"illiterate"

Brett Jones, who is a former GBC post-grad graduate and User Acquisition Manager at Game Hive, was our online webinar guest this week. It was a great opportunity for us to get insights about the mobile apps market especially game apps and user acquisition. 

Learning so many details and statistics about the mobile app market was really informative for me since I have no prior information about the industry. Do you know that;

87% of the time on devices is spent in App

65% of the millennials prefer to make a purchase in-app

5M+ apps in the ecosystem whereas 20% have 0 installs

New Apps: 4000/day on Android and 1000/day IOS

Market Share: 70% Google Play, 30% IOS App Store

The transition from premium to freemium (2008 25% free, 2018 88% free)25% of the apps are games

Monetization is how you make money

I knew the term monetization regarding how people make money from their youtube channels. In order to have ads to be shown on your channel, your channel should be monetized by youtube and it has certain requirements. Likewise, in order to make money from the app, especially with the freemium version, app developers have to monetize their apps. There are various ways of monetizing a channel.         

In-app advertising Subscribing premium to have better features Having gated features to make users pay for these features. Mostly with the gaming apps.

Marketers’ Takeaway

This week we had the opportunity to hear from Lucy Baumgartner, group director at Omnicom; Jasbeen Chunara, senior analyst at OMD, and Kristen Keays, senior brand manager at Rogers.

Since Jasbeen was a former George Brown graduate, she talked about her procedure how she landed her job which really helpful for us to visualize the process. She gave detailed information about the job search stage, how we should make the job research, why it is important to make a Google search about the company, how to connect with the hiring manager from various social media platforms to make it easier to get the job.

Lucy talked about her career and how she got into Omnicom. She said that she started working at Omnicom 8years ago in London. She worked in different clients and departments in Omnicom and she was transferred to Toronto office a short time ago. 

Kristen was the group director of media buying at Rogers and she talked about how they develop strategies and execute different campaigns at Rogers. She gave a lot of insights about the process and mentioned about the trial-error side of the campaigns and how they optimize the campaigns and end the campaigns if necessary.

You don’t need to know any tools!

One of the most important takeaway for me was the answer given to the question of one of our friends. She asked if they would suggest any tools which would differentiate us from the current competition in the digital marketing industry. I was very curious about the answer because there were tons of tools that were suggested to be used in digital marketing and the advice of these seniors would really help us to make a difference in the “job hunt.” I was shocked about the answer because none of the panelists suggested any tools but highlighted the importance of “having a desire to learn.” In other words, being adaptive to the ever-changing work environment of digital marketing and being curious about the new technologies. All three panelists confirmed that they didn’t know anything about the tools they were going to use when they landed their jobs and they emphasized that they learned everything at the workplace. 

Although this may be considered as a soft skill and difficult to demonstrate on the resume, it really helped me to be more optimistic about my current job search period. I sometimes feel a little bit nervous due to lack of experience but as far as I see, nobody born “marketer.” Everyone just worked continuously to become a better version of themselves. I didn’t give up completing my Google and Facebook Certificates since they are very important for the digital marketing field but it really gave me an important life lesson.  

Do you know how much time do people spend on their smartphones? According to emarketer.com average US adult spends almost 3 hours per day on their smartphones. Three hours per day does not look so much, where I spend more than average according to the data on my screen time statistics. Why do I spend so much time, is it due to the number of Apps I have on my phone? 

How Many Apps Are "Too Many?"

I have never counted the number of apps on my phone so far. It took a little bit time for me to counted them all and I was shocked! I have 178 apps installed on my phone! Is it too many? How many apps are too many for an average person? According to an article in buildfire.com, there are between 60 and 90 apps installed on the average smartphone. OMG! I am over the average, again! While I was counting the Apps, I realized that I have so many apps that are not used for months. Even more, there are apps that I haven’t logged in and launched or I don’t know why I downloaded it. Obviously I am not using most of the apps I have on my phone, but which ones are my favorite?

My Top Five Apps

When I swipe down my iPhone, Siri gives me suggestions which are the ones I use most often. Here is my top five;

Amazon Seller App is my most favorite App since I am an Amazon Seller. I just like to check out how my sales are doing through out the day.

Shopify App is my second most favorite app. Being an entrepreneur, I have two Shopify stores where I learn and implement the strategies and tactics about selling products using Facebook and Instagram Ads. I have been implementing SEO tactics lately and trying to boost my organic ranking.

Instagram is always my favorite since I am sharing content for my brands regularly and follow the trends and my competitors on social media. 

Google is all about the micro-moments. If I want to know, want to go, want to do, want to buy, it is always there for me.

Zip Recruiter Job Search App started to get on to the top, due to the coop and internship search period. I am applying for jobs oppotunuties on Zip Recruiter in addition to the ones on GBC Field Education listings. 

It is all about Micro-Moments

I believe that the reason why people can’t leave their phones away or even why they feel naked without their mobile phones is about the micro-moments they live. It became so spontaneous that we just “Google it.” Everyone knows that  Google is blocked in China, but they have Baidu.com instead. Chinese people also have their micro moments and they use the same expression “Baidu it!” It proves me that it is not only about Google, but it is about the Micro-Moments that people live all day, every day. People are always looking for micro moments and the omni channel experience. It gives them freedom, flexibility, and ease to reach whatever they need and whenever they want.

Is my mobile “friendly?”

Since all the apps are developed for the mobile experience, they generally have friction-free experience with the users according to my experience. The only app that I want to use but I don’t like to use on my phone is the Facebook Ads App. It gives a general overview of my campaigns, my spending, and purchases but it does not update as it updates on desktop. It may be due to some technical glitch or they may do it intentionally. It was worse before but now it is getting better. Although it is a complicated task to sync with the ads, I believe it is going to be completely mobile friendly soon. 

Marketer’s Takeaway

This week we had the opportunity to meet with Mark Neves,  and Lawrence Sit. Mark is director for Central at NABS. NABS is a unique charity specifically designed to support the health and well-being of all individuals in the media, marketing, and communications industry in Canada. They provide career development workshops and subject-matter experts to help marketers in any way they need. Lawrence director of social media at CCS Creative, a food service marketing company that does work in print, web, digital, phography and social media. 

To be honest, I like to work with the ads and analytics part of digital media marketing. Content and social media is a little bit difficult for me. It may be due to my engineering background, I always like the numbers and formulas. On the other hand, social media and content is very important for brands. In order to have a healthy engagement with the customers/audience, brands should have health social presence. The content calender, developing strategies according to the brands objectives, creating and pushing the posts if necessary etc. One of the most important things Lawrence highlighted was the importance of organic growth. He added that, in order to have organic growth, brands should focus on the engagement not vanity numbers. 

He walk us through Facebook ads manager which was really interesting for me. The reason is that, so far I run Facebook ads for e-commerce and conversions that’s why I was running ads for purchase objectives.  Since he was running ads for restaurants, he was looking for “buds & seats” for restaurants not online purchases. Although I couldn’t attend the live session with the speakers previous week, the recording was really informative and useful for me. 

This is not a mathematics class. This is not an equation at all. What are these numbers for? They are representing something which is an important mindset to be understood and to be implemented into the lives of every entrepreneur. Hamza Khan who is a multi-award winning marketer & entrepreneur. He had several start-up companies like Splash Effect, a boutique marketing & creative agency, as well as SkillsCamp, a soft skills training company and Student Life Network, Canada’s most comprehensive resource hub dedicated to helping and empowering millions of students across the country. His life is full of stories and the story he shared taught me lifesaving principles to be used for the rest of my life. “1X4X4”  represents “1 Question”, “4 Principles” and “4 Steps” which makes it easier to memorize and learn. He starts with one question “What is next?” This question is the question also changed the entire trajectory of his life and helped others to make changes about their lifestyle. This is the question to be asked at every step of our life. Unfortunately, most of the time, we don’t give ourselves to take a break and think about “what is next?” If we start thinking about the next thing, it becomes easier to plan it and accomplish our goals.  Here comes the next part, while planning about the “next thing” we had better put some international principles to guide our purpose.  These common principles are;1.    What you love;2.    What you are good at;3.    What you can be paid for;4.    What the world needs.If your purpose has one of these principles, it is nice, but it is better to be able to have all these 4 principles in your goals. The target, the job, the business you love, you are good at, paid for and the world needs. It is the sweet spot where your dreams meet international principles. Then we have 4 Steps of our iterative the process to make it better.1.    Ideate: self-discovery;2.    Prototype: experiment and evaluate solutions;3.    Build: execute a solution;4.    Analyze: learn and evolve through the entire process and be open to feedback.This is a continues process to be done. It is a long journey to start. We cannot pick the correct thing at the beginning but we have to pick something, start doing it and then we should try to make it better. To sum up, we should not be overwhelmed by the question of “what is next” We probably may not do everything right at the beginning. But the important thing is we should start doing and we should continuously move forward and use the principles and steps to grow ourselves or our businesses. We cannot always make a “right decision” but we can “make a decision” and then make it right! I want to finish this with the quote Hamza shared from Robert Greene “THIS VENTURE HAS TO SUCCEED AND SO IT WILL.”

This week we had an online meeting with Shereen who is a Senior Strategist at McCann Worldgroup & Strategy. She is specialized in content creation and personal branding. I was more curious about her side career as being a YouTube Creator. She is a dancer and has a YouTube Channel about dancing which has interesting content and has 100K+  followers. I was interested in the YouTube creation part of her career and would like to learn about the difficulties of being a youtube creator and how she overcomes these issues. 

While I was listening to what she was doing and how she was managing her tasks, I realized that she was like a “superwoman”. It is really very difficult to be able to do her-kind of multitasking and being able to be successful! According to my understanding, number one reason of her success is her passion, her biggest advantage is knowing the digital space and being able to manage so many tasks with the help of technology. To be honest, working in a corporate job and doing entrepreneurial things like running a youtube channel and growing my personal brand was my ultimate goal, so I learned a lot from her. One of the most important points I got from her presentation was her way of segmenting social media channels. She categorized the channels according to how they help her personal brand’s growth and gave me a clearer understanding of the functionalities of different platforms. She also said that determining different strategies for different platforms is important for the brands’ audience and this is how brands should determine how their audience would like to engage with them. Being an “Instagram person” I didn’t like/want to be on each and every platform and produce different content for these platforms. On the other hand, I realized that every platform has its own characteristics and should have different kind of content for different kind of users on these platforms. 

What action I want to take based on my learning from this meeting is I am going to take action and start my youtube channel. I know that it needs time and work to make it perfect, but I cannot be perfect unless I start doing it. That's why I am gonna start creating my channel and hopefully it is going to be better and better while I work/learn consistently. 

We had an Alumni Panel this week where welcomed Natasha Burtenshaw and Jennifer Nugent. Since they were GBC graduates, their experience was really very helpful for me. As  they know the assignments, courses, professors and the environment, I feel like they were the future of ourselves which made me feel very close to them. Moreover, they transferred their knowledge about their employment process very practically which was also really helpful. Due to the reason that, I was interested in SEO and analytics part of Digital Marketing, I had questions ready for Natasha like; how to improve myself for the industry and how to close the gap about not having enough experience, what tools should I focus, etc. 

After I learned about the background of Natasha, I was really impressed. Although she was doing the most tech-savvy side of digital marketing, she doesn’t have an engineering or technical background. She had a personal interest about web design and coding, which I think helped her to be employed but it was a drastic change for her to shift her career from Child and Youth Program staff at YMCA to an SEO expert at a digital marketing agency. This change really encouraged me about my career opportunities. I should work more to improve myself but I am sure that my postgrad at GBC was a good decision to network and be employed in the industry. 

What action I want to take based on my learning from this meeting is I have to prepare a portfolio to show off my work. So far, I developed some e-com websites and tried to develop my online brands. They were not perfect but with a few tweaks, they would demonstrate my skills and really help me to be employed in a good agency. Moreover, I should finish the Google Ads and Analytics courses and have my certificates ASAP. I believe these steps are going to help me to accomplish my goals faster.