What is a Freelance Data Scientist and How Will They Benefit My Business?

Big data and data science is an important and ever-expanding field, and it’s one you shouldn’t ignore. A good data scientist can provide important and actionable business insights that can predict customer behavior, industry trends, and company growth. Hiring a full-time, in-house data scientist is costly, so it makes sense to use Fiverr freelance data scientists and data analysts to fill those roles on a project-by-project basis. Read on to learn more about what a data scientist does and how they can benefit your business.

Data science is a multidisciplinary field. According to Fiverr’s Data Science Team Leader, Yuval Ben-Zion, data science includes multiple main pillars at its basis: statistics and mathematics, data analysis and information science, business understanding, and computer science.

Some of the most common data science algorithm outputs come in the form of predictions, classifications, and statistical inferences.

The latest state-of-the-art set of algorithms, referred to as ‘deep learning,’ are based on the concept of imitating the learning process of the human brain,” says Ben-Zion. He also notes that data science provides “vast options to utilize data and algorithms, driving impact to the business.

Data Engineer vs Data Analyst vs Data Scientist

It is important to differentiate between a data engineer, a data analyst, and a data scientist. While all three roles can contribute to business objectives, the role of the data scientist is specific. Here’s a breakdown of the three:

Data Engineer

Data engineers create new data infrastructure solutions and maintain existing solutions, acting as a focal point for all the technical aspects of data activity. Rather than collecting, inputting, or analyzing data, the engineer develops advanced data architectures and automations to support both real-time needs in data production and batch needs for analysis.

You can find a freelance data engineer on Fiverr who can provide data infrastructure services.

Data Analyst

The primary role of the data analyst is storytelling. That is, they act as a liaison between business decision-makers and their data assets, explaining to them in simple terms what the data they’ve collected means and how they can use it to inform their strategies. They may have additional skills in writing, graphic design, and visual analytics, which can help them draft reports and other communicative content.

Despite their duty to decision-makers, data analysts work closely with almost every business unit, whether it’s the marketing department of the C-suite.  They are tasked with supporting data insights and making recommendations that influence the company’s strategic and tactical decisions.

A freelance data analyst typically provides freelance data analysis services on an ad hoc basis, as well as recommendations on a project-by-project basis. 

Data Scientist

A data scientist may work closely with engineers and analysts, but they typically possess a different set of skills (although there can be some overlap). 

According to Ben-Zion, A data scientist will usually start their task by analyzing the data they’ll use with respect to the business or product problem. Once they have a strong understanding of the data, they’ll build the algorithm or statistical process which will solve that problem. They usually do so by writing code (here at Fiverr, we use Python) that will implement the process. And in order to achieve this, they’ll use machine learning, statistical modeling, information science theories, and more.

In other words, a data scientist is skilled in identifying the problems and opportunities that present the greatest opportunity to the organization, then building a solution to solve that problem.

How Can a Data Scientist Help Your Business?

Data science algorithms use large amounts of data to predict the future or better describe the present. This is immensely useful in a business context, especially when these models are self-learning ones.

Here are a few examples of the types of projects a skilled data scientist can tackle:

• Predicting a user’s or customer’s future value for the company in order to optimize campaigns.
• Recommending the next best product or service for user purchase.
• Real-time scanning and NLP (Natural Language Processing) of communications between users on an online platform in order to detect spam, violations of terms of service, indications of the user experience, user sentiment, and more.
• Forecasting company growth.
• Making landing page recommendations, and recommendations of other assets, based on a user’s characteristics and the company’s learned knowledge of that user.

All of these are examples of data science tasks that utilize data and an algorithm to drive business results, and new applications for data science are emerging all the time. Overall, a data scientist can help businesses make more evidence-based decisions, improve the relevance of their products and services, and better reach their target audience.

How Can Data Science Improve Your Marketing?

Marketing is often associated with creative content, advertisements, and messaging, but modern marketing wouldn’t be possible without marketing data science.

One of the most commonly used terms in this regard is “big data analytics,” which refers to the analysis of the ever-increasing volume of data available to organizations. Big data marketing is the practice of harnessing immense sets of data, analyzing them, then using those analyses to glean insights for marketing purposes.

The emergence of data science in marketing is still relatively new. Nonetheless, there are already many ways a freelance data scientist can help the marketing department. For example, they can help with:

• Conducting market research
• Optimizing the marketing budget
• Optimizing a content strategy
• Identifying viable marketing channels
• Advanced lead scoring
• Customer profiling
• Managing and optimizing social media ad campaigns
• Programmatic ad buying

Data scientists are often employed by companies to interpret data and extract the most out of it. Of course, many marketers aren’t entirely sure what they need from a data scientist, they just know they need help with their data. If that’s the case, the best option is to reach out to a data scientist for consulting help.

Should You Use a Freelance Data Scientist, an Agency, or Hire a Staffer?

If you’re in the market for a data scientist, you have the decision to hire someone internally, work with an agency that specializes in data science, or to hire a freelance data scientist.

Hiring internally and contracting an agency are the two most expensive options. They provide some benefits. For example, an agency may be staffed with a team of experts who have years of experience, and an internal employee is someone you can align with your core business objectives.

But hiring a freelancer is often the best option if you need help with a specific problem, require an expert for a niche project, want to try out a small data science project, or you only need to work with a data scientist on a project-by-project basis. Hiring a freelance data scientist is also far more cost-effective, as you only pay for the pre-defined project price or for an allotted number of hours. You essentially only pay for what you use.

An experienced data scientist can help you gather large amounts of data relating to your customers and your business, and help you make predictions and informed decisions based on that data. These multi-disciplinary experts may also be able to use machine learning or create self-learning models so you can keep gathering data and making refinements to your business, projects, and content to align with what your data tells you. Future-proof your business by hiring a freelance data scientist on Fiverr today!

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