Hena Jose is a digital strategist with strong analytical skills and data-driven thinking.
She puts her expertise to use to optimize and improve digital marketing ROI, content offerings, and overall business performance and customer experience.
As a digital strategist, she performs research and gathers requirements for digital projects—whether that project is for building a website, SEO optimization, executing digital ad campaigns, etc.—and creates a plan of action with tactics and goals well defined.
Her strong healthcare and technology background and strong communication skills give her an edge in handling B2B and healthcare clients.
In addition to her full-time job as a digital strategist, she also owns and manages a health, wellness, and science blog titled ScienceandSamosa.
How did you start out as a marketer?
Blogging introduced me to the world of digital marketing. I found the field extremely dynamic and challenging.
Since I came from an analytics and technology background, that helped me pick up the nuances of the field quickly.
Strong content creation skills, along with digital marketing acumen and analytics skills, helped me gain the job of digital strategist at an agency.
This role introduced me to a lot of clients from diverse industries like FMCG, hospitals, government, B2B, and many more.
Looking back, what was your hardest struggle when it came to delivering results?
The major negative point about the digital marketing field is the presence of spurious alternatives to achieve deliverables (bots, blackhat link building, etc.).
The client who is naive to this finds it difficult to understand when we propose the ‘best practice’ methods driven by content creation and campaigns.
Google algorithm updates are indeed a boon for digital marketing experts relying completely on ‘white hat’ methods.
What do you find most rewarding about what you do?
With new technologies and platforms emerging every day, this field requires one to be constantly learning and on their toes to adopt new changes.
I, being a person who loves to read, research, learn, and play around with data points, find the field exactly matching my interests.
We have a lot of readers who are bent on becoming freelancers. Aside from freelancing, how else can someone earn online? And what is your advice?
Since the digital marketing field does not have an entry barrier, anybody, irrespective of their education or experience, can enter this field.
This will put extra pressure on everyone to prove their capability again and again.
Creating a blog of your own would be ideal to establish capabilities and will always help in earning extra income by offering e-books, workshops, and finally opening the blog to advertisements.
Affiliate marketing can be explored too.
What recently developed marketing strategy, technique, or tool interests you the most right now?
I am an analytics person, and I like advances in technology that help in analyzing data points.
I love Tableau and Google Data Studio. I like the visualization we can create using these tools with minimal effort.
I am an R expert and personally like to explore marketing packages.
What do you do to stay up-to-date with new marketing techniques?
There is definitely no single way to stay updated. Some ways that I regularly use:
1. Constantly follow top digital marketing experts like Neil Patel, Mark Schaefer, Rand Fishkin, and Mari Smith on their blogs, podcasts, and YouTube
2. Track the hashtag #digitalmarketingtrends, #digitalmarketingstrategies, etc. on LinkedIn and Twitter.
3. Read about digital marketing trends from Medium and Buzzsumo.
4. Follow updates from the platforms your work focuses on: Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, etc.
Which one book/blog post would you recommend every Marketer should read?
More than books I find blogs/podcasts relevant as it would always be up to date.
But then for the beginner, it would be good to read Digital Marketing for Dummies By Ryan Deiss and Russ Hennesberry and Digital Marketing That Actually Works the Ultimate Guide by Kristen Neher
What advice would you share with other Marketer who wants to become more productive?
1. Do a thorough study about the company and product/service you are going to work on even if it requires you to spend a lot of time, as the entire project planning would be dependent on product/service understanding
2. Perform competitor analysis. This will help in understanding a lot about the target market and their preferences
3. Plan your content in such a way that it addresses every stage of a buyer’s journey
4. Define Key Performance Indicators, Regularly assess business performance through these KPI’s and bring in changes accordingly
If there’s one Marketing Guru you’d recommend who and why.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone in particular.
Keep following at least 8-10 marketing experts
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