Big data is one of the biggest buzzwords in the recent years. Due to huge publicity by Mckinsey Company, IBM and many others, the topic had generated a lot of interest among marketers. However, not many people know how to implement big data successfully and even fewer gained competitive advantage working with big data.
A/B and multivariate testing has finally come of age is now considered a mainstream digital marketing and website management practice. However, though testing has been implemented by many organizations, few organizations has embarked on the personalization aspects of website optimization. Most of them mistake personalization for user-customization and hence did not make full use of the power of personalization.
Lets travel back in time to World War II. You are an analyst and you discovered that your aircrafts has low survival rate. Only 10% of the aircrafts made it back from missions. You examined the aircrafts and discovered that the enemy has good marksmen and all the shots landed in the cockpit. 90% of the bullet holes are on the left cockpit. 10% are on the right cockpit. You can only armor plate one side of the aircraft due to weight constrain. Which side would you armor plate?
The complexity of search engine marketing (SEM) cannot be overstated and yet a majority of search marketers avoided complex problems by over-simplifying the problems. Usually, marketers depend on their media agencies to optimize their search budgets and set KPIs for their agencies. Unfortunately, these KPIs are not useful in optimizing the budget and can even work against them.
The age-old adage “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched” certainly had not taken into account the advances in mathematics and predictive analytics. Savvy marketers today not only need to be able to count their chickens before hatching (forecasting), but even more savvy marketers can influence the number of chickens that are hatched by clever intervention. Welcome to the world of predictive analytics.
In the Chinese military classic “The Art of War”, a lot of emphasis was given to differentiate tactics to strategy. “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” The strategy is therefore the winning formula and tactics are merely outward manifestations of the strategy. In our world of analytics, strategy is “Information strategy” set by the management and tactics are “Operational decisions” made by middle managers.