Marketing Analysts: 3 Reasons to Embrace Machine Learning

As a marketing analyst, you are aware of the increasing convergence of marketing and technology. In the past year or so, “machine learning” has come to the forefront of technology trends, and its capabilities suggest that it will have a long-term impact on the marketing industry. As a graduate student at Northwestern University who is studying marketing analytics methodology as part of my coursework, I have become curious to find out more about machine learning and the advantages it offers to marketers, especially for those who analyze customer data and develop insights on a regular basis.

While machine learning capabilities are still relatively new, there are already many ways in which marketing analysts can benefit from knowing more about the technology. In a recent Huffington Post article, Steven Wong and Derek Slater of Ready State, a marketing agency in San Francisco, state that “machine learning’s near-term effect on marketing is greatly underappreciated” and discuss several examples of how machine learning has already contributed to the marketing industry. For programmatic advertising, machine learning technology has helped to optimize real-time bidding results based on its analysis of past consumer behavior, ensuring that it delivers ads that are contextually relevant to the user. While some marketers may be intimidated to learn more about machine learning due to its complex technology, Wong and Slater agree that at least being aware of its strategic marketing implications is important for working effectively with other data-driven professionals.

Image Source: Kevin Moturi

In addition to delivering relevant content to consumers through programmatic advertising, machine learning has also helped marketing analysts to determine which actions are most important in the consumer decision journey. In an interview with eMarketer, Google Analytics thought leader Justin Cutroni explains that “[metrics] are not all of equal value, and a company shouldn’t be paying the same amount for all leads.” For example, the Smart Goals section within Google Analytics uses machine learning to analyze past website visits and confirm which actions are most likely to lead to a conversion. This capability can help marketers spend their budget more efficiently by prioritizing channels that lead to the highest number of conversions.

After reviewing these two articles along with my relevant coursework at Northwestern, I have developed three reasons why marketing analytics professionals should become familiar with machine learning:

·      Speak the language - Given that machine learning is an advanced, data-driven technology built by data scientists and engineers, it is imperative that marketing analysts can at least understand its key principles so that they can explain its capabilities to clients who may not have a clear understanding.

·      Identify valuable conversions - Machine learning can predict user behavior at all points of the consumer decision journey, making it easier than ever to pinpoint the most important conversions.

·      Customize consumer interaction - With machine learning, marketers can humanize automated consumer interactions that respond with customized answers learned over time, creating a more authentic connection between brand and consumer.

By becoming familiar with machine learning and its advantages for the marketing industry, analysts can expand their skill set and make more informed business decisions than ever before.

Katie More is a graduate student at Northwestern University pursuing her master’s degree in integrated marketing communications with a specialization in marketing analytics. She has three years of advertising agency experience at Havas and hopes to work in marketing analytics/research upon graduating in December 2017. To contact Katie, you can find her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

CMOs: 3 steps to implement Big Data road map

Big Data helps to bring excellent customer experience that not only improves company’s performance but also reduces costs and boosts profits. It facilitates marketers to get tasks done more effectively and efficiently. However, many marketing managers face the challenge of capturing, integrating and analyzing Big Data when carrying out the practice into daily work. As a Northwestern Medill Integrated Marketing Communication graduate student, I have found two articles closely related to the topic: the benefits of Big Data, and the current challenges of implementing Big Data into practice.

eMarketer’s article “Big Data Helps Reveal Consumer Behavior” indicated that more and more companies began to see the positive returns of their investment on Big Data in various areas. According to the survey conducted by Forbes Insights and Rocket Fuel, among US agencies and brand managers, 85% indicated that big data helped to yield more than half of marketing initiatives regarding to increasing insights into consumer behavior. It helped the company to yield improvement in sales, sigh-ups, registrations, ROI and customer satisfaction. Both advertising agency and marketers recognized benefits of developing insights into customer experiences, identifying products customers wanted, and establishing the corresponding strategy.

(Source: http://www.emarketer.com/)

According to Kevin Geraghty in his article “The CMO’s Guide to Bid Data” Big data allowed marketers to create a highly effective marketing program that can connect with your customers closer and beat your competitors. It enabled marketers to retain the customer, identify new customers, reveal new marketing opportunities, driving profitable advertising, and measure ROI. However, the author also argued that when implementing the big data into work, the company was facing some challenges such as developing efficient infrastructure that supports big data and identifying ways to connect disparate data together. It’s important for marketers to consider those problems when approaching the process.''

Based on the insights in my research, here are 3 efficient and effective ways for CMO to implement Big Data into practice.

1.     Develop Your Team - Appoint an experienced data scientist in charge of the data analysis.

2.     Aggressively Collect Data - Marketers need to collect data from both inside and outside of the company.

3.     Develop Insights - Find the right technologies and software to clean up the unstructured data to fine insights.

In order to deliver great experience, marketing managers need to find the right person with the right message and product at the right time in the right place. Machine-generated data, personal productively applications’ data, and mixed-media data all help markets to understand the increasingly complex customer decisions journeys and improve the experience during each touch-points to enhance the interactions with the company. It’s important for marketers to leverage big data to understand your customers and expand your business.






Yilun Cao is currently a master student major in Integrated Marketing Communication at theNorthwestern University. She is now studying marketing analytics and brand strategy. She has earned Bachelor’s Degree in Communication at the University of Washington. Yilun can be reached by Twitter @yilun_cao.

Market Data Studies: Not a Problem Any More.

Obtain Cheaper and Faster Results.

Google has revolutionized us again? Traditional market research is an expensive and long process. We know that many of our interviewees don’t want to answer long surveys and/or answer in an inappropriate way. Google has made an important change in how data is been collected. With Google’s new tool, you can create online surveys and have answers in a very fast and easy way about your clients. With Google’s tool business decisions are made faster and with the same accuracy as with old methods.

Benefits

Market research is now easier; you don’t need to hire a lot of people for the research since Google provides you with the templates, finds your interviewees, and aggregates the data. With Google Consumer Surveys you will be able to produce timely and cost-effective results while still maintaining much of the accuracy of pre-existing surveying techniques. This new method will help you to gain insights about your customers, save time, and take more efficient and effective business decisions by analyzing aggregate data.

This tool provides both a new way to perform Internet surveys and a new method for publishers to monetize their content. Therefore, this new tool involves three different groups of users: researchers, publishers, and consumers. According to Google, “Consumer Surveys provides a new way for researchers to perform Internet surveys, for publishers to monetize their content and for consumers to support publishers.”

How it Works?

According to Google, companies create an online survey with existing templates. Then, customers complete questions to access premium content. Google Consumer Surveys runs multi-question surveys by asking people one question at a time. This results in higher response rates (15-20% compared with an industry standard of 0.1 - 2%), more accurate answers, and respondents may be more representative due, to the short survey length. Consumer Surveys infers approximate demographic and location information using the respondent’s IP address and DoubleClick cookie. Then, publishers get paid as their visitors answer. And finally, companies get aggregated and analyzed data.

Stop losing you time and money, and talk with your market research team. As soon as this new tool is incorporated to your market research, you will start receiving the benefits. I encourage you to visit http://bit.ly/I2v8Tt and http://bit.ly/J5ccZJ to learn how to use this new tool. Remember, it will help you to know more about your customers, reduce your costs, and increase business decisions’ accuracy, regardless of the size of your company. So, what are you waiting for? 


Paula Fuentealba is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC program and is specializing in digital marketing and e-commerce.  Paula will be graduating in December 2012.  Paula can be reached on twitter using the handle @PaulaIMC.