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SDS PODCAST
EPISODE 281:
FUTUREPROOFING
YOUR DIGITAL
MARKETING
TACTICS
Kirill Eremenko: This is episode number 281 with Founder and Director
of Digital Strategy at Webfor, Kevin Getch.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome to the SuperDataScience podcast. My name
is Kirill Eremenko, Data Science Coach and Lifestyle
Entrepreneur. Each week we bring you inspiring
people and ideas to help you build your successful
career in data science. Thanks for being here today
and now let's make the complex simple.
Hadelin: This podcast is brought to you by Bluelife AI. Bluelife
AI is a company that empowers businesses to make
massive profits by leveraging artificial intelligence at
no upfront cost.
Kirill Eremenko: That's correct. You heard it right, we are so sure about
artificial intelligence that we will create a customized
AI solution for you and you won't need to pay unless it
actually adds massive value to your business.
Hadelin: If you're interested to try out artificial intelligence in
your business, go to www.bluelife.ai, fill in the form
and we'll get back to you as quick as possible.
Kirill Eremenko: Once again, that's www.bluelife.ai and Hadelin and I
both look forward to working together with you.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, ladies
and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on
the show today. Today we're talking about marketing.
We've got the Founder and Director of Digital Strategy
at Webfor which is a marketing agency in the US.
Kevin is an expert in the space of marketing. He's also
a published author. His book, Future Proof Your
Marketing just came out a few days ago.
Kirill Eremenko: In this podcast, we won't be talking about data science
algorithms or artificial intelligence methodologies and
frameworks and things like that. If you're after that,
then this is not the podcast for that. This podcast is
specifically about marketing and where this field is
going. The reason why I wanted to invite Kevin onto
the show is because marketing is one of the fields
where data science is most heavily applied, where
artificial intelligence is making massive impacts and
it's important to know, if you're in this field or if you
want to get into this field, it's important to know where
it's going.
Kirill Eremenko: Kevin has some fantastic ideas about that. You will
find out about what the future of marketing looks like
and of course we'll touch on the surface about some of
the technologies, but overall you will need to make
your own conclusions on what you will need to study
or what you will need to incorporate in your data
science career in order to break into this field.
Kirill Eremenko: However, in terms of the marketing space itself, it's a
very valuable conversation. Here are a couple of things
that you will learn from this podcast. What digital
assistants are and where they're going with the help of
people like Ray Kurzweil at Google. Kevin's philosophy
on what gets measured gets managed and what it
means for marketing and data science. Why websites
are less and less important, how segmentation is
slowly transitioning to personalization, creating
amazing customer experiences, disk profiles, natural
language processing and computer vision and their
role in the future of marketing.
Kirill Eremenko: That's what this podcast is about. If you're into
marketing or you want to dive into this space and
apply your digital skills there, this is going to be a very
valuable podcast for you. On that note, without further
ado, I bring to you Founder and Director of Digital
Strategy at Webfor Kevin Getch.
Kirill Eremenko: Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast ladies
and gentlemen, super excited to have you on the show
and on the other line I've got Kevin Getch calling in
from Vancouver. Kevin, how you doing today?
Kevin Getch: I'm doing very good.
Kirill Eremenko: It was so cool talking just now that you specifically
told me you're from Vancouver, Washington, not
Canada, and I still managed to make the mistake. How
often do people make that mistake that Vancouver,
Washington and not Vancouver, Canada?
Kevin Getch: Honestly, more often than not, and even in the States
when I'm talking to people in the states that are
outside of the local area here they always think it's
Vancouver, Canada. You're not alone.
Kirill Eremenko: Do you know the story behind this? Which city came
first?
Kevin Getch: Honestly, I don't know. I just know that we're the
better Vancouver. I love Vancouver BC and I travel up
there quite a bit but I do think that they came before
us. I want to say we're about 100 and... We're only
about 114 years old or something like that. I think
they came before us.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay, that's very cool. There's a city in Western
Australia that recently celebrated its 70th birthday. So
young. When you say 114 that is huge in my mind.
Because simply Australia is such a young country.
Kevin Getch: US is pretty young too. That's one of the things when
we were over there and just the European side of
things. I was really amazed at the history and how old
some of those both buildings and cities were.
Kirill Eremenko: Yes, it's crazy. I'm in Slovenia with my business
partner we were traveling through some places in...
Was it east of France? There are cities there couple
hundred, 500 years old and so on. There's cities in
more like the Middle East zone that are thousands of
years old. How crazy is that?
Kevin Getch: Yes it's pretty insane. When we were over there in
London, we stopped by Stonehenge and I'm looking at
this and they're saying... Basically it's supposed to be
about 4000 years old. I'm just like, man, it's insane. I
really love that history.
Kirill Eremenko: The thing that also gets me every time is paintings.
Some of these paintings like Leonardo, Michelangelo
painted hundreds of years ago. They're still there and
they still look the same as they did hundreds of years
ago and they'll be there when we're gone. They're
paintings. It's crazy.
Kevin Getch: It's really cool. Who knows, someday we'll be like that.
Kirill Eremenko: Maybe. Anyway, Kevin, we met at Tony Robbins
Business Mastery 2.0, well not 2.0 but part two in
Amsterdam, a couple weeks ago. How did you find the
event?
Kevin Getch: Man, it was amazing. I had been to the first business
mastery. There was some repetition, but there was a
lot of new content as well. The repetition is really
important. I brought my wife with me, she also owns
her own business. It was really... For her it was a
game changer which I knew it was going to be. I was
really excited to have her there. Her business has been
growing and I wanted to make sure she had the skills
and tools to hit that next level.
Kevin Getch: Entrepreneurs were always being pushed to grow more
and that was really eye opening for her. It was great
for me too. The group I was with was amazing and just
the speakers and the content. All the Tony Robbins
events I've been to have been just top notch.
Kirill Eremenko: Absolutely agree. I think it is five days, every single
one of those days was worth the price paid for the
whole event. Totally awesome. What business is your
wife in?
Kevin Getch: She owns a speech therapy practice.
Kirill Eremenko: Oh wow.
Kevin Getch: She mainly works with pediatrics, so children
[inaudible 00:08:25] speech therapy.
Kirill Eremenko: Gotcha. Okay, very nice noble area to be in. You were
one of... It was so fun meeting you. I was just standing
there to get a tea, you were I think in line before me
and you are one of the most nonconforming people.
You were barefoot. You were walking around barefoot
what's up with that?
Kevin Getch: You're like, "Hey, you from Austria?" It's just funny
because I think you're standing up a lot during those
events, and you're jumping around and stuff like that.
I just find it more comfortable to take off the... I had
flip flops on that day so it was really easy. I just feel
it's more comfortable to take off the shoes. It seems it's
better for your body and posture overall. I just took it
off and was walking around barefoot. I'm like, hey,
why not?
Kirill Eremenko: That's so cool. Well, it was great to catch up. I'm glad
you could make it onto the show. So, Kevin, you've got
a lot of experience and you've done a lot of different
things and your book just come out, actually.
Congratulations on that. Tell us a bit about yourself.
You're now a published author, you're business owner,
you're in the space of digital strategy and marketing. If
somebody off the street were to ask you who is Kevin
Getch what would you say?
Kevin Getch: Well, if somebody off the street asked me I'd probably
talk more a lot about my personal life and some about
my professional life but I'd say, I'm a husband, I'm a
father, I'm very passionate about helping people,
especially focusing on my local community. I do a lot
of work with local teams in the area. I speak at
different events to help local teams like the Boys and
Girls Club or we have another rock solid community
teen center in the local area that I went out and spoke
at recently. Then I also own a creative and digital
marketing agency where we basically help small
businesses and medium sized businesses make more
money and really develop strategies that help them
grow their business by more than 30% on average.
Kevin Getch: That for me has been a huge part of just enjoyment
because my biggest driver is having a positive impact
in other people's lives. I'm able to do that and we have
now a team of 14 people where I'm not only able to
have a positive impact in our clients lives but I'm able
to have a positive impact in their lives and in turn,
they are able to have a positive impact in our clients
lives and in the community.
Kevin Getch: Beyond blessed to be where I'm at, I have two amazing
kids and a beautiful wife. If you ever hear me
complaining, slap me.
Kirill Eremenko: Love it. Thank you for [inaudible 00:11:22]. Your book
that just came out two days ago, well, as of when this
podcast is going to be released, it will be two days.
Future proof your marketing. Tell us a bit about that.
What is it about?
Kevin Getch: It was funny because I actually want to thank the
previous business mastery in Tony Robbins event for
me doing this book because when I was at business
mastery in Las Vegas, it was like, set some lofty goals
for yourself and it was like take away all the
limitations, all the excuses, all the different things that
are in your way because being a business owner and a
father and a husband and kids in sports and all that
kind of stuff, there's a lot of time there.
Kevin Getch: I've been making excuses. One of the things I wrote
down was, launch my book in the next eight months
finish and write my book. I knew it was a big task. I
didn't realize quite how big it was. I wanted to do that
for a few reasons. One, obviously, there's some self
interest in just growing our brand and all that but the
other part was really, I've seen this happen before. I've
seen when we went... When I say we, when the world
went from more of a print, marketing and it evolved
into more digital marketing, there is literally hundreds
and hundreds of businesses that just couldn't keep
up.
Kevin Getch: They didn't know how to adapt, they were still doing
the same old thing. The market was changing and it
was changing fairly quickly but not as quickly as
what's going to happen. My concern is, then a lot of
businesses that didn't evolve ended up going extinct.
Right now we're about to go through what I consider,
at least in my lifetime, the largest dramatic shift in our
lifetime. In the next five to 10 years, we're going to see
so much change, it's going to make the last century...
In comparison, it's going to make the last century look
small as far as advancements both in technology and
changes in consumer behavior and things like that.
Kevin Getch: It's going to happen very quickly. I wanted to write a
book that prepared business owners, marketing
executives, so that they understood what is currently
working, what's going to change in the future,
probably. Obviously looking at consumer behavior,
looking at some of the large tech companies where are
the consumers and tech companies pushing this
marketplace, and how do we create a strategy that's
not only successful now but creates the foundation for
what's to come. That's what really prompted me to
write this book. I'm excited to share it. I'm hoping that
a lot of people get a lot of value out of it.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. Well, thank you very much. You said
something is going to happen in the next couple of
years? What's going to happen exactly?
Kevin Getch: Telling you exactly is hard, but I don't think predicting
the future is all that hard when it comes to consumer
behavior and tech and things like that. For me, it's
just is pretty easy to connect the dots, so to speak.
What's driving this change... I guess I'll first lay the
foundation of what I call the macro trends that help...
Because I realized there's so many different micro
things are going to happen and there's no way to really
look at all those different things and really predict all
those different things.
Kevin Getch: You can at a macro level look at what trends are going
to drive the market, and then understand what's
driving those trends. In the book, I talk about what I
call the three P's that are these macro trends. Three
P's are personalized, predictive, and proactive. In the
next five to 10 years, and I actually... In 2015, I
originally came up with these three P's as far as
driving the trends, and they have definitely held true. I
just think that we're going to continue seeing an
exponential growth in these areas.
Kevin Getch: Personalization obviously has grown substantially in
the last four or five years and for the next five to 10
years is going to increase significantly. What's driving
all of this, to a large extent is advancements in
technology like AI, machine learning, and some of the
underlying currents that we're going to see catch up
even more the next five to 10 years is going to be
advancements and computing power.
Kevin Getch: Right now there's certain things that just from a
processing standpoint, the amount of information,
whether it be audio or video, it's starting to happen
more. In the next five to 10 years, computing power is
going to see with quantum computing and a number of
other things, we're going to be able to see such a
higher level of computing power, that it's going to
make processing everyday information and being able
to take and record audio, just all day long and video all
day long make it possible. By doing that, it's going to
allow for a complete change.
Kevin Getch: I can definitely dive into more details there as far as
the specifics, but I think for me, I think it's important
to understand that the largest or the most
fundamental shift for people is the proactive part.
We've been in a reactive marketing phase for most of
our lives. I mean if we want to go look for something, if
we want to go search for a restaurant or something
like that, we get online and we start searching for
restaurants.
Kevin Getch: If I want to learn how to fly a plane, I have to go in and
start typing in flight lessons, learning about flying, all
that kind of stuff. It's reacting to me, but in the
future... We're already starting to see this at a smaller
scale. In the future, it will be much more proactive. We
might be having a conversation and I have my digital
assistant that's in always on mode, it's there to listen.
It can take notes and be of use and value to me.
Kevin Getch: As it's always on and listening. It's basically processing
all of that data and because we're having a
conversation about saying, hey, one of my goals is to
learn how to fly a plane in the next eight years. It takes
that information and it processes and later it will pop
up and say hey, here's some information on whether
learning how to fly is right for you, and of course,
here's some ads for flight schools.
Kevin Getch: That's just a small portion of what I think, to me, I
think the large tech companies know that the Holy
Grail for them is basically proactive assistance. If they
have... If that's set up in place, it will provide so much
value obviously to the person who's using it that,
obviously, especially if they get the majority of it for
free there may be advanced features, there may be the
always on mode, maybe there's other things you have
to pay for some of this stuff.
Kevin Getch: As we go down the road, we'll see how that plays out.
Even just from a free standpoint, which I think will be
the majority of it, all of a sudden that digital assistant
becomes basically an executive who has an assistant.
They become the gateway to all the other things. Now
as you build that marketplace, you end up developing
something that could be the largest... What I call a
gateway channel to all other marketing channels,
whether it be social media, or search or email or all
these other things, you now have this gateway channel
between those things.
Kirill Eremenko: We're already seeing that I think in it's very basic
stages. For instance, I have Foursquare on my phone
which helps me like find vegan restaurants when I go
to a new city. It's really very useful tool. It's all user
generated data and people rate these places and
[inaudible 00:19:43]. Sometimes when I'm just even
driving through a new city, even before I decide I want
to have lunch, I want to find a place where to eat it, I
guess it knows through my GPS location where I am, it
knows about lunchtime and it pops up this
notification, "Hey Kirill, based on your previous... place
that you've eaten previously, you might like this place
in this city." I'm like, wow, that's so cool. I didn't have
to do anything. I just click that place and I go there
and I have lunch.
Kirill Eremenko: The recommendations are pretty outstanding there. I
think, would you agree that we're really seeing these
predictive or proactive marketing in basic forms?
Kevin Getch: Yes definitely. Actually I use almost that same example
in the book talking about some of the current ways
that we're already seeing proactive. Whether it's your
calendar, whether it's your digital assistant popping
up and saying, "Hey, based on the traffic and your
next appointment, you're going to have to leave in 10
minutes to get to your meeting on time." That's one of
the ways we're starting to see that.
Kevin Getch: The same thing with restaurants... The analogy I often
give is, if you are going to actually hire... You're going
to hire a personal assistant that was going to work for
you. It's like, would you want that personal assistant
to not really get to know you and just sit there and
wait for when you ask them to do something and
always just be waiting and then say, "Okay, yes, I'll go
get that for you." No, you're going to want them to
actually really get to understand you, understand your
needs, be proactive about serving those and taking
care of you. If they're really good, they're going to
predict your needs and offer up solutions even before
you need them.
Kevin Getch: If they do that, then they become so valuable to you.
That's what these companies want to do. They want to
create the best digital assistant you ever had. If they
provide that much value... I've been speaking to
audiences where I have a couple hundred people in the
audience and about 94% of the people, 95% of the
people would say, yes I'd definitely take that.
Obviously, if it's a free digital assistant, no question.
They're like, yes hook me up.
Kirill Eremenko: There's quite a quite a few around, right? There's Siri,
there's Google Assistant, there's Cortana I think from
Microsoft, there's Alexa, which one? Which one do you
choose?
Kevin Getch: Honestly, those are the top ones. Will.i.am, the singer,
writer, artist whatever, will.i.am is actually creating a
digital assistant called... I think it's omega. He has 300
employees at least last time I checked, which was
probably three, four months ago. He was working on
launching this digital assistant. There's not just going
to be one and honestly, they're definitely companies
that have, I guess what I'd say, they have big strategic
advantages in this marketplace.
Kevin Getch: Search is definitely the foundation of these digital
assistance. Companies with a really strong base
foundation of search can obviously come in better and
provide better results because they've already have
that huge amount of obviously data and experience in
pulling up and providing useful information and useful
answers. That is definitely a foundational element that
gives them a strategic advantage, as well as size as
well as other things.
Kevin Getch: We're truly in a position where anyone could come in
and potentially disrupt this marketplace. When I see
something like will.i.am I'm like you never know. If it
gets in the right market and finds a niche, honestly,
even Bank of America in the US has its own digital
system called Erica. Many companies are going to have
digital assistance in their different ways.
Kevin Getch: As far as the standout ones, it's funny because I look
at Apple, and Apple has so many strategic advantages,
but I feel like they've stopped innovating in the last
couple years, or at least aren't positioning themselves
as much to take advantage of the things that they
could and maybe that's purposeful. Maybe that's just
part of the direction they're going. They have a
strategic advantage in a lot of way.
Kevin Getch: In the US, iPhone has a large percentage of the
market. Whereas Google and Android operating system
globally has a larger percentage of the market. Then
obviously, Amazon has a huge advantage as well, for
people shopping patterns. In home digital assistance,
they actually have a larger footprint than a lot of
companies do with Alexa in home. Each one has its
advantages. For someone like Google who basically is
just... Part of their strategic advantage is they're the
most used search engine, and pretty much soon the
digital assistant will just be baked into everything
there. They'll have the largest, I guess, user base of
people using digital assistance.
Kirill Eremenko: Very interesting. Basically, at this point, doesn't really
matter which one you choose. Just pick one and go
with it.
Kevin Getch: I mean, everyone has their own preferences. If you
want to get serious and be like, which one is the best, I
think people have their preferences. From an accuracy
and helpfulness standpoint, Google's digital assistant
beats all the others pretty hands down. Siri has
normally been pretty bad. Whereas Alexa is in the
middle. Cortana is even looking... It seems to me there
may be getting... They're trying to find their own niche
outside of just being a general digital assistant. We'll
see what path that they go in.
Kevin Getch: When I talked to some of my friends, people at Google
or people at Microsoft that are in the know in these
areas. It's really interesting, because they are very
much so looking at not only like digital systems, but
digital assistants that are, I guess, have emotional
awareness based on the tone of your voice. At some
point based on biometric feedback by being able to see
facial expressions and things like that.
Kevin Getch: Google actually has a patent since 2012, actually, a
patent on biometric feedback for changing their search
results. They're not using it at this point, but if at
some point, they have a visual capability to see your
face while you're doing a search, and they see, your
facial expression isn't satisfied with the result. They
could use that as feedback to determine maybe these
weren't the best results.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow. That's crazy.
Kevin Getch: They've been thinking about this for a while. It's not
something that's just came up. It's just a matter of I
think... Actually, one of the things I find really
interesting is Google hired... What's his name? Ray
Kurzweil. Are you familiar with Ray Kurzweil?
Kirill Eremenko: Yes. The predictor of the future.
Kevin Getch: Yes, he's got an 86% accuracy rate. Well, they hired
him back in... Was it 2013 I think? It was around that
time. The big thing that he was bringing to Google was
one that was obviously his... A little backstory, Ray
Kurzweil has never worked for another company. He's
always had his own business. Obviously, he doesn't
need to work for anyone.
Kirill Eremenko: Yes he created the synthesizer back in the day I think.
Kevin Getch: He's actually created so many different things and
been part of it. He's a genius. He's a futurist. He's a
genius. Why would he go to work for Google? Honestly,
it's because they have the, I guess, the most of the
foundational elements, in order for him to create what
he wants to create. In order to create a digital
assistant that really understands the information, the
people.
Kevin Getch: What I thought was really interesting was, everybody
was like, "Why is Ray Kurzweil being assigned to the
auto reply in Gmail?" He was in charge of that. It's
because of data science. Data scientists understand
that. They look at that and they go, "Okay, what is the
biggest data spot where people are having
conversations, where I could actually train a machine
learning algorithm to understand these
communications that are going on?" Then I can also
start providing responses and based on how people
select those responses, I can create reinforcement
around what was accurate and what wasn't accurate.
Kevin Getch: That's how they've been training the digital assistant
throughout this time, is looking at conversations in
Gmail and teaching. Basically learning how to have a
conversation and how to provide responses. Those are
some of the foundational elements as I look forward,
and I see how far we've come already and then what
the next five to 10 years holds. It's really... To me, it's
really exciting. I'm excited to see where we're going to
go.
Kirill Eremenko: Those predictions are getting so good. Now they're
predicting the topic of the email. I was writing up an
email earlier today. I click the subject line, and the
topic just appeared and there was exactly what I
wanted to put in there. Then I actually deleted it, tried
to come up with something better just for the sake of
my ego. I couldn't. I just left whatever the assistance...
It's crazy.
Kirill Eremenko: You mentioned data science and I think this is a good
segue to that. What's the whole role of data science,
artificial intelligence analytics in this new future of
digital systems that's coming?
Kevin Getch: Oh, man, it's... That's a really interesting question. I
think there's actually a lot of different aspects. That's a
big question because one, AI, machine learning is
driving... is going to be driving this. It's going to be one
of the key drivers for these macro trends, pushing
them forward. As far as the future, our ability to
process massive amounts of data, and be able to
intelligently at scale, provide solutions and good
answers and good assistance throughout this process.
Kevin Getch: Then it's all going to be done by obviously data
scientists, machine learning, people who are
professionals in AI and machine learning on that side
of things. That's all going to be driven by them and
there's obviously a shortage in that area. There
definitely needs to... I keep telling people if you want to
get in a growing field, a really in demand field where
people will basically pay you to go to school to some
extent, get into data science. Get into just AI, machine
learning programming area things.
Kevin Getch: To me, that's the backbone that's going to drive things.
I also think it's important to understand analytics is
going to have to change to some extent as we grow.
Our organization is very analytic driven company. We
want to make sure... We have a saying. It's actually
what gets measured gets managed. Something you
hear throughout our organization all the time.
Kevin Getch: Whatever we're doing from our marketing campaigns,
we want to have measurement in place to be able to
track what's effective and what actions are the users
taking and understanding what we want them to do
and what they want to do and finding that sweet spot
in the middle. As we move towards much more audio,
as we move towards different modes of interaction,
we're going to have to capture different things to some
extent.
Kevin Getch: Some people... We're already to the point where if
you're looking for a restaurant, someone may never
visit your website, because they might be searching on
Google or Yelp, or Foursquare, like you mentioned.
They might be looking at these different sources. They
may never end up visiting the website. It's important to
understand and have the right analytics data and be
able to pull all that information in so that you
understand what's actually effective for marketing.
What's getting us attention, what's getting... Where are
people taking the actions we want them to take.
Whether it's directions to our office, whether it's phone
calls, calling into our office, whether it's someone
filling out a form or making a purchase online.
Kevin Getch: All those things, to some extent, are trackable now.
One of the areas that is really interesting to me in the
future, and we're seeing it right now with some of our
clients is retail locations where we can actually get
data around how many people are actually driving into
the office based on anonymized data.
Kevin Getch: There's a lot of different things we'll see I think going
forward that analytics is going to need to change to
some extent to keep up with the changes in both
consumer behavior and how they act and where they
go, and all that kind of stuff. In 10 years... I definitely
think the website is a critical component and it's one
that businesses own. They need to be very... They
definitely need to be very focused on that.
Kevin Getch: But there are some businesses, and some of these are
probably smaller businesses that may not need a
website as much in the next 10 years. They'll have
these other platforms, they'll have ways of doing it. It's
interesting, and it's becoming fragmented and that's
part of the challenge, but I don't know. To me, that's
exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of opportunity for us
to help businesses because it is getting so fragmented,
but that fragmentation offers opportunity, because it
allows us to target more effectively in some of those
areas to.
Kirill Eremenko: Got you. You mentioned in your company, what gets
measured, gets managed. Can you give us a couple of
examples? What do you measure in your company
about your clients and how does that help you manage
those relationships?
Kevin Getch: Definitely. One of the clients we just brought on
recently, they're big in the education space. They have
148 locations around in the United States. When we
first started working with them, we had seen that
there had been a downward trend in their traffic. A
downward trend in the number of conversions. People
taking actions, in this case, filling out a form on the
website.
Kevin Getch: They weren't tracking phone calls really by channel.
They didn't know which channels were driving phone
calls. They had all of their local listings. Their business
name, address, phone number for all those different
locations. They did have what are called UTM tracking
parameters on those sites, but the way they were set
up was wrong. It was actually putting everything in the
wrong bucket.
Kevin Getch: I'll give you an idea of what we did was we actually
went in there and we switched over how they're call
tracking setup so that we can see... When someone
comes to their website, we use dynamic number
insertion so it changes the phone number based on
the channel that they're coming from. Whether it's
social, or search, which search engine so we can track
and actually get data around where that information is
coming from.
Kevin Getch: Then we also know from those calls, it's integrated
with their CRM data. We know ultimately, we can
track to some extent, did those calls turn into a good
lead? Then ultimately, did they end up becoming a
client. We can close that attribution gap between leads
and conversions and actual revenue, with a good
amount of accuracy. That was one portion.
Kevin Getch: The other portion was they're setting up their on site
analytics correctly, moving them over to Google Tag
Manager. Getting just better data, and then fixing all
of their local listings, because the UTM tags... There's
little things and people don't realize that sometimes in
a UTM tracking parameter if for source, if they put in...
The traffic in this case should be coming from a search
engine, because it was all Google My Business listings.
Kevin Getch: They had something like GMB listing in there or
Google My Business or something like that. What that
does is it just throws it in other category when you
actually look at analytics. This becomes a problem
when you're trying to understand and go up say 90%
of your conversions are coming from other. We don't
really know what that is. Well, as we looked into it
more we discovered what it was.
Kevin Getch: As we started to crack that UTM tracking parameters
on their actual Google My Business listings, now
they're able to actually get real data. They see how
many conversions are coming from it. We set it up so
that they know that it was coming from each
individual location. Then that individual location pulls
into their CRM data as well. Then it's about closing
that attribution gap so they understand where are we
getting our inquiries from?
Kevin Getch: Then are those inquiries turning into customers? How
much revenue do those customers equate to so that
they can look at what's their actual return on
investment? Because most businesses unfortunately
don't know. They know half my marketing is working,
they just don't know which half, right?
Kirill Eremenko: Yes. I guess what you said about driving those
numbers all the way to the revenue and understanding
where that revenue is coming from, and how it's
distributed across possibly different challenge
channels, different types of customers, and so on.
That's a very important thing for data scientists to
consider. It's in the best interest and should be a part
of a role of data scientist.
Kirill Eremenko: I think it is it, whether it's explicitly stated or
implicitly, if a data scientist is in the marketing space,
what the business cares about is the revenue. Is the
final bottom line. Nothing else. Good intentions or just
good work and things like that. That's not good
enough. Results and specifically revenue that's what
really matters.
Kevin Getch: Well, ultimately, that supports their clients, and that
supports their team. Because if they're putting... Will
say for a company, they're putting $100,000 behind a
marketing tactic that isn't working. That's not
effective. It's actually creating more costs for their
customers, it's bloated, they can't pay their employees
as much. If they can be more effective in their actual
marketing tactics, they can better serve their
customers, both the external ones and the internal
ones.
Kirill Eremenko: Yep. What role does segmentation play in all of this?
That's a big part or one of the core value adds that
data science can offer in space through machine
learning or through other techniques on segmentation
of customers. What kind of role does segmentation
play in Modern Marketing?
Kevin Getch: Well, the role it plays right now is already really cool.
The role it's going to play in the future is going to be
even cooler. Segmentation... Right now, you can
segment by different customer types. There's different
ways to set that up, whether you have customers that
are actually coming in and logging in based off their
previous, I guess, experience with you and your
website. You can start segmenting and changing the
messaging for different audiences based on their
previous experience with you in different ways.
Kevin Getch: Maybe they visited your website, and now they come
back, you could say welcome back. If they put in,
signed up for an email form in the past and put in
their name, you could say, welcome back, Kevin, or
you could start personalizing it a little bit more to
them because you've gathered this data on them and
you now know that, hey, this person is coming back
and it's Kevin.
Kevin Getch: When you start to personalize those things, it's like if
you send out an email to someone and just say, "Hey,
you." Or don't even address them by name, the
effectiveness rate of that drop significantly, but if you
actually address it to them, personalize it to them, so
it's being sent to them, the effectiveness is much
higher.
Kevin Getch: We're already starting to see that with our current
audiences. I still look at it as being a little... in its
infancy, because you might have customers who are
logged in or have accounts with you. Maybe it's an E-
commerce site, or maybe it's a educational based site,
whatever it may be. You can personalize based off that
information. Knowing they have certain experience
level with you, maybe they've reached a certain point
with you, they've been a customer for so long. You can
change your messaging. You can change your offers to
this.
Kevin Getch: I find this to be awesome but part of me is also torn
because I know what's going to happen in the future
and I already want it to be there. What I'd love to be
able to do is where segmentation is going to go is, by
utilizing machine learning is the only way I see this
possibly happening, is at scale being able to
communicate with large number of customers in a
personalized fashion that is going to be more effective
for every single individual as opposed to audience
segments.
Kevin Getch: Right now, for instance, Google, will use this audience
segments but they also personalize down to the
individual level to some extent based off of maybe
location or based off of search history and things like
that. For us, for business owners with a website, we
can start to personalize more effectively based of
location and based of previous history with the website
experience with you, and the business and the website
and things like that.
Kevin Getch: That's great but I think as Google's algorithm or
search engines algorithms become more down to the
individual level where they get to know you, we also as
businesses need to think about those three P's and
how can we be more personalized? How can we predict
the customers needs and how can we be proactive,
right?
Kevin Getch: Segmentation is going to become even more critical in
the future because it's going to have to be done at a
algorithmic level and be able to communicate
effectively. Right now, one way we do that is with
chatbots. You can create chatbots but to me, at least,
the experiences I've seen, are not as personalizes as I
would like them. They're not very...
Kevin Getch: Sometimes they're very ineffective, honestly, then
sometimes they're effective because it'... It's more of an
if this, then that kind of communication, as opposed to
a learning communication where it's had 10s, or
hundreds of thousands of conversations and it's
learned different patterns around people and how to
communicate effectively with those people based on
the words they use. We'll be able to look and
understand based on words people use, and maybe
when they start communicating with us
understanding what their disc profile is.
Kevin Getch: We might know what their personality profile's like to
some extent. We know that they prefer short, concise
communications and they like these words, or we have
someone else who might be on the far end of the
spectrum where they're very detail oriented, and they
want a lot of detail. There's going to be different ways
that we can communicate with them in the future.
That kind of segmentation is only going to be done, at
least at scale, it's only going to be done by machine
learning which is going to require data scientist to help
with that segmentation.
Kirill Eremenko: Very interesting. Basically, you're saying that
segmentation, as we see it today, where you have these
cohorts of customers, is going to be replaced with
personalization rather, where you don't try to fit
somebody into... Approximately, they fit into this
group of people, or approximately they fit into this
category of customers that we have. You find out more
and more information about them and personalize
your approach, your marketing, everything you can
towards that person.
Kevin Getch: That's exactly it. The only thing I'd say is you basically
would be drilling down farther. You'd still have the
categorization of this person is male and maybe in this
age range, or female and they tend to be... There
shopping for these general categories. You're still going
to have the affinity category that they're in and you're
still going to have what they're in market for.
[inaudible 00:45:43] those larger buckets but then,
with machine learning, with that capability, you'll be
able to drill down at the individual level, much like you
and I would be able to and actually talking to an
individual and really find out their specific needs.
Kevin Getch: What's so powerful about that is, when you find out
that individual's specific needs, what's actually
important to them, and then you deliver that, then
you're creating this amazing customer experience
rather than trying to just categorize them in this
general category, which is what we have to do now and
is more effective than not personalizing it, obviously.
That's the right way to do it. But again, we could fall
into assumptions. Not every male who's 32 years old is
going to have these preferences, right?
Kirill Eremenko: Yes. Very good. That's very [inaudible 00:46:36]. You
said that, already now, you're able to by the words
people use, create their disc profile, understand
whether there more detail or less detail, short phrases,
and so on. Are you able to disclose what kind of
technology, what kind of machine learning you use in
order to accomplish that?
Kevin Getch: Yes, there's a tool called Crystal Knows. It's C-R-Y-S-T-
A-L-K-N-O-W-S. Crystalknows.com and actually... I
utilize this and it's actually integrated with my
calendar. I also have it set up through... There's a
extension in Chrome. If I'm on someone's LinkedIn
profile, I can click the button and it will estimate their
disc profile based off of the information that's in their
social or their LinkedIn profile.
Kevin Getch: Actually, what's funny is I've done a lot... I use it for
interviews, I use it when we meet with clients.
Kirill Eremenko: Are you using it now?
Kevin Getch: Yes. I haven't used it with you, but I should have.
What's really cool about it is, it's actually really helped
me in communication because I am... In the disc
profile, I'm a very high D very high I. If I meet sit down
with someone and they're very high C, or high S, my
communication style may totally conflict with their
communication style. If I go in, and I know this person
is, say, a high C, I know they're going to be a little
more cautious. They're going to want a lot of details to
make a decision. Whereas I'm just like, "Hey, let's go,
let's move."
Kevin Getch: That's just my communication style. That's how I am.
That's fine but if I want to help them, I'm going to need
to communicate in the style that is effective for them.
I've actually asked a lot of the people, both that I've
interviewed as well as clients I've sat down with, and
I've showed them, "Hey, this is what I came up with, is
this correct?" And they're like, "Oh, wow." They're
reading it. They're like, you're not... It's pretty accurate
actually. I'd give it maybe an 80% accuracy rating
which is pretty good for just going off of LinkedIn.
Kirill Eremenko: Interesting. Basically to... This is interesting podcast
because you are obviously an expert in the space of
marketing. I'm in my head trying to convert all these
things that you're saying about the future, which is
very insightful about where we're going. I'm trying to
convert this into, alright, what does that mean for data
scientists who are listening to this. What kind of
technology should they be looking in for their future
careers, if they want to get into the space of marketing
or if they're already there and they want to be
successful?
Kirill Eremenko: Sounds like to me that a massive role is going to be
played by natural language processing. Not only just a
massive role, but in order to accomplish this
segmentation to personalization transition, we are
going to have to move away from algorithms like
sessions. K means clustering, K nearest neighbors and
other ways of creating these segmentations to
something that creates personalization. That is
predominantly natural language processing.
Kevin Getch: Computer vision, natural language processing, I think
are probably two areas that are going to grow a lot.
Obviously, natural language processing is more of the
foundation because everything starts from that
language. Actually part of Ray Kurzweil coming to
Google was understanding the... Coming up with
semantic search. He was big with semantic search and
understanding word vectors and creating an actual
framework for understanding the semantics,
understanding the intent behind a user's query.
Kevin Getch: There's a lot that he came up with. That's the
foundation. What I think is interesting is I think, we'll
see a lot more in computer vision as well because part
of the problem there is just processing power. It's
grown a lot so we've seen a lot. Again, you take
something like Google Photos, gives you unlimited
ability to upload your photos. It's the one of the things
I really like about what Google does is they're like,
"Hey, let me give you this free tool that's just massive
value, because now my phone's not clogged up with all
these videos and all these photos."
Kevin Getch: Then they're like, "Do you want the ability to be able to
tag and sort and view and search all your images." I'm
like, yes, I want that ability. I'm sitting here looking to
sell this elliptical machine. It's in the garage behind a
bunch of stuff. I'm like, I think I might have a picture
of it somewhere. I just go on Google Photos and I
search for elliptical and a photo pops up with the
elliptical machine that's in the garage only in half the
picture but it still found it.
Kevin Getch: That's the power of computer vision. That's why they
have such... They're getting this large data set of
everyone's photos and then they're using that to train
it, and then based off your interactions with it, if it's
actually working, all that kind of stuff. As processing
power improves, computer vision is going to come in a
lot more. I think, always on video will be something
that we'll see in the future. Maybe farther down the
road, but, and the ability to process all that
information and see everything as we go. Tie that in
with augmented reality and some of the other things
and the ability to process and record that.
Kevin Getch: There's definitely going to be a lot in both those fields.
I agree 100% that natural language processing is
foundational for all of this.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. Natural language processing, and computer
vision technologies. If you want to get into this space
of marketing in the way that is going to be in the
future. Any other trends in marketing that involve
technology or data science that you're witnessing
currently that you're anticipating?
Kevin Getch: It coincides but I think there's still some delineation
between chatbots and digital systems. I do think
chatbots are definitely something that is going to
continue growing significantly. Again, it's one of those
things where there's definitely a close relation between
chatbots and assistance to some extent. They're still
very clearly delineated in a lot of ways as well. I think
right now, as I been utilizing chatbots a little bit more
and working with them and testing them out for
clients and things like that, I think there's a lot of
different methods.
Kevin Getch: One of my friends and colleagues, Larry Kim, created a
company called Mobile Monkey. One of the things that
they've done is basically created a chatbot that is
integrated with Facebook Messenger. While that
doesn't seem... Okay, there's a lot of chatbots,
Facebook Messenger and all that, what I found really
interesting is the ability to then tie it in Facebook itself
and when you have a post... You might post on
Facebook, and you put in something called a comment
guard.
Kevin Getch: When someone goes in and comments on that post,
whether it's being pushed out, boosted or by an ad, or
whether it's just an organic post, a comment, you can
automatically have your chatbot, send them a quick
message saying, "Hey, thanks for commenting." You
can actually start developing that conversation
automated. Then it has a whole funnel that you can
bring them down and say, "Hey..." And start gathering
more information. Are you a CEO? Are you an
executive, marketing manager or a business owner
maybe? You might ask that. They say that, then you
can take them down this path.
Kevin Getch: To me, I honestly think that there's so much value in
that right now. My concern is it can come across
intrusive in some areas. You have to be really careful
as a business to not just go out there and be like oh,
let me do this. Let me actually test this. If you go out
to all your customers all of a sudden, and you have a
chatbot that's messaging them all these different
things and it's going through Facebook Messenger,
some people may feel like Facebook Messenger is not
the place to do that.
Kevin Getch: That's the problem when you have segmentation. All
those fragmentation, you have all these different
marketing channels and all these different tactics. You
have to not only understand what's appropriate there
and what's going to be effective but how is my
customer going to respond to this? Possibly starting
out with a smaller test and starting to see how that
works. Because I've had people message me through
Facebook Messenger and I'm like, "Why are they..." I
felt a little violated.
Kevin Getch: I'm like why are you calling me through Facebook
Messenger on the weekend. I don't get it. I barely know
you. Why are you calling on Facebook Messenger? I
think that's big. There's a lot of things that I'm really
excited about in the area of... I guess, just overall. One
of my main areas is just search. Organic search.
Search engine optimization as well as paid search.
Kevin Getch: We have a team of specialists that do all this but for
me, I think it's really exciting to see where that is
going. Machine learning is being used in search
algorithms for quite a while. The technology, the ability
to have better answers and questions. Some of the
stuff is fundamental. When I say fundamental, it's
more I think in its infancy. In the past, if you would
ask... You would go online, and you would search for
the Statue of Liberty, say, "Where's the Statue of
Liberty?" Then you would do another search
afterwards and you would say, "How tall is it?" It
wouldn't know what you were talking about.
Kevin Getch: It would just look for the words, how tall is it in a
bunch of documents. This is where semantics changes
it because you have this history. You have their search
history, you know, they just searched for the Statue of
Liberty. When you say how tall is it, it knows that
you're referencing the Statue of Liberty and will
actually tell you how tall the Statue of Liberty is.
That's just a small example of some of the changes.
Kevin Getch: In the US at least, you can search for a hotel. If you're
using Google Assistant search for a hotel and it will
ask you, "Do you know what dates you are going?" You
can say I'm going these dates. Then it will say, "Would
you like to narrow the things by amenities or pricing or
ratings. Things like that." You can start to narrow it.
It's all voice. This is all done by voice or prompts on
your screen like a text message almost. Then it will
provide you personalized results.
Kevin Getch: That's already happening. I mean, to me, a lot of the
stuff I'm talking about is already here, it's just to the
level. It's growing at a different extent. To me, I think
some of the areas in search that I think businesses
can take advantage of is a lot of the searches. What
Google's trying to do is they move to at one point
becoming more of what they call an answer engine
where they come up with answers.
Kevin Getch: I think they're moving away from answer engine and
becoming more of a... They're moving towards
becoming an assistant. That's the direction that
they're going. You can still take advantage of that by
making sure that you're creating the right kind of
content. If you know what questions your customers
are asking, you know what they're interested in. If you
really understand your customer really deeply, then
you can provide better content and better solutions for
those customers.
Kevin Getch: One of the, I guess, assertions that I make in my book
is that customer experience will become one of the
largest ranking factors in the next 10 years. The
simple analogy I use is, if you were referring your
friends to a business and they weren't having a good
experience, how long would you do that for?
Probably... Not very long, right?
Kirill Eremenko: Yes, of course.
Kevin Getch: This is the same with a search engine, their business
is dependent on how well they do at referring people to
your business. They're looking, understanding the
customer understanding who they're referring to and
is this going to provide value for them? Is this going to
meet their needs, the intent of what they're searching
for? The better you can do at providing that the better.
Customer experience, whether it be when someone
comes to your website, does it load quickly? Do they
find what they're looking for? Is the website laid out in
a mobile friendly fashion?
Kevin Getch: All those different factors come into play, as well as
how's the content laid out and does it answer the
question specifically or is it buried in a bunch of other
information on the site, there's so much that comes
into play there.
Kirill Eremenko: Very interesting that you mentioned where Google is
going because this actually echoes something that one
of my previous guests, Khai Pham, on two podcasts
before this one mentioned and he was talking about,
in the 20th century, we lived in a world of information
and hence that's where the search engines came from.
The 21st century, we live in an age of knowledge and
therefore the next step from search engine is a
reasoning engine.
Kirill Eremenko: Something that you ask a question... You can ask a
question not just get like you said one short answer,
but something that will do the reasoning for you and
do the research and give you the appropriate
descriptions, experiences, and whatever it is that
you're after to understand you much better. Sounds
like the Google Assistant that it's moving towards
might be exactly that.
Kevin Getch: Yes I would agree with that 100%. The assistant is
basically an advanced version that is, again, not even
just reasoning, but personalized. They're going to
know if my... When we look for a restaurant, my wife
likes to go to gluten free places, food preferences. If
you've seen anything about Google duplex, it can call
up and make reservations.
Kevin Getch: I could say, "Hey, find me some good restaurants.
Some place I haven't been to that you think we're
going to like." It could go out there and search and
say, "Based on people who have reviewed restaurants
like you have in the past that like those, have also
reviewed this highly." They could use that information.
They could say they have gluten free information and
items on their menu for your wife. Would you like me
to call make reservations? The system calls up and
actually makes the reservation for you as well.
Kevin Getch: It's little beyond reasoning and that's why I like to call
it assistance because it's going to actually do actions
on your behalf as well. You can ask it to go purchase
something. You can tell it to call and make you a
reservation. There's a lot of things that's actually going
to do much like an assistant would.
Kirill Eremenko: Got you. Well, thank you very much for sharing that.
This actually brings us to the close of this podcast.
Just to recap, you shared the three main piece of
marketing, where it's going, personalized, predictive,
proactive, and that's all going to be enabled by
technology. That's where data scientists come in and
they need to look out for trends that will facilitate this
transition and will facilitate the future marketing.
Kirill Eremenko: That's the best bet to be successful in the world of
marketing that's coming. Is to work on these skills,
work on these technologies, such as we identified
computer vision and natural language processing as a
couple in order to be most prepared for the future
that's coming. Is that all right?
Kevin Getch: That sounds great.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. Well, once again, thank you so much, Kevin,
for coming. If anybody wants to grab your book it's
called Future Proof Your Marketing. Just came out.
Apart from that, where else can people find you,
connect with you?
Kevin Getch: I love to connect with people on LinkedIn, our
company website, webfor.com. We have a blog on there
consistently and put up new information and
resources and stories. As well as my own website,
Kevingetch.com.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome. Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kevin,
appreciate you coming on the show today and talk to
you later.
Kevin Getch: Thank you, Kirill, I appreciate you having me on.
Kirill Eremenko: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for tuning in to the
podcast today and spending this hour with us. I hope
you enjoyed our conversation with Kevin and got some
valuable insights from what we discussed. My favorite
takeaway was the whole idea behind digital assistants.
Very interesting where the world is going. Possibly very
soon our search will actually be... Not just search but
a conversation with a digital assistant.
Kirill Eremenko: I think Kevin did a great job portraying what that will
look like in terms of how we're going to want our
personal assistance or digital assistance to be
personalized and therefore understand us better. Even
though we all have these privacy considerations and
we don't want our data to be leaked or anything like
that. At the same time, we will want our digital
assistants to know us better so they can help serve
our needs better.
Kirill Eremenko: That'll be a very interesting future we're heading into.
As you can imagine, data scientists and artificial
intelligence experts, machine learning engineers are all
going to have a massive role in that. Hopefully, this
podcast outlined what to look out for. Kevin's book is
called Future Proof Your Marketing. It just came out
recently. Two days ago as of when this podcast is
launched, two days before that. You can go and pick it
up and learn more about Kevin's perspective on
marketing and where this whole field is going.
Kirill Eremenko: Of course, as always, you can get the show notes for
this episode at www.superdatascience.com/281 where
you will also get any of the materials mentioned on
this episode plus the transcript. On that note, thank
you so much for being here. I look forward to seeing
you next time. Until then, happy analyzing.
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