Latha Sharma is the chief marketing officer of Deqode who has driven growth for all the organizations she has worked with – leading them to new markets and partnerships. At Deqode, she helps clients to run customer-centric transformations and build their blockchain practice. Drawing on her years of client experience, Latha helps the company operations related to negotiation, business planning, and brand building. She has been known to assemble and motivating high performing teams.
Latha is passionate about making social impacts using technology and leads the company’s pro bono initiatives. Humanitarian efforts and environmental sustainability are key areas of interest for Latha, who is the leader of Deqode’s CSR initiative.
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Your Journey as a Marketing Professional.
My journey as a marketing professional has been challenging and an experience full of learning. I’ve held many roles in marketing & business development but Techracers is where I made the move from corporate communications and PR to oversee the entire marketing department of the organization.
Throughout these years, what I’ve learned is that it starts with really knowing your customer. We all have the ability to measure impressions, clicks, downloads, views, etc., and through marketing automation, we can provide real-time customer-driven engagement. But what’s missing from that big data is the “why”— why our customers do what they do, how they think and feel to drive their actions — our customer’s truth. It’s not until we do the work to understand our customer’s truth — through the right research, both quantitative and qualitative — that we can become part of our customer’s story.
What I’m passionate about is understanding and remembering that we are still marketing to human beings and I don’t want to lose the human connection in the marketing that we do. Driven by my passion to make Techracers a brand which resonates with the voice of our customers, we took a decision to rebrand ourselves from Techracers to Deqode. Deqode expresses what we have become as an organization as well as what we hope to be – a solution provider that transcends the boundaries of traditional information technology companies and decodes business problems with quality solutions, quickly delivered.
I work—a lot—by choice, because it gives me energy and it’s such a privilege. I love spending every minute of my productive week pervasively solving complex business problems with my team at Deqode.
What are the primary marketing channels you have worked on? What will be your advice to young marketers on each of these channels?
Over the years I have worked with a lot of digital marketing channels including display advertising, email marketing, and social media marketing. However, social media marketing has always been a major element in our business marketing strategy.
It helps us to connect with our customers, increase brand awareness and boost leads and sales. With more than three billion people around the world using social media every month, it becomes crucial to strategically leverage this channel to increase visibility among potential customers.
For social media marketing, my advice to young marketing professionals would be to produce quality content consistently. And more importantly, have a social media strategy which is data driven and be flexible in your approach. Play with new ways to connect with your audience, and give yourself permission to learn as you go.
What are some of the important marketing software that you have used and found to be really useful for your company?
Currently, we are using Google analytics, SEMrush and Hubspot and a number of other technology platforms. We are also building some in-house tools based on AI and machine learning.
Would you like to share a few words about any marketing software that you love?
I absolutely love SEMrush – I think it is the most powerful SEO platform currently. It provides you with almost everything you would need to manage an effective SEO strategy. Recently, they have also added Social media planner and tracker in their feature list. This addition has really helped my team by allowing them to manage SEO and SMM in one place. It has a straight forward dashboard which provides reports and insights about the domain. Although these reports are informative they are very generic. I think more detailed reports would help marketers to improve their strategy.
I would highly recommend small to medium-sized businesses to use SEMrush for their Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing automation.
Your 2 line advice to people entering in the marketing domain.
Marketing is a dynamic domain. Keep yourself updated and be flexible in your approach. Take data-driven decisions in marketing. Data will always overshadow creativity in marketing.
