As Australian businesses become increasingly savvy about their marketing spend, Shivam shares his insights on embracing the power of digital marketing.
Shivam, Digital Marketing and Optimisation Manager
What drew you to a career in digital marketing?
I was drawn to digital marketing during my early days after college when my dad needed help improving his healthcare business’ digital presence. I started from scratch, doing everything from social media marketing to digital website building and analytics, and I came to understand the importance of digital marketing, especially for small businesses. This was when I knew I could make a career in helping businesses efficiently reach their audiences.
Why should clients invest in digital marketing and analytics?
Digital marketing and analytics can seem like the dark arts. With no silver bullet, there is a plethora of tools used to gather, analyse and inform your business or organisations marketing decisions.
Regardless of whether you are in the game of consumer or exist to solve complex communications, having a digital marketing team as an extension to your own is crucial to help you understand your audience's behaviour.
We use a mix of tools like GA4, Semrush, and custom reporting dashboards to measure performance across our digital channels, which enables us to modify our marketing strategies in a timely manner. These automated and real-time dashboards also help us focus more of our time on analysis rather than on manual reporting grunt work every time we deliver a new report. Heat-mapping tools like Hotjar also enable us to understand specific user behaviour on our landing pages, helping us optimise it for maximum performance.
What are some misconceptions about digital marketing?
One of the most recent and common misconceptions in digital marketing is that AI will replace human marketers completely. This myth overlooks the nuanced relationship between technology and creativity in digital marketing. While AI excels at automating routine tasks, data analysis, and personalisation, it lacks the human touch essential for creative thinking, emotional intelligence, and understanding nuanced cultural and societal contexts. Successful marketing involves storytelling, empathy, and the ability to adapt to evolving consumer trends, which are all fundamentally human traits. AI's true role is to empower human marketers by freeing them from repetitive chores, enabling data-driven decisions, and enhancing campaign efficiency, allowing them to focus on the uniquely human aspects of their work.
Before you joined Icon, you worked in India. What lessons did you learn there? How does it compare to Australia?
In Australia, businesses place a priority on understanding their customers and optimising their digital assets for specific audiences—this is especially visible in small and medium businesses.
Indian businesses often suffer when they leave their marketing tasks to novices and freelancers who don’t often understand the business or client—and often focus on delivering a set volume of social media posts without enough thought about quality or messaging.
In comparison, smaller Australian businesses are much more aware of the benefits of digital marketing and optimisation—as evident from the attention to detail and care with which each of our strategy pitches is done here at Icon, from the largest client to the smallest.
