3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE #14: Data Automation in Online Marketing with David McFetridge

Episode #14 of 3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE featured David McFetridge, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at Zenjob. We discussed how to get data automation in Online Marketing.

In this episode of 3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE, George Natsvlishvili is joined by David McFetridge, Senior Marketing Technology Manager at Zenjob. Zenjob is a digital marketplace for side jobs that build innovative tech solutions to shape the future of work.

David shares his experience as a Mobile Growth Expert in Data Automation in Online Marketing.

Check out all the other episodes of 3 MINUTES BULLSHIT WITH GEORGE on our website or on Youtube channel.

Connect with David and Zenjob here:

• David McFetridge's Linkedin

• Zenjob

Timestamps:

00:00 Dance

00:15 David’s Introduction

00:35 Mobile App User Experience

03:55 Bloopers

Transcript & Key takeaways from the episode:

• The marketing teams want to have control over the data that they send and also how they set it. But they are quite far down the list of priorities often for data engineering. Marketing teams have a few different options.

• One option might be commercially available tools like Zapier, which is super easy to use and contains a lot of integration straight out of the box and enables to link that set of different marketing tools together. However, Zapier is coming quite expensive especially if you want to send a big volume of data. Easy to use comes at the expense of some flexibility.

• Second option. As a self-hosted version, as soon you have several resources, you could use n8n. It is more complicated to use, but it gives you more flexibility.

• Third option. To develop an AdTech team for marketing tasks. As soon as you can get the server resources from the tech team, or if you can set up a server by yourself, using something like Amazon LightSail, you can set up a Marketing Automation Server. Marketing Automation Server will allow you to maintain full control of your data and you can send data essentially for free, depending on how much you are paying for the server. With Marketing Automation Server, you can actually automate the whole thing inside the Marketing Department.

George: The question is about automation in online marketing: How marketing department can get automation of the data?

David: Well, I think this is an interesting question, I think the increasingly the marketing teams want to have control over the data that they send and also how they set it. I think as companies scale their data engineering, the demands on the data engineering teams, and the tech teams are increasing. And I think, as we all know, as marketers, we're quite far down the list of priorities often for data engineering.

So I think when you've kind of accepted that you want to maintain that control over your data, I think you have a few different options: you have commercially available tools like Zapier which I think probably many people have heard of. Zapier is super easy to use. It contains a lot of integration straight out of the box and enables to link that set of different marketing tools together. Zapier is coming quite expensive especially if you want to send a big volume of data. I think, for more tech-savvy users it can be slightly frustrating to use. Seeing that easy to use comes at the expense of some flexibility.

You have alternatives. So as a self-hosted version, as soon you have several resources, you could use n8n. As n8n I think is a little bit more complicated to use, but it gives you more flexibility. So when you're using the web functionality, for example, you can define error handling and retry logic.

Once you have an AdTech team though, I think you really do have some more options. As soon as you can get the server resources from the tech team, or if you can set up a server by yourself, using something like Amazon LightSail, which I think it is super easy to use, you can set up a Marketing Automation Server. Marketing Automation Server will allow you to I mean, it can be something as simple as having SQL queries using a Phyton script to automate that SQL queries. And a CronJob to trigger that contacts been around for many years contract to trigger that Python script. And then you can actually automate with a data warehouse login that data exported from these wells and put it into your sales CRM tool, for example. I think the big advantage of that is that you maintain full control of your data and you can send data essentially for free, depending on how much you are paying for the server and your CRM team is gonna love you because you basically, can take a lot from them at your work. Let's say, for example, you want to do a promotional during the weekend. As a CRM manager, you have to do manual export every day, over the weekend with this Marketing Automation Server, you can actually automate the whole thing. The engineering team will love you too because we're gonna take away these kinds of small tests and let them concentrate on bigger topics.

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