In the Headlights: August 19, 2020 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

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Learn the 2020 State of Search Marketing from Directive Consulting in a new, free report »

Test every assumption.

We are living in (choose your favorite adjective) times, and with great uncertainty comes the necessity to re-prove past assumptions. Over the past week, I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my personal website, and one of the long-held assumptions I’ve operated under is that the SEO plugin I’ve been using, Yoast SEO, is the best tool for the job. A challenger for that crown, RankMath, had caught my eye previously, but an early version of the software was… unreliable, to say the least. However, in reading up on the state of SEO, I saw RankMath had garnered the favor of quite a few respected SEO professionals, so I thought it was time to give it another shake.

This time, it didn’t blow up my personal website (always a positive start). Before I began, I ran a site crawler over my entire site to see how it performed on basic SEO features like duplicate title tags, page load times, etc. I uninstalled Yoast, installed RankMath, and ran the same tool again. What did I find?

There’s a definite difference in lexical diversity in the way RankMath does its descriptions out of the box compared to Yoast. More lexical diversity is generally better – it means more variations in the language used.
Rankmath’s descriptions end up being longer as a result.
RankMath’s internal backlinking seems to behave a little differently – but not much – to Yoast.
RankMath makes the site run about 0.4 seconds slower in terms of page load time.

Now, all these variables are descriptive in nature. The next step in the test is to let my site run RankMath for a few weeks to see if my overall search traffic changes. After all, updating SEO practices and technologies is meaningless if it doesn’t generate any actual results.

The real lesson here isn’t about SEO – it’s about testing an assumption in a rigorous way to make sure it’s still valid. As busy marketing professionals, we don’t give ourselves enough time to study, to research, to investigate, and most important, to challenge our assumptions. When we fail to do this, we operate under old knowledge – and in a rapidly-changing world, old knowledge is dangerous. I was having a conversation last night with a friend who’s taking a digital marketing Associate of Applied Business degree, and the course materials referenced social media practices and networks from 2012, and SEO practices from 2008. Could you imagine walking into a workplace and talking about your MySpace strategy? You’d be drummed out of the office in minutes.

Yet how many of us operate under stale knowledge and untested assumptions? Our challenge as professionals is to stay fresh, stay current, and prove again and again that what we know generates results.

Here’s the takeaway question: what percentage of your work week do you dedicate to research and testing your own knowledge and assumptions? If it’s not at least 5%, I’d posit that your knowledge may not be as fresh as it should be, and your assumptions are beginning to age to the point of diminishing results, if not counterproductive results. Commit 5% – 2 hours of the 40 hour work week – each week to testing something you think you know.

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In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris discuss what happens when junior or naive AI engineers or data scientists make bad choices for algorithms. Featuring amusing examples with Anne Rice, EL James, and Stephanie Meyer, you’ll learn what went wrong, why, and how to prevent it from happening in your own data science, analytics, and AI efforts.

Watch the discussion now!

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In this week’s Rear View mirror, we take a look at the state of marketing hiring. How is the marketing industry doing?

What we see is clear: the marketing industry as a whole has resumed re-hiring after the pandemic’s initial impact. We saw hiring fall to its lowest levels at the beginning of May and since then, hiring volume has substantially increased. We don’t have data prior to the pandemic because we hadn’t been collecting it beforehand, unfortunately.

Key takeaway: for those looking for work, opportunities for work are increasing steadily. For those who do business with marketers, in a B2B context, know that while your databases have aged badly and need to be cleaned, there’s cause for optimism that previously vacant roles/points of contact may be refilled over time.

Methodology: Trust Insights uses the Indeed.com API to extract open positions from a geographic area focused on marketing analytics, marketing, social media, data science, machine learning, advertising, and public relations. The dates of extraction are April 12, 2020 – August 17, 2020. The date of study is August 19, 2020. Trust Insights is the sole sponsor of the study and neither gave nor received compensation for data used, beyond applicable service fees to software vendors, and declares no competing interests.

AI Academy for Marketers is an online education platform designed to help marketers understand, pilot, and scale artificial intelligence. The AI Academy features deep-dive Certification Courses (3 – 5 hours each), along with dozens of Short Courses (30 – 60 minutes each) taught by leading AI and marketing experts.

Join Katie Robbert, CEO of Trust Insights, and Christopher Penn, Chief Data Scientist of Trust Insights, for three separate courses in the academy:

5 use cases of AI for content marketing
Intelligent Attribution Modeling for Marketing
Detecting and Mitigating BIAS in Marketing AI

The Academy is designed for manager-level and above marketers, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning you do not need a background in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what you learn. One registration gives you unlimited access to all the courses, an invitation to a members-only Slack Instance, and access to new courses every quarter.

Join now and save $100 off registration when you go to TrustInsights.ai/aiacademy and use registration code PENN100 today.

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

Data Science and AI

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Content Marketing

Get Back To Work

We’ve changed things up in Get Back To Work, and we’re looking at the top 310 metro areas in the United States by population. This will give you a much better sense of what the overall market looks like, and will cover companies hiring in multiple locations. Want the entire, raw list? Join our Slack group!

What do you do with this information?

By looking at this data, you’ll see what the most popular titles are; use any of the major job/career sites to ensure your resume/CV/LinkedIn profile matches keywords and phrases for those titles. For companies, search job sites for those companies specifically to see all the open positions and apply for them.

You can also hit up LinkedIn and see who you know at companies listed, and see if your connections have any inside tips on hiring.

Top Marketing Positions by Count, Manager and Above

Marketing Manager : 460 open positions
Digital Marketing Manager : 271 open positions
Social Media Manager : 183 open positions
Account Manager : 174 open positions
Director of Marketing : 163 open positions
Marketing Director : 141 open positions
Project Manager : 130 open positions
Product Manager : 116 open positions
Program Manager : 86 open positions
Product Marketing Manager : 83 open positions

Top Marketing Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above

Amazon.com Services LLC : 133 open positions
Google : 102 open positions
Pearson : 86 open positions
Amazon Web Services, Inc. : 71 open positions
Northrop Grumman : 68 open positions
Facebook : 48 open positions
Flosum : 44 open positions
Walmart : 43 open positions
Interdependence : 42 open positions
Verizon : 42 open positions

Top Locations of Hiring Companies by Count, Manager and Above

New York, NY : 583 open positions
San Francisco, CA : 384 open positions
Austin, TX : 380 open positions
Chicago, IL : 343 open positions
Seattle, WA : 308 open positions
Atlanta, GA : 261 open positions
Boston, MA : 244 open positions
Los Angeles, CA : 238 open positions
San Diego, CA : 201 open positions
Denver, CO : 195 open positions

Featured Partners

Our Featured Partners are companies we work with and promote because we love their stuff. If you’ve ever wondered how we do what we do behind the scenes, chances are we use the tools and skills of one of our partners to do it.

Join the Club

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 800+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today.

Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

INBOUND 2020, September 2020, virtual
MarTech East, October 2020, virtual
MarketingProfs, November 2020, virtual
MadConNYC, December 2020, New York City

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

Want some private training at your company? Ask us!

In Your Ears

Would you rather listen to our content? Follow the Trust Insights show, In-Ear Insights in the podcast listening software of your choice:

Stay In Touch

Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?

Required FTC Disclosures

Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.

Trust Insights maintains business partnerships with companies including, but not limited to, IBM, Talkwalker, Zignal Labs, Agorapulse, and others. All Featured Partners are affiliate links for which we receive financial compensation. While links shared from partners are not explicit endorsements, nor do they directly financially benefit Trust Insights, a commercial relationship exists for which we may receive indirect financial benefit.

Conclusion

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