1. Marketing lever fundamentals
Welcome to the course!
My name is Sarah DeAtley, and I am a data scientist.
Throughout my career, I have tackled marketing analytics problems in the software, travel, education, IT, and automotive industries.
2. Upcoming topics
In this course, we will walk through the day-to-day of a Marketing Analyst.
Campaign analysis, privacy implications, audience segmentation, sentiment analysis, and ROI modeling are all areas we'll visit in the chapters ahead, but to start us off, we will explore fundamental concepts that help marketers achieve their goals.
This lesson introduces marketing levers: the various methods that marketers have at their disposal to execute marketing goals.
3. Marketing campaigns
What exactly does the term "marketing campaign" mean? Campaigns are organized efforts to achieve a specific marketing goal. For example, Apple has launched prominent campaigns when releasing new products like the iPod and iPhone.
Because campaigns target a specific message or goal, they tend to run for a finite time period.
A common way of evaluating campaign performance is to benchmark against prior campaigns with similar goals. For example, comparing this year's holiday campaign to last year's holiday campaign.
Campaigns can include one channel, or many channels, depending on the scale.
4. Marketing channels
Channels are methods of delivering messages to customers to drive campaign goals.
Channels are often on distinct platforms from each other, like radio versus billboards.
Some channels are offline (meaning not digital), like brick-and-mortar retail stores or TV.
Many channels are online (meaning on digital surfaces), like social media on Twitter or paid search on Google. Increasingly, channels serve ads on multiple platforms at the same time, and marketers select one surface over another as a tactic.
5. Marketing tactics
Tactics are the specific actions we employ within channels to achieve a strategy.
Take TV as an example; marketers can choose the tactic of running TV ads on streaming platforms or on cable.
Other tactics apply to multiple channels, like retargeting, where users are shown more relevant advertising based on their behavior.
6. Marketing lever hierarchy
While there are always exceptions to the rule, marketing levers are typically hierarchical.
It is important to understand this as a Marketing Analyst because similar structures are observed in data models.
A marketing program includes all marketing efforts and is the broadest lever.
By comparison, individual ads are very granular.
The three levers we just reviewed also follow a hierarchy, in which campaigns contain channels, and channels contain tactics. This should be leveraged in deep-dive analysis; if we see a concerning trend at the campaign level, we can investigate channels within that campaign, and tactics within that channel.
7. Let's practice!
Time to review marketing lever concepts! We will review these concepts as if we are interviewing for a Marketing Analyst role.