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Newspapers to lose £50m in online ads as firms use coronavirus ‘blacklist’

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Publishers struggle to make advertising revenue despite record digital readership

UK newspapers face losing £50m in digital revenues as advertisers use “blacklist” technology to block ads from appearing next to all stories that mention the coronavirus pandemic.

When advertisers run digital campaigns they use keyword blacklists – stocked with trigger words such as “attack” and “death” – that automatically stop ads running in potentially problematic stories that feature them. Publishers say that words related to the pandemic – such as coronavirus and Covid-19 – are appearing on blacklists across the industry.

This has meant that while national and regional newspaper publishers are gaining record numbers of digital readers seeking to keep up to date about the pandemic, publishers are struggling to make ad revenue from their interest.

Advertisers’ blacklist technology is also indiscriminate meaning that even positive or innocuous pieces such as those on the Joe Wicks YouTube PE phenomenon, family activities for the housebound, or articles recommending TV shows, films and books to read in isolation are also shorn of adverts.

“While we have seen a huge surge in demand from readers for trusted, accurate reporting, advertising ‘blacklists’ are preventing adverts from appearing alongside online stories with the word coronavirus in them,” said Tracy De Groose, executive chair of Newsworks, the campaigning body for the UK newspaper industry.

“If the pandemic lasts for another three months the total loss across our news brands is expected to be £50m, threatening our ability to fund the quality journalism that is vital to ensure that the UK public is accurately informed during the crisis.”

The UK’s national and regional newspaper publishers have put their rivalries to one side and published an open letter calling on advertisers to rethink the addition of coronavirus-related words to blacklists.

In the industry letter scheduled to be published on Wednesday, De Groose says: “We understand many marketing budgets are under real pressure now. All we ask is that when you launch your next campaign you check you’re not unknowingly blocking trusted news brands from your plans.”

Publishers also feel they are not being treated fairly as other platforms flooded with coronavirus content, such as social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are not treated in the same way by advertisers.

“The same advertisers [blocking ads on newspaper sites] are running campaigns on radio and social media, where all the chat is about the virus, which is inconsistent, to say the least,” says Nick Hewat, commercial director at Guardian News & Media, publisher of the Guardian and the Observer.

“Publishers are the only ones who are punished, in an advertising sense, for reporting and distributing the news that society desperately needs. The system needs an overhaul, the technology needs improving.”

Since you’re here…

… we’re asking readers like you to make a contribution in support of our open, independent journalism. In these frightening and uncertain times, the expertise, scientific knowledge and careful judgment in our reporting has never been so vital. No matter how unpredictable the future feels, we will remain with you, delivering high quality news so we can all make critical decisions about our lives, health and security. Together we can find a way through this.

We believe every one of us deserves equal access to accurate news and calm explanation. So, unlike many others, we made a different choice: to keep Guardian journalism open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay. This would not be possible without the generosity of readers, who now support our work from 180 countries around the world.

We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.

Your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.

We need your support so we can keep delivering quality journalism that’s open and independent. And that is here for the long term. Every reader contribution, however big or small, is so valuable. Support the Guardian from as little as €1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you. Support The Guardian

Feature Image Credit: Newspapers have gained record readership online but that isn’t translating into revenue. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP

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Sourced from The Guardian

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3 key ways to reduce news product friction

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By Twipe

Coming off recent industry discussions on the importance of product thinking, this week we are exploring three key ways publishers can reduce news product friction in their digital strategies.

Registration walls increase conversion

More and more publishers are adopting registration walls to help solve some of the new problems of today, including legal obligations, de-anonymizing users, and improved user experiences. We heard recently from Peter Doucette of FTI Consulting that he believes that registration walls are a matter of when, not if, for most publishers.

Today more and more legislation requires explicit user permissions, such as GDPR in the EU or CCPA in California. Many publishers have decided to abide by these rules through a variety of pop-ups asking for permissions, however this can impact the reading experience. Combine those pop-ups with the ever common newsletter signup pop-up (like the one you probably just closed), browser notification requests, and intrusive ads and it can take more than your readers are willing to tolerate before they actually are able to consume any content. By requiring users to log-in to access content, these pop-ups can be avoided since the user permissions will already be saved every time, no matter if they access from a new browser or device.

Furthermore, registration walls are a great tool for de-anonymising users. With the future looking like a third-party cookie-less world, this ability to gather data directly from users will be increasingly important, as will the ability to build a first-hand relationship with audiences. Of course, it also improves the publisher’s ability to market subscription offerings as well.

Finally, registration walls can help to ultimately reduce subscription friction down the line. It’s true that requiring users to give their email address to access content does provide a layer of friction, however it is a necessary layer that can increase conversions. To make the benefit of logging-in even more clear, some publishers today are offering features only to logged-in users such as commenting, saving articles, or a personalised feed. Ultimately it helps to reduce the friction at the moment of conversion since the reader does not have to create a new account or give their email address again when they decide to actually subscribe. This also ties into the importance of ‘incremental commitment’: it is psychologically easier to give a credit card number if you have already given an email address a while ago.

Clarity in language matters

The news media industry is interesting because almost everyone has personal experience of consuming news, which leads to them having an opinion on the industry. However there seems to be a bit of opaqueness surrounding the industry. Most readers don’t actually understand the realities of the news industry today. That is why it is key for newspapers to take the time to make sure they are communicating openly and clearly to their audiences. For example, the average layperson might not realise the newspaper industry is in a critical moment of change. When conducting reader interviews last year, we were surprised at how many said they didn’t understand why they were being asked to pay for a subscription when they were already “paying” through the advertising (even if they acknowledged they had an ad-blocker!).

This lesson can be applied to converting paid subscribers, something The Wall Street Journal did when they experimented with the language in their subscription offering ads. They found that they were often taking for granted certain benefits, so did not promote them when showing subscription offerings. For example, we’ve heard before about a feared “subscription fatigue”, and we know that signing up for a new subscription can be a bit anxiety-inducing. The Wall Street Journal was able to increase subscriptions 10% by simply highlighting the ease at which subscribers could cancel (which had no impact on the average tenure of subscribers).

We also have to be conscious of the terms we use to describe our readers. While membership programmes seem to be making a splash in Europe, with the success of The Guardian being a key standout, this term does not always translate in the United States. Mark Campbell, Chief Marketing Officer of Tribune Publishing, shared recently that their research shows American subscribers have viscerally negative reactions to being called ‘members’. This was backed up by Yasmin Namini, former Chief Consumer Officer at The New York Times, who explained that their subscribers thought if they were ‘members’ it meant they had to also agree with the editorial or opinion articles in the newspaper. It would be interesting to see if this is a cultural difference between the American and European news markets, or if it holds true in other regions as well. Still, this does not mean that American publishers cannot learn from successful European membership programmes, they just might need to avoid using the membership term explicitly.

At INMA’s third Subscription Summit last month, Yasmin Namini had further advice for publishers who are starting to explore a new paywall strategy. She believes that dynamic paywalls can be difficult to explain to readers, while hybrid models can be better explained. Having premium articles that are locked for subscribers only, with the rest being metered, makes it more clear to readers what value they would get from subscribing. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that news organisations need to be transparent, not only with their coverage but also about their business models. With a dynamic paywall, how is a reader supposed to understand why they cannot access a story that their friend is able to access? During these discussions at the Summit, there seemed to be a divide between American and European publishers: American publishers had no qualms about dynamic price offers, with Newsday even adapting the billing cycle for each new subscriber to best optimise for retention. However European publishers were more uneasy about this set-up, preferring to have very clearly defined subscription offerings.

Make it easier to cancel, but not too easy

No matter how frictionless we make the subscriber experience, there will always be some subscribers who want to cancel. Recently at the INMA Subscription Summit, the question of just how easy, or hard, we should make it for subscribers to cancel came up. While the majority of attendees said we should make it easy for subscribers to cancel, this tune changed when asked if they actually had made it easier.

It is clear that the harder it is to cancel, the longer a subscriber will stay before being able to cancel. But what does this mean for the long term? If we are moving toward a reader-focus, we need to be looking at the long game and be optimsizing for reader relationships, not short term monetary gains. Plus there are signals that this reader-focus can also have a positive business impact: recently on the INMA Study Tour, Kate Piselli (Product Director of Subscription Growth) shared that The New York Times found the easier they made it to cancel, the more likely those churned subscribers were to re-subscribe later on.

Furthermore, as the industry has made it harder to cancel, regulators have started to move in and take away this choice from us. For example, in California it is now against the law to not allow someone to cancel their subscriptions the same way they originally subscribed. So if you want to offer digital subscriptions directly on your website, you have to allow them to cancel on the website as well (no more requiring a phone call during limited hours).

Still that doesn’t mean we should make it so easy to unsubscribe that people who didn’t mean to cancel end up churning. Patrick Appel, Director of Research at Piano, found that 35.3% of cancellations are passive, meaning the payment method on file didn’t work when it came time to renew. Simply retrying the credit card on file can save a third of payment failure-related cancellations.

Brain snacks for those who read until the end

  • The Wall Street Journal found that using link texting for app downloads led to 450% increase in app downloads.
  • New threat on the horizon: It is not just publishers working to reduce friction. A new Chrome extension was just released to make it easier to share passwords for online subscriptions to services such as Spotify and Netflix. Publishers will undoubtedly need to keep an eye on ‘DoNotPay‘.
  • The New York Times found that allowing users to login via clicking a link in an email (“magic linking”) had a 2% lift in successful logins.

Mary-Katharine Phillips
Media innovation analyst @ Twipe

By Twipe

Twipe is a SaaS platform for edition distribution, creation, and analytics, used by leading newspapers across Europe. It is an innovation leader helping publishers like The Times, Le Monde and DuMont in the area of digital edition publishing. Every month more than 8 million digital editions are downloaded from its platform.

Sourced from WNIP What’s New in Publishing

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WhatsApp group chats can be found on Google and could be less private than people realise

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By Andrew Griffin.

WhatsApp group chats can be easily found through Google and may not be as private as the people in them might think, it has emerged.

Chats could be found on the search engine and then joined, without people necessarily knowing they were part of a chat that was publicly accessible and could be easily found through Google.

Once someone is in a WhatsApp chat – even if they have found a link through a search engine, and haven’t been explicitly invited – they can see all the messages shared in a group and all the numbers of those people who are in it.

WhatsApp says the feature is working as intended, and is not a bug. But it has led to warnings that people should be careful about what is being shared in ostensibly private groups, since they could be seen by people they don’t know.

The issue has arisen because WhatsApp offers the ability to create an invite link for WhatsApp chats, in the hope of making it easier for people to join conversations. If someone in a group wants to add another user, they only need to share that link, and the person clicking on it will join the conversation.

But if that link is then posted on a publicly accessible website, it will be spotted by Google, and added to its index. Once that happens, people can find the link through Google.

If they click that link, they will then be able to join the group, without needing permission from anyone inside it.

That means that a conversation may appear private, but could actually be discovered and seen by anyone looking for it on Google.

In a statement, WhatsApp said that the feature was working as expected – and that users could avoid the problems by avoiding posting links.

“Like all content that is shared in searchable, public channels, invite links that are posted publicly on the internet can be found by other WhatsApp users,” a spokesperson said. “Links that users wish to share privately with people they know and trust should not be posted on a publicly accessible website.”

When a WhatsApp user creates a group link, the app shows a message indicating that the link should only be shared with people they trust. They are also notified that once the link is created, it can be used by anyone to join the group.

WhatsApp also sends a notification to all users in a chat when someone new joins.

Feature Image Credit: File photo of the WhatsApp app icon on a smartphone ( Nick Ansell/PA Wire )

By Andrew Griffin

Sourced from Independent

 

 

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AI tools developed to predict COVID-19 case severity: research

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Sourced from Global Times.

An artificial intelligence (AI) model which can predict whether a COVID-19 patient will experience a severe illness has been jointly developed by researchers from China and the US. The research was based on 53 patients from China and its findings were 70 to 80 percent accurate.

“The predictive model learns from historical data to help predict who will develop acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a severe outcome of COVID-19,” read a research article by Jiang Xiangao, Megan Coffee and others published in Computers, Materials & Continua Magazine on Tuesday.

Among all clinical symptoms, “a mildly elevated alanine aminotransferase (ALT) (a liver enzyme), the presence of myalgias (body aches), and elevated hemoglobin (red blood cells), in this order, are the clinical features, on presentation, that are the most predictive,” read the article.

Meanwhile, key diagnosis characteristics including fever, lymphopenia and chest imaging were not as predictive of severity, it said.

The coronavirus pandemic has spread rapidly across the world in recent days, with a total of 857,957 confirmed infections and 42,139 deaths as of 8:58 am (US time), per data from the Johns Hopkins University. The US topped the list with 188,547 confirmed cases.

Given the rapid spread and increasing caseloads, there is an urgent need to develop clinical skills to rapidly identify which mild cases could progress to critical illnesses, according to the research.

Based on 53 patients from two hospitals in Wenzhou, East China’s Zhejiang Province, the research intended to establish an AI framework with predictive analytics (PA) capabilities applied to real patient data, to provide rapid clinical decision-making support.

AI technology has been widely used during the period of virus prevention and treatment in China, including the use of thermo detectors and disinfection robots.

Though the research did not use a large data base, the article noted that overall accuracy among the included cases was 70 to 80 percent.

Feature Image Credit: A researcher works at a laboratory of the disease prevention and control center in Nanyang, central China’s Henan Province, (Xinhua/Hao Yuan)

Sourced from Global Times

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7 Strategies for Marketing Yourself

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By DP Taylor

A lot of us find it tough to put ourselves out there. We naturally default to being self-deprecating or deflecting the attention to someone else when we’re praised for our expertise in an area.

But when you’re marketing yourself, it’s not time to be shy. You need to sing your own praises from the rooftops, with a careful strategy in place, of course.

Whether you’re talking about marketing or advertising, building yourself up is all about brand positioning. You’ve got to show your customer base that you’re the first person they should go to with a problem in your market.

The question of how to market yourself online, and offline, is a tricky one. It’s hard to get it right, and it takes a lot of legwork on your part.

But if you put in the necessary effort to do it by implementing a few tried-and-true strategies, you’ll stand out from the pack, and that makes all the difference in the world of marketing.

7 best strategies for marketing yourself

  • Choose a niche
  • Become an expert
  • Educate
  • Build a social media following
  • Be inclusive
  • Look for speaking opportunities
  • Get to know people

Things to consider while creating a marketing plan for yourself

There’s a big difference between marketing yourself and marketing a business. You can always get rid of one business and start a new one with a totally new name and identity, but you will always have your face, your personality, and your reputation.

As a result, you have to be very thoughtful with how you go about marketing yourself. There are two extremely important things to keep in mind if you want to maximize yourself in building yourself up as a brand:

You’ve got to know your stuff

In order to be successful in marketing yourself, you absolutely have to know what you are talking about.

If you’re not an expert in your field, you have no hope of selling whatever product or service you have on offer to a client. You don’t have to know everything about a subject — almost no one does — but you should have a firm grasp on one aspect of, say, IT security.

For example, if you can help any small business come up with a simple solution to protect their IT infrastructure, that’s worthwhile expertise to have.

You’ve got to be willing to put yourself out there

If you’re shy, you better get over it, because you can’t market yourself if you aren’t willing to put yourself out there.

Fortunately, if you feel like you are an expert in your chosen field, that should help give you the confidence you need.

It won’t be enough to sit behind a computer and try to get people to buy into you as a brand; potential customers have got to see you out there being your company’s evangelist-in-chief.

7 best ways to market yourself

There are an endless number of ways to market yourself, but the seven we’ve chosen below cover the gamut of the kind of basics you need to be focusing on in order to build a multi-layered and effective marketing campaign to promote your brand.

1. Choose a niche

The first step in self-marketing is identifying who you are. For example, if you do IT security for a living, your niche cannot be IT security. That is way too broad and there are too many people who do it. You’ll immediately get lost in the shuffle.

Instead, you could be someone who provides low-cost IT security to sole proprietor businesses who are total novices when it comes to the world of cyber.

When you choose a niche that is appropriately narrow like this, ideas immediately spring to mind on who you need to be marketing to and what your messaging needs to be. If it’s just “IT security,” you’d have a hard time figuring out where to even begin marketing yourself.

Identifying your niche is tricky, but there are a few simple steps you can take now to get the ball rolling:

  • Research your market to identify underserved areas
  • Create a few customer profiles describing the types of clients you will go for
  • Ask yourself if the market you’ve chosen is niche enough or if you should get even more specific
  • Ask if you may be going too niche, and focusing on a market so small that there aren’t enough customers to provide the revenue you need

Example of doing it wrong: Greg doesn’t try to define his market and just advertises himself as a marketing firm. Months later, he’s still struggling to get clients.

Example of doing it right: After extensive market research, Sally decides that she should position herself as a marketing agency that will put pet-based businesses on the map with a custom-tailored plan, and promises to beat any competitor’s price. She immediately starts developing relationships with pet-based businesses in the area.

2. Become an expert

Trust is important when you’re marketing yourself, and people trust experts, so it’s important you find a way to position yourself as someone with knowledge of your niche. You already have that knowledge, of course, but people don’t know that, so you’ve got to do some legwork to get your name out there.

If there’s some certification you can get, that’s a good first step. You should also reach out to the media. Use services like HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to offer your expertise up to journalists looking to interview someone on the topic. You can then point to these articles as proof that you’re seen as an expert.

Becoming an expert takes a good deal of effort, but you can do it if you carve out some time to do the following things:

  • Set aside an hour per day to read up on articles or market research about your industry
  • Have a couple conversations per week with clients in your field to ask for their perspectives
  • Reach out to organizations that run conferences or other events that feature speakers to find out how you can get on the list
  • Create a YouTube channel where you provide your expert opinions

Example of doing it wrong: Jean doesn’t do much research on what software tools construction managers need to be successful, and when a member of the media reaches out to her, her answers are unusable and she is not featured in the journalist’s article.

Example of doing it right: Tony spends hours researching construction management software tools and talks to some users about their preferences. When he speaks at a construction management conference, the audience is wowed by his knowledge and his in-depth responses to questions, raising his profile among his clientele.

3. Educate

You have knowledge that a lot of people find valuable, so put it out there. Content marketing is an incredibly valuable tool to build your brand, so take advantage of it by creating insightful and keyword-rich articles to post to your website.

Of course, you need to build a website first, and you should review several examples to get some ideas on what kind of format your website should take that will most appeal to your audience.

There’s a lot of tools that can help you here. CMS software can help you develop a content strategy and execute it.

Email marketing software can help with creating a newsletter that your clients will find useful. Use email marketing best practices and some digital marketing tips to maximize your success.

And don’t just post to your own website — visit influential blogs in your niche or use sites like Quora to answer people’s questions and interact with the community. By helping to educate your consumers, they increasingly see you as a trustworthy expert and they will get to know your business as well, and hopefully you’ll be at the front of their minds when they need your services.

Content marketing sounds like a lot of effort learning a skill you’re not familiar with, but in fact it’s just about creating quality content that helps people, so take these steps first:

  • Read up on search engine optimization (SEO) best practices
  • Set aside a block of time each day, or at least each week, to produce content
  • Solicit questions from your audience that you can offer your expertise on in the form of a YouTube video or blog post
  • Ask around for guest-posting opportunities

Example doing it wrong: Sam doesn’t set aside any time to produce insightful content and has to pay top dollar for advertising because he doesn’t get any organic traffic.

Example of doing it right: The first thing Tina does each morning is hop onto Quora and answer a few questions from people looking for answers in her field. As a result, she begins to see an uptick in traffic to her website from people checking out her profile.

4. Build a social media following

Social media is challenging to master, but it’s important, so you need to be developing accounts on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.

One important thing to keep in mind is to know your audience: if most of your clients can be found on Facebook, spend more time there, and if it’s LinkedIn, that’s where you should devote most of your resources.

You can take the content you’re creating for your website and share it on social media. You can also use these platforms to interact with clients and other companies in your niche to further develop a following and make a name for yourself.

Screenshot of Holly Daskal's twitter page showing her headshot, description, and recent posts.

Project management expert Lolly Daskal provides a good example of how to market yourself on Twitter. Source: twitter.com/lollydaskal.

A lot of people have no idea where to begin with social media, but the first steps aren’t that hard:

  • Determine how often you can post meaningful content on your social media accounts, and set up a schedule to do so
  • Interact with potential customers and other influencers in your market by asking questions or answering them on a daily basis
  • Edit your profile to send people straight to your landing page
  • Experiment with all social media platforms to see which ones work best for you

Example of doing it wrong: Wendy doesn’t see the point of social media and doesn’t even have any accounts, meaning she gets zero traffic from one of the most popular places for her customers to congregate.

Example of doing it right: Alyssa uses tools like Hootsuite to schedule blasts to Facebook and Twitter at regular intervals so people are always getting content from her, and she’s responding to other people’s social media posts. As a result, her social media audience increases every week, and therefore her potential client pool is expanding.

5. Be inclusive

Sometimes, it’s best to let someone else do the talking, and build your brand in the process. By being inclusive and letting others join the conversation, you show that you are willing to listen to other people’s input which increases their willingness to work with you or do business with your company.

Invite guest posters to write for your blog, or maybe even take over your social media account for the day. They’ll add an additional perspective that your readers or followers will find valuable, and they’ll increase the profile of your personal brand.

A lot of us have a control freak side that wants to be the only voice in our business, but if you want to grow, you need to take a few steps to start bringing more people under the umbrella:

  • Create a long list of people you would want to write a guest post for your site in an ideal world. Be ambitious, they can only say no
  • Commit to asking one person per day to write for your site on a topic of their choosing, although you can gently offer your own ideas
  • Add a forum to your site to build a community
  • Promptly respond to comments to your blog posts

Doing it wrong: Troy posts a lot of content, but never invites his peers to join him. He’s disappointed by the lack of engagement from influential people in his market.

Doing it right: Kim is using her social media strategy to reach out to influencers and see if they’d be willing to share their knowledge with a quick post, and she’s delighted to see the resulting guest posts bring in visitors who wouldn’t have otherwise known about her.

6. Look for speaking opportunities

One of the best ways to market yourself is to have a captive audience, so look for opportunities for public speaking.

Figure out where your customers gather, and get on the list. That could be conferences, trade shows, workshops, association meetings. Whatever the case, contact the organizer, point to the credentials you’ve established as an expert, and offer to speak.

When you do get a speaking engagement, remember at all times that you are marketing yourself, not selling a product. As a result, your goal should be building trust by sharing your knowledge with the audience.

You should, of course, plug your product or service at the end of your talk, but the focus of the talk should be on helping the audience learn more about a subject they care about.

This can be an intimidating step, especially for introverts, but you can do the following things to make it a bit easier:

  • Make a list of where your customers gather
  • Create a one-page information sheet detailing your expertise
  • Contact these events to ask about speaking engagements and provide the sheet to them
  • Start with small events and use these to bolster your credentials to speak at big conferences

Example of doing it wrong: Tim never physically puts himself in front of customers and struggles with name recognition as a result, making it harder to get guest posters or interact with new clients.

Example of doing it right: Bob is constantly scouring IT trade shows for new speaking opportunities to promote his new book on easy ways small businesses can boost IT security, and has found it to be an incredibly lucrative new pipeline to finding new customers.

7. Get to know people

The oldest marketing technique in the book is to network, and even in today’s world of digital marketing, face-to-face contact is still the best way to market yourself.

People trust individuals they have met and spoken to more than someone they’ve only interacted with on social media or via email. It lets them know this is a real person they’re dealing with and they’re not just a number.

When you get those speaking engagements, take opportunities to talk to people afterward and exchange cards.

Identify important people in your industry and offer to buy them lunch to pick their brain; people love to share their expertise, after all. Go to where your customers gather and ask them about their wants and needs. All of these situations create tremendous opportunities to market yourself.

You’d be surprised at how big of an impact just a couple of extra face-to-face meetings per week can make, and here’s what you can do to experience that for yourself:

  • Determine how much time you should spend each week on face-to-face interaction
  • Take your list of trade shows and events and put as many in the calendar as you can
  • Create business cards and marketing materials you can hand out when you talk to people
  • Invite one person you admire or want to get to know to coffee each week

Example of doing it wrong: Mona spends all her time on content marketing and social media, but finds that it’s just not bringing in enough clients to get her business into profitability.

Example of doing it right: Brett supplements his online activities with visiting workshops and conferences to meet with potential clients face-to-face, and finds that it is a great way to create a pipeline of referrals.

It’s time to come up with your own strategy

It’s tricky figuring out how to promote yourself online or how to properly prioritize time-consuming, in-person networking and public speaking, but when you get it right, you will see a huge increase in your customer base.

Branding yourself isn’t just about asking the question of how to advertise yourself, it’s about positioning yourself as an expert, and there’s no shortcut to becoming one.

Take the next opportunity to sit down for an hour or two and really map out what kind of changes you need to make to implement the above strategies. Do you need to carve out time in the morning for more social media promotion? Do you need to set aside Thursdays for speaking engagements?

Once you’ve mapped out a plan, you’ll be well on your way to success.

By DP Taylor

Sourced from the blueprint

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How To Improve Marketing Personalization, Even With Crappy Data

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By Bruce McMeekin

When marketing teams are forced to use “crappy” data, they risk sending inaccurate or ineffective messages to customers and prospects. When you consider that personalization is a vital technique for businesses looking to draw customers’ attention, this is especially problematic. In fact, customers tend to respond more favorably to emails tailored to their preferences, and brands with mature personalization strategies see increases in revenue.

After all, most customers appreciate when Amazon emails a useful purchase suggestion or when Netflix understands their viewing preferences better than a spouse. These companies — and other personalization-first brands — use behavioral analytics to scrutinize customer behavior, develop personas and present offers with a high probability of converting into sales or improved user experience.

In working with clients across the board at my marketing agency, I’ve found that the art of personalization isn’t as easy to master. According to Experian, the majority of businesses say inaccurate data will impact their ability to provide a great customer experience.

5 Ways To Improve Personalization

Lacking insightful data is tough for any business trying to keep up in the digital age. According to Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer,” 73% of customers “expect companies to understand their needs and expectations,” and 62% “expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behavior.” However, you don’t need stellar data resources to practice personalization.

Personalized marketing is nothing new (after all, it’s nice when your favorite restaurant’s sommelier knows you enjoy Super Tuscans and suggests one to try). However, automated personalization now occurs much earlier in the sales process than it used to. If you have crappy data, there are still valuable best practices you can adopt to personalize your communications:

1. Place your non-crappy data sources in an inventory. 

The best place to find trustworthy contact and behavioral data is perhaps your transactional database (think QuickBooks or another accounting platform). Here, you can likely find email or postal addresses, customer or business names, and products or services purchased.

Make sure you focus on recent transactions, as data from the last year is more likely to be accurate. Besides this, focus on records with complete contact information and see if you can obtain any proxy for profitability (if so, consider also assigning a profitability decile). After all, there’s no point in spending marketing time or dollars to acquire low-profit business.

Look for data fields that show how much you know about customers’ needs. For example, if you run a computer servicing business, note which customers use Macs and which use PCs. If you have email addresses, you can get more information from FullContact, FreshAddress, Datanyze or Clearbit. Google Analytics also offers behavioral data, such as how frequently customers visit your site, webpages of interest and more.

2. Use your intuition to build personas. 

If you still can’t summon much confidence in your data, don’t worry. Create your own data by shaping personas from disparate pieces of accurate information and your intuition. Form a narrative around these scraps by answering some simple questions:

• What is this person’s pain point?

• What makes this person happy?

• What makes this person feel successful?

• How can our company help?

Creative teams love this type of information — it helps them craft offers to persuade and engage audiences. You also don’t need clean data to do this (though it helps).

3. Say ‘thank you.’

You’ll know this right away: Every transaction in your sales database represents a customer. With that simple fact, personalize your communication using an appreciative tone. You can also send communication from the manager of the store that customer visited or the employee whom the customer spoke with. Likewise, you can probably find out where customers like to do business, where they live and which website pages interest them most. All of these factors can help personalize your messaging.

Tie in the benefits of your product in a personal way. This could mean appealing to emotions (perhaps helping your audience feel or look better). And when customers visit your website, use cookies to trigger dynamic content based on the pages they visit. From these seemingly dull instruments, you can scratch out a convincing image of who your customers might be and which offers could interest them.

4. Remember that all you need is a single piece of personal information.

The quest for data wealth can be overwhelming — you want to know everything about your customers all at once. But even a single piece of information can be illuminating.

We recently helped a bank identify which of its personal banking customers owned a business. To do this, we scoured LinkedIn and company websites, verified contact information and assessed suitability for a business banking offer. Because this extra step individualized customer messages, it added much more credibility to the marketing campaign: “You trust us with your personal banking. We can help (insert business name) succeed, too.”

Is this tactic too intrusive? Not necessarily: Salesforce’s study also suggests that 62% of millennials and Generation Zers are okay with companies using relevant personal data in a “transparent and beneficial” way.

5. Don’t be afraid to take risks. 

People are understandably nervous around data. Remember that you can afford to take calculated risks in the quest for better personalization. Simply make sure you act ethically and comply with privacy laws.

For example, if you have more than 50% confidence in the personalized content you use, go with it. Perfection is impossible when dealing with marketing data, so it’s okay to be wrong with a minority of prospects in order to move your revenue and market share needles forward.

With customers increasingly expecting personalized communication, you can’t afford to stay frozen in fear. According to the Salesforce study above, half of millennials and Gen Zers usually ignore messages from brands unless they’re personalized — that’s 50% of connected young people shut out of your business before they get a chance to learn more. Don’t let your data insecurities stand in the way.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Bruce McMeekin

Bruce McMeekin is CEO and Founder of BKM Marketing, an integrated marketing agency based in the Boston area.

Sourced from Forbes

 

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‘More Money Than Drugs:’ A Deep Dive Into Ad Fraud

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By John Koetsier .

The average individual ad fraudster makes $5-20 million dollars a year. The average ad fraud corporation pulls “many multiples of that,” says TrafficGuard chief operating officer Luke Taylor.

In other words: more than most drug dealers.

Estimates on how much ad fraud costs are all over the map. Juniper Research says that digital ad spend will hit $520 billion by 2023. But Juniper also says the fraudulent component of that spent hit $42 billion last year. With these kinds of numbers, you know it’s not just script kiddies in a basement somewhere. In fact, Google just kicked Cheetah Mobile, a half-billion-dollar company with stock traded on the NYSE, off Google Play, citing “mobile ad fraud” in an accompanying statement.

I dove deep into mobile ad fraud in my latest Tech First Draft podcast with Taylor, an ad fraud prevention expert.

Ad fraud ranges from app install farms, which feature hundreds or thousands of smartphones on which people click ads and install apps endlessly, to electronic simulated versions of the same thing, to sophisticated spoofing of ad measurement platforms, Taylor says.

And some uses malware infecting our own computers to spoof domains like Forbes.com or the NYTimes.com, so advertisers think they’re buying premium ad inventory.

“This type of malware resides on people’s local computer and then as they navigate through different websites it’s able to change up the domain,” says Taylor. “So a site that is not premium can be represented as one that is, or a site that’s just covered solely in ads says that it’s the New York Times.”

Some old-school tricks still work too, like cookie stuffing.

Cookie stuffing, Taylor explains, is setting small bits of code in your browser that say you’ve visited a website that in fact you haven’t. Retailers like Amazon might look for cookies that indicate that a sale happened because of a click on a affiliated partner who drove the customer to the point of purchase, and when they find it, reward that affiliate with a bounty or commission.

Cookie stuffing gets the commission without having to do the work.

Ad stacking is another oldy but goodie in the fraudster’s bag of tricks, both on the web and in mobile apps.

“There’s some apps that we’ve been looking into lately and within three seconds of opening the app you get ten ads,” Taylor told me. “A couple of those are full screens just overlaid over themselves … when you’ve got a website that’s only got a certain amount of space to display ads, if you want to increase the amount of ads that you can display to a user you just put ten of them in the same spot. You know that the consumer is never going to see the other nine, but they still charge for them nonetheless.”

Naturally advertisers have gotten more sophisticated over the past decade and use multiple verification systems, like TrafficGuard, to ensure that their ads are being seen by real people on real devices and lead to real impact.

But advertising and ad fraud is an ongoing arms race, with fraudsters continually developing new technology to steal from advertisers.

And, ultimately, from all of us.

If we’re watching free videos online, it’s because an advertiser paid for that to be available. If we’re getting free news on the web, it’s because a brand bought ads, ultimately sponsoring journalists to do their work. And the same is true with free search, free email, free social media, free messaging, free games, and the list goes on.

One of the newer technologies, Taylor says, is bots that pretend to be people and act like people, even inside mobile games.

Think: a bot playing a game and winning a level.

Paid app installs is big business — growing to $118 billion/year in 2022 according to AppsFlyer — and sophisticated app publishers rarely pay just for an install anymore. Instead, they pay for a new user that doesn’t just install the app but actually uses it and does something: beating a level in a game, signing up for an account in a fintech app, or initiating a purchase in a retail app.

Now though, bots do that too.

In fact, that’s where the big money is. Instead of $1, think perhaps $25.

“And then there’s the bad bots and they can range from pretty trivial examples to highly sophisticated bots that can download an application, install it, play the game for days,” Taylor says. “Many of these games might be paying for purchase after level seven, say, and the reward for that is far greater … they might earn tens of dollars for that kind of a conversion and so they’re incentivized to put in this effort.”

Solving this isn’t easy, says Taylor, though using AI to distinguish between good actors and bad actors helps. One in three clicks in pay-per-click display advertising is fraudulent, Taylor said.

Ultimately, however, only removing the economic incentive for fraud will be a complete and final solution. And that is challenging to do, to say the least.

One reason: the complexity of the modern advertising ecosystem.

“The advertising ecosystem has so many layers that the ultimate fraudster at the top of the funnel could be sitting behind many networks,” Taylor says. “So when they get blocked at one they’re still running with hundreds more so they’re not affected as much.”

The entire transcript of our conversation is available on my site.

Feature Image Credit: Imelda on Unsplash

By John Koetsier

I forecast and analyze trends affecting the mobile ecosystem. I’ve been a journalist, analyst, and corporate executive, and have chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. I built the VB Insight research team at VentureBeat and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In addition, I’ve led technical teams, built social sites and mobile apps, and consulted on mobile, social, and IoT. In 2014, I was named to Folio’s top 100 of the media industry’s “most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.” I live in Vancouver, Canada with my family, where I coach baseball and hockey, though not at the same time.

Sourced from Forbes

 

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Stephan Loerke, Tamara Rogers, Nigel Vaz and more on the next digital disruptions

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By The Drum Reporters

From The Trade Desk to Condé Nast and Puma to PepsiCo, we ask some of the world’s best digital marketers where they think the next big industry shift will come from?

Nigel Vaz, global chief executive officer, Publicis Sapient

If you’re riding (or getting hit by) waves then you’re probably still swimming in the shallows. By which I mean it would be easy to answer that the next big wave is the ability to reach new possibilities in personalization at scale, across touchpoints, through data and machine learning. It’s true, but tells only part of the story. What we are all here to do is not to help clients create a deliverable, but a way to operate and exist so they don’t end up on the receiving end of another company’s disruptive breakthrough. The most compelling conversations I have are with business leaders who aren’t looking for waves, but horizons: people such as Novartis chief executive Vas Narasimhan, whose vision is to move beyond being a pharmaceutical company and to create value for patients and support them through their entire lifecycle. That’s an incredibly powerful and purposeful ambition that requires reimagining that business on a number of fronts, from strategy to experience to the application of data.

Oliver Deane, director of commercial digital, Global

Voice will start to have a huge impact on our daily lives. We will begin to do much more than ask Alexa to play the radio. As we embrace voice to be more productive, we will use our devices to order groceries while we make dinner, have a long-form feature read to us while we exercise and book our train travel while shopping. Much of this technology is already accessible – the wave of disruption in the coming years will be how much voice is used and how regular it becomes within our lives.

Ray Soto, director of emerging tech, Gannett

The digital signs of the next big wave are all around us, but you can’t focus on one without considering the others. I foresee the next big wave will be a convergence of several technologies that solves a problem and delivers an experience worth being a part of. I see it as something that helps us navigate our digital space differently, but provides a more immersive experience and efficiency without a lack of connection we may feel today.

Adam Harris, director of custom solutions, Twitch

I believe live sport is surfing the first wave of digital disruption. Sports often look to expand their reach into different audiences or look for different ways to communicate with existing fans. On top of that you have a host of traditional sports, such as golf and Formula 1, with aging fan bases, contrasted with the eSports scene, which is thriving among younger demographics – just look at the success of the recent Fortnite World Cup.

With eSports’ success as a purely digital-first experience, traditional sports have a huge opportunity. Interactive live environments such as Twitch are made for the kind of communal, passionate tribal experiences live sport delivers. We are already seeing strong engagement in this area with the likes of the NFL, Champions and Europa Leagues, MLS, Rugby League and National Women’s Hockey League all broadcasting live on Twitch.

Luke Davies, senior manager of global yield, Reuters

Data privacy law, again. GDPR is a slow burner and unfortunately our industry’s attempts of adoption have reduced the general user experience quality across the web. For GDPR, and now CCPA in 2020, with the potential for wider uptake across the US market, we can expect to experience changing tides across the next few years.

Simon Gresham Jones, chief digital officer, Condé Nast

On our mobile devices, again. 5G will open up a new frontier of business and creative possibilities for brands. For media and entertainment in particular, there’s an opportunity to re-imagine how we inspire our audiences at scale.

Morten Grubak, executive creative director for northern Europe, Virtue

The intellectual properties of brands. Brands need to be innovative in the products, services and solutions they bring to the world (this is where adding value really gets to live), not just in their communication.

Creative agencies should have as much contact with product development and innovation, not just marketing. We need to prove our value by solving real problems – and not just that, but doing it in surprising and interesting ways to capture the world’s increasingly scarce attention. It’s harder than it sounds. But don’t fret: the world is young.

Alexandra Willis, head of communications, content and digital, AELTC

A continuation of the ability of AI, machine learning and automation to drive personalization: it will just get better and more sophisticated and therefore true choice for the consumer over experience, rather than just customization within rules.

Voice: not being wedded to keyboards will rapidly increase the speed at which things are expected to happen, both in terms of the way we work and how consumers engage.

5G penetration: if it does what it says, it could transform the cost and flexibility of content production in such a way that we move completely away from linear and digital, and have a truly integrated model.

Alysia Borsa, chief marketing and data officer, Meredith

It’s hard to pick just one thing. From a consumer perspective, behaviors continue to evolve and expand to multiple platforms, with voice being a major shift in engagement. From a business perspective, providing personalization and relevancy in a cookieless world is going to be disruptive, and players who have direct relationships with consumers will be best set up to succeed.

Julie Clark, global head of automation revenue and podcast monetization, Spotify

How we leverage and utilize data is going to be a massive disruptor to our industry; we all need to plan for it now rather than allowing it to happen to us. There is also a reimagining happening right now as we start to connect digital back to real-world engagement of consumers. While direct to consumer brands have fundamentally changed purchase behaviors, I do believe human tactile experiences will continue to be fundamental now and into the future. From pop-up store trends to retailers becoming more skilled in connecting their on and offline worlds, I think we are going to have an interesting few years seeing these worlds merge.

Victor Knaap, chief executive officer, MediaMonks

In my opinion the word ‘digital’ needs to be killed soon – everything is digital. Besides that, my prediction is media companies that don’t master programmatic will have a real hard time in the next 12 months. To be frank, I am afraid we all generally expect too much from the near future. Old models die slowly, while we are overlooking the real change that will happen in the long-term. The media, agency and consultancy industry will look completely different in 10 years’ time.

Tamara Rogers, global chief marketing officer, GSK Consumer Healthcare

A truly intelligent internet of things. A world where the devices around you no longer just respond to your instructions, but predict your needs based on the behavioral data patterns they have tracked. For example, your vehicle self-adjusting the seat and heat pads to the optimum position and temperature to ease your back pain, identified as an issue from the way you have been moving during sleep the previous night and your range of mobility since rising. How are brands part of a dynamic system to improve the quality of life?

Aaron Cho, head of digital, IPG Mediabrands Hong Kong

There are growing privacy concerns around the usage of data, while digital properties continue to tighten their data policies. I think these forces might bring about the next big shift in digital marketing for two main reasons. Firstly, the privacy landscape is still changing and the dust has yet to settle – there’s no clear indication about which digital linkages will break and which ones marketers will need to bridge, which affects practices around identity resolution and data-driven audience planning. Secondly, while there are numerous data and tech companies on the market right now, their solutions are mostly still in development in the APAC region and there’s also a very real shortage of talent that understands how to manage their implementation.

Josh Peters, director of data partnerships, BuzzFeed

First-party audience collection and data privacy. They’re intrinsically linked together – as they should be – and companies and brands who handle this well will be big winners. We’re already seeing apps like BigToken helping consumers not just take control of their data but also helping them monetize it themselves. That’s a huge shift in the market – users making money off their own data instead of just companies. This, in turn, makes the data the app holds even more valuable in the market.

For brands and publishers, the ways in which they collect and use audiences is going to be imperative to future success, especially in an industry whose regulatory structure is exponentially increasing in complexity. Tech that makes it easy to collect in areas third-party pixels can’t, that seamlessly connects to privacy compliance frameworks and even the privacy frameworks themselves, will change the way marketers do business. The ones who make it both easy and effective will help change the course of digital marketing soon.

Sean Lyons, global chief executive officer, R/GA

Data privacy. There are a lot of new technologies currently in development that rely on almost unlimited access to people’s behavioral and personal data. What happens when people, and legislators, decide that privacy is more important than personalized messages and services? What happens when these technologies fall into the wrong hands? There is a big opportunity to solve this problem in fair and novel ways.

Mike Scafidi, head of martech, adtech and consumer data, PepsiCo

The next digital disruption will be through establishing trust. This will protect the interests of the consumer and improve the marketer’s ability to have an accurate understanding of the consumer. This will fundamentally disrupt everything we see in the data ecosystem today.

Sujatha Kumar, senior director of marketing, Visa India

I think we are seeing it as we speak. It’s no longer a fragmented market or media, but it’s a fragmented consumer who has a myriad of choices and a short attention span – hence the rise of programmatic ad platforms for dynamic creative optimization. There’s still a long way to go on how these platforms really evolve to serve their purpose – not just to us marketers, but also the end consumer.

The other big disruption will be voice – how it will become the key enabler and how tools such as facial and voice recognition will become the norm for security encryptions.

Stephan Loerke, chief executive officer, World Federation of Advertisers

The next big wave of digital disruption will be voice. We see penetration of voice assistants growing exponentially, and hurdles to voice commerce are comparatively low – once the technology is fully there. From a brand marketer’s perspective, voice will change the equation fundamentally – in terms of consumer trust, role of platforms and brand presence.

Chris Curtin, chief brand and innovation marketing officer, Visa

Augmented reality will hit in a big way. I think we’ll see it primarily through virtual shopping experiences, with consumers being able to trigger supplemental experiences through AR and brands. With AR, companies can manifest much more engaging experiences with their consumers than what we generally see today.

Adam Petrick, global director of brand and marketing, Puma

I think many brands have been successful in making the jump from advertising-based messaging to storytelling, story creation and content-focused messaging. Now we must find ways to actually leverage the power of the technology at our fingertips to leverage content and story creation in a targeted way, at scale. That’s the issue at the heart of the current moment of stress and tension in the industry. Once we overcome the hurdle of getting promising dots to line up, then we can all start to focus on the ‘next’ wave, which I have to assume will be linked to end customers beginning to exert ownership of their personally owned marketing space and opting in to virtually all messaging that we want to deliver.

Jeff Green, chief executive officer, The Trade Desk

As I have said before, we will likely never see a bigger industry shift than what’s happening right now in connected TV. We are at the very beginning of the digitization of TV advertising. For the first time, advertisers can apply real data to their large TV ad campaigns. Much of what we’ve done over the past decade has simply been a dress rehearsal for the digital shift happening in TV right now. Every top advertiser wants to know how they can best access CTV inventory at scale and how they can apply programmatic to it.

Nicolas Bidon, global chief executive officer, Xaxis

To use a famous quote: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” I believe the next big wave of digital disruption will be when some of the forces that have been at play in China for a couple of years already – such as mobile-first experiences powered by AI, social commerce at scale and frictionless mobile financial payments, to name just a few – will make their way to the US and Europe.

Lisa Utzschneider, chief executive officer, IAS

At IAS we are placing big bets on connected TV and OTT as the next digital disruption. We are already seeing major broadcasters start the shift to CTV/OTT content and that trend is expected to continue and grow. We’re leaders in creating solutions for advertisers and publishers to ensure that every ad impression is viewable, brand-safe and fraud-free, and we’re bringing our 10 years of experience in digital verification to the CTV space with our open beta in the US.

By The Drum Reporters

Sourced from The Drum

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How to Improve Your Data Science Skills while Working from Home

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By Siddhesh Jadhav

This article will serve as a guide to improving your Data Science skills while working from home. You can use it to build real-life projects, beef up your portfolio, and prepare yourself for what’s next.

The coronavirus outbreak is taking over headlines. Due to the spread of COVID-19, remote work is suddenly an overnight requirement for many. You might be working from home as you are reading this article.

With millions working from home for many weeks now, we should seize this opportunity to improve our skills in the domain we are focusing on.

Here is my strategy to learn Data Science while working from home with few personal real life projects.

“So what should we do?”

“Where should we start learning?”

Grab your coffee as I explain the process of how you can learn data science sitting at home. This blog is for everyone, from beginners to professionals.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

Prerequisites

To start this journey, you will need to cover the prerequisites. No matter which specific field you are in, you will need to learn the following prerequisites for data science.

Logic/Algorithms:

It’s important to know why we need a particular prerequisite before learning it. Algorithms are basically a set of instructions given to a computer to make it do a specific task.

Machine learning is built from various complex algorithms. So you need to understand how algorithms and logic work on a basic level before jumping into complex algorithms needed for machine learning.

If you are able to write the logic for any given puzzle with the proper steps, it will be easy for you to understand how these algorithms work and you can write one for yourself.

Resources: Some awesome free resources to learn data structures and algorithms in depth.

Statistics:

Statistics is a collection of tools that you can use to get answers to important questions about data.

Machine learning and statistics are two tightly related fields of study. So much so that statisticians refer to machine learning as “applied statistics” or “statistical learning”.

Image source : http://me.me/

The following topics should be covered by aspiring data scientists before they start machine learning.

  • Measures of Central Tendency — mean, median, mode, etc
  • Measures of Variability — variance, standard deviation, z-score, etc
  • Probability — probability density function, conditional probability, etc
  • Accuracy — true positive, false positive, sensitivity, etc
  • Hypothesis Testing and Statistical Significance — p-value, null hypothesis, etc

Resources: Learn college level statistics in this free 8 hour course.

Business:

This depends on which domain you want to focus on. It basically involves understanding the particular domain and getting domain expertise before you get into a data science project. This is important as it helps in defining our problem accurately.

Resources: Data science for business

Brush up your basics

This sounds pretty easy but we tend to forget some important basic concepts. It gets difficult to learn more complex concepts and the latest technologies in a specific domain without having a solid foundation in the basics.

Here are few concepts you can start revising:

Python programming language

Python is widely used in data science. Check out this collection of great Python tutorials and these helpful code samples to get started.

Image source : memecrunch.com

You can also check out this Python3 Cheatsheet that will help you learn new syntax that was released in python3. It’ll also help you brush up on basic syntax.

And if you want a great free course, check out this Python for Everybody course from Dr. Chuck.

General data science skills

Want to take a great course on data science concepts? Here’s a bunch of data science courses that you can take online, ranked according to thousands of data points.

Resources: Data science for beginners – free 6 hour course, What languages should you learn for data science?

Data Collection

Now it is time for us to explore all the ways you can collect your data. You never know where your data might be hiding. Following are a few ways you can collect your data.

Web scraping

Web scraping helps you gather structured data from the web, select some of that data, and keep what you selected for whatever use you require.

You can start learning BeautifulSoup4 which helps you scrape websites and make your own datasets.

Advance Tip: You can automate browsers and get data from interactive web pages such as Firebase using Selenium. It is useful for automating web applications and automating boring web based administration

Resources: Web Scraping 101 in Python

Cloud servers

If your data is stored on cloud servers such as S3, you might need to get familiar with how to get data from there. The following link will help you understand how to implement them using Amazon S3.

Resources : Getting started with Amazon S3, How to deploy your site or app to AWS S3 with CloudFront

APIs

There are millions of websites that provide data through APIs such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. So it is important to learn how they are used and have a good idea on how they are implemented.

Resources : What is an API? In English, please, How to build a JSON API with Python, and Getting started with Python API.

Data Preprocessing

This topic includes everything from data cleaning to feature engineering. It takes a lot of time and effort. So we need to dedicate a lot of time to actually learn it.

Image source : https://www.pinterest.com/pin/293648838181843463/

Data cleaning involves different techniques based on the problem and data type. The data needs to be cleaned from irrelevant data, syntax erros, data inconsistencies and missing data. The following guide will get you started with data cleaning.

Resources : Ultimate guide to data cleaning

Data Preprocessing is an important step in which the data gets transformed, or encoded, so that the machine can easily parse it. It requires time as well as effort to preprocess different types of data which include numerical, textual and image data.

Resources : Data Preprocessing: Concepts, All you need to know about text preprocessing for NLP and Machine Learning, Preprocessing for deep learning.

Machine Learning

Finally we reach our favourite part of data science: Machine Learning.

Image source : https://in.pinterest.com/pin/536209899383255279/

My suggestion here would be  to  first brush up your basic algorithms.

Classification — Logistic Regression, RandomForest, SVM, Naive Bayes, Decision Trees

Resources : Types of classification algorithms in Machine Learning, Classification Algorithms in Machine Learning

Regression — Linear Regression, RandomForest, Polynomial Regression

Resources : Introduction to Linear Regression , Use Linear Regression models to predict quadratic, root, and polynomial functions, 7 Regression Techniques you should know, Selecting the best Machine Learning algorithm for your regression problem,

Clustering — K-Means Clustering, DBSCAN, Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering

Resources : Clustering algorithms

Gradient Boosting — XGBoost, Catboost, AdaBoost

Resources : Gradient boosting from scratch, Understanding Gradient Boosting Machines

I urge you all to understand the math behind these algorithms so you have a clear idea of how it actually works. You can refer to this blog where I have implemented XGBoost from scratch — Implementing XGBoost from scratch

Now you can move on to Neural Networks and start your Deep Learning journey.

Resources: Deep Learning for Developers, Introduction to Deep Learning with Tensorflow, How to develop neural networks with Tensorflow, Learn how deep neural networks work

You can then further dive deep into how LSTM, Siamese Networks, CapsNet and BERT works.

Hackathons:

Image Source : https://me.me/

Now we need to implement these algorithms on a competitive level. You can start looking for online Data Science Hackathons. Here is the list of websites where I try to compete with other data scientists.

Analytics Vidhya — https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/all/

Kaggle — https://www.kaggle.com/competitions

Hackerearth — https://www.hackerearth.com/challenges/

MachineHack — https://www.machinehack.com/

TechGig — https://www.techgig.com/challenge

Dare2compete — https://dare2compete.com/e/competitions/latest

Crowdanalytix — https://www.crowdanalytix.com/community

To have a look at a winning solution, here is a link to my winning solution to one online Hackathon on Analytics Vidhya — https://github.com/Sid11/AnalyticsVidhya_DataSupremacy

Projects:

We see people working on dummy data and still don’t get the taste of how actual data looks like. In my opinion, working on real life data gives you a very clear idea how data in real life looks like. The amount of time and effort required in cleaning real life data takes about 70% of your project’s time.

Business Intelligence

After you get the results from your project, it is now time to make business decisions from those results. Business Intelligence is a suite of software and services that helps transform data into actionable intelligence and knowledge.

This can be done by creating a dashboard from the output of our model. Tableau is a powerful and the fastest growing data visualization tool used in the Business Intelligence Industry. It helps in simplifying raw data into the very easily understandable format. Data analysis is very fast with Tableau and the visualizations created are in the form of dashboards and worksheets.

Resources : Getting started with Tableau, Tableau for Data Science course

Image source : https://imgflip.com/i/31dvdc

It is now time for you start your work from home to improve your skillset. Also if you started this journey and need my advice or details about any subpart which I have mentioned above, feel free to comment or mail me at jsiddhesh96[at]gmail[dot]com.

Feature Image Credit: Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters / Unsplash

By Siddhesh Jadhav

Sourced from freeCodeCamp

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What is Digital Marketing and Why is it Important for Startups

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By John Boitnott

Digital marketing is a series of tools that most modern businesses use to bring customers to their products and services. It involves using digital outlets like websites, social platforms, and software applications as marketing channels. There are a wide variety of options in digital marketing encompassing many different methods.

Some marketing techniques that fall under digital marketing include:

  • Search engine marketing (search engine optimization, and pay-per-click digital advertising)
  • Blogging
  • Content marketing (everything from podcasts and video marketing to infographics)
  • Social media marketing and networking on platforms like Linkedin or Facebook
  • Viral marketing
  • Infomercials

Digital marketing activities have several advantages over traditional marketing techniques. For one, digital marketing strategies can reach a vast audience of potential customers. The internet is now available in nearly every part of the world, and the number of Internet users grows every year. Secondly, online marketing can be quite easy to put in place and track.

Contrary to what you might assume, digital marketing is not just for big firms and businesses. Small businesses and, indeed, startups can leverage the power of digital channels to build their brands, get leads, and reach more of their target audience. In fact, startups usually need all the help they can get to lift business off the ground. Here are some of the ways that startup businesses can best use digital marketing strategies.

Gain Insights into The Market with Digital Marketing

Digital marketing methods use trackable metrics that show marketing performance and behavior of customers. This information is useful in informing business decisions and optimizing marketing approaches. An entrepreneur just starting out in the business world may find these insights particularly helpful as they choose media channels and refine digital marketing campaigns.

Many entrepreneurs jump into businesses blindly without a clear marketing plan or course of action. Business is inherently risky, so “winging it” could be a recipe for disaster. It’s crucial to serve a market you understand and can predict, digital marketing enables you to do that.

High ROI on Marketing Efforts 

The early stages of a business are critical and difficult. Many startups struggle with managing expenses and available resources. Low cash flow is a common problem with many startups, and it can lead to business failure. So, most early-stage companies are very cautious about their spending. This is where digital marketing comes in handy.

Compared to traditional marketing styles, some digital marketing methods are more cost-effective. Email marketing, SEO or PPC campaigns can cost very little to launch and run. Also, digital marketing tactics can generate impressive ROI if carried out well. This type of marketing can reduce the upfront startup marketing cost considerably.

Many entrepreneurs assume that digital marketing is highly expensive. Well, this may be the case for some techniques, such as Google adwords or Facebook ads. But for organic digital marketing – efforts like SEO, guest blogging, or social media, outreach doesn’t cost that much. So, there’s no good reason why a startup shouldn’t start using digital marketing channels. The results, in most cases, more than justify any costs incurred.

Keep Up with the Competition using Digital Marketing

The good and bad thing about the digital space is that it levels the playing field for all businesses, big and small. This is good for startups though. It means even digital marketers at new businesses can go head-to-head with established cooperate giants.

The success of digital marketing has nothing to do with the size of the businesses. It’s all about identifying and capitalizing on market opportunities. Despite dominant influence of large competitors, startups can still contend by taking advantage of digital marketing techniques.

Drive Conversions and Sales 

The ultimate goal of digital marketing is to drive conversations and sales, both online and locally. Nowadays, it doesn’t matter whether your business is a brick-and-mortar shop or an online e-commerce store. Digital marketing will still prove useful. Startups can use inexpensive techniques to boost sales during the critical early stages. That generates the revenue needed to grow.

Many businesses use digital marketing to maintain online presence, increase sales, spread brand awareness, and promote new ideas. Startups can do the same, and without necessarily getting into expensive marketing campaigns.

By John Boitnott

CEO, Boitnott Consulting LLC

A journalist and digital consultant, John Boitnott has worked at TV, print, radio and Internet companies for 25 years. He’s an advisor at StartupGrind and has written for BusinessInsider, Fortune, NBC, Fast Company, Inc., Entrepreneur and Venturebeat.

Sourced from ReadWrite

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