My Best Marketing Tips #32: Experian Marketing Services, North America / Aimee Irwin / VP Strategy & Partnerships
My Best Marketing Tips #32: Experian Marketing Services, North America / Aimee Irwin / VP Strategy & Partnerships
After starting her career in strategy consulting, Aimee Irwin became fascinated by the relationship between technology and advertising and how technology can better enable marketing. In her role as VP for Strategy & Partnerships at Experian Marketing Services, North America, Aimee helps companies make data-driven marketing decisions and better understand and connect with consumers.
Aimee strongly believes that building a network and picking people’s brains is one of the most valuable activities you can do as you start out in marketing. In such a dynamic, ever-changing industry, talking to others to learn more and always adapting to change is a key to succeeding.
What would be your best marketing tip?
Keep consumers at the heart of your marketing strategy.
This means you need to test, test, and test again! Of course, digital marketing makes it easier to test audiences and their reactions. But, outside digital marketing, I’m a big advocate of focus groups to listen to what consumers really think.
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
In digital channels, I always look to test all our initiatives, from strategy, to messaging, customer triggers etc. But, even outside digital, I find focus groups are amazingly useful as I get to listen to what consumers respond to and, most importantly, what they don’t respond to. That is invaluable information to construct a solid marketing strategy.
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
The Internet and digital marketing are changing. We’re moving into a world more focused on privacy and consumer consent, where harnessing customer data will become extremely important to build a 360-degree view of the customer and their preferences. As the algorithms change, we’ll need to ask customers to opt in to leave their email addresses wherever they engage with brands in a digital interaction.
This becomes crucial, because brands will need to start linking up all the touchpoints with customers and use these identities to create the best customer experience. This data will also help cap the frequency with which we advertise to one consumer, for example across multiple devices, avoiding them becoming frustrated with the brand.
What is the marketing tip you give most often?
Meet people, pick their brains, and learn from them. If you build a strong network, it will be so much easier to get things done. At the same time, I think people are generally happy to help, especially if you can prove you’ve studied them and their company or industry beforehand.
Also, research the different careers within the industry you’re looking to get into and understand the various paths that are available to you and the underlying skills that you’ll need to build to take those paths.
Listen to Aimee talk about the future state of identity in the marketing landscape, her top advice for students and her best investment in her career, on the latest episode of our Shiny New Object podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3bgtsDhXW2uRTUM54oodFJ
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