Event Recap: Data Analysis for Marketing Careers

Dear Marketing Club members and fans, on July 13, we had a great pleasure to host two great speakers: Clay Schulenburg, Manager of SEM at WebTrends, and Thimaya Subaiya, Director of Marketing Strategy at Salesforce.com. I have to say that we had full room, and lots of questions for our speakers, so the event lasted almost two hours. Our audience had an opportunity to meet our speakers, and talk about potential job opportunities.

Here are several facts that our speakers pointed out…

Clay Schulenburg has more than seven years of experience in search engine marketing (SEM). He explained the importance of SEM, and how companies can achieve better position and visitation from search engines. They should focus on key words, explanations and relevancy. He also pointed out the difference between SEM and SEO. For instance, for SEM to get a better position in search results, a company needs to pay (it is usually “pay-per-click”). Besides amount of money, there are other factors that affect the ranking among results that Google (or other search engine) organizes. On the other hand, SEO is a non-paid method, results are organic, and depends on relevancy, key words, etc. It is always better to be first in organic, “natural” search results, but Mr. Schulenburg stressed that even paid results are also effective.

Thimaya Subaiya has several years of experience in marketing strategy and planning. In his presentation, he focused on importance of data in any marketing decision. He pointed out that in order to make the right decision, and allocate the budget to different marketing “programs,” marketing manager has to analyze the existing data. In terms of Salesforce.com, he said that its marketing budget goes mostly on PR and online promotions.

Both the speakers emphasized that when they are looking for a new employee, they have several requirements: passion for the profession, certain knowledge and experience in data analysis field, previous experience, etc. In today’s job market, it is also important to have some technical skills, and particularly in data analysis to be very familiar with Excel program.