My Squared Experience

When I started off the Squared Online course six months ago, I never imagined how quickly it would go by. And how much my work life would change!

At the beginning of this course, I was working in an e-commerce company focusing on digital strategy. And my only objective was to hone my digital skills and focus on the details. However, as the course progressed, I became responsible for the entire marketing department and thus had to step out of the details and focus on the big picture and ROI of our overall marketing spends. And now I’m working in growth and marketing of a mobile finance app - what a journey it has been!

My expectations from the Squared Online course were to get a better grasp on the details of digital marketing. Turns out, my understanding of analytics and other details has been pretty good (at least for this course) and what I’m taking away is the importance of theory and the organizational tools. I now am familiar with the Business Model Canvas, how to make an kickass infographic and understand the 5 P’s of marketing. I also was exposed to some great examples of content and video marketing, and now really understand the value of a good concept before anything else.

As I move forward, I’ll be really looking forward to working on my mobile marketing skills, and specifically mobile analytics. While web analytics have really grown and evolved to the point of too much data, mobile analytics still seems to be far behind. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve heard “sorry we can’t do that” or “we’re not sure” in the past few weeks. Considering how big a part of our lives mobile apps have become, I can easily see this to be a differentiation point for marketeers in the future.

When I found out Module 4 was all about data, I did a little internal dance. After all, data is my favorite part about marketing and probably one of the reasons I decided to switch over from engineering to marketing.

When people ask why/how I switched from oil-and-gas to e-commerce, I always remark that there are many similarities between reservoir optimization and digital (paid) marketing. And now I have the perfect opportunity to explain. In O&G, your inputs are water and gas which react with a baseline (reservoir/geology) formula to give you the output of oil. In digital marketing, you have inputs of money with a baseline CPC and conversion rate formula that you optimize to maximize your conversions to sales/registration. And in both cases, if you have the right data and understand it, you can  get things to work out.

At the beginning of my digital career, it was all about never having enough data. And more often than not, when I walked into a company, I’d see that certain key metrics weren’t even being measured. For example, in e-commerce, we’d keep track of sales coming from paid channels, but we never had a separate tracker for assisted sales generated by the customer service team. If I added these sales to my books, I’d see my campaigns were even more effective. Of if I didn’t take into account canceled/return/fraud orders, I’d be getting a rosier picture than what my finance team was seeing. So I learnt my first lesson in data - ensure you have the FULL picture before you make any assumptions.

Now that you have all the data and log-ins to all the tools you need, you can get going with analysis and give game-changing recommendations, right? Wrong! What I probably spend the most time doing these days is data validation. More often than not, you’ll have multiple sources of data for any part of your business, for example e-commerce sales reflected in Google Analytics and what your CRM tool is reporting. If you’re dealing with a small volume, it can really skew your analysis. And if you wait until you have large volumes, understanding the source of your discrepancy can become very difficult. And then sometimes it’s all about understanding HOW you collect data. For example, what happens when a JavaScript doesn’t fire or when data is sampled instead of measured - can you really trust these data points? A good data-led marketeer needs to validate and understand the technology and logic between data collection.

And as I approach the mid-career phase, I’ve becomes familiar with the perils of too much data. If you told me 3 years ago that I’d complain about too much data, I’d never have believed you. When starting any new project, once I’ve gotten all the data I need and  validated its accuracy, I’ll have more data that I can manage. Since my day job requires me to work on strategy and execution and not just the analysis, I can’t spend my day sifting through the data. I need to get a quick sense of the pulse of the business and most importantly react and implement what the data recommends. Because without actually acting on what your data tells you, data is just pretty graphs.

One of the reasons I took the Squared Online course was to legitimize my title as a Digital Marketing Manager.  With my educational background as an engineer, I have no formal schooling in marketing or digital. Yet in my day-to-day job, I have managed digital budgets ranging from USD 10-200,000. So with Module 3 focusing on marketing strategies, I was excited to see how far my hands-on knowledge would be validated.

One of the key parts of this module for me was moving beyond the “4 Ps”. In my last job, there were countless meetings where we were pushed to think strategically using this concept. I could never get my head around it - it seemed to simplistic and archaic a framework to apply to the digital age. The biggest thing I couldn’t get beyond was the People part. How are you supposed to sell a product if you didn’t know who you were selling to? And that’s where the 7 Ps made more sense to me.

But this seemed to go into the other direction and was too complex. So if I had to choose one acronym to take forward, I think S.A.V.E. worked best for me:

Instead of Product, focus on Solution

Instead of Place, focus on Access

Instead of Price, focus on Value

Instead of Promotion, focus on Education

In Module 3, we worked on the marketing plan for a hair coloring product - Kleur Tonacity. If I just attempt to apply the S.A.V.E. strategy to search marketing for Kleur, I find it quite useful. For example:

Instead of Product, focus on Solution

Bid on keywords that refer to covering greys

Instead of Place, focus on Access

Instead of just geographically targeting, make search more effective by bidding on times of day busy working women would be concerned about this, i.e. before the weekend or late at night

Instead of Price, focus on Value

With search copy, focus on the cost and time savings of coloring your hair at home

Instead of Promotion, focus on Education

Again with search copy, talk about the ease of coloring your hair at home and avoiding professional-level fiascos

Module 2 of Squared Online focused on the business model and how to become successful. One buzzword that keeps coming up is DISRUPTION. But I’d like to look at this as a requirement to constantly evolve.

Think about it - there are many companies that were household names that we grew up with that are dying or no longer even exist. Think Kodak, Compaq, BlackBerry, and Nokia. Most of these brands were market leaders and were enjoying tremendous success. However, instead of evolving their core product, they stuck to their comfort zone for far too long. And suddenly it was too late.

I’ve worked in startups for three years now where the priority has been to take away market share from a very successful business. But one idea that I’ve recently come across that makes more sense is the Blue Ocean Strategy. Instead of the traditional Red Ocean Strategy, where you compete for customers over a product or service, with the Blue Ocean Strategy, you work with a traditional “competitor” and carve out a unique service for them and essentially create a new market. Think how eBay created a niche in the e-commerce market with the auction model that benefited both buyers and sellers. We currently have Nokia working to product phones with the Windows platform from Microsoft and at the same time working with Android for phones to access the emerging markets where Nokia has been popular for a long time.

Puts it in perspective of how much data is being generated! Also makes you realize what order of magnitude you need to aim for if you want to be a major player in digital.

I got promoted at the end of last year and never got around to updating all my social profiles. It's something I decided to put as my "New Year" to-do's, which made me realize how many things I had to update. Here is a quick list:

LinkedIn

Facebook

Email Signatures (across various devices)

Local Job Boards with LinkedIn-esque profiles

Quora

About.Me page

My Personal Blog

Business Cards

Company Outlook Database

And I'm sure there are a few I've forgotten.This made me ask, what's the ONE profile that is a must-update. I think for professional reasons it has to be LinkedIn. However in my case, I have a link to my About.Me page on my personal email so that's equally important.

So I ask you, what's your definitive online profile these days?

Kaleidoscope-print dresses for under $60, available worldwide.

I just placed my Net-a-Porter order for the Peter Pilotto for Target collection and realized how interesting of a collaboration this was. Both Target and Net-a-Porter are trying to build their e-commerce reach (Target more so considering recent issues of site stability and credit card security).

In this case, Target used Net-a-Porter's luxury and mostly international customers to take their product to a larger demographic than they would have normally been able to reach. Net-a-Porter on the other hand satisfies its customers by giving them a collection that would have normally been out of reach and further promotes brand loyalty.

Working in the (relatively) small e-commerce market in the Middle East, I'd happily bet that this type of collaboration would never happen here. Unfortunately businesses are too worried about competition and would  burn profits to acquire market share rather than forge tactical partnerships that are mutually beneficial.

On my other girlie blog, I run a column called #TuesdayTip - so I figured why not do the same and share some of the little tricks I've picked up while working in digital. So here goes!

As digital marketers, we get so wrapped up in analytics sometimes it can be overwhelming that you may miss the basic "health" checks. One of the things I like to do on a weekly basis is check landing page analysis in Google Analytics.

Visit Behavior > Site Content > Landing Page and select the data for the past week. If you're running any paid campaigns, you should have a good idea of where you're directing traffic. If anything sticks out (old landing pages, error pages), then take a look at that. The other thing worth checking are which pages have a higher than average exit rate or bounce rate. Sometimes just eyeballing these 5-10 pages on a weekly basis can help give ideas of what content to update or what campaigns to turn off.

This is probably the 7th blog I've created online but it is the first one with a specific purpose - starting the Squared Online course.

3 years ago, I had my early life crisis. I finally realized that engineering and Oil & Gas were boring me and it was time to take a risk. In an impulse move, I decided to jump into the untested waters of digital marketing and e-commerce.

3 years later, I'm still loving digital and the "one year experiment" has turned into a full-blown career. Squared Online is the first step officially committing to this career by starting to grow my qualifications in the field of digital.

In this course, I look forward to formalizing my on the job digital marketing skills, potential unlearning some bad digital habits I've picked up  and connecting with fellow Squares from varying backgrounds in learning new skills.