THE POWER OF DATA

Presented by - Blair Roebuck, Vice President, Marketing Science, Valtech

At George Brown's Digital Marketing Seminar series two weeks ago, we had a guest lecturer, Blair Roebuck . She is vice president of Marketing Science at Valtech. She seemed very passionate about Data Personalization, Data Optimization, Data Analytics, Strategic, and Data Reporting.

Over the years of her experience, she has worked for multiple industries like Fashion, Healthcare, Hospitality, Insurance, and Travel, where she has created data models that link digital initiatives and serve business objectives.

As a marketer, I have always been curious about data and wanted to know how companies utilize huge amounts of data from different sources. The seminar by Blair was very thoughtful and educational and has ignited a curiosity for data. Through this article, I would like to explain further the importance of Data Science shared by the speaker.

Marketing Science

In simple words, Blair explained Marketing Science as the unification of business and technology. It translates data into business insights through data wrangling, data analysis, digital strategy, reporting and optimization. Using strategy, the raw data is transformed into business insights to generate ROI.

The three pillars of Marketing Science –?

The amalgamation of Technology, Business, Analytics and Data helps marketers achieve the objectives of Marketing Science.?

Expectations of a Marketing Analyst

Blair works with a team of 25 Data scientists from different parts of the world. She mentioned about four core skills marketers should deliver an understanding of – Data Analysis, Data Wrangling, Subject Expertise, and Communication from a technical perspective and business point of view.

• Data Wrangling – This involves finding, cleaning and structuring data. Many data are received in raw form, so removing errors and combining the data sets is the starting point of working with data.
• Data Analysis – A marketing analyst should be able to analyze data, set hypotheses and test the data. One needs to find meaning in data meaning, find fine details, and use all this information in a business context.
• Subject Expertise – Analysts need t know the business and be able to craft a compelling strategy to achieve business objectives.
• Communicator – From a business perspective, an analyst is expected to be able to present data insights and bridge the gap between complex algorithms and executives.

Also, a Marketing Analyst is expected to work with a Solution Architect, Developer, Product Owner, UX/Creative designer, Project Manager and Account Manager at different stages.

Benefits of component-based architecture

Blair also discussed the importance of component-based architecture, which plays a crucial role in the decision-making journey of the user. She showed an example of a Client Project – Rotman School of Management.

The client's main objective was to accelerate the decision-making process of their end users, who were prospective students from the Middle East and South Asia. The students have no idea how the school is and how their journey will be after they get into the school and course. The analyst team at Valtech identified the friction points and utilized analytics techniques and A/B testing to reduce the gap. They redesigned the website based on component-based architecture. They did a rules-based personalization based on location and used geographic personalization to drive engagement and revisits. Each visit to the Rotman website presented a prospective student with different information to drive more admissions. ?

After redesigning the website, Blair explained the benefits of component-based architecture on a website –

• Creates a customized experience on different elements/pages of the website.
• Perform efficient A/B testing with more accuracy
• Reduce bounce rate and increase revisits.
• Increase the overall visit duration.
• All these things helped in reducing the website's maintenance cost.

Biggest challenges faced by the industry

Discussing the challenges of the industry, Blair mentioned cookies. Cookies are files created by the website you visit. They save all the browsing information. Cooking helps the browser to let you stay signed in, remember your preferences and improve the quality of content by giving relevant and local content based on your location.

But Blair explained this to be an opportunity. The phase-out of cookies will make Marketers rely more on first-party data. This is an opportunity for companies to be more strategic as the user sharing data with consent conveys the correct data. So the data quality improves and gives Marketing Analysts a chance to improve personalization.

Group Activity Learnings

During the seminar, we were given a group task to analyze the raw data of an alcohol distributor worldwide. We were asked to answer some business objectives via data analysis. We analyzed the data to find patterns based on country. We filtered the columns in ascending and descending order to identify the lowest and highest levels. And after the analysis, we were asked to suggest content types for every region.

After thoroughly analyzing the data and matching it with the business objectives of my group, I have understood that it requires patients to analyze such long data. We learned the following –

• Always step into the customer's shoes.
• Understand your target market's needs.
• Perform A/B testing
• Performing risk management (why and how)

Questions for the speaker

After listing how companies get such large data sets to work on and how they have to create strategies based on the data insights, I was curious to know what problems data analysts face while analyzing such big data sets.

To this, Blair answered that there are times when analysts get volumes of data but don't know what to do with it. So, they start by slicing down the data. There are also times when companies where the data is, or they have no unified funnel of receiving data as data comes from different sources. Analysts also face issues in structuring the data.

Another question that caught my attention was when one of my classmates asked that privacy rules are changing, like cookies are going away, so how it affects the data collection methods. Answering this, Blair said these changing rules are an opportunity. This will lead to more emphasis on first-party data and challenge us to do more. She also emphasized that the changing regulations will ensure the data available is rich and full of depth because the audience who consent to share the data are giving the correct data, making it more authentic and meaningful.

Some key takeaways from the seminar to stand out from the crowd

• Failure is a part of this industry. Don't give up, and continue you're A/B testing.
• Focus on your audience and personalize their journey.
• Follow component-based architecture, add all website data from the audience's perspective and don't make them leave without any information.
• Analyze, strategize and succeed.