“Most businesses underestimate the importance of content”, says Pradeep Chopra, CEO, Digital Vidya

Coffee with the CEO – In conversation with Pradeep Chopra, CEO, Digital Vidya

After starting an online marketing company, what had driven you to venture into training and starting a digital marketing training company?

We were always passionate to share our experience in leveraging Digital Marketing with others. We were doing this informally while speaking at various conferences to help fellow entrepreneurs and professionals leverage Digital Marketing for their organizational growth. Someone suggested us to do it formally and that brought the idea of ‘Digital Vidya’ into existence.

If you are to attribute Digital Vidya’s success to just one thing, what would that be?

Our passion is to share the opportunity of Digital Marketing with others.

What is your vision for Digital Vidya? Where do you wish to take Digital Vidya in the next five years?

We want to build the world’s best Digital Marketing education company and would like to achieve that in next 5 years.

How do you wish to take the digital vidya movement to the next level? If you are asked to tweet Digital Vidya’s expansion plans in a few characters, what would that be?

Go online & Productize to scale globally.

What, according to you, is the most significant difference between B2B and B2C conversations on social media?

Honestly, I don’t see any significant conversations happening for B2B on Social Media in India. B2B players have still not tasted success to jump in fully.

What are the several parameters on which you would judge the success of a digital campaign?

Ability to appropriately define and link digital marketing objectives to business objectives and agility to evolve while executing in order to produce desired outcomes.

What challenges do brands usually face to build their presence online?

They don’t consider online as integral part of their overall marketing and thus, don’t invest right resources to strategize & execute them. For the same reason, they don’t set right and realistic metrics to measure their success. They mostly underestimate the importance of content.

Content generation is the key to building a successful digital presence. What do you think sometimes go wrong with this?

As I shared earlier, most of the businesses underestimate the importance of content. Unlike traditional marketing/advertising, digital requires a continuous flow of high quality content. When it comes to Social, content is the key to engage in relevant conversations. Since businesses don’t give required importance to content and conversations, they don’t invest enough including involving key marketing people and thus fail to meet success.

What challenges have you faced while building Digital Vidya, both professionally and personally?

Like any training business, scale is the biggest challenge for us. The other challenge we’d faced was to remove dependency on the founding team to lead our trainings, which we’ve fortunately been able to address so far.

What has been your most significant takeaway while imparting digital education to corporate clients both in India and overseas?

One of the key takeaways for us is that our participants time is even more precious than the money they invest in our trainings. Since beginning, one of the questions we’ve kept asking ourselves is ‘Are we delivering real value to our participants?’

We are required to continuously adapt ourselves in terms of quality of our content & delivery to get a ‘Yes’ to this question.

Moving forward, what challenges do you foresee for Digital Vidya in the near future?

Given we’ve already completed 4 years of existence and have been able to mature our training delivery, the real challenge is to scale the business.

How do you see the digital space shaping up in 2014 both in India and globally?

I see the next level of growth in terms of investment in digital space across the world and Asia is going to take a lead in terms of growth. Integration of technology with marketing, growth of mobile marketing, increased investment into content and more participation among B2B players will be key factors of growth in 2014 in my view. Also, consolidation at an agency level will continue in 2014.

What has been your single biggest challenge in sourcing and retaining talent?

To be honest, unlike a Social Media/Digital Marketing agency, we don’t face that big a challenge in sourcing and retaining talent. At the same time, there’s a constant challenge to  adapt ourselves with the evolution of this dynamic industry.

How had been your life prior to Digital Vidya?

It hasn’t been much different. Entrepreneurship and Digital Marketing have been integral parts of my 13 years of entrepreneurial journey.

Tell us a little more about your personal journey. You co-founded a couple of companies before, so did you always want to be an entrepreneur since your IIT days?

I started my 1^st business, Whizlabs Software in year 2000 with 2 of my batchmates from IIT Delhi. It was a pure chance event. In Oct 2000, I was in Delhi and was waiting for my Visa to join a startup in US and happened to meet my batchmates Kapil Nakra and Purvesh Sharma.

Couple of conversations over the next few days led to our decision of starting our own company. Again, we accidentally hit upon Digital Marketing as a vehicle for our growth to create global brand for Whizlabs.

A piece of advice for us at iimjobs.com to enhance our digital footprint.

You’ve access to one of the most intelligent and influential people of the industry. You should leverage their influence and intelligence by involving & engaging them to create the next level of growth for iimjobs.com.

Pradeep Chopra is the CEO of Digital Vidya. Among the pioneers of Digital Marketing, Pradeep has been part of the Internet Industry since 2000. He has been a serial entrepreneur for last 13 years and is currently a Co-founder & CEO of Digital Vidya, India’s premier Digital Marketing training company. Pradeep has personally trained & advised over 2000 professionals including CEOs across Asia in helping them grow their businesses through Digital Vidya’s hands-on Digital Marketing trainings. Pradeep is one of the most sought after international speakers on Digital Marketing and Entrepreneurship. His speaking assignments include ad-tech, SES (USA), World Social Media Summit at Kuala Lumpur, Social Media Workshops across Asia, Click Asia Summit, Global Youth Marketing Forum, TiEcon and NASSCOM India Leadership Forum. He writes on Entrepreneurship and Digital Marketing for Wall Street Journal, Inc & Entrepreneur Magazines. Pradeep is also the recipient of Social Media Entrepreneur Award (at Global Youth Marketing Forum), PIMR Marketing Excellence Award and CMOAsia’s Brand Slam Leadership Award for his contribution to Digital Marketing industry.

A graduate from IIT Delhi, Pradeep is a core member of the Global Committee at SEMPO USA, a non-profit that nurtures the growth of Digital Marketing globally. He started his first venture Whizlabs, a global leader in PMP and Java Certification preparation. He also sits on the advisory board of Social Media Chambers Malaysia. His obsession for the digital medium has led him to believe that the Internet connectivity is more important than the water supply :). He’s a tweet away @PradeepChopra.

About Digital Vidya
Digital Vidya is India’s largest Digital Marketing training company and the first to launch Social Media Marketing Workshop Series in India. Since January 2010, over 3500 professionals (including CXOs) from over 1500 brands brands such as Nokia, Google, eBay, Reliance, Star TV, Cisco, GE, MakeMyTrip, Naukri, Citibank, Toyota, Intel, ITC, CNBC and CII have participated in more than 160 trainings by Digital Vidya across Asia.