Small data, big impact, and GMB adds ‘time in business’ label: Thursday’s daily brief

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Good morning, Marketers, how low is your code?

If you’re a marketer, not a developer (and I’m sure some of you are both), your coding skills are probably fairly low. A bit of html here and there maybe? Does that mean low code tools might make your lives easier? Do you use them to build customer journeys or campaigns, or create emails or other content?

Or are you using genuine no code tools to do parts of your job. A WYSIWYG CMS interface, perhaps, or project management tools with drag and drop configurations?

I’m planning to take a closer look at the low code/no code space in an attempt to figure out how new it is, how significant it is, and who can benefit. I’d love to hear your views: kdavis@thirddoormedia.com.

Kim Davis
Editorial Director

How small businesses can drive value from small data  

Big data is taken so much for granted these days we hardly use the term any more. But what about small businesses, many of which — by their very nature — have fewer customers and less customer data. Is there anything to be done with small data?

There are some familiar use cases: A/B testing doesn’t require big data, and neither do Net Promoter Scores. Beyond that, are there ways to drive big data value from smaller data sets? In fact, there are at least two approaches. Some vendors like Mailchimp, the marketing automation and email marketing platform, builds large data sets out of its clients’ smaller ones. It has AI tools which can drive insights from this aggregated, anonymized data.

A very different approach is taken by Proof Analytics which uses smaller volumes of data to track sales and marketing outcomes in real-time, suggesting optimizations: a kind of “Business GPS,” as it calls the solution. Of course, the larger the data-set, the less vulnerable it is likely to be to unexpected, outlier events. But after COVID-19, perhaps we can agree that past is not always prologue, and maybe real-time analytics applied to smaller data streams creates better opportunities to respond.

Read more here.

EU may force big tech to pay for news links  

Following in the footsteps of Australia, European lawmakers may compel tech companies to pay for news. According to the Financial Times, regulations already in draft form could be amended to incorporate provisions which track the moves in Australia.

Search Engine Land editor George Nguyen writes: “It’s unreasonable to expect Google to pay to link to publishers on the main search results page…If Google is made to pay news outlets for …links, the argument can be made by other industries that Google should pay them, too.”

Read more here.

Google officially displays years in business in local pack

If your clients are proud of their business tenure, they can now brag about it in their Google My Business listing. The new label shows up in local search results in the map pack. You can add it to your listing or your clients’ profiles by adding an opening date under the “Info” option in the admin menu.

Showing your years in business can help establish trust with potential clients (like Barry’s listing above which shows he’s both old [lol jk] and has been working in search for over 25 years). You can also use the feature to display a future opening date for a new business.

Read more here.

Quote of the day

“Perfectionism is one of the biggest blockers to swift, effective decision-making because it operates on faulty all-or-nothing thinking.” Melody Wilding, executive coach.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.