e-journal #2 Hidden gem found by marketing scientist
Speaker: Blair Roebuck, Vice President, Marketing Science, Valtech
Another fruitful 3 weeks passed, it’s our class’s pleasure to have several speakers to share their story on their career journey and provide guidance to all of us, aka digital marketer-to-be. Last week, Blair Roebuck, Vice President, Marketing Science from Valtech, has shared the job nature of marketing scientist and how to utilise data to provide benefits to the company.
Marketing science is about achieving marketing goals in a more scientific method. Dig into the data and view the truth so as to transform the data to useful business insights and provide recommendations for client to improve performance or meet marketing objectives. Blair mentioned that marketing science is a function that help the client to get Value from data. In this century, what to know is no longer the main problem, however, what can gain from those data is the challenge. If the data could not tell the truth or provide valuable insight to the business, data analysis is useless for business development. Therefore, Blair said marketing science is thinking the long-term gain instead of project based. They are not solving one small problem but instead they are aiming to bring permanent improvement the business.
Learnings/ Inspirations from the speaker
After listening the introduction about the job of being marketing scientist, my question came up is “How equip myself with different knowledge for projects or clients from different industry that I may not be familiar with?” But before I was asking that, Blair has pointed out 4 expectations of a marketing scientist, one of them is about Subject Expertise. Being an agency, data that a marketing scientist has to deal with may be from various industries and have their own professional. It may be hard for a marketing scientist has comprehensive knowledge for different industry. However, Blair stated that it’s important to have the ability to apply knowledge on client’s context and discover any opportunity to satisfy their needs. Although it’s acceptable that a marketing scientist may have insufficient knowledge on the business professional, there’s nothing bad to expand own horizon and try to know as much as we can by reviewing the current best practice in the industry or the update trends in the world. These can equip ourselves and inspire us to come up ideas on recommendations with the support of data analysis. Also, Blair mentioned “education” is needed to understand the clients, which means common language is needed to communicate or present that data and ideas between marketing scientists and the clients. Among many marketing students, the skills sets are all similar. However, exposure may differ which make every one of us different. In order to outstand, we have to try to gain as much exposure as we can to expand our insights and enable ourselves to apply the skills on practical cases. When we know more and can create more board “common language”, we will be able to understand more and facilitate to work as agent to create value to clients.
Component-based website
Blair shared the component-based architecture on Rotman’s website. They personalize the website by using different components according to the user’s decision-making journey and geographic location. Through the component-based design, they can make sure visitors can get the most useful information for their needs and questions. Also, they designed different landing pages according to the number of visiting the website and the visit intention which can lead the audience to the useful webpage directly and push the users to the next level in decision-making funnel. Their solution is very clever. By dividing the landing page into several components, more information can be displayed to visitors and the content can also be more personalized according to different variables. The team can create more optimised combinations to more types of visitors and satisfy more specific objectives. From this design, the users will feel more well-tailored and find the information more easily that match their thoughts.
During the session, Blair has provided the class with 2 scenarios and asked us how to deal with the data and what insights we had. For my group, we got the case about the car insurance company. Data from the case study is not as much as the actual case has, however, there’s a lot of insights can be found. Even 3 groups share the same data, insights and recommendations can be different. That’s the power of data analysis. I love how Blair said “Help client to get the value from data” and raise data to the level is consumable”. Data is just data, they can’t tell the story or draw the picture by themselves. If no one to draw it on the paper, the value of data will be covered and data is just a set of number. Yet, it is a hidden gem which needs marketing scientists to dig it. To try, find and test in order to understand the relationships, trends, pattern of data which is valuable and usable information for business. From the results, recommendations and suggestions are provided to clients to improve their performance or achieve their certain target or goal. This makes job more interesting and fruitful.
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