Category: Data
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You Ask, I Answer: What is the Marketing Data Science Lifecycle?
Monina asks, “What steps make up a data science lifecycle? Where do you begin?” The short answer to this question is to define the problem and hypothesis, prepare your data, explore your data, test your hypothesis, build a model, validate the model, and then deploy and observe. Each stage is composed of multiple sub-steps. Watch…
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You Ask, I Answer: Data Science Tools for Marketers?
Monina asks, “What tools are useful to help marketers dig deep into their organization’s data?” The answer to this question depends on the level of skill a marketer has in data science, specifically the technical and statistical skillsets. I’d put the available tools in categories of beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Beginner tools help marketers extract…
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You Ask, I Answer: Analytics Uncovered By Data Science?
Monina asks, “What kind of analytics can data science uncover?” This is an interestingly worded question. Analytics are fundamentally about explaining what happened, the what in your data. Very often, as stakeholders we also want to know what’s relevant (data overload) and then why (insights). That’s where data science can help, especially with understanding what’s…
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Data With No Decisions PDF Sign
Here’s the sign from this week’s Almost Timely Newsletter, which you can download as a PDF and print out for your office. Click on the image or this link to download a 384 KB PDF file.
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You Ask, I Answer: Data Quality and AI?
Sampurnakumar asks, “What level of data quality do you need for AI to be successful? Does it require the best data and best data usage to solve problems?” One of the problems with AI, conceptually, is that it’s seen as this mysterious entity that we don’t fully understand. Any qualified AI practitioner should immediately debunk…
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You Ask, I Answer: ZIP Code Mapping for Sales Territories?
Maria asks, “I need to create a zip code territory map with each area represented by a different color (that I can pick). It will be exported as a graphic file. Are there any free/low cost options for this that are easy to use?” Download all the ZIP codes from the USPS/Data.gov and then code…
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You Ask, I Answer: Best Simple Data Visualization Tools?
Mike asks, “My former partner/creative director is looking for a layman-accessible tool for doing cool animations with simple data sets. (Think Hans Rosling.) Do you know any tools or people who can make information beautiful?” There are tons of tools out there that do data animations. I’d suggest looking at Google’s Data GIF Maker as…
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You Ask, I Answer: Visualizing Qualitative Data in Dashboards?
At my MPB2B talk this week, one of the attendees (I didn’t get their name) asked, “What are your suggestions for visualizing qualitative data in dashboards?” First, you can render some of it as-is; in text, for example, one of the most popular and least helpful visualizations is the word cloud. Second, all qualitative data…
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You Ask, I Answer: Balancing Privacy and Marketing Effectiveness?
Dennis and Kim ask, “Is it possible to be an ethical marketer and still use data to inform the ways we interact with our customers? Or are we crossing a line that puts us in opposition to our audience?” In short, yes, it’s possible. A few principles come to mind: – Be clear and honest…
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The Evolution of the Data-Driven Company
What does it mean to be a data-driven company? Companies generally aren’t created as data-driven, data-centric entities from the beginning; for most companies, it’s an evolution in their culture and strategy, a journey that can take years. To become data-driven, companies evolve through five stages: Data-resistant Data-curious Data-aware Data-savvy Data-driven Data-Resistant The mantra of the…