Building Customer Experience Strategies with Data, Empathy, and AI: Nora von Arnim

Zach:
Hey, welcome back to The Marketer Exchange.

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Nora von Arnim. She’s a Strategy Director at the global marketing agency RAPP, where she focuses on customer experience, CRM, and personalization.

We talk about what strong strategy actually looks like within agencies, how you can use data without losing empathy for your customer, and what early-career marketers need to get right.

Let’s get into it.

Zach:
Nora von Arnim, thank you so much for joining The Marketer Exchange. I really appreciate you coming today. It’s good to have you here.

Nora:
Thanks for having me.

Zach:
Why don’t we start with you just introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about the work that you do?

Nora:
Yeah, I’m a Strategy Director at RAPP.

I’m from Germany. I moved to New York about three and a half years ago. I’ve been with RAPP for six years now.

RAPP has been really great to work for. RAPP is a marketing agency that really looks at building stronger relationships with customers using data, creative, and strategy.

I’m an experience strategist.

So we do everything around customer experience development. We try to understand the customers, the data that we get, and really design the most optimized customer experience.

Everything around customer relationship management is what we do.

We look at all sorts of channels. Email is our primary channel, but we look at direct mail, SMS, apps, website optimizations as well. We work with digital banner ads and paid social too.

So really across the spectrum, but really directly talking to the consumer there.

Zach:
For folks that don’t know much about agency life, where does strategy sit within RAPP?

How does that work in connection with other teams and working with other folks?

Nora:
The strategy team is really kind of in the middle a little bit.

We have the client services, also called the account team, that are directly responsible for the relationship with the clients.

They’re directly tuned in with the clients on a daily basis, finding out what projects need to happen, working on that relationship, and delivering that back to us.

If a brief comes in, they would come to us and we would start working on a project. So that would be funneled through them.

Then we would do our research, come up with a strategy, and work together with the marketing sciences team in collaboration to come up with that solution.

Once we have dug into the data, looked at everything that the clients have sent us, and looked at the current customer experience, then we would come up with a brief together.

So the marketing sciences team and strategy, but predominantly strategy with the marketing sciences input.

Then we would go to the creative team to brief them.

So we sort of take it from the client services team, work with marketing sciences together, and then we give it to creative, who then comes up with the end product.

We’re kind of the middleman that gets the project, builds the strategy and direction for it, and then guides the rest of the team, so the creatives, to come up with the copy and visuals for it.

Zach:
You’ve come up through the ranks at RAPP too.

You haven’t always been a Strategy Director. You were a junior strategist, I guess you might call it, and then you’ve come up through the ranks now to Strategy Director.

Tell us a little bit about how that role has changed, going from working on individual briefs for one client and now looking at the whole customer journey.

Nora:
It’s been great.

I’ve been very lucky working at RAPP, starting as a junior strategist. I came straight out of university.

I had a placement year and other experiences, but RAPP is really the biggest chunk of my experience.

I got really lucky. I’m still here and I’ve been able to grow so much.

It’s changed a lot over the years, for sure.

When I started as a junior strategist, I would work on one-off briefs. So I would write a creative brief for an email, I think at the time it was Virgin Media, and work on just single deliverables.

So writing that creative brief, briefing the creatives, and seeing that creative all the way through.

Really single touch points that could be offer emails or things like that.

Then as I got more and more senior in my role, I would work on larger strategic initiatives, which now can take up to three or four months at a time.

Now we really look at the holistic customer experience.

I’ve really started to work with a tool that we call an affinity analysis. It looks like an infinity loop, and we call it the affinity loop, where we map the whole customer experience from start to finish.

So the path to purchase, the path to loyalty on the right.

We will look at mapping the whole customer experience for our clients and optimizing it end to end, looking at all channels and really diving deep into the data.

These projects can take several months.

We would then uncover things like, “The onboarding experience is terrible for your brand, so we need to optimize that.”

Then we would slate that within our fiscal year planning as the top priority and start working on that and coming up with that strategy.

Even though sometimes it’s maybe 10 touch points, which sounds like something that you could quickly do, that can take a few months to work internally and then also externally to get it approved and have lots of different teams feed into it.

Those are more complex initiatives.

Now I also work with the inter-agency teams.

We’ve got other agencies, sometimes within Omnicom, sometimes outside of Omnicom, that we work with.

So we would have to come up with integrated strategies.

We would work with the media planning and buying agency as well to work on integrating digital and CRM, and that would be more complex too because you’ve got different stakeholders there.

So projects have become more complex and longer reaching over time.

It’s changed quite a lot.

Zach:
Yeah, it sounds like it.

Tell me a little bit more about the research side of the customer journey work that you guys do.

How are you gathering that data? Is it focus groups? What are you doing to gather that data about the customer journey?

Nora:
It really depends on the project.

We have a team called CXI, who are our customer intelligence team that we can tap into for larger projects.

They will do things like primary research for us. I’ve done this a couple of times for clients.

They are also in charge of our research tools.

We’ve got a huge suite of research tools, things like WARC and Mintel, eMarketer, things like that.

We’ve got subscriptions that we can dig into and use at our leisure, and things like Brandwatch as well, social listening tools.

So we will use those to do a lot of our research.

Then we will use our own clients’ data.

Often our clients have done their own research internally that they share with us.

In good cases, they have a sophisticated team that can show us what that experience looks like.

Sometimes we have to do a lot of desk research to supplement what they can’t give us.

It really depends on what’s available from the clients.

But we’ve got expertise in some verticals like pharma and automotive, where we’ve gathered quite a lot of intel and research over the years that we continuously build on.

Zach:
You referred to yourself earlier as an experience strategist.

For somebody who’s hearing that for the first time, what does that mean in practice?

What do you do as an experience strategist?

Nora:
Experience might sound like we’re doing some sort of pop-up in person, but it’s not really an in-person experience. It’s the online experience.

We call it experience strategy because it’s that direct customer experience that we’re influencing.

We’re not building the huge ads that you see on the side of the road or the TV ads. We’re direct to the customer.

So we’re really building that online experience and direct experience for them.

We will look at not just the emails that we’re sending out, but all of the other channels that are part of that.

We’ll look at the whole ecosystem, including the things that they will get from apps, SMS, direct mail.

Sometimes, for example, in automotive, we’ll talk to the dealer. What are they getting from the dealer? What are they getting from other levels within the organization?

And we try to align that experience.

So we don’t just look at one channel as the full experience, but we look at all of the channels and how that forms the full experience for them.

Sometimes, for example, we’ve talked to the call center team and asked what complaints have come in.

As we develop a welcome onboarding journey, for example, we would take that into account. We would talk to that team.

If we know that people are really struggling with a certain issue, we would try to address that within our experience.

We want to make sure we look at each channel, what problems have come up, and where there are any barriers that we need to address within the channels we can influence.

Zach:
As you guys are putting different strategies together, I would imagine you hear a lot of pitches for strategy and put together a lot of pitches for strategy.

What makes a strategy feel strong to you versus something that maybe is just a good presenter or something that is well presented?

What’s the difference between that and a good strategy?

Nora:
I think sometimes strategy can be a lot of smoke and mirrors and just fancy words without the data behind it.

So a good strategy is really something that’s been thoughtfully crafted with lots of teams in mind.

What I’ve always heard from our Chief Strategy Officer is that we, as strategists, should always listen more than we speak.

It’s really about listening and about doing the research and talking to the different teams.

A good brief should never be built just by a strategist. It should happen in collaboration with the other teams.

For me, if I know I’ve spoken to my marketing sciences colleagues and I’ve spoken to my creative colleagues and to my account colleagues and have taken their point of view on board, then I know I have the different lenses and ways that they look at it in there.

Then it’s really about using the data that we have in the right way.

Looking at our customer data that the marketing sciences team can access and seeing what we can see there.

Then looking at the research and backing up our approach with what we can see is happening in the market.

So really not working on your own in your own little box and just going away and doing it by yourself.

It’s really that exchange. It’s really a team effort because every team comes in with their own perspective on things.

I think it’s important to make it a collaborative effort, because otherwise the strategies tend to not have legs if it’s just developed in your own little bubble.

Zach:
So supporting your claims with data, making sure that you have data to support what you’re saying, and then also this collaborative effort across teams.

Awesome. That’s so good.

What do you think are some of the things that people still misunderstand about customer experience strategy?

Nora:
I think a lot of the time, we look at some of the channels in silos.

I think that’s not looking at it through the full lens.

We sometimes have clients who are very focused on the channel that they can impact without thinking about all of the other touch points that will come in.

Just because a specific team is only responsible for these emails doesn’t mean that that’s the only thing that a customer sees.

Customers don’t see these emails as a separate stream from the legal emails that come through and the ads that they see on TV.

All of it together builds the perception of the brand.

So we can’t look at things in those silos.

It’s really not a good customer experience if we’re treating them as separate from each other.

Zach:
One of the things that we’ve talked about previously was personalization.

That was something that you seemed to get very excited about.

What are the things that are exciting you about personalization right now?

Nora:
I think we have access to so much great data that sometimes is not used in the right way or to its full potential.

We really do a lot with personalization at RAPP.

I think there’s a lot of potential to really tap into things that people enjoy outside of our brand.

For example, we worked on an automotive company where we realized that a lot of the customers love to golf.

So we did a test with golf creative, and it performed really well because people felt like it resonated with them. They connected.

Going beyond just looking at a demographic, but looking at the other interests that connect you, has really helped.

We’ve done a lot of fun things with integrating those things and seeing people as full humans that have experiences and hobbies and joys outside of the brand.

Not just looking at you for your gender, household income, location, because that really doesn’t show us the full person.

So when we have access to that data, which we can look at through customer data and append it with Experian data, then we can find some pretty fun nuggets.

It gets a lot more interesting than just talking about some generic things.

Also in terms of personalization, thinking about the right moment in time.

At RAPP, we always try to talk to people in the right moment, in the right channel, in the right way.

Life cycle planning, I think I touched on with that affinity analysis that we do, is really important.

For example, in automotive, someone who has come to the end of their lease in a newsletter might not want to hear about certain subjects that you would talk about with a new owner.

A new owner might want to hear a little bit more about their current car. They want to learn about the brand.

But someone who’s come to the end of their lease will be open to an offer of a new car versus someone who just bought and is like, “Why are you sending me an offer?”

Personalization in that sense is really important because you can really annoy customers if you get it wrong in the beginning and risk people unsubscribing and stopping engaging if they feel like you’re not really listening to them.

There’s a lot to be gained by being personal in the right ways.

It’s also a fine line. It can become creepy.

So you need to find the right level of personalization so that people are receptive to it.

Zach:
There are a lot of good ways that you just mentioned about how data can be used.

We’ve seen this big push toward big data since the 2010s, really. It’s been around for a while.

We’ve seen this proliferation of data now. It’s everywhere. We’re almost drowning in it.

You mentioned the car lease example. I just got a new car, so I don’t need a new one.

I’ve had that happen to me recently where I’ve taken my car in for servicing and got an email within the next week saying, “Hey, you’re due for a service.”

No, I just had one.

So what do you think brands are still getting wrong about personalization?

Because we’ve been talking about it for a decade at least.

Nora:
Having a lot of data doesn’t necessarily mean you’re understanding it.

I think a lot of people look at the action. We look at what people did, but not maybe why they did it.

The reasons behind it, the mindsets, the intentions.

Sometimes I think we come to conclusions too quickly and we don’t fully look at the full picture.

I think that’s where precision and empathy comes in, which is important for us here.

We really try to make sure that we do talk to people in the right moments, in the right way, and connect with them across the journey, across the channels, in those manners.

I think a lot of the time we still make broad-stroke assumptions and just focus on the wrong things and really get it wrong.

Zach:
So it’s not just about having the data, but being able to use it well, right?

Nora:
Yeah.

Zach:
You mentioned previously too, precision with empathy at RAPP.

This is something that you guys are focused on, right?

What does this look like in the work that you’re doing on a daily basis?

Nora:
It’s really important that we work with our marketing science colleagues because they have so much access to all of the data.

Precision with empathy is really only possible if we work closely with them and we keep our pulse on how customers are reacting.

We will have biweekly meetings where we look at the results for recent campaigns and look at how things performed to try and make sure that we can continuously optimize.

We will have test-and-learn plans for these clients to keep testing and learning and try to get better with how we target people in the right way.

For every big campaign, we will look at certain ways to segment and personalize to become even better in the way that we talk to people.

We also have a very modular approach in how we look at emails.

We will have a single email that you might receive, but I will receive a very different version of it with dynamic modules that pull in based on your behavior.

We do a lot of that where we make it easier for our clients.

We don’t have 16 versions of an email, but we have one template that flows in different modules depending on your behavior.

That’s really where we try and be as precise as we can by understanding what our customers need at the different stages of their life cycle with us.

Zach:
Can I go back to that answer you said earlier about the golf example, where the automotive company discovered that customers were responding really well to the golf creative?

How did you come up with that?

How did you identify that they were responding to that or that that idea might even work?

Nora:
We had run tests before based on demographics that just didn’t resonate as well.

So we looked at the data.

We looked at their customer data appended with Experian, and we looked at what their hobbies were.

Golf and skiing came out as things that resonated.

So we thought it would be worth a test.

We would never roll this out to the whole base. We would always do a test to see if it performs well against a generic creative.

So we did that golf test and it performed really well.

It was within the copy, within the visuals. Not too much, not too little, but leaning into that hobby, and it performed well.

Since then, we’ve been trying to roll that out across other clients or depending on the season as well to see where we can incorporate it.

I think with that, we also need to be careful because you don’t want to be constantly sending them golf, golf, golf.

You’re not a golf company.

Trying to figure out the right moments to lean into their hobbies is important so that you don’t risk fatigue with that as well.

Zach:
So secondary data through Experian.

You saw that this was a potential opportunity, ran some tests to see if it was going to be effective, and then rolled it out more broadly.

That’s really interesting.

Nora:
Yeah.

Zach:
We’d be remiss not to talk about AI in this space.

Talk to me a little bit about how AI works within strategy work and how you guys are using it and maybe how you feel like you shouldn’t be using it.

Nora:
AI has really changed things.

I’m quite glad that I started out as a junior strategist learning everything from the ground up because I think now a lot of the things that I used to do manually can be done with AI.

We really use it as a partner, not as someone to do our job.

At the onset of a brief, I always find it very useful to look at the client brief through the lens of AI and pull out the key opportunities there.

We use it for creative brief writing as well.

We will work with AI to come up with some of the phrasing for the creatives.

We will come up with the ultimate strategy, but a lot of our job is writing PowerPoint decks, right?

AI can be really helpful in phrasing things in the right way and having you turn this thing that you were thinking about into a really succinct bullet point.

It really helps to make us better storytellers and make sure we’re really hitting the nail on the head with how we’re talking about things.

I think a few years ago, it would take a lot longer to build a PowerPoint deck.

Now a lot of the real crafting of the language can really be helped through AI.

So we use it a lot for that.

We don’t use it to do research.

We have access to a lot of great research tools, and we cannot trust AI to do that work for us.

It can sometimes point you in the right direction, but we really don’t want to leverage any sort of sourcing from there.

But it definitely helps as a partner to try and figure out the narrative that you’re creating.

Zach:
You said that as a young strategist or a junior strategist, you’re grateful that you had to learn some of these things manually.

What are some of those things that you feel like junior strategists today should be learning to do manually rather than leaning too heavily on AI?

Nora:
I think it’s important to learn how to write a creative brief without having an AI tool because it’ll really teach you to think more deeply about things.

I think it teaches you critical thinking.

AI has taken away the ability, or the need, to critically think about something yourself and just ask the AI what it thinks.

I don’t think you can be a strategist without being able to be a critical thinker.

So I think relying on it heavily can really shoot people in the foot later on.

Even relying on it while studying too much.

I think you should really be able to sit with your own thoughts about a subject and figure out which way you want to go with it.

A lot of that is now, you can just ask AI and it’ll give you an answer.

But coming up with that yourself, I think, is really important because that will really make you a good strategist.

Zach:
You’ve stayed within RAPP.

You’ve moved up pretty quickly, and you’ve moved up through the ranks and progressed a lot within one agency, within one organization.

That seems to me to be fairly unique these days.

People tend to move around a lot.

So it seems interesting to me that you’ve stayed within RAPP and progressed like you have.

What do you think has mattered most for you as you’ve progressed, and what has helped you the most as you’ve progressed through the organization?

Nora:
I do think it’s quite unique that I’ve stayed for so long.

I think I was really lucky to work with some great people over the years.

Working with the right managers and mentors really makes a huge difference.

I’ve always had great cheerleaders that have supported me in my efforts.

What’s helped me is that I’ve always been, I think my main drive is constant growth and learning.

I’ve always felt like I got those experiences at RAPP really well.

There’s the affinity analysis tool, for example, which was something that I really enjoyed working on and became someone that’s done a lot of those.

When I moved to New York, I started coaching some of the colleagues here on how to use those tools and things like that.

I’ve always put myself forward as someone that doesn’t just work in their own little corner and clock off.

I’ve always been someone that wants to teach the team and work with the team.

I’ve always just been very involved with the team, and I’ve never seen this as just a job where I go home and forget about it.

I’ve always enjoyed just being really involved and improving things and pushing our leadership teams to do things differently or set up a call for these things.

We’ve run AI sessions where we’ve taught the rest of the team how to use it and things like that.

I think I’ve always just been a very collaborative person in that way and proactive.

That is always appreciated because I think a lot of people come in, go home.

For me, it’s always been more than that.

Also, RAPP offering me the opportunity to come to New York was huge.

I’ve loved that change.

It’s a big difference to move across the ocean like that.

That’s also a reason why I’ve stayed and why I still feel like I’m learning, because it almost feels like a different agency when you move to a new city.

Zach:
Absolutely.

So collaboration with others, work ethic, and also having supportive managers and leadership.

But I’d imagine that you’ve had to push hard for your own progression too.

What does that look like in practice as you’ve pushed hard for making it happen for yourself?

Nora:
I’m lucky because I’m quite extroverted and confident in the workplace.

That’s definitely helped me.

I’ve definitely never been handed a promotion just because I sat back and smiled.

I’ve always had to go to my managers and my leaders and advocate for progression, ask for the job, ask for more money.

Sometimes those are challenging conversations. They’re not always easy, and it can be very intimidating.

But I’ve always pushed for it.

I would always have a list ready of all the reasons why I deserve that promotion, why I’ve worked hard.

I’ve always been someone that volunteers for things and is proactive as well, or working on pitches and things like that.

I’ve always shown that I’m a team player and I put in the work, but also that I want that recognition back.

You do have to speak up.

You do have to put yourself out there.

You can’t expect those things to just come because you’ve been at a company for a certain amount of years.

That’s just not how it works.

So yeah, it comes with a lot of work for sure.

Zach:
What do some of those conversations look like when you go to your manager, your leadership, and you say you’ve got your list of things that you’ve done well over the last however long?

What does that conversation look like?

What do some of the negotiations look like?

Nora:
Every year we would write a self-reflection report with a number of questions where we would reflect on how we’ve improved and developed.

That in itself helps as a starting point to try and figure out, yeah, I have actually made quite a lot of progress. I’ve done all these things.

It helps you also feel confident that you do deserve this promotion as you look back because I think sometimes you can forget how much you achieve within a year.

Then it’s a continuous conversation with your managers.

It would never be something that just gets brought up once and it comes out of nowhere.

It’s a conversation that, after a certain amount of time, you know you would be eligible for it.

So there would be conversations before the promotion cycle would even begin, like four months prior, to say, “I would really like to go for this promotion.”

You can kind of feel out with your manager if that’s something that’s in the cards for this time and something you should push for.

If you have a good relationship with your manager, which is really important, then you can start crafting the reasons why, because they also have to go to their manager to push for your promotion.

So it’s kind of a long game.

It’s not just a one-off negotiation. It’s something that develops over a few months.

Sometimes I’ve brought up the salary that people have in other agencies before and how much I think I’m worth and things like that.

You say how much you bring to the team and the things that you are in charge of, even though you might not have that level.

Just being confident about what you bring to the table and what you bring to the company and hoping that that gets seen.

Sometimes it’s out of your manager’s or manager’s manager’s control because we work for big holding companies and sometimes things aren’t possible.

But I’ve always tried to push for things because there’s nothing more frustrating than missing a cycle opportunity and being really angry at yourself that you didn’t go for it.

Zach:
So it sounds a little bit like a similar approach to pitching ideas to a client.

Bringing the data.

Having data related to what other agencies are paying people who are in a similar position to you.

Also having data about the projects that you’ve been working on and what you’ve been able to contribute and what that’s generated for that business maybe.

So having data to support the claims that you’re making about what you do, right?

Nora:
Definitely. Yeah, for sure.

Zach:
For somebody early in their career, you’ve kind of touched on how you’ve done this, but any advice for people who are early in their career about how they can show initiative, how they can get more involved and help the business grow?

Nora:
I personally also want to say my work-life balance is very important to me.

I think that when you’re early on in your career, working late is not the thing that’s going to cut it.

In some companies, maybe that will show that you’re very dedicated, but it can also show that you have very poor time management.

So I wouldn’t just rely on showing up and being there late and being the last person to leave the office.

I think the most important thing is really talking to other people.

Talking to people across teams and really shadowing other people and reaching out and saying, “Hey, I know we don’t work on a project together, but I would really love a 30-minute chat to hear about this thing that you guys do.”

“I heard you work on this thing. How can I just see what you guys are doing and learn a little bit?”

So really putting yourself out there across the teams and showing interest and having those conversations.

Show that you’re available for supporting on pitches and to shadow how those happen.

When you’re a junior, you don’t usually get involved at the forefront in pitches, but you can offer yourself up to do some research for it and shadow.

All those things will help you so much because you will gain experience.

You will start to understand early how those things work, and you will really show that you’re proactive.

You’re showing initiative.

You’re there offering to do small team share-outs.

In most agencies, there are team meetings where someone can share work or teach a tool or do things like that.

Putting yourself forward for those things is always really helpful too.

Or even social initiatives.

If you’re really someone who cares about the culture of the agency, helping organize that always helps too.

Those things don’t have to be things that you do outside of your work or do on your weekend, but really just in the day-to-day, in how you interact with people.

I think really not sitting in the office with your headphones on, not talking to anyone.

That’s going to be difficult and also will make your job feel more intimidating.

But actually just having conversations, I think, is honestly the best way.

That’s how I’ve done it as well.

Zach:
It’s such an important piece of advice.

It can be very difficult for new grads or people new to an agency or new to a business, maybe more introverted than others.

It’s such a hard thing for people to get over sometimes, but it’s so important.

It’s missed opportunities every day when you’re not doing that.

Nora:
Yeah.

And start with people that are your age, that are a similar level in a different team that you can talk to, to start building confidence.

It doesn’t have to be the head of department.

It can be people on your level that you start to learn from until you feel more confident to speak to others.

So yeah, definitely important.

Zach:
Good advice.

You’re from Germany, also lived in London, and now live in New York.

How has living and working across those three different cultures, pretty distinct cultures, shaped your career?

Nora:
I think it’s really interesting.

I was kind of terrified to move to New York because I thought, “Oh my God, this is going to be so different from London.”

But actually, honestly, London and New York have so much in common in the way that they are so multicultural and just have so much arts and culture.

It’s been really fun.

I think it’s helped me understand the different consumer environments for sure.

I think in Europe, with GDPR, certain things personalization-wise are not possible in the same way that they are possible here.

There’s a lot more pharma advertising that happens in the U.S. compared to Europe.

So a lot of things have been different there.

I think it’s really helped me look at a broad spectrum of clients.

It’s been interesting even just working across clients that we had in the UK and working for them here.

The work culture is definitely very different, and you learn to adapt to the American way.

But yeah, it’s been fun.

I think it’s going to help me in the long term because I can really adapt to the different markets and understand consumers across the globe better now, I think.

Zach:
What’s been your favorite place to live and work?

Nora:
It’s really tough.

I love London and I love New York.

I think they’re both so unique.

I love living in New York right now.

I lived in London for eight years, and it was so fun to live there. I loved the job there and the agency.

But for right now, New York is incredible, and we have some really fun clients that we work with.

I wouldn’t change it right now.

New York is where I want to be.

Zach:
Nice.

Always a good feeling to be where you want to be.

Nora:
For sure.

Zach:
As you are hiring or training new marketers, this is getting back to some advice for new marketers or folks who are about to graduate.

What is it that you wish they understood about agency life and about strategy within an agency?

Nora:
I think the most important thing is that you really need to know that you’re a storyteller as a strategist.

Your strategy can be as sound as you think it is, but if that doesn’t come across, it’s completely lost.

So the most important thing really is to learn to tell a story and to try and craft your slides, your pitch deck, in a way that is captivating and that feels supported by data and feels obvious and clear.

Sometimes we will brief creative and it will just not land with them.

They won’t understand the brief. They won’t quite get it.

Even though that’s an internal team, they still need to believe that that’s the right way to go, and they will push back if they don’t agree with how you’ve written the brief.

So really being clear is important.

One thing that I did when I studied was I would always write 10% above the word limit, and I would really struggle to be succinct.

That’s really something I’ve tried to get better at.

I used to build decks of like 50 slides, and you lose clients halfway through. It’s just too much.

Now we really try and reduce it to 10 or 15 slides.

Say it in way less than you have to.

Really moving slides to the appendix and upleveling things and not having slides with long texts on them that you have to take ages to digest.

At its essence, what do you need to deliver?

So that storytelling, I think that’s the key thing that you need to learn.

Zach:
That’s really good.

So storytelling.

Are there other capabilities that you feel like graduates or new marketers should have as they come into work?

Nora:
I think it’s important to get very comfortable getting super deep into the data and into the research.

I think you have to be a bit of a nerd and enjoy digging deep without falling into rabbit holes.

That skill of trying to figure out what’s the right data point to go after, what’s coming up the most.

Not looking at one article and saying, “Okay, cool. This is it. We’re going to go away with it.”

But really looking at different data sources and contrasting, comparing, and seeing, what am I seeing across the board here?

What keeps bubbling up to the surface?

When it comes to that, you really can’t be lazy.

You have to really look at the different sources and try and see what’s the key theme that I’m getting from this.

I think that’s an important skill.

That’s something that sometimes gets lost if you use AI in a way that you rely on it too much, because you’re just like, “Well, that’s what AI says. I’m going to go with that.”

So really that research, and then that critical thinking attached to it, I think, is really key there.

Zach:
Are there places that you would point them toward to gain that knowledge as it relates to data?

Nora:
You mean in terms of learning how to do that?

I think that’s probably not official training.

I think it’s really something that you learn as you go.

It’s something that you have to continuously practice.

I think with every brief, what we try and do here when I onboard someone new is show them a few tools that they can start using.

I will introduce them to our CXI strategist to walk them through and to start getting comfortable with more and more tools so that you know exactly how to use them and when to pull them in.

So I think that’s the best way, to start to use certain tools, get comfortable with them, and see the value that they bring.

Then the more you feel comfortable with using those, the more natural it also becomes to dive in and take a look at what you can find.

But it’s really a learning-by-doing thing.

I think you learn at university as well already.

You have access to, I think, probably some of the same research tools we do.

So really looking through the data and distilling it.

It’s important to just keep practicing.

Zach:
So there’s going to be some training that will happen, some onboarding that will happen when graduates or new marketers join agencies and businesses.

That will be part of it.

But having some data literacy, we could call it, through utilizing the tools that they already have access to before they get to that part.

That’s really good.

Nora:
Definitely important.

Especially as you’re coming in as a graduate, that is really the main skill you can bring to the table, to be good at doing research and pulling out the right nuggets of insights.

That’s really the first step that you need to be a successful strategist.

Zach:
Again, you’ve already started to touch on some of these things, but looking back at yourself when you were about to graduate, what’s some advice that you would give yourself at that point?

Nora:
I think especially for strategy, it’s quite tough to land a junior position as your first job.

So I started applying for creative agencies for any type of role that I could get.

I started working at first in an account role, so in the client leadership position for a few months.

I think trying to get your foot in the door however you can is great because you can always, once you’ve got a little bit of agency experience in one place, swap teams or switch over.

I’m glad that I did that because if I had held out for that perfect position to come up, it’s really difficult to land that on the first go.

So I think not being too picky with your first position, even though maybe that will sound weird, is actually probably the right way to go.

Just getting your foot in the door, especially in the current market, can be really tricky.

Really being open to entering through a lot of different pathways and then finding your way into the position that you ideally would like to have.

Also, you might love being an account person in the agency.

You might not want to be a strategist.

So I think it also helps because it grounds you in the different departments and teaches you how they work.

I’m glad that I did that at the time.

I also think that having a mentor is really important.

I had a mentor outside of the agency before I went into a job that really helped.

There are a lot of programs that offer those partnerships for free where you can get a mentor within the industry.

I think that’s incredibly helpful because it’s so difficult to know how to navigate an industry that you’re new to.

So having someone there to talk to is super important and has helped me a lot.

Zach:
Is there anything that we haven’t talked about today that you feel like we should have?

Nora:
I think we covered a lot of subjects, actually.

I think we covered most of it.

Yeah, a lot to talk about.

Zach:
Excellent.

Where can people find out more about you and the work that you do?

Nora:
I’m on LinkedIn.

I don’t post that frequently on it, but I am on LinkedIn.

So you can find me, Nora von Arnim, and the RAPP website as well.

Those are probably the main places.

Zach:
Excellent.

Nora, thank you so much for coming on The Marketer Exchange.

I really appreciate you. I really enjoyed talking to you today.

Thank you so much.

Nora:
Thank you so much.