Week 6: MKTG 348- Hubspot Lesson 1

Hubspot lesson one focuses on the essentials of an effective inbound strategy. An inbound strategy is less interuptive than traditional marketing, focusing on SEO, blogging, and the attraction of customers. Instead of creating commercials, they create videos to attract customers. It is much more customer focused, and inbound marketing wants you to find them, not the customers to find you.

The first step in inbound marketing is attract. You take strangers and turn them into visitors. This can be done through a blog, keywords, or social publishing. Next you convert them from visitors to leads. This is done through forms, calls-to-action, and landing pages. The last step is to close, this takes the leads and turns them into actual customers. This is done through CRM, email, and workflows.

The buyers journey consists of three stages: the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. This is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. Buyer persona stories should contain information about their background, their demographics, and their goals and challenges. These are all topics that were touched on in lesson one. It is important to have these concepts memorized because they are essential in inbound marketing.

Week 6: MKTG 348- Hubspot Lesson 2

Hubspot is a developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing and sales. Inbound marketing is drawing customers to products and services using content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optomization and branding. Hubspot offers a certification that will be a great resume builder. It consists of 12 video sections that give you information on ways to help improve your knowledge of Hubspot. The first section talks about the essentials of an effective inbound strategy. Section Two talks about optimizing your website for search engines.

Hubspot helps you with SEO, the  process of improving your website so it attracts more visitors to increase the clicks on your webpage. Having a solid SEO your page will get ranked higher and higher on a page. The use of keywords is first and most important step in SEO. In order to find more keywords for you to use is type one of your current keywords into the internet. This will help you find what keywords lead you to and help you find more leads. It is important to have keywords that optimize the amount of clicks, you should research your keywords and only use words that will get you lots of clicks. Try general words as well as more specific keywords to help target broad and specific audiences. One things that a lot of people forget to do is to optimize your website for mobile phones. Pages that are not mobile friendly lose lots of traffic. Hubspot is a great tool that will help you optimize your website. Look into getting Hubspot certified not just for your resume, but to help yourself grow your business.

Module 2: IDS 202

In the book Food Justice by Gottlieb and Joshi, they talk about multiple issues within the food system that have affected the world. On pages 59-73 and 87-91 they specifically talk about the issues of standardization of food, cooking becoming a lost skill, the increase of obesity, fast food companies targeting children, and school lunches. These issues are still issues today and these authors want to point out the problems they have noticed in hopes of changing the way food is looked at.

Fast food over the centuries has led to a standardization of food. There are many critics who say that fast food is changing the way food is viewed. The growth in the fast food industry has led to the loss of home cooked meals. School lunches sped up the decrease of home-prepared meals because children now had a readily accessible meal waiting for them at home (Gottlieb, 2013).

Post-World War II cooking started to become a lost skill. This is largely due to an increase in products such as microwaves and instant cookers that were made to speed up the cooking process. During World War II women were not only homemakers, but they worked jobs while their kids were at school. These convenient foods helped women save time and energy. There was also an increase in the number of convenient foods and fast food options. Foods such as dried soup mixes and canned soups were emphasized over homemade soups with fresh ingredients (Gottlieb, 2013).

The increase in fast foods and convenient food options lead to a major increase in obesity. There was an emphasis on fast and convenient with little to no emphasis on the nutritional value. Fast food companies have specifically targeted two vulnerable groups- children and low income residents. With the huge portion sizes and the low prices low income residents are drawn to fast food to fill their stomachs. "According to the County Public Health Department, the area in South Los Angles with the highest rate of poverty and food insecurity in the county also had the highest rates of obesity among adults (68)."

A major problem is the targeting of fast food restaurants to children. These kids see these delicious foods advertised and get hooked on the brands. Companies like McDonalds build product loyalty and establish effective viral marketing to draw in children. These parents like the convenience and ease of these restaurants as well as making their children happy (Gottlieb, 2013).

School food politics: During World War I school lunches became under scrutiny when a third of those called to serve the country were considered malnourished. President Truman signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 saying that the welfare of farmers directly correlated with the health of children. While programs like these helped feed our youth, they did nothing to ensure the quality of the meals they are being fed. The meals were focused on providing the right number of calories, not the proper nutritional value. In 2009 Obama and his agriculture secretary pushed to make changes in the broader food system, and help increase the nutritional value of school lunches (Gottlieb, 2013).

Gottlieb and Joshi make many valid points that should be analyzed even closer. The only way to increase the longevity of life is to ensure that we are fueling our body with the proper nutrients. I think the first step in fixing this is looking at the way companies target young children, as well as the addressing the nutritional value of school lunches.

  

References

Gottlieb, R., & Joshi, A. (2013). Food justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Week 6: MKTG 345 Introduction to Google Analytics Chapter 5

Tracking ROI is a very important skill because it helps businesses make huge profits. This week we will be talking about Shopify, which is one of the easiest ways to set up an e-commerce system to learn about tracking ROI with analytics. Shopify costs $29.95/month and is the best and easiest way to track ROI. Conversion tracking is important because it helps ensure that you are actually making a profit, and if you can confidently increase or decrease your budget to help grow sales.

Lets get started by going to shopify.com and click get started. There is a free 14-day trial available so make a login and hit "create your store now." Pick your name, click the online store checkbox and proceed by click next. Enter in your current address, answer the questions displayed on the next page, and last enter your product. You can add images to make your product pop even more.

The next step is to customize your navigation. Go to the menu on the side of the screen and click navigation, you can now edit your page. Another feature that is important is adding your product to the front page. Go to Collections, then click front page collection, select the product you added, and then hit save. After you have added your product to the front page go to your dashboard. You can add your business address and bank information, remember Shopify is not free. Click through the different tabs and you can discover dozens of ways you can customize your page. The more time you spend customizing it, the better it will look!

Week 6: MKTG 345 Surfing the Tsunami Ch 6

Last week we talked about the second step in responding to AI, adopt. This week we will be discussing the last, and best step, adept. Adept means getting directly involved with developing AI, by learning coding and how to work with related data. While you may not think getting involved in AI is easy, it will get easier with the use of assistive tools that make the technology more accessible. Theses assistive skills are ways to help you, not a way to replace learning the core skills. The more knowledge you can gain the better.

DataRobot is an advanced automated machine learning platform that can be used to help you learn about AI and machine learning. Machine learning is a core part of AI. It is not the only form of artificial intelligence, but it is the one that is having a huge impact now.

AI and machine learning relate very closely to data science. Coursera, DataCamp, and Khan Academy are all great tools to help learn about machine learning. Some books offered are Machine Learning for Dummies and Data Science for Dummies. These are all great sources to help you move from adopting AI to becoming adept. Hopefully you are starting to take AI More and more seriously and will look into these resources provided above!

Week 5: MKTG 345- Introduction to Google Analytics Chapter 4

This week we will be talking about some of the ways you can track the performance of a website or campaign, as well as some related terms, and the idea of ongoing reporting. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/. and click on the overview tab. This tab will show you recent data, based on sessions (technical term for a visit). There will also be a part of the page which lists sessions, users, page views, and a couple other sections. If there are more page views than sessions that is because people often view multiple pages while in a session. You are also able to see the average time a viewer spends on your page. The bounce rate represents the number of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages on the same site.

Another fun thing to look at is the location of people who are viewing your site. If you click on Geo, then location a map will pop up with a break down of session with the area it was in.

Another fun thing to look at is trends. It helps you look at how well your website has done over time. To do this in Google Analytics simply go to Acquisition and then click All Traficc. You can look at the percentage of traffic from computers or mobile devices. Doing this can help you tell if you need to make your site more mobile friendly. One thing to be aware of when viewing your traffic is automated bots that appear like regular users.

Week 5: MKTG 345 Surfing the Tsunami Ch 5

Chapter 5 of Surfing the Tsunami is dedicated to the second step of excepting AI. Last week we talked about the first step, Adapt, but this week we are moving on to Adopt! As a review adapt means to learn to pay attention to AI, and to be aware of where things are headed. Adopt means to adopt AI-related tools and platforms, so you can be involved in managing AI. AI is already starting to be used in eCommerce, in most of the major social media platforms people use, in devices, digital assistants, and even more. Trying to resist AI is not going to help you, instead it is best to adopt the principles even if you do not like it.

The first place to look for AI is in routine work that is redundant and boring. Tools and platforms can be used to make this work done faster and easier. In order to fully accept AI you should advocate for it so your company takes it seriously. If you take AI seriously but your company does not, that will not help you. AI is not just automation, it can do a lot of complex things as well.

AI has impacted Google in a big way. Think of AdWords, it helps companies track results of advertising. There are platforms that help simplify working with AdWords, such as Marin and Kenshoo, where companies with enough to spend can automate the process of working with many keywords and bids. Optmyzr is an example of an AdWords tool that already has automization in it. It allows developers to connect to Google and make us of machine learning.

Step one and two of AI include adapt and adopt. Next week we will move on to the third and final step of becoming adept. Adept means to get directly involved with developing AI, by learning coding and how to work with related data.