Years ago I seriously contemplated taking a job in the
finance industry, but eventually decided to pursue a career in technology
instead. These days I have come to the
conclusion that being an executive in digital marketing is a lot like being a
portfolio manager in the finance industry.
When you run a digital marketing department, you have
countless experiments going at any time.
You are running parallel programs in SEO, paid search, banner ads, social
media, content creation, PR, etc. In each of these areas you can be testing
dozens or hundreds of different concepts.
Add this up and it can easily mean thousands or tens of thousands of
things going at once.
With this many experiments running at any one time, overseeing
a digital marketing department really becomes portfolio management. You need to constantly compute the ROI of
your investments and move your money into the initiatives with the best
returns.
On the surface that sounds simple, but the reality is that
some marketing activities are harder to measure than others. That is why digital marketing executives have
to be experts at analytics. Sure they
should have an outstanding analytics department behind them, but at the end of
the day they need to be analytical experts themselves.
I spend 3 to 4 hours a day in Google Analytics, SQL,
Tableau, Optimizely and other analytical tools. Sure I am an analytics fanatic, but more and
more digital marketing execs are putting a considerable amount of their time
into analytics so they can focus their team’s marketing efforts on the most
valuable areas.
