By Janus Boye
“Why does your business exist digitally?”
It sounds like a simple question, but to many, it is actually quite difficult to answer. In particular, in large and complex organisations, depending on who you ask, you’ll often find quite different answers.
In my recent conversation with Toronto-based Blair Roebuck, she shared her challenge of looking behind the numbers, finding the compromise between different views and opinions, yet with only one corporate website.
According to Blair, every website has a purpose. If you are in B2B, it might be showing your authority or it might be all about lead generation. The trick is, that we are being measured on different outcomes and conversion doesn’t necessarily mean checking out in an e-commerce flow. Long story short: We’re often not measuring against the right metrics
Blair works as Director of Marketing Science for North America at Valtech. Valtech is a global digital agency with just over 3000 employees and Blair is our expert of the month.
Introducing Marketing Science
There are a few well-known problems within digital transformation, that marketing science aims to address. Mostly it’s the age-old problem of overinvesting in technology (also known as customers buying the Cadillac), but with a lack of strategy.
To Blair, her main focus is bringing together business and technology, and marketing science is the unifier. She works with clients to identify business objectives, KPIs and measures of success. And then she works with the tech team to make it a reality.
The key pillars of marketing science within an organization are the measurement strategy, data, analytics and optimization.
Also, as with the other moving parts of the digital transformation equation: The marketing science practice is evolving rapidly. To quote Blair:
“We used to go straight to optimization & quick wins using the existing analytics. That may lead to quick wins, but it overlooked the foundational questions: what does success look like to our organization? Is the data we are using reliable & accurate? These foundational questions ensure that you are getting the most out of your investment.”
The nonlinear path that makes a difference
So how do you get to work in marketing science? Blair started her career in the world of digital marketing, working at a firm that specialized in data services and digital marketing. During this time, she gained insights into the value of data and the fundamentals of digital marketing.
Later, Blair worked on brand and social media strategy at an advertising agency before joining Valtech in 2016. It was during her time in advertising where she saw the real-world applications of strategy to tell a business story and began bolstering her assertions & recommendations with analytics.
These foundational experiences led her to Valtech & Marketing Science: the ability to unify strategy with data to provide tangible outputs for clients.
Interestingly, she does not have her technical knowledge by schooling, but through exposure, mentorship and real-world experience. This unique perspective has allowed her to straddle the two worlds: technology and business. More importantly, her grounding in business and experience in technology has allowed Blair to bridge the gap between these two, often separate units.
From her initial entry into the industry through traditional digital marketing, she now charts her own path, leading with data-first initiatives with clients, helping businesses become more data-centric, and enabling technocrats with the tools and verbiage to articulate their value.
To tell a story of transformation
In our conversation, it became clear to me, that marketing science is also about storytelling. By asking questions, being open to learning new things and paying attention to underperforming data trends, you can gain valuable new insights and actually transform by doing.
According to Blair:
Marketing Science seeks to enact business transformation through actionable data. This transformation doesn’t occur overnight: it happens through strategic business conversations that map back to existing technology & data sets within our clients organization.
In this process, Blair and her team work collaboratively with their clients to ensure that the program they are putting in place is scalable and sustainable for their team size, bandwidth & data literacy levels.
Blair shared the following process:
Define & Understand the business landscape
Assess & Validate the technology ecosystem
Align & Implement a program that reflects the clients maturity & ambitions
Measure & Track the results
Optimize...and reoptimize the experience based on our insights
As Blair said:
Data provides a live-feed of business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats.
Marketing Science is a new term to me, but by challenging norms, questioning results and pushing clients forward into the data-led future, it will be very interesting to follow Blair and her work.
Learn more about marketing science
To quote from Wikipedia on marketing science:
Before marketing science was formally labeled, its activity appeared as management science within the marketing framework. The interaction between academics and practitioners in marketing science dates back to 1961, with the founding of the Marketing Science Institute.
Blair has also published two relevant articles on the topics that we’ve covered. Continue your learning journey by taking a look: