Holistic Marketing in the Digital Age

A/B testing is a controlled experiment on a live audience: visitors are assigned at random to two or more versions of a page, an email or a feature, and the versions are compared on one pre-chosen outcome so that the difference can be attributed to the change rather than to who happened to see it.

Retargeting is advertising shown to people because of something they did before: visited a site, viewed a product, abandoned a basket or appeared on a customer list, with the ad platform recognising them later on other sites, in search results or in a video feed and serving an ad tied to that earlier action.

Content marketing is the practice of earning customers by publishing material they want for its own sake, guides, comparisons, tools, data, video, so that the people who need what a business sells find it, trust it and come back, instead of being interrupted by an advertisement.

A data lake is a store that keeps data in its original form, files of any shape in cheap object storage, loaded before anyone has decided what questions will be asked of it, so that the structure is applied when the data is read rather than when it is written.

Business intelligence is the practice and the tooling for turning an organisation's data into reports and dashboards that people use to run it: connecting to the sources, modelling the data into measures everyone agrees on, and presenting it so that a manager sees the state of the business without asking an analyst.

Data governance is the set of decisions and responsibilities an organisation puts in place over its data: who owns each dataset, what each field means, who may read or change it, how long it is kept and how its quality is measured, recorded so that the answers do not depend on who is asked.