Vidya Varadarajan on Performance Marketing, Google Ads Strategy, and Digital Growth
📝Interviews
Performance marketing today requires a balance of creativity, strategy, and data-driven decision-making. Vidya Varadarajan, Director – Digital at Jacob Creative, brings this blend through her journey from copywriting to managing high-impact digital campaigns and Google Ads strategies. In this interview with StartupTalky, she shares how storytelling shaped her marketing mindset, her experiences working in the early days of digital marketing, and her advice for young professionals, especially women, looking to build successful careers in the evolving digital landscape.
StartupTalky: You began your career in copywriting before transitioning to performance marketing. How did that foundation in persuasive storytelling shape the way you approach digital campaigns and Google Ads strategy today?
Vidya Varadarajan: Copywriting is an excellent way to initiate a writing and marketing career, as it aligns thinking towards the audience and the objective. You learn to view communication from different perspectives to generate creative ideas. Doing this on repeat brought me a lot of confidence in my ability to find a creative solution to tackle any communication problem.
In digital marketing, we often think creativity takes a back seat, but the truth is, without that ability to think creatively, your ads tend to get lost in the crowd. You need the ability to keep thinking up new ways, lines, or angles to move your engagement needle (social media) or generate leads (performance marketing).
Creativity is what is taught in copywriting, but it is the backbone of all my work, including performance marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, and even when writing my mystery series for children.
StartupTalky: You founded your digital agency when the field was still in its early stages. What were the biggest challenges of building a business in an emerging industry, and what kept you going during those formative years?
Vidya Varadarajan: When I began my digital agency, it was still very hard to convince clients that they needed a social media strategy. There was a lot of effort we had to put into educating clients on content marketing, how it is tied to SEO, how content must be repurposed across channels, and how each piece contributed to an overall objective.
But even before that, we had to sell the why? We had to talk about how consumers wanted to be in direct touch with their favourite brands and understand what went on behind the scenes.
It was fun, because we were also learning so much on the job. We had our first Twitter party and pushed a brand’s hashtag into going viral. It wasn’t by accident. We studied how to do it and aligned it towards our objective.
We got our clients’ apps mentioned at a New York Apple conference by Tim Cook, as great examples of educational content. Running my own agency gave me a chance to empower my team to pursue ideas, and it was great to be on the edge of testing new media opportunities and monitoring results.
StartupTalky: Performance marketing is often viewed as a purely data-driven discipline. How do you blend your “old school” marketing instincts with deep technical expertise to deliver results that numbers alone cannot achieve?
Vidya Varadarajan: I was lucky to have been tossed into performance marketing (and responsible for a quarter-million-dollar budget) at a time when Google Adwords was still new.
I got hands-on learning how to optimize ads, tweak targeting, analyse metrics, and fix landing pages. All these things now have specialised teams and agencies.
Today’s digital marketing agencies are very good with the tools, but often lack the deeper understanding of how it fits into the marketing objective or crafting ads. Big agencies have great experience in crafting ads and understanding objectives, but they need multiple teams to fix the tools and analyse the data.
In fact, most teams today do performance marketing in silos, one person writes the ads, someone else runs the ads, and then one month later, you get the results in the form of analytics. And at the end of a few months, sales and CEOs are either scratching their heads, wondering what’s going wrong, or simply decide performance marketing lead quality is poor.
These days, I always get called to “fix” performance marketing campaigns after a client has been badly burned. It’s a bigger task as they have already had a bad experience and are usually skeptical of seeing any results.
The fact that I’m hands-on and understand the entire process from the marketing strategy to the sales call, can offer immediate creative solutions, while also being able to explain the data results, is what convinces my clients to keep working with me. That, and of course, the bottomline… quality leads.
StartupTalky: You manage large Google Ads budgets for clients. What core principles guide your decisions around budget allocation, bidding strategies, and campaign optimization?
Vidya Varadarajan: Most agencies end their responsibility at bringing in the leads. I always bring the sales team into the process in order for leadership to have a true end-to-end view. It’s only when you bring together the results of marketing and sales that you can understand value in terms of quantity and quality.
And this is very important because it is very hard to make any impactful decisions unless you know what is happening to the leads you are bringing in. Things like budget allocations cannot be effective without a deeper understanding of what people are seeking. And salespeople have this insight.
Unlike traditional marketing teams, I strongly believe performance marketing people work for sales. This is the core principle to keep in mind regardless of whether it is Google Ads, Meta, or LinkedIn. There is no one-size-fits-all in terms of optimization and bidding. There is a balance to be achieved between quantity and quality.
StartupTalky: As a woman leading a performance marketing agency in a field that is heavily analytical and often male-dominated, what unique strengths or perspectives do you bring to the table?
Vidya Varadarajan: This is an interesting question because I never looked at it in that way. But in fact, the very short list of people I would recommend for this field is all women.
Women multitask very well, and I think being able to hold numbers, creatives, and approaches simultaneously is a valuable skill in performance marketing.
StartupTalky: What advice would you give to young women aspiring to build careers in digital marketing or launch their own agencies in today’s fast-evolving landscape?
Vidya Varadarajan: Creativity. Curiosity. Learning. Courage.
These are the skills you need to excel in any field, not just digital marketing. When you are seeking to do things that have not been done before, you have no guidelines or methods to follow.
AI is our big disruptor, and we are approaching it with ‘How do we leverage this tool for better results?’ Curiosity. ‘Where are the places we can learn to do that?’ ‘Can we create an AI agent for…’ Creative. Finally, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’
Don’t worry, you will figure it out.
Sakshi Jadhav