What Does It Takes To Be A Marketing Analyst?

Up until last week if someone would come to me and say you can lead a Marketing Science department at a global organization without having a degree in data science, I would have not believed them. That’s because I always used to think that to be an analyst, you need an extensive background in data science or math-related education. But this changed last week when our Marketing seminar class had the great privilege of having Blair Roebuck as a guest speaker.

Blair shared with us her non-linear career pathway. She graduated from Western University with a degree in Media, Information and Technoculture (MIT) and is now the Director of Marketing science at Valtech. She is responsible for overseeing a team of analysts in the North American region.

Blair was exposed to data, digital marketing and business strategy at various internships which eventually led her to a Marketing Analyst position at Valtech.

She also was kind enough to provide us with a deeper understanding of what Marketing Science is all about and the career options in this field that I would like to share with you:

"Marketing Science is the unification of Business & Technology."

Blair Roebuck Tweet

Marketing Science takes complex data and transforms them into business insights designed to achieve an ROI.

There are three pillars of Marketing Science:

It is a skill to draw insights from data when business and technology come together. And that’s where the Marketing Analyst comes in. The role of an analyst is to gather data using technology, interpret and use this complex data to develop actionable steps that will improve business processes and optimize results. In today’s world, this is an extremely important position that every organization wants to invest in.

What does it take to be a Marketing Analyst?

There are a number of skills required to start a career as a Marketing Analyst, the top among those are:

Data Wrangling: The ability to find, clean and unifying messy and complex data for easy access and analysis.
Data Analysis: The ability to set hypotheses and test them, find meaning in data and apply them to specific business contexts.
Subject Expertise: The ability to understand the current standing of the client’s business, their pain points and formulating a strategy to achieve business outcomes.
Communicator: The ability to present data insights to key stakeholders on one hand and clearly communicate the requirements to the technical team on the other.

Whom does the Marketing Analyst work with?

The short answer is ‘everyone’ within the organization. But here’s a list to name a few:

Solution architect
Developers
Product owners
UX/Creative
Project Manager
Account Manager

Blair went ahead to share with us a case study how they helped their client develop a personalized website based on geo-location data that increased landing page visit duration and significantly reduced bounce rate.

As someone who has a greater interest in eCommerce, I was hoping to get an answer to how data helps these websites apart from the measurement of user activity. And I was amazed to learn from Blair that the recommendation engine uses algorithms and data analysis techniques to recommend the most relevant product to a particular user. This recommendation box helps to increase the cart order size. That was really an aha moment for me to learn how digital marketing and data science are closely integrated.

The group brainstorming activity during the session also helped me to understand the value of data and how it can be useful to make important business and marketing decisions based on facts, trends and statistical numbers.

Lastly, Blair’s comment to never stop reaching out and being inquisitive is a piece of valuable advice that will definitely help in my job search.

“You can never have too many informational interviews”

Blair Roebuck Tweet

I have been networking since the start of study program, but she made me realize how reaching out to people within the industry and having informational interviews with them could open up doors to a new job, a connection, or maybe an opportunity.

More importantly, before attending this seminar I would have not thought Marketing Analyst as a career options for myself. But after listening to her, I feel encouraged to expand my scope of job search in this field. I am good at numbers, I love marketing and I have an entrepreneurial mindset, so I feel it’s a good combination that can help me to make a successful career in Marketing Science.

What are you think about a career in Marketing Science? Share your thoughts in the comment section below.