Category: Data
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What Personal Data Science Teaches Marketers
A few years ago, there was a big movement called Quantified Self, in which we would apply principles of analytics and data science to our lives with fitness trackers and other apps that would help quantify how we were living. For a variety of reasons – mainly overhead – that movement never really took off.…
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You Ask, I Answer: Adopting Data-Driven Marketing Strategy?
Kait asks, “How do you suggest to go about to creating a data-driven strategy standard and breaking the “because we’ve always done it this way” mentality?” Strategy is always a sale. Every sale has to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” for the buyer. Not what’s best for the company, for the organization,…
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You Ask, I Answer: Data Visualization Courses?
Dasha asks, “I want to take some classes on analytics and visualization skills – what would you recommend?” I’d start by learning the principles of data visualization first. Edward Tufte’s book, The Visualization of Quantitative Information, is the classic textbook to start with. Then look at Data Studio’s introductory course, followed by Microsoft’s free EdX…
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You Ask, I Answer: Best Tools for Cleaning Data?
Jessica asks, “What are the best tools for cleaning data?” That’s a fairly broad question. It’s heavily dependent on what the data is, but I can tell you one tool that will always be key to data cleansing no matter what data set. It’s the neural network between your ears. Can’t see anything? Watch it…
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You Ask, I Answer: Company-Level Amazon Ecommerce Datasets?
Steve asks, “I’m looking for a dataset of companies that are actively selling on Amazon. How would you as a marketing data scientist approach this problem?” That’s an interesting question. To my knowledge, there aren’t publicly available, free datasets of this sort (though please leave a link in the comments if you know one), so…
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You Ask, I Answer: The ROI of Data Quality?
Oz asks, “I have a question about what you mean about data quality can’t be sold and it’s seen as overhead? I suspect we’re talking about 2 different things but I’m curious about what you’re describing.” In the data analytics and data science process, data quality is absolutely foundational – without it, nothing else matters.…
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You Ask, I Answer: How to Use Data in Content Marketing?
Jason asks, “Can you describe a marketing initiative that illustrates the intersection of data and content?” Data is an ingredient, and a fairly substantial one, for any form of content marketing. In content marketing, you have an opinion, a point of view, and then you have to support that opinion. That’s where data comes into…
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You Ask, I Answer: Where To Start Using Marketing Data Science?
Ashwin asks, “I have data around me related to campaigns – emails, phone calls, and survey data – so how should I start analyzing it?” First, let’s recall that marketing data science is about the application of the scientific method to data. Our first priority, then, is to use the data we have, techniques like…
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You Ask, I Answer: Marketing Ethics and Data Collection?
Oz asks, “There’s still the ethical questions that my marketing friends avoid: should Google even have all that data? How ethical is it to use that data? What about pending legislation that would hopefully criminalize lots of common data acquisition methods?” Two points I think are super important: minimum viable data, and behavior rather than…
