1 Exercise: Project Progress - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->All right, you're not just gonna listen to me</v> during this course. I'm gonna put you to work. So one of the best ways for you to get the most out of this course is for you to apply what you're learning all the way through. And so we're gonna start right now. So we're gonna have you pick out a project that you're gonna do to solve some kind of digital marketing analytics problem of your choice. And you're gonna use the strategy that we walk through in the course to do it. So you're gonna think about all these different steps in the process, as you figure out how to solve your problem. So, first thing you wanna do is to choose the organization that you're solving the problem for. So maybe it's the place where you work now or a place where you'd like to work or a place you used to work, or maybe it's a nonprofit that you're passionate about or a business that you wanna start. Any of those things are fine, but what I would recommend is to pick something that you know a lot about, pick a problem you really understand, pick an organization you're very familiar with because it's gonna be enough work for you to just put together the plan based on all of this information you're learning about analytics. It would be really hard if you were trying to research the problem at the same time. Now, if you choose a really large organization, you might wanna pick some kind of geographic region like a country or even smaller region than that to make the problem manageable. So you don't wanna pick such a big scope that you've got this insurmountable opportunity in front of you. So next, the thing you might wanna do is you might wanna choose a particular product or service or a product line within that company, because maybe the company again is pretty big and maybe you need to pick something that will scope your problem a little bit smaller so that you're not trying to boil the ocean. So try again, to pick an area that you know something about, some place where you know there's a problem that you wanna improve the use of analytics, or you wanna collect analytics where you're not collecting it now, just try and get your problem down to the smallest scope that it's still worth solving the problem for, because you wanna make your problem manageable enough that you can actually work through all the steps of the process. If you pick something too big, it can be so time-consuming that it gets a little frustrating and I wanna save you from that. So next, you're gonna decide the exact problem that you wanna solve. Now, it could be a problem of poor usage of analytics, where you actually can't calculate your ROI, or you can't attribute your revenue to any marketing tactics, or you have lousy leads scoring that just isn't working. I've just listed a few examples there, but it could be problem where you need to really improve the way your company does analytics, or it could be a performance problem that's measured by analytics. Either of these are fine. So you could say, hey, our web traffic is down or we don't know how to sell to millennials, or our leads are lousy, right? Any of those things are possible. But the thing that you wanna focus on is one of these two types of problems. Either you wanna improve your company's usage of analytics, or you wanna improve a performance problem that analytics can measure. Either of those are really good problems to pick. Now, as we go through the course, not all of the exercises we do might apply to each kind of problem. So just use your judgment as to whether the exercise I'm giving you to do, or the information I'm giving you really applies to your analytics, just tap into your inner wisdom and you'll do just fine. Now, there are dozens of problems that you can choose from, and I've listed just a few here, but you can pick any one you want, pick a problem that you're really motivated to solve that's what's gonna get you to wanna put the work in, that's what's gonna get you to really drill down and do a good solution for the problem is if you're really motivated, it's a problem that really bothers you it's one you'd really like to succeed at solving. And the other thing you should do as you're going through this process is to picture who the person is that you need to convince. As you're putting this plan together to solve this problem, who are you gonna be presenting it to? Is it your boss? That could be. Is it your client? Maybe you're a consultant. Is it an investor? Because you're starting a new business or yeah, you're starting a new business and it's your spouse. And you need to convince your spouse that this is not a dumb thing to do to quit your job and start this business. So develop your plan for that person, who is the person you really need to persuade. And what I want you to do is to not just give surface knee jerk reactions as you're going through these exercises and as you're thinking through your problem and your solution, because you can easily rattle off some quick answer to the cause of any problem, don't do that. Instead use the power of why, keep asking yourself why. So you can go from that initial knee jerk surface observation to something that has real insights, something that's really actionable. So let's go through an example of using the power of why. So suppose you're asking yourself, why can't we improve our usage of marketing analytics? And your knee jerk reaction is, well, we don't have the budget. Why? Well, management doesn't really believe in analytics. Why? Well, they don't see how it makes the money. Why? Well, it's hard for us to show our ROI. Why? Well, we can't tie our offline sales to online activity. Is this the actual root cause? Is this why they're not willing to invest in marketing analytics? Because they don't see how any of the things that are going on in digital marketing are leading to sales. And so if this is your answer, then that's the focus of your plan. This is something actionable. This is something that you could say, hey, the big problem we have to solve is to be able to show that our marketing tactics are leading to the sales that happen offline. And that's what we have to do. And so keep asking why as you go through these questions so that you can get down to something that's either a real insight or it's something actionable that you can actually build a plan to solve for. So let's summarize what we're given you to do. So to start your plan first we want you to choose an organization for your analytics problem and optionally you might choose a region, or a geography, or a country, or some product area if you picked a really large organization. Next, we want you to decide who you're going to present your plan to. This is part of your ability to communicate with numbers. Who are you communicating to? Keep your audience in mind as you're developing this plan. Then we want you to choose a very specific analytics problem to solve. Remember, it could be a problem about how you use analytics within the organization, or it could be a problem of poor performance that analytics can measure. And then we want you to determine the root cause of that problem remembering the power of why. All right, you've got your assignment, go get after it.