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3 Growing Niches That Digital Nomads Can Leverage in the Next Decade

December 23, 2020 No Comments

About two years ago, my wife Anika and I decided to give up our jobs as stewardess and hotel concierge in order to pursue our dreams of living as digital nomads. Since we left the corporate world, we have ventured into various models of online business, from ecommerce to lead generation and coaching, all while traveling to more than 85 countries around the world. Today, we help individuals who are tired of working 9-to-5 jobs become successful online and start their own digital nomad fairy tales.

Since the start of 2020, remote working has become a key element in the fight against the ongoing health crisis. And although traveling might still come with a few hurdles during the next 12 months, it appears that many businesses have changed their attitudes toward working from home. This provides an excellent opportunity for those who are looking to break the mould and work through their computers and smartphones instead of a tight and noisy city office.

If you are thinking about packing on some new skills that don’t demand your physical presence at an office, here are three exciting niches that are not only likely to grow in the next decade, but that are also perfect for remote work.

1. Data-driven marketing

Analysts believe that global B2C ecommerce sales will reach and estimated $4.5 trillion by 2021. In such a fast-growing industry, the need for digital media marketing experts is omnipresent. However, in this day and age, everyone and his mother is calling him or herself an online marketer. Knowing the basics about marketing just doesn’t do the deed anymore. To cut through the noise of tens of thousands of self-proclaimed marketing geniuses, we advise focusing on a bit more complex yet highly efficient marketing strategy: data-driven marketing.

Today, data-driven marketing is a key priority for marketing executives. According to recent reports, 40 percent of companies are seeking to increase their data-driven marketing spending, and 64 percent of marketing executives say that data-driven strategies are essential in today’s economy. While it may sound confusing at first, data-driven marketing is actually not that hard to execute. Did you ever run a social media or search engine ad and later optimized it based on the results that you were getting? This is essentially a very comprehensive form of data-driven marketing.

Thanks to the incredible value of reliable data these days, almost every bit of software tracks user behavior and collects information that might be highly valuable for your marketing decisions. To become a data-driven marketing specialist, you need to learn how to generate useful data, how to extract it and, most important, how to use this data to your advantage.

As you might have noticed, data-driven marketing requires a distinct set of marketing skills, including social media marketing and search engine marketing, which are very effective for gathering data, as well as content marketing and traditional advertising, which are great for using the data to improve marketing results. Nevertheless, as only a few are willing to go this extra mile, becoming a data-driven marketer allows you to position yourself as a valuable team member no matter where you currently are in the world.

2. High-quality content production

Before the introduction of the web 2.0, distributing one’s own ideas and opinions on a large scale was usually reserved for a limited number of people, mostly in the media industry. However, with the rise of user-generated content and social networks, this has changed quite dramatically. Today, almost everyone can upload original content, whether it is in the form of small posts, blog articles, images or videos, at an infinite number of virtual places and at any time.

If you can monetize your content, you can actually make quite a good living off of it. But monetization doesn’t mean merely pushing out tweets for the sake of content. This won’t make anybody rich — well, at least in most cases. Considering that hundreds of millions of human beings are uploading billions of content pieces every day, the key to success is quality.

User-generated content can play a significant role in marketing. According to research conducted by Bright Local, 92 percent of people rely on user-generated content when making a buying decision. In addition, as marketing software behemoth Stackla recently reported, about 57 percent of consumers believe that only a minority of brands create authentic content. The demand for influencers from not only major platforms such YouTube as Instagram but also from native channels like blogs and podcasts is expected to grow significantly over the next few years.

The beauty of a content production business is that you can choose from a variety of methods to produce, distribute and promote your content along a broad range of potential topics and niches. Immense possibilities for scaling your operation exist. It may take some time to get the ball rolling, so start by putting out content that supports an existing business or your personal brand. This will allow you to prepare your journey as a profitable content producer ahead of time.

3. Virtual jobs

Thanks to the rapid spread of COVID-19 regulations among workplaces, 2020 has sparked an immense number of new virtual jobs, many of which are expected to remain virtual even after the conclusion of the health crisis. This still relatively novel form of employment does not require any physical presence in an office or even a certain country and is thus perfect for digital nomads both with and without prior work experience.

Besides rising health concerns, another key reason for the substantial increase of virtual employees is the fact that they cost businesses significantly less than in-house job positions, since virtual jobs require less office space, fewer extras and often lower salaries or hourly rates. The opportunities for virtual jobs are plentiful and varied.

As more businesses start to recognize the benefits of remote work, both regular employees and freelancers may have many more opportunities to fulfil their dreams of becoming digital nomads.

Feature Image Credit: Natalie_magic | Getty Images

By Tayler Schweigert

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

Eight Rules for Data-Driven Marketing

September 1, 2017 No Comments

By Ashley Stirrup.

This article will provide some sound advice about getting data-driven marketing right—from think big but start small (and with the basics), to take an action-based approach, pick your battles, beware of small sample sizes, and more…

1. Start with the basics

It’s easy to become obsessed with pinpointing the ultimate ROI-based marketing metrics; but, rather than hunt for ‘the killer’ indicators, it’s best to identify a few easy-to-implement, basic metrics that can provide a sound assessment of both performance and ROI.

Those can include number of leads, number of Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), number of MQLs pending sales review, and the number of MQLs recycled/accepted. All of those will give you an idea of how to ensure leads have the proper number of touchpoints to be qualified and get to the right salesperson for conversion.

2. Think big, start small

Your data-driven strategy should be a combination of small wins and long-term goals. For example, it’s relatively straightforward to track the conversion of leads into opportunities. It’s much harder to track the ROI on search engine marketing campaigns if you want to track ROI all the way to closed deals that were touched by 10-20 different campaigns.

Both are important, so get your quick wins where possible and recognize that other data points will take much longer to realize.

For example, in search engine marketing, you will need to tie Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others to your website to begin, then connect your site with Marketo, Salesforce, and your data warehouse. After that, you’ll need to do attribution across marketing campaigns. There are various places where tagging and data sharing can go wrong, so be prepared—and allocate time for setbacks.

3. Take an action-based approach

It’s easy to come up with a wish list of data… and much harder to find actionable data. All too often, a marketing analysis will take days of crunching numbers, only to discover that there is no smoking gun or major opportunity to optimize the business. The best data-driven marketers will find ways to minimize the time they spend “exploring” data and accelerate their time-to-insight.

When you’re considering the data you want to analyze, ask yourself two questions:

If I had this data regularly, how could I improve my efforts? If you can’t answer, there is probably a better analysis to run.
What is the quick-and-dirty version of this analysis? If a cursory analysis of the data doesn’t yield much, it may be an indicator that the data isn’t as important as initially thought—or, at least, not as actionable.

4. Pick your battles

There will always be an infinite number of metrics you can analyze; but, most often, less is more. Whatever the major needle-movers are for your business, put 80% of your effort into optimizing those rather than trying to focus on every possible metric.

Once you’ve picked your battles, the real analysis begins to determine how to improve tracking, fine-tune efforts, etc.; then, over time, you just need to wash, rinse, repeat.

With big metrics, the low-hanging fruit often isn’t there, but with focus and dedication these key drivers can improve significantly over time with small, steady enhancements.

5. Beware of small sample sizes

One can quickly go blind trying to track down the cause behind every dip and spike in results. All too often, it will be impossible to pinpoint the underlying cause of those peaks and valleys. Instead of obsessing over them, stay focused on the big picture and overall trends.

It’s often better to look at trends or campaigns quarter over quarter rather than week over week if you want draw more accurate conclusions on overall success. That’s especially true for international data, because every country has its own ebb and flow due to cultural nuances, market drivers, and societal biases.

6. It takes a village

To have a truly data-driven marketing organization, you need every marketing employee to be goal-oriented and diligent about performing analysis. There are too many nuances and exceptions in marketing to have just one marketing analyst and a CMO who makes all data-driven decisions. As they say, “It takes a village”: To ensure the data used to enhance marketing efforts is accurate and trustworthy, you need for the entire market context to be taken into account by all your analysts. Collaboration is therefore key!

7. Create a shared-learning organization

In marketing efforts, it’s usually better to have a “long tail” to each campaign, meaning it would runs for many months or years. That approach gives you and your team the ability to message-test, refine, launch, analyze, and adjust as needed to increase the success rate and traction.

Being able to complete the review cycle quickly and incorporate those learnings in near-real-time is key. Having an organization trained in the art of launching, benchmarking, and re-visiting all cross-marketing efforts will pay the biggest dividends over time.

8. The devil is in the details

Having reliable partners on both your operations and sales teams is key to executing any data-driven marketing program. Otherwise, many great marketing ideas will be poorly executed and leads will go untouched.

Thinking through the entire marketing process, understanding the cast of characters involved, and taking steps to ensure all are aligned around a common goal are critical to success.

By Ashley Stirrup

Sourced from MarketingProfs

Eight Rules for Data-Driven Marketing

August 11, 2017 No Comments

By Ashley Stirrup.

This article will provide some sound advice about getting data-driven marketing right—from think big but start small (and with the basics), to take an action-based approach, pick your battles, beware of small sample sizes, and more…

1. Start with the basics

It’s easy to become obsessed with pinpointing the ultimate ROI-based marketing metrics; but, rather than hunt for ‘the killer’ indicators, it’s best to identify a few easy-to-implement, basic metrics that can provide a sound assessment of both performance and ROI.

Those can include number of leads, number of Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), number of MQLs pending sales review, and the number of MQLs recycled/accepted. All of those will give you an idea of how to ensure leads have the proper number of touchpoints to be qualified and get to the right salesperson for conversion.

2. Think big, start small

Your data-driven strategy should be a combination of small wins and long-term goals. For example, it’s relatively straightforward to track the conversion of leads into opportunities. It’s much harder to track the ROI on search engine marketing campaigns if you want to track ROI all the way to closed deals that were touched by 10-20 different campaigns.

Both are important, so get your quick wins where possible and recognize that other data points will take much longer to realize.

For example, in search engine marketing, you will need to tie Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others to your website to begin, then connect your site with Marketo, Salesforce, and your data warehouse. After that, you’ll need to do attribution across marketing campaigns. There are various places where tagging and data sharing can go wrong, so be prepared—and allocate time for setbacks.

3. Take an action-based approach

It’s easy to come up with a wish list of data… and much harder to find actionable data. All too often, a marketing analysis will take days of crunching numbers, only to discover that there is no smoking gun or major opportunity to optimize the business. The best data-driven marketers will find ways to minimize the time they spend “exploring” data and accelerate their time-to-insight.

When you’re considering the data you want to analyze, ask yourself two questions:

If I had this data regularly, how could I improve my efforts? If you can’t answer, there is probably a better analysis to run.
What is the quick-and-dirty version of this analysis? If a cursory analysis of the data doesn’t yield much, it may be an indicator that the data isn’t as important as initially thought—or, at least, not as actionable.

4. Pick your battles

There will always be an infinite number of metrics you can analyze; but, most often, less is more. Whatever the major needle-movers are for your business, put 80% of your effort into optimizing those rather than trying to focus on every possible metric.

Once you’ve picked your battles, the real analysis begins to determine how to improve tracking, fine-tune efforts, etc.; then, over time, you just need to wash, rinse, repeat.

With big metrics, the low-hanging fruit often isn’t there, but with focus and dedication these key drivers can improve significantly over time with small, steady enhancements.

5. Beware of small sample sizes

One can quickly go blind trying to track down the cause behind every dip and spike in results. All too often, it will be impossible to pinpoint the underlying cause of those peaks and valleys. Instead of obsessing over them, stay focused on the big picture and overall trends.

It’s often better to look at trends or campaigns quarter over quarter rather than week over week if you want draw more accurate conclusions on overall success. That’s especially true for international data, because every country has its own ebb and flow due to cultural nuances, market drivers, and societal biases.

6. It takes a village

To have a truly data-driven marketing organization, you need every marketing employee to be goal-oriented and diligent about performing analysis. There are too many nuances and exceptions in marketing to have just one marketing analyst and a CMO who makes all data-driven decisions. As they say, “It takes a village”: To ensure the data used to enhance marketing efforts is accurate and trustworthy, you need for the entire market context to be taken into account by all your analysts. Collaboration is therefore key!

7. Create a shared-learning organization

In marketing efforts, it’s usually better to have a “long tail” to each campaign, meaning it would runs for many months or years. That approach gives you and your team the ability to message-test, refine, launch, analyze, and adjust as needed to increase the success rate and traction.

Being able to complete the review cycle quickly and incorporate those learnings in near-real-time is key. Having an organization trained in the art of launching, benchmarking, and re-visiting all cross-marketing efforts will pay the biggest dividends over time.

8. The devil is in the details

Having reliable partners on both your operations and sales teams is key to executing any data-driven marketing program. Otherwise, many great marketing ideas will be poorly executed and leads will go untouched.

Thinking through the entire marketing process, understanding the cast of characters involved, and taking steps to ensure all are aligned around a common goal are critical to success.

By Ashley Stirrup.

Ashley Stirrup is CMO of Talend, a leader in Cloud and Big Data integration solutions.

LinkedIn: Ashley Stirrup