Make the most of your data. VB Insight’s Jon Cifuentes chats with TaskEasy’s CEO and Upstart’s CMO about how to build a solid analytics powerhouse that drives killer results.
Ore mining involves digging through the earth to discover generous veins of material that can be turned into prospective riches. Similarly, data mining involves digging through a database to discover generous veins of sales that can be turned into prospective riches.
And running a lucrative digital-marketing program in 2016 is more than just filling servers with scads of data pulled from existing consumers and prospective customers hitting your website. It’s how you subsequently mine that data to discover the treasure that’s buried within that sets the profitable companies apart from those who are blowing their budgets on data collection because they don’t know how to translate the data into useful information.
VentureBeat’s upcoming webinar, “Data-driven: Customer-obsessed results through analytics,” will delve into Jon Cifuentes’ recent “The State of Marketing Analytics” report, which is derived from a survey of over 1,000 marketing-analytics professionals, a review of hundreds of vendor-driven, best-practices documents, and more. Among its points, the report references the annual Duke CMO Survey, which claims that 65 percent of the respondents lack the ability to accurately measure their marketing impact. While those figures seem disturbing and dire, Cifuentes’ cup-half-full vision concludes that it signals that “a huge opportunity is buried in the data, waiting to be uncovered.”
To that point, the webinar will also look at the state of data analytics through the real-world experience of some top companies’ executives who have been in the data trenches and emerged alive and well. They’ll recount how they structured their data-collection process, but more importantly how they then put that data to use to drive their businesses in the right direction.
One such exec is Ken Davis, CEO of Salt Lake City-based TaskEasy. His firm connects home owners and property managers with contractors who can handle such critical tasks as lawn maintenance and clearing snow.
“We facilitate services disposition in a way that provides the consumer with the same experience that they would have if they were shipping a package via FedEx or ordering a taxi from Uber,” said Ken Davis, TaskEasy’s CEO.
TaskEasy vets and ranks contractors, and ensures good quality service through a money-back guarantee; offers accountability for owners/managers who may not be local to their property, through geofencing and photographic proof to confirm the contractor went to the site and completed the work; and offers discounts to multiple property owners, such as homeowners’ associations and real-estate investors.
A large number of TaskEasy’s engineering team, Davis included, previously worked for Oakley Networks — a cybersecurity company that analyzed data to seek out threats and was later sold to Raytheon. While Davis said their previous experience “probably overqualifies us to analyze data related to lawn mowing,” their background gives them a unique perspective on how they can put data to good use for the benefit of TaskEasy’s customers and contractor network (the latter which is comprised of over 14,000 registered contractors, with 5,000 of them who “scored high enough that we continue to use them,” Davis said)
For instance, Davis explained that his team’s deep analytics background also enables them to better cope with and even predict what he calls a “wave problem,” where the number of lawns TaskEasy facilitates in a week may fluctuate from a “normal” count, such as those due to weather problems or because a customer’s kid mowed the lawn without knowing a contractor had been scheduled to do the work.
“There’s just a hundred reasons why that happens, but we now manage them aggressively and analytically,” Davis said, “so that, from a predictability standpoint and from a performance standpoint, we can still achieve near-perfect execution for our customers, because we understand that analytic wave in this case.”
If you’re looking for ways you can put your company’s data gathering to best use, you’d be smart to check out this webinar to get answers to your questions, and to hear more from Davis and other data wizards about their real-world strategies, tactics, and results.
Through this webinar, marketers will learn how to:
- Determine your organization’s primary objectives for analytics
- Winnow down your options to a handful of appropriate platforms
- Come up with ways to measure success
- Generate meaningful business insight from data
- Plan for the future by the ability to add new data sources and tools
Don’t miss out!
Speakers:
Jon Cifuentes, Analyst, VB Insight
Ken Davis, CEO, TaskEasy
Ware Sykes, CEO, Nowait
Mike Osborn, CMO, Upstart
Moderator:
Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat