Welcome to a new edition of the P4Digital Round Tables!
Have you heard about SAS? Do you know how to use it? This week we break down what it is and what other skills and platforms are needed to make you and your company competitive.
Stay tuned and enjoy
Transcript
Amanda: We are P4Digital, and we are all about the digital revolution. What is SAS? Will it help your company stay current? How do you master it? Should you? These are all questions that the P4Digital executive team asks and answers in this week’s round table discussion.
James: Good morning or afternoon, depending on when you’re listening to this. Today we’re going to be talking about several enterprise softwares, that we’re increasingly seeing clients ask for, or that are great assets on a person’s resume when they’re applying for jobs in the digital marketing world. So then, what we were going to do today was talk about the Adobe marketing cloud, which is basically regarded by many as the leading cloud marketing Suite. And then also we’re going to talk about the SAS institute and their SAS solutions, which are very much at the forefront of analytics for the large majority of the Fortune 500. So we’ll start by talking about Adobe, and what Adobe does for companies and why it’s useful to have that kind of experience on a resume.
Andrew: Excellent! So Adobe’s digital marketing cloud. Exactly what it says – it’s a digital marketing tool that’s all-encompassing for small, medium and large-sized businesses that are looking to do some advanced digital marketing. Obviously all the uses of Adobe marketing cloud are a little more than we can encompass in a 10 minute Podcast here, but to speak from a high level, you can use their tools to do things such as optimize web pages or landing pages, help with converting traffic into buying traffic, advanced analytics, they’ve got a social media tool. So basically it’s kind of looking at all of the pillars of digital marketing and putting it under one suite of tools, which you can get some enterprise support for.
Harnoor: Just to go into a bit more depth regarding exactly what the Adobe marketing suite has to offer, and one of the first of the eight different modules that are encompassed in this package includes Adobe Analytics. So basically what this module does is it lets you view extremely large quantities of real-time data to give you the chance to analyze information as it’s happening, in order to tailor your marketing efforts in initiatives that not only make sense in order to better the journey that your customers or your clients or whoever has to go through, but also to give you a leg up on competitors. So for example, to keep this simple the analytics module will let you see things as intricate as who’s buying a specific product – lets take skis or snowboards for an example, within a specific geographic location. It also gives you information such as who’s buying it, how much they’re spending, what are their related items their buying and within what time frame. So for example, it will tell you that people in the age group or 25 to 35 are buying brand x snowboards over brand y, but when they buy brand y they are also purchasing items a, b and c. So you can better create a package and offer that to your customer.
Andrew: What’s interesting is what Harnoor was just talking about is actually what SAS is really, really good at too. There’s data analysis and there’s analytics and the two – there’s a little bit of cross over but doing some real deep diving data analysis, building co-relations, getting into data science, that’s where SAS really excels as opposed to Adobe. Adobe’s analytics tool is probably best served at analyzing web traffic specifically, and figuring out what people buy based upon where they’re visiting websites, and which websites they’re visiting.
James: And how they’re getting to the websites.
Andrew: Thank you James! And how they’re coming to the website is exactly what I was going to say.
Laughter
James: Yeah. To kind of go further really when you’re looking at the two, what Adobe has done really well is they’ve obviously gone out and acquired best in breed technologies, and done a very good job at integrating them, which has saved a lot of integration costs for companies, which certainly when I worked in the space several years ago was the biggest challenge. How did you plug all of this stuff together? Shifting on to the SAS institute, SAS really is focused on the old digital data component, and the digital data is an industry that is now doubling every year in terms of what clients are capturing. When you look at some of the work that SAS has done, and look at their kind of annual report, they have a number of success stories at large retailers like Macy’s, Staples, and then they go further to sports teams and so on, who all use their tool very successfully in a number of different ways.
Andrew: The Toronto Maple Leafs Kyle Dubas, a little plug to the home town team here. He uses SAS.
James: Yeah, so what we’re seeing is employers are now looking for people who have some experience working with their platform, and their platform does a number of wonderful things. These really range from the advanced analytics and business intelligence that we touched on through to a number of other core features not just exclusive to digital marketing but things like fraud and security intelligence, in-memory analytics, risk management and supply chain intelligence. So people who are taking the time to learn these platforms and learn these skills are valuable because obviously when they go into employers and interview, employers can see, 1; that they’re keeping in touch with ground breaking technologies, but 2; they’re obviously also individuals who can hit the ground running with little training. We all know the cost of getting employees up to speed to use these tools. So if you’ve taken the time to learn these platforms and how you can help your organization or the organization you’re looking at uplift what their business goals are, then you’re going to be obviously looked at very, very favorably in any situation like that.
Andrew: Yeah, what’s really interesting is we’ve covered Adobe Marketing Cloud and SAS here, you’re basically looking at the two tools that will bring any company up to speed in the digital world very quickly if you’re using the two of them effectively. James mentioned the supply chain piece of SAS for example. Amanda actually wrote about the Rise of The Drone and Amazon’s plans when it comes to drone shipping. If you think about what goes into that and the amount of predictive analytics that have to be part of that, and the data analysis and the co-relations and the consumer buying habits and all that sort of information that has to be processed, the people who can use these tools to give a company an edge in areas such as that are going to be positioning their companies very, very competitively in the future.
Harnoor: As the recruitment team here at P4Digital has seen over the last few months, there’s been a massive increase in the number of employers who are looking for people with both SAS as well as Adobe Marketing Cloud Skills. So if you have any sort of experience using any of these two pieces of technology please feel free to send your resumes to us at Planet4IT.com or #p4digital on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Amanda: Amanda: That was the P4Digital executive talking about SAS and Adobe Marketing Cloud. Want to know more? Check out our website at http://www.planet4it.com or follow us on Twitter @pfourdigital. Thanks and see you next time.
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