Is Digital Analytics as a Standalone Expertise Dead?
Digital analytics was standalone expertise in recent years. Some companies built groups around it with analytics experts; others hired analytics professionals to act as support for their marketing team. Now it has been changed, and it’s a natural evolution for the industry.
Digital analytics is no longer single expertise you can build on as an employee and companies are no longer in need of a single digital analytics expert. This is the nature of the evolution of analytics, and it is highly beneficial for everyone. The new setup has high demands for everyone: digital analytics is a must to know, and everyone who has any single authority in marketing has to know some analytics knowledge.
Everyone is an analytics expert
Back to basics
As a marketing expert, you should be aware of the key performance indicators anyway. These are metrics that justify your marketing choices and demonstrate your success undeniably because they are hard figures. As a marketer living in the digital world, the core metrics have enhanced with various new ones from the digital analytics world. Meaning now, everyone who makes relevant marketing or business choices should know something about digital analytics.
This is the state when digital analytics has grown up finally. It has happened with social media; you can’t sell services now only by updating social channels. You should be expert in content, marketing and digital. Analytics is no longer a special place too.
Working with massive data sets and connecting separate sources: still an expertise
Of course, you won’t be an expert in big data but let’s face it: most companies don’t need massive big data knowledge, they just know how their funnels work regarding metrics. When a business has more sources of data and the number of files they are getting is beyond traditional digital analytics tools: they still need a good specialised expert in digital analytics. But most companies don’t need this knowledge.
Learn the basics or teach your staff
The basics of digital analytics can be taught via online academies or internal training. It is accessible and cost-effective to find out more. Now that this is not a unique place to visit, you can make an impact on learning the basics of digital analytics. This is what you can do:
- Follow current digital analytics experts and listen to what they say, learn their knowledge
- Hire an external training professional to teach you the basics of analytics
- Attend online courses or visit online digital analytics academies, the resource for knowledge is vast and mostly free or cost little only
- Hire someone who has demonstrated digital analytics knowledge and let the new one teach the others via internal training
- Start to cooperate with an external digital analytics expert
There are also added benefits once you mastered the basics of digital analytics:
- You will become more responsible regarding your business choices as you now know how to measure against them
- You will become more confident working with figures and experts in data
- You will get great eureka moments and insights from your audiences as you deep-dive in figures
Remember, if something is accessible for everyone, then it is not special expertise anymore. The basics of digital analytics are easy to learn and follow, and if you think you can outsmart the best analytics experts, you can still upgrade your knowledge.
