen changes evolving. How significant has this evolution been for you? Where do you think the future of marketing lies going ahead?
Conventional marketing has always been constant. There will always be a grey area in the conventional marketing space, Digital marketing started very simply, but it has evolved a lot. Around 2004-07, people ran task-oriented campaigns, and now people think about new ways of engaging people.
This task and process-oriented discipline has become a very innovative discipline. Thanks to search engines and these platforms, we have evolved so much. We are highly dependent on platforms like Meta, and these platforms have evolved so much for us. Like we were running bullock carts when roads were like tracks, today we have highways.
3. In these 18+ years, you’ve been a part of different teams, brands, and industries. What are some of the common pain points that continue to persist for most marketers?
One of the biggest challenges is the lack of cohesion in terms of the hot processes.
Marketing is still like a stepchild kind of department. Marketing should be done in a way that product and marketing work together day and night to work as per the goals, but sadly it doesn’t work that way.
There is also an inherent lack of trust in marketers for various reasons. If I take paid and organic marketing together, it is seen as a cost center instead of a profit center. This needs to change as businesses will unnecessarily invest money in places they shouldn’t, and marketers will continue to do that too. But both of them should work together to fulfill common goals.
4. AI has come into several forms in our life. Marketing hasn’t been left untouched by AI, either. How do you see AI’s Impact on marketing?
A lot of companies use AI without naming it. Camera filters, photo editing apps, and the software within our phones use AI. It is already a part of our lives.
The tragedy is that we aren’t able to recognize AI and tap its full potential as marketers. The advent of ChatGPT, the buzzword of today, is a very fragmented, shallow approach to what AI can do. AI can drive cars (Tesla has shown it). It can predict things (scientists, space programs), machine learning, and deep learning. We need to use AI to grow our efficiencies.
An app like ChatGPT gives you information that is curated very well. If a content strategist wants to research a topic, ChatGPT is there to help. But that strategy cannot work without human intervention. Google used ChatGPT even before it came around to
They used it for their EEAT algorithm (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Now is the time to actually bring AI to do the research, semi-manual work that takes a lot of time. But at the top, you must have someone to overlook AI’s work, picking what to use and what not to.
5. You’ve been in SEO for a very long time. Content is a very big part of SEO. What does it mean by good content? What does it mean for you?
I’ll give you both a short and a long answer.
Short answer: Whatever content users find useful is good content.
Long answer: We understand the user or broader query, then break it down into smaller problem statements and solve them.
Every piece of content should have four pillars: Content should be able to address a particular ques or topic. It should be covered in depth. Videos, audio, vernacular languages, etc., should be used as alternative ways to make it easily consumable and not boring for people who do not want to read texts. The writer should understand the user and start writing for them by thinking what the user will genuinely think and type in the search engine to find it, and they’ll end up writing SEO-friendly content.
6. Have you created any specific strategy to crack certain types of content or for different content stages?
Content is a centerpiece for SEO, no doubt, but many brands either don’t understand how content works or don’t understand the value of content. A lot of B2B businesses don’t value content as much as B2B businesses. They go for content because they hear it from others. They don’t mind having the content, but they don’t have faith, either.
Building a strategy is dependent on the level of faith the internal stakeholders have in its power. For that, you need to build a lot of swings like ideation, creation, strategy, public relation, analytics, user journey, etc.
I’ve done all of that at a scale of generating 500 pieces of content and 100 videos a day or week with crews in the studio.
7. You don’t claim to be a techie, but based on your tech background, what do you use for marketing? What’s your favorite tech stack?
I am very old-fashioned in terms of tools. I still use notebooks for all practical stuff, flowcharts, diagrams, etc. I majorly need three things, two of which are free and one is paid. We have used many tools in the past, and many tools are available in the market. For internal analytics, I heavily rely on Google Analytics for analytics.
Another free tool is Google Search Console. You can get the entire data set in your system with the help of a techie for a few big queries, and you can use that data yourself as well if you know how to do it.
For competitor analysis, I use a combination of 3 tools that are Ahrefs, SimilarWeb, and Semrush. There’s no clear winner out of the three, so I use all three. I love conversion optimization tools, so I use Optimizely and HotJar integrations for scroll and click tracking. You may also need to use Google’s Data Studio to make sense of the data.
