Data-led Marketing: a Natural Fit for Scientists, But Not for the Faint of Heart

In this first episode of the 'Talk Life Science Marketing Analysis' podcast, I interview my business partner at Covalent Bonds, Olga Torres. We explore marketing and media analysis for life sciences. Touching on topics from how to use marketing data to understand the impact of a company’s marketing, to why Google Tag Manager is not for the faint of heart, to the importance of getting to the gym on a daily basis to get headspace from data.

Finally we explore Olga’s biggest life science marketing failures and successes, because it is in learning from others that the magic happens.

Show Notes

In this inaugural episode of the 'Talk Life Science Marketing Analysis' podcast, I interview my business partner Olga Torres. Olga started life as a bench scientist, progressing through sales into marketing, culminating as the Chief Optimization Officer at Covalent Bonds, managing a team of data scientists.

During our conversation we explore topics of interest to marketers working specifically in life sciences, who are looking to use data to increase the impact of their marketing:

Our discussion starts on how to use marketing data for life science companies:

• Acquiring marketing data
• Determine what data sources you have (marketing automation, CRM, surveys, Media measurement (share of voice) Google etc) and how to connect them
• Exploring how people engage with your company’s marketing
• Understanding how to evaluate success of marketing and to optimize programs based on the insights you gather

We talk through what a typical day looks like for Olga as well as her journey to becoming a life science marketer (it is pretty typical of marketers in our industry). Olga explains how she feels different people, and different industries have alternative definitions of marketing, and this has become even more prominent with the advent of data science for marketers.

We discuss the unique challenges facing marketers in life science companies. Are scientists more comfortable with data, than with emotive marketing? How do you translate the behavioral and emotional side of marketing into a language that the C-suite understands and cares about. Olga elaborates on her experience of growing up in a bilingual household.

Finally we explore Olga’s biggest life science marketing failures and successes. Learning from failure: paranoia can drive really great things. We discuss using Google Tag Manager to gain behavioral insights, but how it is not a tool for the inexperienced, as Olga describes a situation where she managed to pollute a clients’ data.

In contrast, in her most proud moment, Olga describes how she helped an instrumentation company use data to segment and understand its audiences better: how they think, feel and behave. Three large sets of data were combined and statistically analyzed: survey (cluster analysis), qualitative interviews (sentiment analysis), behavioral (analytics from across 5 different websites) to confirm demographics, the customer journey, experience and things they care about. She explains the importance of obtaining this digital fingerprint for personas, to be able to target them with specific messages, how you can watch the group of people and their behavior change over time. She discusses why this is important for evaluating the impact of marketing.

We touch on hot data and privacy topics such as GDPR and ‘no bias’.

Listen to this podcast to learn more about using marketing data to optimize your marketing success.

Links to Referenced Sites

• Google Developer conference
• Google Marketing conference