Why MBA in Digital Marketing is a great option for smart students

Prof Jayanta Chakraborty & Prof Sujit Deb *

Amazon and Flipkart do not own a single shop, yet they sell more than 10 lakh products per day in India. Ola Cabs and Uber do not own a single taxi, yet they account for more than a million rides per day. Yatra and MakeMyTrip do not own any airline or hotel, yet they account for more than a lakh airline ticket bookings and more than 10,000 hotel room bookings per day.

Zomato and FoodPanda do not own any restaurant and yet they account for more than a lakh of online food order and delivery per day. OLX and Quikr do not buy or sell anything, yet account for a whopping $5 billion GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) per month. MagicBricks and 99 Acres do not own any property, yet account for 25-30% of property sales in India .

What has changed in the buying-selling mechanism in the marketplace in recent years? The answer is quite obvious. The marketplace has moved from brick-and-mortar shops to e-marketplaces in the mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. Shopping is no more the elaborate exercise of going to a shopping mall, sifting through the displayed products and choosing what to buy. It is simply the process of opening a mobile app, browsing through the displayed catalogue, clicking the choices into the virtual basket and making payment through online gateway .

E-Commerce and Digital Marketing is poised to grow in a big way in India and globally. Morgan Stanley, in a research report, estimated that the E-Commerce market in India is poised to touch the $150 billion mark by 2020. Globally, the figure will cross the $700 billion mark. The number of online shoppers will be crossing the 300 million mark. The Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of the top three retailers (Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal) surpassed the turnover of the top ten offline retailers in India .

Besides, we already have had a record $6.6 billion of Venture Capital and Private Equity investments poured into E-Commerce Ventures in 2016-17. Future Group has bought Fabfurnish.com to make an aggressive foray into E-commerce. Reliance Retail, Aditya Birla Retail and Bharti’s Retail arm are also creating a hybrid model where E-Commerce is very much a parallel activity along with selling through physical retail stores (Economic Times, 8th December, 2016) .

So what is the manpower requirement at E-Commerce Industry? As per data given in Business Standard, Flipkart currently employs more than 45,000 people in India. Amazon has 2,40,000 employees worldwide. This headcount is double that of Apple and four times that of Google. Snapdeal, the third major E-commerce player in India has 8,000 people on its rolls.

The top recruiters coming on the day zero slot in IIM and IIT campus are E-Commerce companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Paytm. And if we take the recruitments done by the Unicorns and Start-Ups like Zomato, Shopclues, MakeMyTrip, Ola Cabs, Quikr, Foodpanda, BookmyShow, Urban Ladder, Lenskart, RedBus and others, the current requirement exceeds to more than a lakh of employees per year .

Now the moot question — Why an MBA in Digital Marketing? A post graduate management degree in digital marketing opens up two distinct career paths for a student — either to become an entrepreneur or take up a job in E-Commerce Company or Digital Marketing Consultancy.

The requirements are mainly for e-marketing specialists who can do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SMM (Social Media Marketing). The tasks will be to set up the e-commerce portal, optimize the portal to get a higher ranking in SERP (Search Engine Result Page), make online bidding on Google AdWords, create banner ads and run Google Analytics to understand ROI (return-on-investment) and goal achievements .

For those who are not interested in regular jobs, there are plenty of freelance projects available at Elance (www.elance.com), Upwork (www.upwork.com) and Freelancer (www.freelancer.in). You have to establish your credentials and bid for the projects. One you get the assignments, you can work flexi-time from your home, submit the work within the stipulated date and get paid online in your account.

All you need is a laptop and a good internet connection. You can also set up your own digital marketing consultancy by hiring professionals and getting business from companies who want to make their presence felt in e-commerce platforms .

At ICFAI University Tripura, we offer Digital Marketing as a dual specialization along with regular MBA degree program. The syllabus comprises of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Google Analytics.

The students, after completion of the course, can sit for the Google Online Certification Exam and become a Google Certified AdWords Professional. This has high degree of credibility in the market and can fetch lucrative jobs in top notch E-Commerce companies .

The career experts are now strongly advocating MBA in Digital Marketing because that will not only open the doors to a great career opportunity but will also facilitate the path to start a business if you have the entrepreneurial zeal. Our Prime Minister’s initiative of Make in India, Start-up India and Digital India has already set off the sparks that were much needed to foster the entrepreneurial culture in India.

And with record breaking Venture Capital pouring in and many Angel Investors available to hold your hand, MBA in Digital Marketing will catapult you to heights that you never knew of before .