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There are now more than 7,000 marketing tools available to help marketers work more efficiently. Companies are now investing a greater percentage of their marketing budgets in technology. Gartner reports that marketing technology accounted for 29% of the total marketing expense budget in 2018, up from 22% in 2017.

With the surge of marketing technology (martech), the skills required to be a marketer are evolving. There’s a rising demand for marketers to take a more technical approach to their campaigns. However, to do so, marketers need to develop new skills and competencies that help them use the influx of marketing tools to their fullest extent.

Here are four technical skills marketers need to keep up with the deluge of marketing technology.

1. Basic front-end development

Front-end development includes everything a user can see and interact with directly on a website, which makes it a critical area for marketing support. While it isn’t necessary for marketers to become experts at coding, understanding the basics of HTML, CSS, and Javascript can go a long way.

Basic coding knowledge allows marketers to carry out essential tasks, such as building landing pages, custom-formatting blog posts, making website changes, structuring and styling emails, and more. Basic HTML and CSS is also useful for creating custom elements, such as forms or call-to-action buttons on websites or email templates. Marketers that learn Javascript can perform robust A/B testing to optimize landing pages.

Another area in which a basic understanding of front-end languages comes in handy is when implementing analytics tools such as KISSmetrics and Google Analytics. With basic coding knowledge, marketers can get more out of these tools and be able to set up advanced tracking, custom variables, and other features for better analytics monitoring and reporting.

Marketers that have a basic knowledge of front-end development are increasingly valuable to the entire business. Even if a company has a dedicated front-end developer, marketers with basic development skills won’t need to wait on this person to make changes or test new ideas. Plus, they can work seamlessly with the developer to get ideas into motion faster. 

(Image: © Shutterstock)

2. Advanced data analysis

More companies are striving to become data-driven, resulting in a higher demand for marketers fluent in data. According to Venngage, only three percent of marketers are competent in handling large sets of data. This number presents a massive marketing skills gap in data analysis.

Collecting the right data alone doesn’t produce results. Knowing how to read the data is crucial  to measuring the performance of campaigns and strategies as a whole. For example, specific metrics may indicate that a campaign is performing poorly. Marketers will benefit from analyzing the data to decide whether to make changes to the campaign or focus their efforts elsewhere.

Today’s marketers need to be proficient in analytics tools, gathering and interpreting data, and creating data-driven strategies. Skills in these areas are in high demand and will allow marketers to make better decisions overall. 

3. Understanding of artificial intelligence (AI)

AI-based tools are replacing an increasing number of human tasks in marketing. IDC forecasts spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence systems will grow from $19.1 billion in 2018 to $52.2 billion in 2021. Marketers will need to have knowledge of this growing technology – specifically how to leverage AI strategically and how it impacts marketing goals.

Marketers can now rely on machine learning to automate some of the most common marketing tasks. For example, numerous tools automate email marketing and personalization. AI-powered systems can help marketers set up automated or drip campaigns based on consumer data.  

Automizy, for example, is an email marketing platform that uses AI to analyze subject lines, perform A/B testing, and resend emails automatically.

AI can also help marketers deliver engaging content based on previous buyer behavior. The more a customer engages with a brand, the smarter the technology becomes, providing a more personalized experience.

While marketers don’t need to know the mechanics of AI, they should understand what it can and can’t do. Knowledge of AI allows marketers to deliver better results and have a positive impact their company’s bottom line.

(Image: © Image Credit: Rawpixel / Pixabay)

4. Fundamentals of design (UX/UI)

As the amount of content rises and attention spans decrease, consumers are becoming increasingly selective about what they choose to engage with or view. Given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people prefer to read something beautifully designed over something plain. Good design – specifically user experience and user interface (UX and UI) – plays a critical role in getting and keeping the attention of consumers.

It’s essential for marketers to consider basic design principles when building landing pages or crafting emails. A user interface, for example, is the look and feel of a website or an email. This design can make or break a consumer’s perception of a brand. Likewise, a website that’s easy for users to navigate and offers a great user experience can build trust, leading to higher conversions.

The martech industry isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. An Ascend2 study reports that 87% of marketers believe marketing technology is improving marketing performance at their companies. Marketers that embrace the change and develop these in-demand technical skills are bound to produce more valuable results for their company. Those that don’t adapt to a more technical mindset may risk falling behind.

Albizu Garcia, CEO and Co-Founder of Gain

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At it’s heart SEO (Search Engine Optimization) developed as an extension to web accessibility by following HTML 4 guidelines, in order to better identify the purpose and content of a document. 

This meant ensuring that web pages had unique page titles that properly reflected their content, as well as keyword headings to be better highlight the content of individual pages, and that other tags were treated the same accordingly. 

This was necessary, not least because web developers were often only focused on whether their coding worked, rather than the user experience, let alone following web publishing guidelines.

This slowly changed as it became increasingly known that search engines used these “on-page” signals to provide their “Search Engine Results Pages” (SERPs) – and that there was an advantage to ranking higher on these to tap into free and natural organic traffic.

The internet has evolved a lot since those early days, and major search engines such as Google now process far more “off page” information when determining their search results, not least by using semantic processing, collating user data, and applying neural networks for the machine learning of patterns, trends, and personal preferences.

Even still, the core ideals of SEO remain the same as they always have – that of ensuring pages have the correct tags for targeting keywords, not just for natural search results, but also for PPC (Pay Per Click) and other marketing campaigns, where call-to-action (CTA) and conversion rates are essential indicators of success.

But how does a business know which keywords to target on its sales pages? How does a website filter transactional traffic from general site visitors? And how can that business increase its ability to capture targeted traffic from across the internet? Here we list a number of tools that will help do exactly that.

(Image: © Google Webmaster Tools)

1. Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is an excellent way for newbie webmasters to get started with SEO. The arsenal of tools includes ‘Fetch as Goole’, which allows you to view URL’s in the same way as Google does. This is a very simple way to detect and troubleshoot poor Search Engine Optimization. You can then modify your page accordingly and even review code to make sure your site has not been hacked.

‘PageSpeed Insights’ permits you to perform speed checks on desktop and mobile versions of your site. As mobile traffic now consumes a hefty portion of web traffic overall, this is crucial for ensuring mobile visitors access and remain on your pages.

The ‘structured data testing tool’ is also useful for checking data has been inputted correctly, performing validation routines to check it’s in the right format.

Google also very generously offers a free chat with a personal representative via Hangouts. You can make use of this feature during regular office hours for assistance with site issues such as mastering the various tools and detecting malicious activity. Further help is available visit the GWT forum. This is a place for Webmaster’s to connect and share troubleshooting and performance tips.

GWT has received the universal praise online with the only criticism being a slight delay between when data is posted and when it is reported.

2. SEMrush SEO toolkit

SEMrush SEO tools was originally developed in 2008 by SEMrush. In 2018, the project received funding of $40 million for expansion.

The keyword research tool is accessible from SEMrush’s super elaborate dashboard. You can view detailed keyword analysis reports as well as a summary of any domains you manage.

More crucially, the SEO toolkit allows you to compare the performance of your pages to see how you rank against the competition. For instance, you can analyze backlinks from other websites to yours. (this process is sometimes as ‘link building’).

Traffic analytics helps to identify your competitors’ principle sources of web traffics, such as the top referring sites. This enables you to drill down to the fine details of how both your and your competitors’ sites measure up in terms of average session duration and bounce rates. For those new to SEO slang ‘bounce rates’ are the percentage of visitors who visit a website then leave without accessing any other pages on the same site.

The domain overview does much more than provide a summation of your competitors’ SEO strategies. You can also detect specific keywords they’ve targeted as well as access the relative performance of your domains on both desktop and mobile devices.

SEMrush has received many positive mentions online but has been critiqued for use of SEO jargon such as ‘SERP’ which may alienate inexperienced users. A ‘Pro’ subscription costs $99.95 (£74.52) per month which includes access to all SEO tools.

3. SEO Spider

SEO Spider was originally created in 2010 by the euphemistically named “Screaming Frog”. This rowdy reptile’s clients include major players like Disney, Shazam and Dell.

One of the most attractive feature of SEO Spider is its ability to perform a quick search of friendly URL’s. SEO best practices dictate that search engines are much more likely to index simple, relevant and human readable URL’s over addresses which are a meaningless string of characters, so this feature is a major bonus.

SEO Spider can also crawl your site to check for broken pages. This saves you the trouble of manually clicking each link to rule out ‘404 errors’.  

The tool also allows you to check for pages with missing title tags, duplicated meta tags, tags of the wrong length and any other features which are not in line with the very best SEO practices.

SEO Spider also checks the number of links placed on each page to avoid the poor SEO practice of posting too many on one page. This usually confuses visitors to your site, causing them to go elsewhere and Google also ranks down pages with over 100 ‘outlinks’.

There is both a free and paid version of SEO Spider. The free version contains most basic features such as crawling redirects but this is limited to 500 URLs. You also can not customize robots.txt and there’s no google analytics integration. This makes the ‘Lite’ version of SEO Spider suitable only for smaller domains. The paid version $180 (£149) per year and includes more advanced features as well as free tech support.

4. Majestic SEO Tools

Majestic has consistently received praise from SEO veterans since its inception in 2011. This also makes it one of the oldest SEO tools available today.

The tools main focus is on backlinks, which represent links between one website and another. This has a significant influence on SEO performance and as such, Majestic has a huge amount of backlink data.

Users can search both a ‘Fresh Index’ which is crawled and updated throughout the day, in addition to an ‘Historic Index’ which has been praised online for its lightning retrieval speed. One of the most popular features is the ‘Majestic Million’ which displays a ranking of the top 1 million websites.

The ‘Lite’ version of Majestic costs $50 (£39.99) per month and incorporates useful features such as a bulk backlink checker, a record of referring domains, IP’s and subnets as well as Majestic’s integrated ‘Site Explorer’. This feature which is designed to give you an overview of your online store has received some negative comments due to looking a little dated. Majestic also has no Google Analytics integration.

(Image: © Moz.com)

5. Moz Pro

Moz.com is a platform of SEO tools that aim to help you increase traffic, rankings, and visibility across search engine results. 

Key tools include the ability to audit your own site using the Moz pro spider, which should highlight potential issues and recommend actionable insights. There’s also the ability to track your site rankings over hundreds or even thousands of keywords per website.

There’s also a keyword research tool to help determine which keywords and keyword combinations may be the best for targeting, and there’s also a backlink analysis tool which mixes a combination of metrics including anchor text in links as well as estimated domain authority.

Pricing for Moz Pro begins at $99 (£80) per month for the Standard plan which covers the basic tools. The Medium plan offers a wider range of features for $179 (£150) per month and a free trial is available. Note that plans come with a 20% discount if paid for annually. Additional plans are available for agency and enterprise needs, and there are additional paid-for tools for local listings and STAT data analysis.

Even if you don’t sign up to Moz Pro, a number of free tools are available. There’s also a huge supporting community ready to offer help, advice, and guidance across the breadth of search marketing issues.

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With the news that Huawei may lose access to Google’s Android platform, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer is in need of a new operating system for its future handsets, and its name may already be decided.

It appears Huawei has trademarked a few names in Europe, with the applications spotted by Android Headlines, which point to a new operating system which could be called Huawei Ark OS.

There are, in fact, several names that Huawei has trademarked around this moniker, including “Huawei Ark”, “Ark” and “Ark OS”.

New OS already in the works

We already knew Huawei was working on its own PC and mobile operating systems, in case such a ban came in, so the news of a possible name being trademarked isn’t all that surprising. 

There’s no guarantee that Ark OS does relate to the firm’s new mobile platform, but the timing certainly appears to line up nicely, with reports suggesting it may be ready for launch before the end of the year.

It’s still not clear whether this is officially the end of the line for Huawei’s Android partnership, or if a U-turn by Google may still be on the cards, but the Chinese firm will likely have an uphill battle if it is forced to move onto it own operating system.

We’ve seen a number of alternative mobile operating systems struggle to gain traction in recent years – such as Windows Phone, BlackBerry OS, Sailfish OS, Ubuntu for smartphones and Firefox OS – proving it’s not easy to break away from the established players of Android and iOS.

A key downfall to many of these alternative operating systems has been a lack of apps, and if Huawei has any hope of its new platform catching on outside of its home nation it will need to ensure it has support for the majority of major apps from launch – which will be no easy feat.

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Researchers in Austria have developed a smart traffic light that analyzes pedestrians’ behavior, spots people who are planning to cross the street, and stops the traffic for them without the need to press a button and wait.

The system, which is due to hit the streets of Vienna next year, uses cameras that monitor an area measuring eight by five meters. It monitors the movements of people walking near the road, and recognizes an intention to cross within one second.

“After two seconds the estimation becomes reliable,” says Horst Possegger from Vienna’s Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision, which created the system.

If a large group of people are showing an intention to cross, the light can hold the traffic for longer to give them all time to reach the other side safely.

It can also make accommodations for people with wheelchairs, prams or pushchairs, who will need a little extra time.

Stop, scanner time

You might not like the idea of cameras on public streets mapping your every move and predicting your actions, but Possegger and his team are keen to point out that all the monitoring and calculations happen within the light itself, and no data is transmitted to external servers. It doesn’t pick up individual people’s features, either, instead using geometric data.

The lights also have a system to report faults automatically, so pedestrians aren’t left stranded by the roadside if the camera fails. “This is a double safeguard,” says Possegger. “The system was developed in such a way that it can work round-the-clock even in a harsh environment and can also deal with voltage fluctuations.”

If it proves successful, we could see the smart lights rolled out in other countries too, where they’d keep the impending tide of autonomous cars in check.

Via Engadget

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With just days to go until the Mobile Industry Awards 2019, we are delighted to confirm the next ten members of the 2019 Mobile Power 50. 

Powered by TechRadar Pro as part of the Mobile Industry Awards, the Power 50 highlights the most important and influential figures in the UK mobile industry during the past year. 

All members of our Power 50 have met our criteria of influencing beyond their existing roles in addition to imbuing their businesses with their values and serving as an inspiration to the rest of the mobile trade.

Below is the release of positions 20 – 11 as we continue to count down to our the 2019 Person of the Year award, which will be announced on the 6th June at the Mobile Industry Awards 2019.

Congratulations to:

11. Gerry McQuade, CEO, BT Enterprise

12. Ettienne Brandt, CCO, EE

13. Shadi Haliwell, CMO, Three

14. Phill Sheppard, Director of Network Strategy, Three

15. Scott Petty, CTO, Vodafone

16. Brendan O’Reilly, CTO, O2

17. Ashley Schofield, CEO, GiffGaff

18. Alan Ritchie, COO, Retail Carphone

19. Nina Bibby, CMO, O2

20. Anson Zhang, Managing Director, UK CBG, Huawei

They join those already nominated in the Power 50 2019:

21. Claire Lorains, CEO, Tesco Mobile

22. Gareth Turpin, Sales Director, O2

23. James Kitto, Sales Director,  Samsung UK and Ireland

24. Matt Child, Managing Director, Endpoint Solutions UK & Ireland, Tech Data

25. Paul Bryan, MD Mobile & IT, Exertis

26. William Paterson, UK & Ireland country director, Alcatel

27. Richard Baxendale, Managing Director (Mobile), AO World PLC

28. Pierre Coppin, Head of Marketing, Sky Mobile

29. Simon Woodman, UK Mobile Director, Exertis

30. Amanda Lambert, People and Customer Director, Three UK

31. Jon Shaw, Head of UK Consumer Sales Operations, Vodafone UK

32. Fergal Donovan, CEO, Data Select Group

33. Anurag Khilnani, Business Development, Europe and Asia, Amazon

34. Sharon Meadows, Director of Devices, Products & Partnerships – Consumer, EE

35. Magnus McDonald, Director of Product & Category Management, O2

36. Andrew Wilson, Mobile Buying Director, Dixons Carphone

37. Sarah Edge, General Manager UK & Ireland, HMD Global

38. Bond Zhang, Country Manager – UK, Honor

39. Kate Beaumont, Director Product, Services & Commercial Strategy, Samsung

40. Jim Michel, Group Managing Director, Redeem UK

41. Anne Sheehan, Enterprise Director, Vodafone UK

42. Phil Lander, European B2B Director, Samsung

43. Sunny Metha, Country Head – UK, Ireland & Nordics, Google

44. Nazish Dossa, UK Managing Director, Brightstar

45. Terry O’Brien, Wholesale CEO, Daisy Group

46. Jason Smith,  Country Head UK & Ireland, Sony Mobile Communications

47. Christian McBride, Founder, Genuine Solutions Group

48. Ben Dowd, CEO, Onecom

49. Martin Flick, CEO, Olive

50. Paul Sisson, MD, A1 Comms Group

• To find out more about these high calibre executives, and the rest of the Power 50 list, click here 

The 2019 Mobile Power 50 is the definitive list of the most influential figures in the UK mobile industry during the past year. The list has been compiled after in-depth interviews with key senior figures across the industry, from operators and retailers, to manufacturers and distributors.

Previous winners of the Mobile Power 50 Person of the Year: 

• 2018: Marc Allera, CEO, EE and BT Consumer
• 2017: David Dyson, CEO Three UK
• 2016: Sebastian James, Group CEO, Dixons Carphone
• 2015: Sebastian James, Group CEO, Dixons Carphone
• 2014: Andrew Harrison, CEO, Carphone Warehouse
• 2013: Olaf Swantee, CEO, EE
• 2012: Simon Stanford, VP of UK & Ireland telecommunications and networks division, Samsung UK
• 2011: Guy Laurence, CEO, Vodafone UK
• 2010: Tom Alexander, CEO, Everything Everywhere
• 2009: Andrew Harrison, CEO, Carphone Warehouse
• 2008: Kevin Russell, CEO, Three UK

• For more information on the Mobile Power 50, or to get more involved in the Mobile Industry Awards 2019, visit the awards site here.  

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Worried that not enough of your home life is being recorded? Amazon has filed a patent for something called “pre-wakeword speech processing”, which could lay the groundwork for an always-on Alexa device that never stops recording.

The patent (via Gizmodo) was filed on January 24, and specifies “a system for capturing and processing portions of a spoken utterance command that may occur before a wakeword” – which would enable the Alexa voice assistant to act on commands you uttered before calling out Alexa’s name.

One of the few things that’s kept user paranoia in check is the existence of the ‘wake word’. You currently need to say the name ‘Alexa’ or ‘Echo’ in order for your Alexa-enabled speaker to start paying attention to your commands, meaning that you shouldn’t have anything recorded unless you specifically ask for it.

The change would mean you could reverse this order, dropping Alexa’s name casually at the end – or even in the middle – of a verbal request. 

Saying “Turn down the lights, Alexa” rather than “Alexa, turn down the lights” may not seem like a drastic change in the way you interact with your Amazon Echo. But it could signal a move further into ongoing surveillance by smart speakers that many may not want from their smart speakers.

User privacy is an increasingly hot topic, with reports of Amazon employees listening to audio recordings to improve Alexa’s comprehension. This patent, however, also points towards a future where you can interact with Alexa in a more casual, natural way. Whether you think that’s a good thing largely depends on whether you want a voice assistant you’re in control of, or one that feels like a friend.

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Today’s businesses rely on data, especially real-time data. Without it, companies have a slim chance to make a mark in their industries. The internet is the best data source for businesses looking to analyze their competitors, their products and services, their methods and processes, their successes and failures, and shared customers. 

As the scale of businesses is ever growing, so is the need to collect a vast amount of data both efficiently and rapidly. Reaching this scale requires three major elements: public data sources, automation, and vast networking solutions (known as proxy networks). Although all three are vital, the latter can make or break any data mining operation.

True value of data

Nowadays, data backs the most valuable business decisions, and almost all profitable business decisions are betting on real-time data. So, whether the information is collected for e-commerce market analysis and price comparison, or marketing lead generation purposes, or any other reason such as SEO monitoring, brand protection, ad verification, to name a few, it is evident that data-driven solutions dictate current and foreseeable business strategies.

Essentially, it does not matter which element of your business gains the most value from data, as the major challenge is to have a robust data gathering solution to keep up with your business’ needs. Regardless of business size, only data will allow you to stay competitive and outsmart your competitors in the long run.

As there is no shortage of great public data sources on the web (think public directories for sales leads or e-commerce marketplaces for price analysis), we need to focus on automation, first. Web scraping, also known as data scraping, is a widely used and thriving method among many businesses for extracting data from various internet resources. It is an automated process which involves the use of a software script or a web crawler to capture desirable information for later analysis. 

Most established websites are real data goldmines for a variety of businesses and entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, when it comes to extracting data from these public sources, more often than not there are obstacles to be faced with. Whenever a website receives a significantly larger volume of data requests, it starts to limit access to its data and blocks or slows down the data extraction process. Here is where proxies come in. 

Proxies, in short, allow an automated script to use different IP addresses. These IP addresses are what websites use to identify visitors, thus a web scraper which connects to a site through 1,000 proxies will appear as 1,000 different users to that site. If all of those connections came from a single IP address, any site would block it immediately, because it would look like a denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. By harnessing proxies, businesses and entrepreneurs can successfully gather as much data as they need, and consequently, capture and create opportunities on demand.

Although it seems rather straightforward at first: all you need is a good data source, a web scraping script and a proxy provider to kick start the data hunt. The reality, however, is quite different. 

Proxyway recently published an in-depth market research paper on the global proxy service providers and revealed the real quality, speed and overall performance of proxy provider’s products and services. The report’s performance section findings emphasize just how essential it is to thoroughly check, test, and evaluate every proxy network before starting any data gathering operation. Vetting proxies are essential for every data source, especially the most popular ones. Otherwise, businesses and entrepreneurs might be gathering data that is an order of magnitude worse than what the market has to offer. In some cases, bad proxies will bring back false data, further sabotaging a business.

Success rates for web data gathering exposed

Proxyway’s research team set out to test all major proxy providers in a first market research paper of its kind and discovered that web data gathering has a severe bottleneck. The performance research section examined proxy providers success rates while collecting intelligence from some of the data-wealthiest websites online. The results were surprising, as some established companies could not provide a passable level of access to some of the best data sources.

The report clearly shows that three proxy providers – Oxylabs, Geosurf, and Smartproxy – have the most versatile proxy infrastructure on offer with a highly-respectable 85% average success rate, while half of the providers offer below par proxies to aid data extraction operations. 

Perhaps most unexpectedly, the report found that market share leaders Luminati under performed when it came to the quality of products and services on offer: its network’s success rate fell over 9–11% below that of their top competitors, as well as being relatively slow as to other providers. 

(Image: © Shutterstock)

All about the data source

Every business must determine the best sources for data to unlock the most valuable insights. For instance, e-commerce companies would benefit from exploring the most prominent online marketplaces for data on pricing intelligence, consumer behavior or trending patterns. According to carried out market research, businesses that are after this kind of data should look into Geosurf, Oxylabs and Storm Proxies proxy providers to achieve the highest data gathering success rates.

Whereas, businesses in the travel industry would benefit from analyzing data from the leading travel and accommodation sites to gather insights on seasonal travel routes, tourist volume or price comparisons. So, when it comes to extracting intelligence from such sites, findings show that Geosurf, Luminati, and Smartproxy should be among the top picks for this particular audience.

Ultimately, search engines are the best data source for digital marketing. Concluded tests discovered that Oxylabs, Smartproxy, and Geosurf would be the most suitable partners to execute successful data extraction operations from the most popular search engines.

The bottom line

The proxy review website’s report reveals not only the strengths and limitations of the test subject’s networks against the most popular data sources but also provides an in-depth review of each proxy provider. Perhaps, most importantly, it allows businesses and entrepreneurs to base their choices on facts and reliable data, as opposed to marketing and advertising material. 

If more businesses would use the most suitable tools for data gathering and analysis, they would not only ensure that their web data gathering is more success than failure but would also directly benefit wider society by offering the best products and services.

Adam Dubois, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Proxyway 

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