Helpful tips for jobseekers looking to break into tech
The future of the tech industry is as promising as ever—and it bodes well for today's job seekers. In 2015, the United States created roughly 6.5 million jobs in the tech industry. Recruiters predict that IT jobs will continue to grow by up to 22% through the year 2020.
While Silicon Valley in California is considered as the home of the main tech startups, other cities like NYC also have a consistently growing tech industry. In fact, New York outpaced Silicon Valley regarding growth with a 33% increase in tech jobs since 2009.
Source: Business Insider
Despite the ongoing rise of tech jobs, millennials and members of the “Gen Z” are faced with one dilemma—competition.
Tech startups know that, if they want to keep up with today’s level of competition, they…
Digital trumps offline when it comes to return on investment
A survey of 200 US retail marketing executives with the power to make budget allocation decisions shows their views of whether digital or offline channels give greater ROI. Over three quarters reported that digital channels gave them better ROI in 2016 than offline channels.
This is good news for digital marketers who can show their strategies and tactics are paying off, at least in the context of US retail. It's also good for those pushing their company to engage in a meaningful digital transformation program. This can be a useful top-level piece of evidence to build the case for greater spending on digital.
Source: Retailmenot
Sample: 200 US retail marketers
Date: July 2016
…
These tools will help you deliver better market research
Nowadays there is a great variety of different useful tools for market researchers that are free to use. Today you can use such instruments to enhance your business and significantly improve effectiveness of your work. But the wide selection means it is possible to waste your precious time for searching the best instrument among the abundance of useful online tools. To save you time, we have already made a list of the top 10 market research tools. These tools were chosen because of their free access, ease of use and comprehensive capabilities.
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is the most popular monitoring tool, and its interface is quite intuitive and easy. All you need is to enter the keywords for monitoring and indicate the sources (News, Blogs, Videos, and Discussions),…
Does your SaaS business measure these key metrics?
New research from Totango reveals the metrics that are being tracked by most Saas businesses. Their survey of over 300 SaaS businesses found that whilst the vast majority measure basic metrics like churn and web visitors, surprisingly few measure customer retention cost. Retention cost is important for SaaS businesses, because churn rates make a huge difference to long-term profitability. It's good to see 80% of SaaS businesses measuring churn, as this is crucial to long growth, as this post on ideas to reduce SaaS churn shows. Really that figure should be closer to 100%. If you're not measuring churn then your setting yourself up to fail.
For reviewing benchmarks of actual performance there are some great compilations including these SaaS business metrics in an updated Google Sheet from Nathan Latka…
A case study on growing a startup to a billion dollar company
7 years ago Zalando was just an inspiration; it was born from Robert Gentz'z fascination of the recently sold German startup StudiVZ which fetched €85 million. After a failed attempt of their first startup, Unibicate, a social media site for Universities in Mexico, David Schneider and Robert Gentz, with the backing of Rocket Internet’s Oliver Samwer, launched Zalando. It was a well-executed clone of the US Zappos, which quickly expanded beyond retailing shoes.
Once a novel single-country startup, Zalando has become a 6-Billion-Euro company and Europe’s top Fashion retail platform. In 2008, Zalando served only Germany, five years later they were serving fifteen European countries.
So Zalando gives an excellent international Ecommerce and digital marketing case study of how digital media and technology can be used to…
China to drive growth of global eCommerce sales
eCommerce has been a booming sector for several years now. The good news is that isn't about to stop. Global retail sales are expected to almost double between now and 2019.
However if we look at the data for established markets like the US, we see a less exciting picture. eCommerce will still grow, but the growth has pretty much plateaued. The big growth is in emerging markets, and China with over 1 billion people is the biggest emerging market of them all. Chinese eCommerce sales are already enormous yet are predicted to more than double between now and 2016. This will present enormous opportunities to international eCommerce businesses. That said, China is a tough market to crack so don't rush off too fast to established a Beijing office. Dip your toe in before taking the plunge.
…
An honest and frank look at the often flawed digital procurement process from the [supplier] dark side
The software procurement process is fundamentally flawed. It's a waste of time and I'd go as far to say that neither the buyer nor the supplier ever really get the result they are looking for.
I hold this view as a digital director who has dealt with a fair number of tender processes over the years and, while I appreciate where this process comes from and why it is used, I just feel it's time to urge businesses to start shaking off this hugely out of date way of buying when it comes to digital. After all, it's a legacy of the advertising industry that operates in a totally different way than it does now.
So what's the problem?
Overall I think it's that…
eCommerce organisations prioritise reliability above all else when it comes to delivery
Research by retail week and Metapack has revealed what eCommerce organisations value most in a delivery provider. The answer is clear: reliability. A whopping three-quarters of the businesses asked in the research agreed this - meeting customers' delivery expectations - was the most important thing when it came to delivery.
This is hardly surprising. Customers are not forgiving when it comes to late deliveries, or worse still, when they never arrive at all. As an eCommerce site, you'll know it's far easy to get a previous customer to come back for repeat business than it is to get a brand new customer. So when if you annoy a customer by missing a delivery thanks to an unreliable provider, you've probably lost that customer for good, and with them all that valuable repeat business.
So if you're an eCommerce site, make sure your delivery provider…
Gnip's API let you see the demographic breakdown and interests of your Twitter community
Importance: [rating=4] (For Any brand using Twitter)
Yesterday Twitter opened up the API of Gnip, a data platform which it owns. Why should you care? Because Gnip handles all of Twitter's audience data, and given that Twitter knows it's users gender, language, city, and favourite shows, products and music, this data is marketing gold dust.
Twitter opened up the API to let brands see demographic information about people that see their Tweets, and then also from people viewing their site when you have Twitter's tailored audience tag set up. Before you start thinking that this is a horrific breach of privacy, don't worry, brands won't be able see demographic details or interests for individual users. Marketers won't be able to see that Jo Bloggs, 22 from Peterborough likes swimming and patterned drapes. What they will get is anonymised demographic data for…
Which marketing skills are most sought after by CMOs?
This week, we're launching a survey on Digital Marketing Skills - we'd appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to give your personal views on digital skills development and you'll receive a free copy of the report.
We've designed the research to be quick to complete, but useful and the survey should take less than 3 minutes.
If you complete the survey you will get a copy of the report recommendations with advice to develop your career in marketing.
Take our skills survey.
Since we're covering demand for skills for digital media and technology, I thought it would be interesting to look at the demand for the broader marketing skills-set. Recruitment specialists Spencer-Stuart have recently published their 2016 CMO Summit Survey Marketing Skills…
