2020 Rewind: Marketing and Machine Learning

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2020 Rewind: Marketing and Machine Learning

Welcome to 2020 Rewind! In this series, we’re taking a look at the year that was and the wonderful shows and podcasts that had me on as a guest this past year. A fair amount of the time, I’d rather read than listen, but podcasts, live streams, webinars, and videos were how we made media this year. So let’s get the best of both worlds; 2020 Rewind will share the original episode and show it aired on, and provide you with a machine-generated transcript from the episode.

2020 Rewind: Marketing and Machine Learning with Kerry Guard and the MKG Podcast

Summary: Data is an ingredient, not an outcome. Identify what numbers and metrics have meaning to you. Focus on the KPIs that will get you a bonus or fired.

Find the original episode here.

Listen to the audio here:

Download the MP3 audio here.

Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Kerry Guard 0:07
Hello, and welcome to the mkg podcast. This podcast helps marketers grow their businesses using the four M’s. The right means messaging, media and measurement. I’m your host Carrie garden to help introduce today’s guest. I have our analytics expert, Spencer Mays. Spencer, thank you for joining me.

Kerry Guard 0:24
Thank you.

Kerry Guard 0:26
Spencer, we send clients weekly reports. But we do analysis monthly over a month and quarter over quarter. Is that is that accurate?

Kerry Guard 0:39
Yes, that’s correct. For all clients, we kind of have a deep dive into monthly and quarterly reports that are direct contacts and send up the chain to the people above them who kind of want to see how the marketing is performing.

Kerry Guard 0:55
Yeah, and when you’re reading those, those, you know, the weekly reports just go out automatically just say, you know, here’s what’s up. But from a monthly and quarterly standpoint, when you’re reading those deeper reports, you know, what questions? Are you asking of our experts who are running the campaigns and our clients who are expecting performance?

Kerry Guard 1:16
Yeah. So in terms of asking our experts kind of some questions about performance, I kind of look at an ask what efforts took place in the past past month, or quarter, and what changed in terms of strategy or optimization. For example, PPC budgets changed for SEO or any algorithm changes that might have impacted SEO, did a spend shift happen to from one campaign to another and PPC, just any type of changes that might have happened and impacted? performance?

Kerry Guard 1:51
Yeah, changes kind of a big deal. And, and, you know, in looking at change, sometimes you have to dig deeper in the data. And sometimes the data gets a bit overwhelming, and a bit much, and the rows and rows and the columns and columns, when you’re looking at raw data, definitely. And so our expert today actually talks about how to cut through all that data using AI, and machine learning, which was sort of this mind boggling thing to me. So Christopher Penn, co founder and data scientist at Trust Insights, helps brands answer these questions around using machine learning and AI with the help of IBM Watson. And if your listeners if you’re feeling as thoroughly confused, and overwhelmed as I, as I am, don’t worry, Chris does. Christopher does a great job of walking us through how this technology really can impact your campaigns, what he’s looking for, what questions he asks, and how he really helps to know what’s driving your performance. So let’s take a listen. Chris, thank you for joining me on the mkg podcast.

Christopher Penn 3:16
Thank you for having me.

Kerry Guard 3:18
So excited to have you and I’ve been following your podcasts for a long time now. But why don’t you for the people who may not have Why don’t you tell us about yourself and what you do and how you got there?

Christopher Penn 3:27
Sure. My name is Christopher Penn. I’m chief data scientist and co founder at Trust insights.ai. We’re a data detective agency, if you will, for marketers who have data mysteries, they need to be solved. I’ve been doing analytics and data really since the mid 2000s when I was at a student loan company, and it was one of the first digital companies trying to figure out how do you make money on the internet kind of thing. And it was way even way back then there was a strong emphasis on measurement on what’s working? And can we do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work? So that has been the story for me since you know, less 15 years?

Kerry Guard 4:08
Well, and you specifically have morphed from, you know, data has come a long way and how we measure data certainly come a long way. And you’re I feel like, correct me if I’m wrong, because I’m not in the exact same space you are. But I feel like you’re on the cutting edge of data from a machine learning AI sort of standpoint. Can you tell us more about how you got specifically there? Because I feel like it’s probably been quite the journey.

Christopher Penn 4:35
It’s an accidental journey. It’s It’s funny, one of the things I tell people that they are usually astonished to hear is about like in college, I failed statistics like actually everybody in college in my class failed statistics because we had a teacher who was a phenomenal researcher, amazing academic, you know, widely published tons of awards, couldn’t teach to save his life. And so, we all just miserably failed because he you You start in a class and he’s automatically goes right into the deep end, you’re like, Whoa, this roller coaster just, you know, it was even going up the hill just real quick, just immediately or straight down. But a lot of this stuff really starts with your basic analytics, whether it’s sales, analytics, marketing analytics, you have data, its data is like an ingredient, right? And you’re like, Okay, what am I going to make of this? What do I do with this stuff? And my own journey, went from the finance industry into email marketing for a few years, then worked at a public relations agency for five years. And throughout at all, that question people always come up with is, well, what’s working? Right? What should we be spending more money on? What should be? What should we be doing less of? And the nice thing is that in marketing and in sales, there are no shortage of good data sources, as long as you’ve got them configured properly, that you can answer those questions with. It’s more a question of, do you know what questions to ask of the data and do know how to get answers out of it. One of the challenges we have in marketing is that we are swimming drowning in data really, and we’re not getting answers out of it, we’re not getting actions out of it. And that really has been sort of my my personal Hilda plan to flag on for the last couple years is just say, it’s great that you’ve got data. And we can use all these technologies, from basic statistics to data science to machine learning and artificial intelligence. But at the end of the day, if you don’t make a decision, if you don’t change what you do, or do more of something, then all of it’s pointless, right? One of the things we’d love to say, in Keynote talks that I give is analytics without action is a recipe you’re cooking, you never eat. Right? It’s it’s exactly that, what are you going to do with the insights you’ve gathered?

Kerry Guard 6:49
I love that. And I couldn’t agree more to have the fact that as marketers, we are absolutely drowning in data. There’s almost too much of it. And so in knowing that there’s too much data, you you mentioned asking the right questions, do you, you know, specifically for me to be especially as specifically for those demand? Gen. Marketers, do you have some examples of what those questions could be?

Christopher Penn 7:13
Absolutely. Number one is what’s working right? What’s what do we get it? What What is getting us results? And that’s where I think everybody needs to start? Well actually take a step back, what’s the goal? So one of the things that marketers in particular are sometimes struggle with is that they don’t have a line of sight to business impact. They, you know, you’ll see this in channels like social media, like people like, Hey, here’s all our social media engagement. Great. What does this do for the business like this make us any money? The way I often coach people is to say, what numbers that what metrics you have access to, will you be fired for? And people like, uh, I don’t know, like, Okay, then then your job may not be safe. You don’t know that answer, right? Whereas, when you talk to like a sales professional, what number five for, like, my closing rate goes below? x, right? They say like, yep, I need to close X number of revenue or X number of deals. Every quarter, I gotta hit my quota. And it’s very clear to them, this is the number that you are measured on and you get your, your bonus that can buy a Ferrari or you get, you know, the you get the the non Glengarry leads if you do that. And so, for marketers, the question is, what number you held accountable for if you’re in demand generation? Are you putting leads on the scoreboard? Right? Are you putting shopping carts on the website? Are you putting feet in the door? What is it that you do that has a direct line of sight to a business impact? And then from there, you start asking questions like, okay, so I know, you know, lead generation is my thing. What metrics and numbers? Do I have that feed into lead generation who is responsible for those particularly bigger organizations? And you take another step? And it’s okay. If it say it’s returning users to the website, okay, what causes returning users to the website and find out maybe it’s, you know, tweets on Tuesday that you’re a poop emoji? Who knows? And see, okay, well, what causes that and what you end up with is what we call KPI mapping, where you’ve mapped out the metrics that are relevant and important and deliver impact. And then you ask questions, those what makes us number go up, what makes us number go down? What else has relationship with this number that we could test? And once you have that, it becomes much easier to focus as a marketer on here’s what is really important, because we know it has a direct connection to business impact.

Kerry Guard 9:49
You mentioned a couple metrics that obviously I’ve heard of leads, I think returning visitors is really interesting, and I don’t know that that’s looked at quite enough and I just got off a podcast to somebody else. Who mentioned the same thing being really important. Do you have any other metrics, you know, that you think people should be considering? in that sort of combination of importance when let’s, I mean, I, I know that this could be so different depending on what your business is, but it’s specifically for my audience and demand Gen marketers do you know, what other metrics Do you find are important in knowing that you’re garnering enough leads in your business? Because it’s not just leads to your point?

Christopher Penn 10:34
The answer to that, again, you said it best, it varies wildly from business to business. So there are hundreds and hundreds of metrics you could be measuring. I’ll give you an example. If you’re familiar with Google Analytics, out of curiosity, how many dimensions and metrics are there available in Google Analytics, you want to take a wild guess?

Kerry Guard 10:54
At least hundreds if not 1000s.

Christopher Penn 10:57
Okay, you’re right on the first go, it’s 510. There are 510 different discrete things you can measure in Google Analytics. And of those, for any given company, probably five of them are going to really matter, but they’re going to be different five. Same is true for social media. When you export your, you know, Facebook page data, you get a spreadsheet with 28 tabs, and you know, 50 columns, a tab like come on. But you have to be able to analyze that alongside all the other stuff you have. And this is channel by channel. So when we add, we work with people to help them figure out what matters very often we end up having to use the advanced tools, do data science tools, machine learning tools to figure that out. What you end up doing is you end up putting sort of all of it into the equivalent of a gigantic spreadsheet by by day. And then you have some outcome on the on the end that you care about whether it is leads, whether it is contact form fills whatever the outcome that you’re measured on. And then you load it into a system like IBM Watson Studio, for example. And their Auto AI capability. And you say to Watson, hey, I care about leads, why don’t you do the math, and mix and match every single possible combination of column in the spreadsheet, and tell me what ones have a mathematical relationship, a correlation to the outcome I care about this is something called multiple regression subset analysis. Watson does this thing and it can take you know, five minutes to five hours depending on how much stuff you throw into it, and eventually comes out and says, Hey, here’s the five things I think, are relevant. Or it says I couldn’t find anything that was relevant, you need to find some different data. And if you get those, you know, three or four or five things, then you have a testing plan. You guys say these things have a correlation. Now we need to prove causation. Because everyone who didn’t take stats one on one, or in my case, didn’t fail stats, one on one knows that correlation and causation are not the same thing. You know, the textbook example is ice cream consumption and drowning deaths are highly correlated. But it would be fallacy to say ice cream causes drowning it doesn’t what causes both cases is a rise in temperature, people go swimming more when it’s hot, ice cream was hot. So the when you do this type of mathematical analysis, maybe you find out that you know, number of emails opened or number of tweets clicked on has a correlation, you then have to go and try and stimulate more of that behavior. So that you can see did if we got 15% more tweets with poop emojis and right did we see 15% more increase a commensurate increase in the outcome we care about? That’s the method for determining what metrics matters. And it varies per business. It varies by time to what worked a year ago, may not work. Now. You know, every marketer in the world knows the joy of dealing with Google search algorithm changes, Facebook newsfeed algorithm changes, so much fun that you have to run these tests fairly often to see if what held true in the past holds true now.

Kerry Guard 14:09
So I don’t know about MB IBM Watson Studio. I don’t know that many people might in my seat do so or our listeners? Can you? Is this relatively easy to sign up for and set up? Do you need an expert? Can you sort of walk me through how you even get started with this thing?

Christopher Penn 14:29
Sure. So full disclosure, my company is an IBM Business Partner FTC regulations, blah, blah, blah. If you buy something through us, we gain financial benefit. Okay. Watson Studio is sort of a pay as you go. piece of software on the web, and you can get a free account. You get like 50 hours a month to have building time within it.

Kerry Guard 14:51
And is it easy?

Christopher Penn 14:55
That is it. This is one of the challenges I have in my world. This is one of the reasons why We’re a consulting company and not a software company. There’s so many varying levels of skill. I think it’s easy. But I also write around code. most marketers don’t. I think, you know, some of the conclusions that Watson Studio come up comes out with, those are not easy to interpret those you do need some guidance with because it will spit out, it’ll say, you know, this has an RMSE score of point 258. And, or this as an area under the ROC curve of this. And, you know, here’s the four measures and the feature importance and all this technological mumbo jumbo that if you’re not versed in it, you feel inclined to say, Okay, I guess this is right. So at that part does need some guidance, getting the actual data into it and doing it that part is easy, just load the Excel spreadsheet and, and let it do its thing. But interpreting the results is tough. And the harder part, believe it or not, is actually getting the data together in the first place. Because, again, as we all know, in marketing, Facebook, and Google don’t play together, and you have your social media posting software, and you have your SEO Software, and all these different tools are creating so much data, but none of it is intended to play well each other, none of it is unified. And so the bigger export is different, every export is different different date formats, you know, America is the weirdest country. In the world, we’re the only country that uses month, day year, for a date format everyone else’s day, month, year, or year, month day. So if you’re working with some certain software vendors like that are overseas guess what they are in the what the rest of the planet uses. So you have to even adapt to that. So the hardest part really is that data preparation and cleaning, to get it ready for analysis that I find that typically takes like 80 to 90% of the time on a project is just getting all the stuff together and making sure it works.

Kerry Guard 16:50
And how getting all the data together certainly an undertaking to say the least. But then you’re talking about having a look at this data all the time. So how do you might be jumping the gun here? And there’s like, a million questions in between these two steps. But how do you then keep it up to date so that you can look at it on a regular basis? Because you can’t go add more data every single time? Or do you have to do you have to go add data every single time gonna pull this thing? Or is there a way to connect all these dots,

Christopher Penn 17:23
there is a way to connect all these dots. And that requires either you’ll be able to write code against all the different systems that you interact with, or paying a vendor to that has connectors, some of some people will be familiar with things like If This Then That or Zapier or a number of these services. But regardless, something has to get the data and put it in. And then you know, build your models and things as as frequently as you need it. Now, the good news is for a lot of companies, when we ask when they asked like how often should we do this, we ask how often do you prepare to make decisions to change, you know, major strategic initiatives? They’ll say, Well, you know, quarterly at best, and so you don’t necessarily need to be running this every single day. There’s very few companies that are that finely tuned. Most of the time, it’s, you know, monthly quarterly, maybe, you know, some companies like we just want to do this as part of our annual planning and which is fine. I think it depends on what the needs are and again, what you’re willing to use, because if you do this, and then you don’t use the data, you didn’t need to use this.

Kerry Guard 18:23
Yeah, it’s pretty worthless. Yeah. And you mentioned seasonality, too. So it does sound like quarterly is probably a really good, really good opportunity to, to scrub the data and get it loaded up and check out that you’re on the right path. And your plan hasn’t changed, our foot has to make those changes and tweaks. So in your experience than in and how you analyze the data, you mentioned some number systems. But at the end of the day, you said you’re basically looking for what data points you should be looking at, essentially, right? And so once you know those data points, where do you go from there? Do you then go and check your your systems that are not sort of tied together, you go check Google Analytics to check Facebook, whatever the case may be to then make day to day decisions? What’s sort of the next step once you have that data?

Christopher Penn 19:15
So that’s a really good question. There’s two paths you have to walk the first is yes, doing that and additional investigation, we were talking about KPI mapping earlier, you do the KPI mapping on those specific pieces of information. Like if it says, you know, tweets on Tuesdays, okay, now you know where to go and what system to look at to do some more digging what happens on Tuesdays? What words what language, what images do we use on Tuesdays that seem to deliver that result as an example. So there is that first branch of deeper investigation, and the second branch is to go into something like dashboarding software like Google Data Studio, and monitor those, you know, three or four or five numbers that seem to matter the most, keep an eye on them, and that’s where you change from that, you know, big quarterly research project, here’s the five numbers that belong in a dashboard that you should make your homepage on your browser. So that you go Ah, hmm, something’s down there today. Well, that’s that’s up on usually there today, in the same way that a lot of you know, I take a lot of lessons from financial services. When you look at what really proficient stock traders have. They don’t have a massive like, airplane cockpit of of everything, they have a few things they really pay attention to, that when the number one of the numbers goes haywire, you’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. I have not seen that recently. And then they know something’s up. There’s a measure, for example, that the Chicago Board of exchange publishes called the VIX the volatility index, that in the stock market world, indicates, you know, the market is afraid. You saw a huge spike in 2008 2009, when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapse that ushered in the Great Recession. And people who are watching that number. As soon as it went from you, it normally hovers in the teens. And then one day it went to 30. And then 40, and 50, you’re like, oh, something’s going on. And, again, that’s an indicator that as a, as a business person in that profession, you were like, Okay, I’m going to hit the sell button on my stuff and get out before people lose their their stuff. And if you did that, at that time, you would have preserved a lot of money that would have later been lost. And you could have gone in and bought stuff on a fire sale, the same thing can be done in marketing, you could set up these different types of measures, you create them for your business to them, so that they go on that dashboard. And then you look at and go, Hmm, something’s up there, I need to look at it. There’s a measure for financial services from stock trading, called the moving average convergence, divergence indicator. And what that means when you deconstruct it is, what’s the seven day average of a number? What’s the 30 day average of a number? And how far apart are they? If your short term average goes below your long term average, that means you’re losing ground. And the reverse is also true. So if you set that up on like your Google Analytics, or your lead generation, or your CRM, or whatever the case may be, and you have that number running, and you saw those things starting to converge, like, Hey, guys, we’re losing momentum, you know, spend more money on ads, or, or go to more events, or, you know, rap more buses, whatever the action is, you would take from that particular metric, you would then be able to say, I see this coming, and I’m going to intercept it and prevent a problem, rather than having to reactively deal with a problem.

Kerry Guard 22:24
And looking at that data, I know, again, we talked about how this depends, you know, business to business. In talking about lead gen, it’s not necessarily is it? Is it necessarily deep down in the funnel, where you want that metric to be? Or is it more top of the funnel metrics, where you want to be looking at that, you know, where that line sort of cross and catching something sooner than later.

Christopher Penn 22:50
It depends on what the analysis that that multiple regression analysis comes up with, there’s a good chance that, you know, depending on the outcome you’re looking at, that’s gonna there’s gonna be a handful of metrics throughout the funnel. That said, it’s not a bad idea to have like, maybe have one KPI at each level of your operations fund and say, like, Hey, we need to pay attention to this from, you know, how many newer returning users on the website? How many email subscriptions do we have? How many lead form fills to how many open deals? If you have one KPI at each level, you can then have you know, three or four or five monitors running that go, okay, something’s something’s up. And we saw this recently with a client where the top of the funnel was good, the middle of funnels, okay. But there was a stage between the middle and the bottom of the funnel where that it just fell off a cliff for like, what, what is going on there? This is not normal behavior. And when they dug in, like, oh, there’s a problem on the website that, you know, people on a mobile phone can’t see this page at all, like, well, if you wonder why your leads are down that because you’re basically you flip the bird, every mobile user having Oh, by the way, 70% of your traffic is mobile. So it’s things like that, that really do help you diagnose operations, wise, what’s going on with your marketing.

Kerry Guard 24:06
And so you drop all this data into IBM, you get this output of what metrics are working, you dig in further to see, okay, where you know, these, this is what they’re saying, but why are they saying these metrics? Okay, here are the things that are working, and then you put an act, it sounds like you put this plan in place to then go execute on those metrics, followed by setting up dashboards to be able to monitor that data on a regular basis. Did I?

Christopher Penn 24:37
Yeah, that’s exactly it.

Kerry Guard 24:39
It sounds easy.

Christopher Penn 24:42
It’s straightforward, but we always say simple is not easy.

Kerry Guard 24:46
That’s true. That’s so true. And so the first step in all of this is basically to go collect the data and do you recommend warehouse you recommended Excel you mentioned excel sheet and I guess it depends on how much much data you’re looking at. But yes, variance.

Christopher Penn 25:04
But the first step is is the strategy of the outcome like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And then yes, the data. And it again, as exactly as you said, it depends on your level of sophistication, what tools you have access to what capabilities, what skills knowledge you have, for some people, and some companies like, Oh, yeah, just dump it to a BigQuery table? And we’ll do you use BigQuery ml to do all the analysis, you know, what companies are deep in that ecosystem? For other companies, it may be got, like five spreadsheets here, you know, can we get them, you know, mush them into one and then feed that to Watson. So it will depend on your capabilities and what data you have access to.

Kerry Guard 25:42
Got it? And, and so I’m just trying to figure out like, if I was just saying, Where would I even start? And I and I think that I could get the Excel sheet done? No problem. I agree, it would take time. I’m assuming Watson has a template that they want you to, you know, what columns to follow, as most of these tools generally do? Or do you need to know that off? Do you need to know that?

Christopher Penn 26:08
Yeah, you need to know in advance what is you want to measure against? That’s called your response variable.

Kerry Guard 26:13
Okay. Okay. And so in this case, let’s assume leads. And so you have the response variable, so are you just, I’m sorry, getting in the weeds here. So feel fine, pull it back up. I’m just trying to think of like, what that first step, if people gonna come off this conduct, I wouldn’t do this. So like, they, let’s assume that they know their business relatively well, and they know what they should know what metric they need to be looking at in order to not get fired. And so what is sort of like, other than calling a vendor, which was probably going to be a step at some point, you know, what’s that first step they can, you know, get started with so when they do call that vendor, they are ready to go.

Christopher Penn 26:57
Um, I think some of the some of the needs some training to some some knowledge building on on, if you’re not going to be handing the whole thing over to a vendor saying, just deal with it, then you’re gonna need a knowledge base of your own as to what technologies what techniques, there’s a really fantastic whole online school totally free of cost from IBM called cognitive class, if you go to cognitive class.ai. You can take course after course, in a while that this, the data science work that you need the fundamentals to begin to understand this. And I think for people who want to grow these skills inside themselves, that’s a great place to start. It’s a it’s from a credible institution, B, it costs you $0 just takes your time. Because you want to have a sense to know the lay of the land, you want to be able to at least talk some of the shop talk, even if you’re working with a vendor just to understand what it is that vendor is doing. Or if or when you’re evaluating a software package like well, the software package even do what it is we expected to do. There is a tremendous amount of old called snake oil, because a lot of the products do eventually work. But there’s a tremendous amount of misinformation in the marketing technology space around data science and machine learning and stuff. And every vendor and their cousin slapping the AI label on all their products. And like, this is really the problem we’re trying to solve. need this particular solution, particularly since a lot of vendors, once they put the AI label on they added zero to the price tag. It comes down to do you have the knowledge to build asks the great questions needed to have the data of the method and of the partners you’re working with.

Kerry Guard 28:45
And so starting with gaining the knowledge is is definitely a great first step. And I would agree with when you’re vetting any vendor, you should know what they’re talking about. And if you don’t ask a lot of questions, really understand what it is they’re talking about, and make sure that they’re not sort of pulling one over on you.

Christopher Penn 29:04
Yeah. My secret. My secret tip is this. Talk to an engineer, but make the salesperson leave the room. Engineers are ruthlessly honest, like, No, we don’t do that. I’m a sales guy. No, I mean, yeah, we can we can do anything. If you pay us enough. Engineers, like you can’t that’s not even that’s not even a thing that’s not real. You know, you may have to buy them some beer, but

Kerry Guard 29:32
I love that go have a drink or coffee date with a developer on the end of the tool. That’s awesome. Okay, well, I think we have our marching orders in terms of getting started with understanding first you got to understand what data is you want to be looking at. And it comes down to what matters the most in terms of knowing that you’re driving the most sales and revenue for your company. And then you know, pulling the data together to go find out That answer and using the right tools to do so. So thank you so much, Chris, this has been incredibly insightful I have I want to go dig in and figure this out, and then come to you with way more questions.

Christopher Penn 30:14
Yep, I will leave you with one last tip on this stuff. A lot of us use marketing automation systems that have lead scores. And we then have things like closed deals, you know, the revenue of the deal. It is a fascinating exercise to compare using any of these tools, the revenue or the deal closing rate or things like that, with the lead scoring, see, is there a correlation there, because if your lead score has nothing to do with the outcome you care about your lead scoring is broken. So it’s what I didn’t say it’s a good research project to play with.

Kerry Guard 30:47
Definitely, yeah, I think it’s probably going to create a lot of questions. Once you have this level of data. It’s not even a level, I mean, it’s actually kind of high level data, in terms of being able to dig and route through all the existing data, you have to actually pull up to what’s important. And I think it is, it would cause you probably are going to shift your strategy pretty significantly, but I’m assuming, correct me if I’m wrong, Christopher. But I’m assuming that means you’re going to save a lot of money on the back end, because you’re actually doing what works, versus what you’re interpreting, without having to scrub all the data yourself.

Christopher Penn 31:25
Exactly. And that is the name of the game, we are about to enter a recession between two and five years long. And the focus for all marketers is going to be on return on investment, what is working, we have to double down on what’s working, got to ruthlessly cut what’s not working. And so if you want to, to make sure that you are the top value in your organization, you need to have done this analysis before the boss comes to ask for it.

Kerry Guard 31:50
Mm hmm. That’s such a good point that you had pasta shoes, look to the future. So interesting time we’re living in that’s for sure. Put it lightly, Chris correctly. Thank you so much. I will share your information out with with our listener so that they can follow up with you and continue to listen to your podcast as well and see what you got going on over there.

Christopher Penn 32:14
All right. Thank you for having me.

Kerry Guard 32:16
Thank you.

Kerry Guard 32:28
So that was my conversation with Christopher Spencer have, have we ever or even before I’m kg Have you ever used machine learning and AI to help clients identify opportunities and campaigns websites.

Kerry Guard 32:42
I haven’t used machine learning or AI. In terms of an analytics tool. We I know that we have used it for some Google Ads campaigns that use machine learning to automatically optimize ad creative audience targeting and bidding to drive more conversions. I think for some clients, it might work well where they have enough data to kind of make those recommendations and where all the tracking and everything is set up correctly to know that optimizations are the correct action to take

Kerry Guard 33:18
customers if you’re listening, and you have both of these things in place, you can measure your funnel end to end which we can certainly help you with if you need some help with that. And you have enough data Christopher’s your guy So reach out to Christopher Penn on LinkedIn. You can find his link in the show notes. You can also check out their website on Trust insights.ai for further information, and again, those links are in the show notes. Thank you for listening to the mkg podcast the podcast that helps marketers grow their businesses using the forums. The right means messaging media and measurement. Spencer, thank you for joining me.

Kerry Guard 33:55
Thank you.

Kerry Guard 33:56
I’m your host Carrie guard and until next time

2020 Rewind: Marketing and Machine Learning with Kerry Guard and the MKG Podcast

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