Embrace the Data Revolution With Marketing Analytics

by Krista Scarlett | Mar 29, 2017

A Q&A with Graphcom’s Marketing Analyst Extraordinaire

Everywhere we look, it seems like data and analytics are being used across all professions. From marketing to sports, data makes us smarter by showing us who to reach and how to reach them. After all, you can’t advertise to someone you know nothing about!

Brands need to know who they should market to, why they should market to them, and what message will resonate most with their needs. Riding high on a few exciting analytics projects for our clients, we sat down for a chat with our own marketing data analyst, Florida native, and quirky 90s’ gal, Christina Karolewicz.

How would you describe marketing analytics?

It’s measuring and analyzing marketing performance to maximize effectiveness and improve ROI. It’s seeing what’s working and what isn’t working and being able to identify areas of improvement.

As a marketing analyst, how would you describe your job to someone you just met?

A marketing analyst does a lot! I analyze our clients’ data to identify trends and predict future patterns. We get the data and then we have to clean and prepare it, which involves making sure that everything makes sense, adjusting for certain calculations, and creating or adding different kinds of variables.

Once the data is ready, we put together the descriptive statistics to identify features of the population. Then, we use the trends and features we identified to recommend different outreach and marketing tactics that are relevant to the population. Sometimes, it goes beyond descriptive statistics, and we create predictive models that help our clients predict future outcomes of their marketing efforts based on historical data.

What’s the coolest thing about data analytics?

How versatile it can be. You can apply it to anything, whether it’s gaming, music, or memes. I was bowling the other day and thought if we know the speed of the ball and we know how many pins are left, we can probably predict how many we’ll knock down.

What blogs, publications, and websites do you follow?

I’m part of a lot of LinkedIn groups. I also find articles on Tableau, IBM, Forbes, Wired, and Popular Science.

Why should all clients be concerned with their analytics?

You can’t manage what you don’t measure! You can’t improve something if you don’t know how it’s performing. If I’m a basketball player and I don’t know how to improve my free throws, how am I going to get better without knowing what I’m really doing wrong?

What’s the most important tool for analytics?

SPSS and Tableau. SPSS is great for stats. I use it for the predictive models and all the complex stuff. Tableau allows you to do a lot of the descriptive analysis. It’s a data visualization and dashboard software. It’s easy to present to clients, everything looks a lot better, plus it’s fun to use.

What’s a project you’re working on right now that you’re really excited about?

We built a survey on Qualtrics for a trade show booth, and you can do so many things on it. We worked on another project that was awesome because it was really big and collaborative. We did focus groups, text analysis, and cluster analysis, and it involved a lot of work between analytics and editorial.

What gadget, tool, or program can’t you live without?

As far as gadgets go, I could never live without my phone. When it comes to tools or programs, Slack and Tableau. SSPS is important just because the number of programs available is limited, so without these I would need to do this all by hand.

What’s the future of marketing analytics?

Hopefully, it’s everywhere! A lot of fields are applying it, but there are a lot of industries where they could implement more and gain insight from existing info. Hopefully, it’s applied to all kinds of things in all kinds of ways.

Why Graphcom?

Graphcom’s awesome. When I first came and met everyone, the company culture was amazing. Even when it’s a crazy week, everyone’s got everyone’s back. We’re encouraged to think outside of the box. If your opinion is different, it’s okay—and you’re encouraged—to voice it. Everyone brings different skills to the table, so it’s cool to have everyone with all these different skills coming together.

What does your workspace look like?

It’s really colorful. I have my lava lamp, a pink calculator, and colorful sticky notes. I try to keep it organized, but it gets messy. I have lots of pictures of friends, family, and analytical quotes. I also have a Napoleon Dynamite bobble head.

What’s something our clients would be surprised to learn about you?

I never planned to study marketing. If you had told me five years ago that I would be in this field, I would have told you, “No, I’m not.” I thought I was going to work in biology and genetics research. I started studying it and didn’t like it. Business has always interested me because I liked looking at applied science, and marketing is cool because I consider myself a creative person. Once I started doing it I thought, “I’m good at statistics, and I like the research end of it.”