The concept of marketing characterizes the set of activities aimed at promoting goods or services provided by a company through advertising, communication with the target audience and potential clients, and delivery of a firms message to them. The trend towards digitalization affected the field of marketing as well. Digital marketing performs the same tasks using social media, web advertising, and emails.
The Internet makes it easier for a marketing department to reach a larger audience and communicate the message more effectively. A significant role in this is played by the opportunities provided by the development of data scientists. The current paper discusses the article on data science in digital marketing written in 2020 by the associate professor of digital marketing at the Rey Juan Carlos University, Jose Ramon Saura.
Data science investigates how businesses could analyze data set more effectively using programming, mathematics, and statistics. Saura (2020) lists several reasons why data science makes digital marketing more effective. The first one is that methods developed by data scientists could streamline the process of users information management (Saura, 2020). Secondly, scientific methods allow the diversification of the types and sources of collected data (Saura, 2020).
This means that new technologies make it possible to trace the preferences, tastes, habits, and behaviors of the target audience and customers. Finally, data science aimed at the development of “innovative techniques to create knowledge” (Saura, 2020, p. 92). According to Saura (2020), the critical advantage of data science is that it makes it possible to find a correlation between hundreds of variables. In contrast, humans are only capable of detecting patterns between two or three of the most obvious variables.
Data science is closely related to machine learning since it is a tool to automatize the analysis of datasets. Marketing specialists could train models based on machine learning to “extract actionable insights and identify patterns” from a companys database (Saura, 2020, p. 94). From what is written above, it becomes evident that the application of data science allows discovering non-apparent and beneficial patterns that could improve the marketing strategies of any company.
The aim of the research conducted by Saura (2020) is to reveal how data science could be used in digital marketing. Saura (2020) claims that through functional analysis, exploratory analysis, and prediction of results based on the analyzed information, data science helps to analyze “the content publicly published by users on social networks and digital platforms”, optimize preferences of customers, track their social media, and analyze trends that appear there (Saura, 2020, p. 99).
In addition to that, methods developed by data science are needed to offer new products more effectively, analyze reviews on goods and services, personalize and improve customer’s experience of online shopping, and even predict the behavior of clients in the future (Saura, 2020). It is also interesting to notice that digital algorithms and machine learning models could help identify fake news and prevent spreading (Saura, 2020).
To conclude, Saura (2020) lists nine indicators that could be used to evaluate the quality of the applied data science approaches in digital marketing. These indicators consist of reliability, accuracy, precision, validity, consistency, sensitivity, probability of detection, specificity, and prevalence (Saura, 2020). Without a doubt, digitalization significantly affects all aspects of humans’ lives and companies performance. It is impossible to deny that new technologies provide us with unprecedented opportunities. Marketing specialists should also keep up with the times and actively incorporate technological breakthroughs in marketing strategies.
References
Saura, J. R. (2020). Using Data Sciences in Digital Marketing: Framework, methods, and performance metrics. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 6(2), 92-102. Web.