Dennis Yu,  CTO, Blitz Metrics

“There’s been a gap between having a diploma and actually being able to do a job. Employers just want to know, of the many things that they have to get done, that they can rely on one person who’s certified in PPC or SEO or social media marketing. They just want to know that this function can operate without them having to worry, and therefore, a trusted certification like OMCP can be valuable  because it’s backed by not just passing a quiz but having actually done it.”

 

Welcome to ‘Take Ten’, OMCP’s blog/podcast where we spend 10 minutes, more or less, talking to online marketing thought leaders, educators, and career professionals about training and certification with hosts Jane Flint and David Temple.

OMCP: This is Jane Flint. I’m here at the Growth Marketing Conference in San Francisco with Dennis Yu, CTO at Blitz Metrics. Dennis, can you tell our audience a little bit about your own career path and how you developed BlitzMetrics?

Dennis Yu: Well, Jane, I’ve always been a math geek analyst, why do things work, sort of person and numbers have always held more power to me than things that are subjective like paintings and colors and feelings. So when I got into college, I found that I got 800 SAT on the math part, it was fun just to blow other students away with that because with the numerical…if you have algebra where you have four things and you’re trying to solve for the fifth and the answer’s five, then the answer’s five, and there could be many creative ways that you can get to it. And in the world of online marketing, which I stumbled into because I helped build AA.com for American Airlines, and then I ran analytics at Yahoo! and then all the social media stuff, it was like the ultimate math problem, which for some people is the ultimate dentist torture.

And I found that there were simple patterns that you could use to figure out what the answer was. Think about, if I just change analogies, your car is broken and you go to the mechanic, and the mechanic has to look through all the stuff and they take their hammer and they bang one part of the engine and it coughs back up to life.

That’s how I view online marketing. You have a machine and it’s getting more and more complex. How can you figure out the one or two things that will solve a constriction issue, or some kind of leakage, or some kind of issue where if you can just fix this one part of the funnel, other stuff will start to work properly? And that’s what I loved about working at Yahoo! He had a bunch of properties and the challenge, just like House, right? You know House? Where you gotta figure out what’s going on with the patient, what’s causing him to die. Well, the issue was this landing page wasn’t working. The issue was we were buying the wrong keyword. The issue was that we had the bad creative, or it was seasonality, or a competitor lowered their price and that’s why ours wasn’t converting as well, and that was such an amazing challenge. Every day I loved the emergency room aspect of online marketing.

OMCP: So you just presented “Facebook for $1 a day: 7 Awesome Hacks for Startup Founders and Growth Marketers.” Dennis, can you clarify for our audience the differences between social media marketing and growth marketing and how each supports the other?

Dennis Yu: Growth marketing is, how do you take a small dose to get maximum yield? That dose could be anywhere. It could be authority that comes from meeting someone at a conference, from being written up in search engine journals, from being a member of SEMPO, from a strong Facebook page. It could come from anywhere,