Bridging the Gap: Scientists and Marketers

One of the strengths of our team is that we hire completely different people with different skillsets and approaches (for example data scientists and creative marketers). However, this has also thrown up some challenges: especially in the area of communication. We have had some difficulty in the past in communicating the vision of the marketing strategy and translating it into a data model that enables us to track and measure effectiveness. 

Our solution has been to use Miro. This is a great visual collaboration tool that has transformed how our teams work together.

In particular, Miro enables us to create visualizations which represent our marketing strategy. We can then share these with each other, discuss them collaboratively and iterate on them until we are all satisfied they accurately reflect what we want to achieve.  This means that when we come up with an idea for a campaign, we can quickly get everyone on board by showing them exactly what we mean by using these visualizations.

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Our Tips for Using Miro for Strategic Marketing Planning:

1. Start with a brainstorm board.

Once you have met with all of the stakeholders within your company to define goals from marketing and the associated metrics for success, you need to document it. Our head of strategy starts this in a brainstorm board. We create two sections:

a) Inspiring Action

This sets out what marketing needs to be performed to produce a specific behavior in the target audience. We use virtual sticky notes that are color coded to identify the ultimate goal of the activity, the associated campaigns, planned tactics etc.

b) Insights to be Gathered

These set out the insights that stakeholders want to see to make agile business decisions. This is the foundation of our data strategy.

2. Data Scientist Should Review Brainstorm and Clarify Information Needed to Build the Data Strategy.

3. Data Scientist Should start to Build Out Map of Available Data Sources and Tracking Elements.

4. Data Scientist and Marketers Collaborate to Confirm the Data Stategy Matches the Marketing Strategy.

5. Head of Strategy Should Add Content and Topics to The Strategy and Map Against the Insights to Be Generated (from this point on insights and marketing should always be considered together).

Once you have completed these five steps, you will have a Miro board that combines marketing and measurement together.

Why does Miro work so well for this? It enables you to be look at planning from multiple perspectives and tie them all together into a cohesive whole. Here are some of the features of Miro that we use and love:

• Online whiteboard for shared ideation
• Templates and workflows that we can customize to get up and running quickly
• Integration with our tech stack. For example we integrate Miro with Slack to alert that someone has been working on the board, and with our project management tool Monday.com to ensure every task we work on is referenced against the strategy that is housed in Miro.
• Security - we know our content is safe

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If you are interested in learning about our strategic management process for developing marketing that is tied to measurement, then ask us about an MMM™ workshop (“Measurement Metrics Methodology”).