Imagine you are a company selling a fast-moving consumer good in the market.

Let’s assume that the customer would follow the given journey to make the final purchase:               These are the states at which the customer would be at any point in the purchase journey.

Now, how to find out in which state the customers would be after 6…

I am an advertising and marketing veteran who is currently transitioning towards data science. The purpose of this write-up is to give you some baseline understanding of marketing, grounded in my professional experience. I am hoping that my write-up will help you gain a bigger share of voice when working with advertising & marketing teams. Eventually, you might ask bigger questions and thus move beyond just optimizing their work.

I will expand this post into a…

                                                                                                  Source: www.mstecker.com/…

Around two decades ago, marketing existed as a soft function within organizations. There is no denying its importance, of course, but from an organizational perspective, it was a function hard to measure in terms of impact on the bottom-line. But then boomed the digital age, and with it, an advent of channels that came to be known as social media. And in its wake,…

Sales Forecasting: Science or Instinct?

Recently, we had talked about marketing automation, a digital transformation in the field that involved both artificial intelligence and machine learning. Even Natural Language Processing (NLP) has come a long way, enough to change the content marketing game. But while marketing has shifted to a digital…

Technology is known to shift landscapes, even change the game. We saw that when the internet exploded in scale and popularity, as computers became smarter, and the world goes through the digital transformation. An easy example is in traditional marketing, which now borders on the irrelevant, unable to hold a candle to its more modern counterparts.

Email, search…

Introduction

“Limited-Service Restaurants” (LSRs) is how the restaurant industry refers collectively to fast food and fast-casual dining establishments.  Marketers who specialize in LSRs often employ marketing research to evaluate hypotheses about their brands or to detect segments within their markets.  An important additional purpose of market research is to understand the total structure of a market, to find out what guests consider important…

A thought provoking series that gives my account of becoming a marketing data scientist hybrid during one of the most chaotic times in the marketing industry, the Big Data boom. In the series, I discuss my enlightenment, highlight challenges to the modern marketer and those who have developed several skills classically associated with Data Scientists; conclude with recommendations for my peers and the marketing industry. The overlap of responsibilities and required skills among Data Analyst,…

Return on Investment (ROI) is defined as the ratio of a return (benefit or net profit) over the investment of resources that generated this return. Both the return and the investment are typically expressed in monetary units, whereas the ROI is calculated as a percentage.

ROI formula:     (Return – Investment)/Investment

It’s typically expressed as a percentage, so multiply your results by 100.…

With marketing and advertising gaining more space on the internet, big data analytics are playing a prominent role in following the trends on the market and providing users with key statistics.

Data analysis and statistics traditionally play an important role in analyzing the success of companies and brands in the market.

The growth of internet…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve written on a broad range of topics pertaining to the customer journey. While we went wide and deep, the main takeaway was this: to properly measure the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives, brands must view all of their data (pulled from all of their touch points) concurrently and through the same lens. This got me to thinking about heuristics, and how my assumptions were framed by the teeny tiny amount of information available to me.

But let me…

An image is a concept. It is a mental picture that we have about things such as an object, a person, a group, an organization, or a nation. It is our notion or belief about something that is not physically present around us.

The image of any entity, be it a product or a person or a company, is its intangible asset. For example, the reliability (hence the high resale value) of a used car stems from its positive image as a dependable…

Have you ever wondered how to segment your customers? Customer segmentation is a really useful technique to group similar customers together and understand what works for that. You can then tailor your offering and marketing messages to the specific segments. If you do it right, you should be able to see a healthy increase in sales. After all, companies like Amazon target their customers on an individual level so you should at least be targeting them on a segment level.…

Marketing analytics software includes various technologies and processes which enable an organization to evaluate and quantify its marketing efforts. Marketing analytics software offers tools to manage, measure, control and analyze marketing performance. With the use of marketing analytics software, organizations are able to improve the effectiveness and optimize the return on investment (ROI) of marketing activities. Marketing analytics software enables organizations to gain…

Big data is a term that has attracted the attention of nearly every chief manager in current digital arena as it offers them a treasure trove of prospective leads. A massive amount of data is available through websites, CRM solutions, social networks, analytics and news feeds. But this data is present in structured, semi-structured and unstructured form, therefore requires deployment of sophisticated tools to make…

4 Types of Data Essential to Data-Driven Marketers

Last year, “Big Data” was THE buzz word. And while Big Data is still buzzing about, marketers today are using the term more frequently as part of their everyday conversations, at least to some extent. It is clear that “Big Data” is no longer just a snazzy new word to use when marketers talk “shop,” but rather a concept that has proven its worth.

However, before running head-first into the…

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half."

John Wanamaker, a department store merchant and marketing pioneer in the late 19^th and early 20^th century (as well as Postmaster General from 1889 to 1893), is reputed to have made this statement and advertisers have been wrestling with the question ever since.

Enter the science of marketing measurement.  In the early days the questions revolved around the…

    The internet, as part of the digital age, has forever changed the way we interact with the world. It has modified our perspective of everything that surround us. Now we have the ability to have immediate access to information, and as a result, we…

Data is everywhere and growing. As a marketer, this is a dream world. Your audience is generating tons of data from your web visits, mobile apps and you have partners giving you data. This is rich customer journey data.

However commonly used terms like Big Data and Analytics can mask the complexity of realizing your ROI gained from analyzing all this data. The promise of the visual tools and Hadoop based platforms is all great but if you don't have a data strategy in place all the…