The "New Currency" of a Marketer - Data

Almost a decade ago, I read an article that mentioned that Data was going to be the “new oil”, and last week, I got to hear it from Blair Roebuck , Vice President of Data and Analytics at Valtech , and how it became the “New Currency” for everyone. I got to see how an incredible company like Valtech is connecting data with experience using tools and technology to create value, build relationships, and grow revenue.

Let's start by analyzing how it is affecting our daily lives, especially if you are a marketer like me. From social media to self-driving cars. Companies are using data to create value, improve customer experience, and gain a competitive edge. Why? It is getting harder to stay competitive without it, for example, companies McDonald′s, Burger King, and the rest of the food chains rely heavily on data to predict customer demand, customize orders, personalize promotions, and more. Even in Healthcare data is needed to improve the quality, accessibility, and affordability. For example, data enables remote diagnosis, telemedicine, and wearable devices that monitor health conditions. It also helps researchers and doctors discover new treatments, prevent diseases, and find cures. It doesn′t matter where you look, data is there and has been there way before we noticed it.

So, what do we do with it?

Tell a story with it.

That is right, data will always be there but what you say about it, makes a difference. One of the key takeaways that I had from Blair’s lecture was the importance of Storytelling. In my opinion, it is my favorite one. If you don′t know how to communicate your findings then all that hard work of gathering, curating data, and analyzing it will not translate into a positive outcome. Data Storytelling will help to contextualize and simplify complex data making it understandable to a wide-ranging audience and making it easier for every team in the company to understand where the company is heading.

Different Perspectives always helps.

The other key takeaway was the importance of teamwork. Working in a team allows data analysts to benefit from the diverse perspectives and skills of our colleagues. ?Analyzing data together will generate new ideas and approaches leading to innovative solutions. Blair mentioned that she loved the experience of working with people around the world because it gave her team a unique edge when analyzing and finding insights from the data.

Make it Unique for the customer.

Until now I have mentioned the importance of storytelling to help translate complex data and teamwork to get different perspectives to find crucial insights but why do we want this? Why are Marketers and Companies so worried about finding the best insight? It′s all for the customer. The customer has the power and as marketers is our job to research and find what drives them to purchase a service or product and what can we do to make the customer fall in love with the brand. We must find what is relevant to them to create a personalized experience and we have data to reach that. For example, Valtech decided to do a geographic personalization for one of their clients because they wanted to accelerate the prospective student decision-making journey. To do that, they had to create a granular personalized experience based on what they knew about the visitor. What this means is that they personalized the experience based on the location that the individual was visiting from. In conclusion, we need to use data to serve the right content to the right user at the right time to achieve better results.

Different ways to tell a story.

I mentioned earlier that storytelling is important, right? But something worth mentioning is that there is always more than one way to tell it. That is what I learned from a case study that we had with Blair. We had the opportunity to analyze data from a fictitious Insurance company. The main idea was to practice how is her daily experience working with data. It was interesting how everyone had a different approach to tell their story about what they found, even though it was the same data, we came up with different strategies to reach the same objective. This is something that might sound obvious, but when we are analyzing data, we forget about this and ask for help from other colleagues and work in teams to find the best solution.

Is Marketing Science my path?

After having the opportunity to hear from Blair all the wonderful insights she gave us about Marketing Science and how this discipline helps businesses overcome challenges have helped me understand that it doesn′t matter in which field we specialize in, we need to understand data so we can translate it into business insight to transform it into a revenue driver. As a marketer, I want to keep learning about this discipline to offer the best experience to customers, and with technology evolving exponentially, I believe, we have just started the path to data-driven decisions.