The Hyperventilating Marketer

We've not yet gotten to the skills necessary for being a Digital Marketing Analyst, and I have a feeling that many of you who have spent a large portion of your marketing careers honing your talents for salesmanship and selling big idea campaigns and product concepts, are starting to hyperventilated at how quickly technology is changing your job, and how your work measured.

Digital marketing tools are soooo faarrrr away from your specialization that you are wondering how you can make it from here to retirement without having to learn said skills. Or perhaps you'll accept only having to gain a vague command of what digital marketers and digital marketing tools do, so that you don't make a fool of yourself in the board room.  You might even understand enough to place requests with IT for interesting types of data that you've always wished you could know.  Maybe this sounds like you? I'm certain I've had a few bosses that were wired for this outlook.  

It is pretty scary to think about mastering coding, finance, marketing, and salesmanship, all just to remain relevant as a CMO.  Isn't that why we went into marketing, as opposed to computer science or finance, to begin with?  A little bit art, a little bit psychology, a little bit salesmanship, and little bit product innovation...  Marketing has been a sweet spot for 'people who understand people' in business for decades, and before they called it marketing, when businesses were just small mom and pops when the owner did it all, it was just called success as opposed to failure.  In the virtual world, we can't just observe our consumer in the store, interview them in a focus group, shmooze them behind the counter, or follow them around in their daily routines, watching how they interact with our product category, and our business, while asking them detailed follow up questions.  Or can we?

In the next section, we'll talk about Data Science-light, which focuses on a narrowing set of functions that mimic the traditional questions marketers wish to ask.  These skills may not make you the all-purpose marketing data unicorn who makes the big money, similar to data scientists, but the skills you'll get as a digital marketing analyst will certainly help you liaise with the data scientists in your company more effectively and with a greater understanding of what they can and can not do with all the new types of data that are being made available to companies today.

Let's  figure this out together, shall we?

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