How to be a Digital Marketer?

How to be a Digital Marketer? This question seems simple and also looks difficult. As we all know, the age of big data drives changes in the whole world faster than ever before. Marketing no longer remains the same as we thought in the past. The four Ps of marketing Price, Place, Product and Promotion used for long time are less emphasized than in the past, and new Four P's even are emerged for digital marketing (but the versions seem varied among different people or parties!). So, one thing for sure is that being a digital marketer would not be the same as being a traditional marketer. The requirements of knowledge, skills and personality for a digital marketer could be a lot different than a traditional marketer.

The subject question could be simple because I can easily speak of many skill sets that is required for a digital marketer randomly. The job for a digital marketer is more digitalised. He or she should know how to use data visualization tools. Excel is only the basic skills marketers should equip with(but of course it might not really need excellent skills in it). What I am saying here is some popular tools which large corporation would pay to use and some free tools for public. For examples, SAS Data Miner, Tableau, Google Data Studio. But that may not be enough for the employers. It is better for the marketers having the certification of the data visualization tools, like mentioned SAS and Tableau they are providing certification exam. Simply say, digital marketers should be very familiar with some popular software in digital marketing field.

However, the reason I said difficult to answer because it is not that simple to be a digital marketer, or say, an outstanding marketers. Having knowledge to extract and report data is just the basic thing for a digital marketer, a good one should be able to analyze the data and make meaningful reports. Not only reporting beautiful and meaning report, but digital marketers should be also able to make good use of data, and think strategically how to use the data to help the company business in the scope of marketing. So, it is tough to answer the question. The job scope would be very wide and diversified. Also, the world is changing too fast, Digital marketers have to keep the pace of the changes in the digital marketing field could be very tough too!

Why do we use Google Data Studio?

There is a long list of tools when speaking of data visualization. Now, more and more great data visualization tools are free and they are very simple to use and easy to access. The number of tools might even make us confused and struggled to pick one that we want. In order to know if Google Data Studio is the good fit for you, we should learn the characteristics of it for comparing with other tools. First, just to have a quick talk of data visualization. It is the process of taking a data set and visualizing it in a way that can be easily understood. Sometimes called data viz, data visualization can be something as simple as a bar chart generated from an Excel file, or as complex as an interactive multimedia experience. The best data visualizations are beautiful, informative, and responsive.

1.Create Beautiful Reports

Many companies, especially large corporation, has tons of data for their businesses and their clients. The data may be already well-organized but may not be visualized. There are people out there who have created entire businesses around making data consumable, easy to read, and simple to understand. Google Data Studio could definitely help simplified the process.

Although we can visual the data on Google Analytics ,it can be kind of tough and time consuming to create spreadsheets, analyze the data, and format in a way that makes sense to shareholders in the company.  As Data Studio is built for data visualization – making it intuitive and simple to pull information into beautiful, consumable reports. The tool gives you the ability to change colors, gradients, fonts, etc. In addition, Data Studio provides a lot of different professional templates which help to make a beautiful report. Furthermore, Data Studio provides different formats or ways, such as bar chart, line graphs, pie chart, to present all the data. 

2. Pull Data From Multiple Sources

It is very amazing that you are able to import data source to Data Studio from multiple sources – even to the same report! You may pull data from some Google products such as Google AdWords and Google Analytics.

As we know, we can own many different accounts under ONE google analytics account. For example, we can have three different online stores and create three different properties under ONE google analytics accounts. Besides, we could create more than one views under one property on Google Analytics. For example, we can have one view for filtered employees' IP address, one view for members, and one view for master (all visitors). I want to point out that in Data Studio, you are able to pull out data from these different sources for your report. When you are creating a report for an online store, you may need to compare data from members and non-members which need you to pull data from two views on Google Analytics and Data Studio makes you do that!

3. Share easily and in real time

No more needing to give or get access to Google Analytics and navigate the UI to get what you need. Because Data Studio reports operate like any document on Google Drive — permissions can be granted to anyone — it allows for collaboration. And, it gets the real time updates, people can see the changes or updates immediately.

4. It’s free

It is free of charge and easy to access. There are some restrictions for this tool. There is also a limit of 5 reports per account (that is, the email address associated with Data Studio). The good news is, there is a bit of a workaround here. Similar to tabs on Google Sheets, Data Studio allows for additional pages on each report you create.

 Reference:

https://www.clickinsight.ca/about/blog/7-reasons-data-studio-google-analytics

What is Google Data Studio?

Speaking of data visualization, we should also look into a comparatively new tool Google Data Studio among many great tools out there. In this post, let's see what Data Studio is.

Google Data Studio allows you to turn your analytics data into informational, easy-to-understand reports - such as charts, graphs and maps, through data visualization. You can easily customize your reports to suit difference needs. Compare to the visualization function in MS Excel, Google Data Studio is much more user friendly and looks much cooler.

Another cool thing about Google Data Studio, for marketing analyst, is that it can be linked to your Google Analytics account to obtain data about your websites or digital marketing campaigns directly from Google Analytics. This make analyzing marketing activities so much easier than in the past when you have to export the google analytics data and use 3^rd party software for analysis. Furthermore, you can also import your data from external source into Google Data Studio to create professional reports.

Reports in Google Data Studio are interactive and dynamic, so that when new data available from a linked source, reports can be updated automatically to provide a real-time report. Additionally, the reports can be shared easily under a controlled environment since it allows you to edit permission on the shared report for each individual, allowing them to read or edit.

Reference:http://searchengineland.com/google-data-studio-258871

The Trend of Digital Marketing in 2017

All the way long we have been discussing big data, data analytics, and data visualization which all about digital marketing. In the digital world, things changing and new things happening all the time. We are too busy to catch up all the new trends and sometimes may get confused. Therefore, it would be god to have an idea the big trend of digital marketing in this year.

1. Marketers will increasingly adopt machine learning and data science

Machine learning and data science provide marketers with the opportunity to increase productivity effectively, enabling them to focus on the overall strategy deployment and eliminating the time spent on day-to-day data analysis and data management. Adobe recently published Adobe Sensei. Adobe Sensei, built on Adobe Cloud Platform, is a new framework and intelligent service that combines artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning to dramatically improve the delivery of design and digital experience.

2. Videos will become dominant

Videos have been regarded as "the next big thing" over the past few years, but marketers have not yet fully understood how to use the video flexibly in marketing. Knowing how customers use video content and learning how to use video ads will provide key opportunities for marketers in 2017.

3. Content speed will become critical

High-speed and large-scale production of personalized and interactive content of the ability is the thing marketers should pay attention to. In order to do this, marketers need to bring into the customer's role, and deeply feel the experience provided by its brand. The customers interact with the brand from multiple touchpoints, so the marketers need to be aware of how these experiences affect the entire customers' consumption process.

4. Customer experience is the biggest driving force of digital transformation

The biggest driver of digital transformation is the establishment of a competitive advantage, and the core of which is the customer experience. Customer experience is a new indicator of the success or failure of the competition, it can distinguish through the digital transformation to promote their own brand and stagnation in the old business model of the brand. Today's digitized layouts are full of users who use multiple devices to interact with each other, including mobile phones, wearable devices, tablets, and even automotive dashboards, and people will want to use it when new products or new ideas are available , The increasing expectations of customers so that the brand must be customer experience for the core business.

5.2017 digital marketing first interaction

The new year's digital marketing trend is about to change, the past marketing, only the pursuit of the target audience design ads, and then put to the community, now only to consumers to see is not the best digital marketing, must also allow consumers to " Interact with you ", 2016 second half of the fame of advertising.

6. Content marketing is not extensive marketing

In the past, many of the products known as content marketing, are the name of the slogan of marketing, marketing and marketing of the real. Still to the brand point of view to send an ad text, this article can not get the favor of consumers. Those business owners who can not be rewarded in digital marketing should think about: "Are you interested in what consumers are writing about?" If you only introduce the brand, tell the selling point, and do not meet the needs of consumers, it is not content Marketing, and with the traditional advertising is no different.

Is Big Data Changing the game of Traditional Marketing?

In traditional marketing, we always were told about four Ps: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place. But the world is changing so fast and we can see the way marketing has been changing rapidly as well. Like, we can see a lot of marketing has been moving online. Are the four Ps of marketing still working in the industry? How can we apply them in today digital marketing?

One of the biggest changes is the shifting customers online and they are able to interact with the companies. In the past, customers might just walk in the physical store, shop and leave. Now, company is able to track their online shopping behavior. The age of big data is providing the chance and leading the trend for business to transit the marketing. Big data enables "personalized marketing" to become the basic service.

 The traditional marketing, cannot do very detailed personal marketing and mostly focusing public marketing or group marketing. For example, traditional marketing based on consumer demand, and the market segmentation is for the different groups. For example, a sports shoes brand has seven market segments, and then with seven marketing activities, often have to spend a lot of manpower and resources. But with big data, the marketers can get every consumer's purchase time, purchase cycle, purchase characteristics to analyze their buying behavior and shopping experience. They can launch online marketing campaign which cost much less money and resources.

Everyone's buying behavior, consumption habits are not the same, but the traditional marketing because of the limitations of resources and manpower, therefore, often can only be with people to marketing, rather than marketing to meet people; when the business can only perform seven marketing activities. But when the marketing activities have the ability to become as many as 70,000, each consumer can be matched from 70,000 activities to the most suitable for these activities, and thus move the old marketing point of view, into a person to find activities, rather than activities find someone.

Marketing activities from groups to the individual, the market segment is getting smaller and smaller, or that each customer has become a focus on the market, marketing become personalized accompany by the age of big data.

The benefits of Big Data

We have talked about data scientist skill sets in digital marketing in an old blog and we realized that how importance and necessary big data and data analytics are in today world. Many people know it is indispensable for online marketing and good for business, but may not realize the benefits of using bid data specifically. I would like to share some of the benefits here. 

Big data analysis actually can make us of big data to increase customer participation. Marketers can improve it through consumer buying behavior, personal shopping experience and other information to gain more consumer interaction. For example, marketers can get data from Google Analytics to analyze their customers' buying behavior. They may know which customer segments are interested in their products most, which customer segments are buying their products most and most frequently, when and what time their customers are most active to browse their website and online store, where and what channels their customers and website visitors come from, how the website visitors are visiting and shopping on the website, etc.

Digital media marketing staff must consider all aspects of consumer information and behavior, to create a better consumer product experience. The use of data analysis help understand the purchase behaviors of consumers and to enhance customer participation through interaction, with the analysis of the information marketers can use data to quickly enter the next target market.

Getting these kinds of data, marketers are able to have more specific, personal and effective marketing campaigns to either potential customers or current customers. Brand marketing staff use data analysis to improve the marketing process of enterprise marketing. Big data analysis has become a new insight into market trends. In the past, digital marketing staff cannot track the consumer's shopping model, and now through the data analysis to become a new way to observe the market trend for the corporate brand in the target market to get the most response.

Why Analytics?

I think all of us cannot avoid analytics in this technology world nowadays and it's time to see analytics seriously. Analytics has been at the top of Gartner’s CIO technology priorities for decades.

Let's speak analytics in marketing field. The job of modern marketers is to optimize the whole system of touch points to maximize the flow of satisfied customers. And to do that, they rely on analytics, to guide the customer at each point – “you may be interested in these other products” or “here’s a discount if you purchase now.”

In the new world, it’s no longer about having a “customer process,” it’s about creating thousands or millions of personalized “processes” on the fly, based on the needs of each individual.

Because these new processes are analytics-powered, they can be much more agile and responsive to change – indeed, with new machine learning approaches, they can even update themselves, automatically adjusting to consumer behavior.

And this doesn’t just apply to marketing. We see the growth of similar on-the-fly processes in every other area of modern business, from production and logistics to finance and human resources.

Effectively creating and managing these kinds of flexible, on-the-fly processes is THE big new opportunity in digital business.

Reference:

http://timoelliott.com/blog/2017/03/analytics-is-the-most-important-business-process-in-your-organization.html