Data Driven Marketing: Effects on The Employability of the Social Media Marketing Analyst: A Study of Pakistani Freelancers

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the impact of Data Driven Marketing Strategies, and how they have changed the entire complexion of the Job market. The Companies and job positions that always had a minimum criterion of having at least graduation has now been diluted in thin air. The Paid Per Click (PPC) ads has entirely changed the dynamics of the jobs. A Social Media Marketing Analyst who has the “Skills and Competency” of understanding the Data Metrices given out by the PPC platforms, which includes, Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel and MetaAds, is being preferred for a Job, rather than a Business Graduate, who has all the knowledge but doesn’t have the skills to setup a Meta or PPC campaign, though the principles for the campaign could be best set up by the Business Graduate. The business graduate has to learn this skill in addition to their qualification if they want to stay within the Employability criterion set by the companies these days. The reason behind this drastic change is that now companies have moved to a Data Driven Marketing Strategies. Initially this was know as Big Data but back then there was no advanced tools and platforms so readily available that everyone could use them. But the introduction of Meta Ads, and PPC has made it so easy and accessible, even to Small and Medium Enterprises that now instead of spending millions on conventional marketing, they prefer Performance marketing, which costs lot less and give extraordinary results. This decoding of Big Data via measurable metrices resulted in more Data Driven organizations. This Data Driven focused approach gave rise to Chief Marketing Technicians (CMTs) eliminating the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs). And for this very reason companies tend to hire Freelancers or go for third party services for their marketing rather than now hiring a Marketing Executive. Now a days companies have more social media managers than having any marketing executives. They introduction of Social Media as a tool for marketing was indeed a paradigm shift for SMEs and small businesses which made them able to compete with market leaders on the same platforms with minimalistic costs, making these businesses go global, (think global, act local), hence giving rise to the people selling their digital marketing courses online, even though they were not graduate, nor they had any expertise in that area academically. This pushed the factors of employability in entirely different direction making the skilled personnel more valuable commodity for the businesses. Hence increasing the employment rate for the non- graduate skilled personnels.