DIGITAL GROWTH STRATEGY
Digital Marketing Consultant for Growth Strategy, Paid Media and Social
I'm Ajay Padhy, a digital marketing consultant based in Mumbai. I help businesses decide where their marketing money should go — SEO, Google Ads, paid social, content or the website — and connect those channels into one plan measured against leads and revenue. As AVP — Digital at Savit Interactive, I lead SEO, paid media, social and web together; before that I spent 14+ years in search and e-commerce growth. I lead every engagement personally as your senior digital marketing expert, with a specialist team for execution.
At a glance
- For: founders and marketing leads spending on several channels without a clear view of which ones pay back.
- Covers: digital marketing strategy, channel mix and budget, Google Ads and paid social oversight, analytics and attribution, and conversion paths.
- Fractional option: senior, part-time head-of-digital support when you need leadership but not a full-time CMO yet.
- Independent: I don't earn a commission on ad spend, so my advice on where to spend isn't tied to how much you spend.
- Delivery: strategy and reviews from me; campaign builds, creative and reporting from my team or yours.
OUTCOMES
What this engagement is measured on
Every client's goals are different, and most are a mix. In the first weeks we agree which of these matter to you, record a baseline, and report against it every month. Targets are set after the audit, never promised up front.
Leads, sales and revenue
More leads or sales across SEO, paid and social, attributed by channel.
- What we measure
- Organic enquiries and leads, conversion rate of key pages, and organic revenue and its share of the total.
- What usually moves first
- Conversion tracking you can trust, and better conversion paths on the pages that already get traffic.
- What follows
- Growth in organic leads, sales and revenue share.
Value delivered vs investment
Budget moved to the channels with the best cost per lead or return.
- What we measure
- What the organic results would cost to buy as paid clicks or paid leads (CPC and CPL based value), and hours saved where work is automated.
- What usually moves first
- An agreed baseline and the tracking needed to put a value on results.
- What follows
- A value-to-investment ratio you can track month by month.
See a worked example of the value calculation →
Proof from past work
Visibility, AI search and brand reach
Consistent brand presence across search, social and AI answers.
- What we measure
- Keywords in the top positions, presence in Google AI Overviews, how often AI assistants mention and cite you, and branded search demand.
- What usually moves first
- Answer-ready pages appearing in AI Overviews and AI citations; more keywords entering the top 10.
- What follows
- More branded searches and more recommendations by AI assistants.
CLIENT RESULTS
Results from similar engagements
Anonymised client work I led, delivered with my team at the time. Client names are withheld; the numbers are real.
+268.16%
Organic visitors in the US.
Organic visitor growth by market
US Store Visitors Up 268% With Custom Store Listings
+25%
Non-branded downloads for the top five keywords.
Growth by metric
Growing Non-Branded App Downloads 25% With Store Listing Tests
3.7 → 4.6
Play Store rating over three months.
Play Store rating
Lifting a Ride-Hailing App's Store Rating From 3.7 to 4.6
+74%
Google Play Explore visits, week on week.
Festive In-App Events Lift Play Store Explore Visits 74%
+100%
Organic views.
Growth by metric
Doubling YouTube Views With a Format and Thumbnail Overhaul
1.5% → 4.5%
Average click-through rate, roughly 3X (+200%).
Average click-through rate
Tripling YouTube CTR From 1.5% to 4.5% With Influencers
Who this is for
Most businesses don't have a channel problem. They have a coordination problem. SEO is run by one vendor, Google Ads by another, social by an intern or a freelancer, and the website by whoever built it three years ago. Each reports its own numbers, and nobody can say what a lead actually costs.
A digital marketing consultant's job is to sit above the channels. I look at where your buyers search, scroll and compare, what each channel costs per qualified lead, and where the website loses them — then build one plan where SEO, GEO, paid search, paid social and content support each other instead of competing for the same budget.
My background is search-first: hands-on SEO from 2017, then leading international SEO teams, and as an assistant manager I also led a PPC team for the automotive vertical before heading SEO for an international operation. In my current role I run SEO, paid media, social and web together, which is where the integrated digital growth case study comes from. That combination matters, because paid and organic decisions are almost always linked.
- Founders spending on Google Ads, Meta and SEO who can't see which one drives sales
- Businesses whose leads stop the day ads are paused
- Marketing leads who need a senior sounding board, not another vendor
- Companies between agencies, or about to hire their first marketing team
- Teams that need a fractional head of digital for a defined period
DIAGNOSIS
Problems I solve
Common constraints teams face before we begin working together.
"Our ad agency says everything is working"
"Leads stop when ads stop"
"We post every day and nothing happens"
"Every vendor has a different number"
What a digital marketing consultant does (and doesn't)
The role is easy to confuse with an agency or a freelancer. The difference is mainly what you're paying for.
| Dimension | Digital marketing consultant | Digital marketing agency | Freelancer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main job | Decide what to do and check it's working | Execute campaigns and content at volume | Execute specific tasks |
| Typically paid for | Strategy, audits, oversight, fractional leadership | Monthly retainer, often linked to scope or ad spend | Hours or deliverables |
| Channel view | Across SEO, paid, social, web and analytics | Often strongest in one or two channels | Usually one channel |
| Best when | You need clarity, a plan, or someone to hold vendors to account | You need lots of execution capacity | You know exactly what task you need done |
Good setups often use more than one: a consultant to set direction and measure, and an agency or freelancers to execute. I work that way myself — I lead the strategy and reviews, and bring in specialists from my team only for the execution you need. If you're weighing options for search specifically, see what SEO consulting is.
Channel strategy: getting paid, organic and social to work together
The most expensive mistake I see is running every channel as if the others didn't exist. A few principles I use when building a channel mix:
- Fix measurement before spending more. If GA4 conversions, call tracking and CRM stages aren't set up, every later decision is a guess.
- Use paid search to learn, organic to compound. Google Ads shows quickly which keywords convert; those become priorities for SEO, which lowers cost per lead over time.
- Give social a clear job. Usually that's either demand creation (reaching people who aren't searching yet) or retargeting — rarely both with the same budget and creative.
- Protect brand demand. Branded search, reviews and how AI assistants describe you all affect conversion rates across every channel. See brand visibility in AI search.
- Judge every channel on the same number. Cost per qualified lead, or revenue per channel, from one source of truth — not each platform's own reporting.
Choosing channels, KPIs and budget split
Most budgets are spread too thin, too early. I'd rather fund one or two channels properly, prove them, and then add the next.
Which one or two channels to fund first
- Where your buyers already are. If people actively search for what you sell, paid search and SEO usually come first. If they don't search for it yet, paid social or LinkedIn is often the better way to create demand.
- What you can measure today. A channel whose results can't be tracked to an enquiry or a sale will be judged on opinion. I start with channels we can measure properly, or fix the tracking before funding them.
- How long your sales cycle is. A short online purchase can be judged within weeks; a B2B deal that takes months needs pipeline measures, not just lead counts.
- What you can keep feeding. Paid social needs a steady supply of creative, and SEO needs content and technical work every month. I only recommend a channel your team, my team or your agency can actually sustain.
The KPI each channel is judged on
| Channel | Judged on | Early signals to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads (search) | Cost per qualified lead; ROAS for e-commerce | Search term relevance, landing page conversion rate |
| Paid social (Meta) | Cost per qualified lead or pipeline created; ROAS for e-commerce | Creative fatigue, cost per landing page visit |
| LinkedIn Ads (B2B) | Pipeline created from target accounts | Lead quality as judged by sales, not form fills |
| SEO and AI search | Qualified organic enquiries and pipeline over time | Rankings and impressions for priority pages, mentions in AI answers |
Each of these rolls up to the one primary number we agree at the start, measured in GA4 and your CRM rather than in each platform's own reporting.
When to move budget
- Monthly, not daily. Budget moves at the monthly review, once tracking is confirmed and there's enough data to judge, not on the strength of one good or bad week.
- Towards the next qualified lead, not the average. When extra spend in a channel starts buying noticeably more expensive leads, I hold that channel and put the next increment somewhere else.
- New channels get a fixed test. We agree the test period and the stop-or-rework rule before launch, so a test doesn't quietly become a permanent cost.
- SEO is judged on a longer clock. I don't cut it because the first month is quiet, but I do expect its early signals to move; if they don't, we change the approach rather than keep paying for the same one.
Google Ads and paid social oversight
I don't take a percentage of ad spend, so I have no reason to recommend spending more. What I look at when reviewing paid media:
- Account ownership. The Google Ads, Meta and analytics accounts should be your business's, with billing on your business's card or invoice so you see every charge. Agencies, and my team, are given access — not the other way round. Any report you receive should reconcile with what the ad platform and GA4 show.
- Conversion tracking. Are conversions real enquiries and sales, or page views and button clicks? This alone changes how good an account looks.
- Search terms and match types. Broad targeting can waste a large share of budget on irrelevant searches if nobody reviews search term reports.
- Landing pages. Ads sending traffic to a generic homepage usually convert worse than ads sending traffic to a page built for that intent.
- Creative and audience fatigue on paid social, and whether results are measured beyond the platform's own attribution.
Campaign builds and day-to-day management can be done by my team, your in-house marketer or your existing agency. My role is to make sure the strategy is right and the numbers are honest.
Changing ad agencies without losing leads
Switching who runs your ads doesn't have to mean a gap in enquiries. Most of the risk sits in the weeks before you give notice.
- Get exports before you give notice. Ask for campaign structures, keyword lists, negative keywords and ad copy while the relationship is still working.
- Make sure tracking sits in accounts you own. Analytics, Google Tag Manager and conversion tracking should be in your business's name before anything else changes.
- Build the new account and run it alongside the old one. Start the new account on a small budget, then move spend across as its conversions are confirmed, rather than switching everything off on one day.
- Start advertiser verification early. Verification on the ad platforms can take weeks, so begin it as soon as you decide to switch.
- Check the contract. Look for clauses saying the agency owns the ad account, and don't sign a new contract that includes one.
My team can build and run the parallel account during the switch, so your leads keep coming while spend moves across.
Fractional head of digital: when you need leadership, not headcount
A fractional head of digital is a senior marketer who works with you part-time to set strategy, manage vendors and build the team. It suits businesses that need senior judgement but aren't ready for a full-time marketing leader.
Signs it might fit:
- You're spending meaningfully on marketing but nobody senior owns the overall plan.
- You manage two or more agencies and spend more time refereeing them than growing.
- You plan to hire a marketing team in the next year and want the roles and processes designed first.
What it usually includes from me: a growth plan, monthly priorities, vendor and team reviews, a single dashboard, and a direct line for decisions. The marketing operations side — SOPs, QA and team structure — often becomes part of it as the team grows.
Hands-on or advisory
The fractional role is leadership. I set the plan, own measurement and run the reviews. Execution is done by specialists in my team, your own staff or your agency, and we agree who does what before we start. If nobody is in place to execute, we plan for that in the scope rather than discovering it later.
Responsibilities, in writing
Every fractional engagement starts with a written list of what I'm responsible for. If your priorities grow beyond that list, we either swap something out or agree an expanded scope openly. That way nobody expects full-time output from part-time involvement.
The first 30 days
Month one is about your numbers: spend, leads and revenue channel by channel, what's working, what to stop, and the one metric we'll judge everything else on. You leave the first month with a prioritised plan.
When to hire full-time instead
If you're running several channels at scale and have a team that needs managing every day, you need a full-time marketing leader rather than a fractional one. I can help you write the role and interview candidates.
What you keep when we finish
A fractional engagement should leave you stronger, not dependent. When it ends, you keep:
- The dashboard — one source of truth for spend, leads and revenue by channel, connected to your own accounts.
- SOPs for the recurring work: campaign launches, reporting, tracking checks and monthly reviews.
- A hiring brief for the marketing roles you need next, with responsibilities and what good looks like.
- Vendor scorecards so you can keep holding agencies and freelancers to the same standard.
- A documented plan — channel mix, budget logic and priorities — that the next person can pick up and run.
And because I don't take a commission on ad spend, none of that advice is shaped by how much you spend.
DELIVERABLES
What you get
Tangible assets, strategic roadmaps and documentation provided during the engagement.
Digital marketing audit
Growth strategy & channel mix
Measurement setup
Paid media review & oversight
Conversion path fixes
Vendor & team guidance
WORKFLOW
How an engagement works
A clear, four-phase delivery model ensuring accountability from kickoff to ongoing impact.
- 01Phase 1
Audit
Access to ad accounts, analytics, CRM and the website. I map spend, tracking and conversion paths and find where money leaks. - 02Phase 2
Plan
Agree goals and constraints, then build the channel mix, budget split, targets and measurement plan. - 03Phase 3
Launch & fix
Fix tracking first, then restructure campaigns and landing pages — with my team, your team or your existing agency. - 04Phase 4
Review
A weekly update and a monthly review against cost per qualified lead and revenue, shifting budget towards what works.
Ways to work together
Every engagement is led by me personally. For execution, I work with a small team of specialists — technical SEO, content, development and automation — so you get senior thinking without agency layers, account managers or hand-offs.
Audit & roadmap
A fixed-scope diagnosis with a prioritised roadmap your team can act on. Typically 2–4 weeks.
Advisory retainer
Ongoing senior guidance: monthly strategy, reviews of your team's work, and a direct line to me when decisions come up.
Strategy + execution
I own the strategy and stay your single point of contact; my specialist team handles implementation — technical fixes, content, builds and reporting.
Proof from past work
~60% → 90%
Client retention
Restructured team operations, accountability and delivery processes to significantly improve client retention.
Operations leadership role
24% COST-TO-REVENUE RATIO
Operational efficiency
Restructured operations, resource allocation and delivery processes to improve cost efficiency while scaling business operations.
Operations leadership role
TOOLING
Tools I use
Industry-standard platforms and custom automation stacks used to audit, track, and execute.
FAQ
Digital marketing consultant: questions clients ask
Straight answers to what people usually want to know before a first call.
A digital marketing consultant reviews how a business acquires customers online — SEO, paid search, paid social, content, email and the website — and builds a plan for where to spend and how to measure it. Unlike an agency, the focus is strategy, prioritisation and oversight rather than producing large volumes of campaigns or content.
Hire a consultant when you need clarity: a plan, an honest audit of what's working, or someone senior to hold vendors to account. Hire an agency when you already know what needs doing and need execution capacity. Many businesses use both — I often set the strategy and review the work of an agency or in-house team.
I set the strategy and review the accounts personally. Campaign builds, creative and day-to-day management are handled by specialists in my team, by your in-house marketer, or by your existing agency — whichever makes most sense for you. You keep ownership of every ad and analytics account.
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who works with a business part-time rather than as a full-time employee. It suits companies spending meaningfully on marketing without a senior owner for the overall plan, or those preparing to build a marketing team. If you only need one channel fixed, a specialist is usually a better fit.
Yes, as a leadership-only role. I set the strategy and monthly priorities, own measurement and run the reviews of vendors and the team. Execution is done by specialists in my team or by your own staff and agencies, and we agree who does what before we start. The engagement is defined by a written list of what I'm responsible for, not by a number of hours.
They do different jobs. A fractional head of digital decides what to do, sets priorities and holds the work to account; an agency produces the campaigns and content. If you have people executing but nobody senior owning the plan, a fractional lead fills that gap. If you have a clear plan but not enough hands, you need execution capacity, from an agency, freelancers or my team. Many businesses use both, with the fractional lead reviewing the agency's work against one agreed number.
I agree one primary number with you before anything changes — usually cost per qualified lead or revenue by channel — and set up GA4, conversion tracking and CRM stages so every channel is judged on it. Platform metrics like clicks, impressions and in-platform ROAS are useful diagnostics, but not the measure of success.
Don't hire anyone until you know why it failed. Start with a detailed audit of what was done — tracking, targeting, landing pages, offer and follow-up — and make the next decision from that evidence. Some products genuinely don't sell through traditional digital channels; in those cases we start with out-of-the-box ideas rather than repeating the same playbook with a new vendor.
Before recommending any spend, I look at where your current customers actually come from, what share of enquiries become customers, and what happens between first contact and a booked call. Sometimes the fix is faster follow-up or a better landing page, not more traffic.
Ask in writing for admin access, or for the account to be unlinked from their manager account and transferred to you. Claims that access would expose other clients' data or proprietary methods usually don't hold, because each ad account is separate. If your business pays the ad bill, platform support can often help you regain access; if the agency pays, starting a fresh account you own is usually quicker. Either way, secure your analytics and Google Tag Manager access first. Outcomes vary by platform and situation, but my team can help recover access or build and run a new account in parallel so leads don't stop.
Yes. A fixed-scope audit is the usual starting point, and it stands on its own: you get the findings and a plan whether or not we work together afterwards. There's no minimum engagement.
Yes. I audit your actual ad accounts, tracking and landing pages and give you a specific list of fixes. You keep running the campaigns yourself.
Agree a stop-or-rework rule before launch, not after. In week one, confirm tracking records real enquiries. In weeks one and two, check search terms are relevant and CTR and CPC are reasonable for your market. By weeks two to four, look at landing page conversion and whether cost per qualified lead is trending down. If those signals miss the agreed thresholds, pause and rework rather than adding budget.
Yes. I'm based in Mumbai and work remotely with businesses across India and internationally. Strategy sessions run over video calls, with shared dashboards and written plans, so location rarely matters.
Guides worth reading first
Free tools to check your site
Related services
Have a growth problem worth solving?
Tell me where you're stuck. On a 30-minute intro call I'll tell you where I think the constraint is and what I'd look at first — whether or not we end up working together.