'The Why Behind the What' with Guest Speaker Jennifer Stoll

Written by: Emma Leishman

From insight mining to digital ecosystem development, Jennifer Stoll does it all when it comes to Digital Marketing Strategy.

Jennifer Stoll

My classmates and I had the opportunity to listen to Jennifer discuss her role as a Digital Marketing Strategist at Valtech, a global digital agency that specializes in technology, innovation, marketing, experience design, and much more.

Jennifer was able teach us about what it takes to work in the digital strategy space, emphasizing the importance of target audience needs and the end user experience.

Jennifer's Strategy Creation Process

In her presentation, Jennifer explained to us the kinds of things that help her create a good strategy. She described the structure of a strategy as less like steps toward a goal and more like a series of diverging and converging activities. They include:

• Research: coming up with a bunch of different hypotheses.

• Synthesis: reconfigure ideas in order to see what's going to stick and what can be used as a launching point.

• Ideation: helping the creative team come up with different ways to approach things, helping the tech team figure out what the best way to engage consumers is, and other idea creation.

• Plan/Iteration: coming up with a plan that ultimately provides a roadmap to achieve the end goal.

What really stuck out to me in her description was that any client needs to not only understand directionally what should be happening to gain success, but why the strategy is being recommended in the first place. It’s about understanding 'the why behind the what’ that really allows clients to understand how they’re going to effectively reach their target audience and why it’ll work.

Digital Strategy Is Problem Solving

"the ultimate job of a strategist is being a problem solver. Looking at things from the customers point of view and making sure that what you’re doing is the right thing for the customer." (Stoll, 2022).

That quote by Jennifer sparked intrigue in me and got me thinking about digital strategy as a career. I think that being able to step back and look at the whole of a company while also taking what the client has to say and solving a more specified problem for them is extremely enticing and seems to be very rewarding, as Jennifer made clear in the extensive strategic campaigns she’s created for companies like Philips and Exelon.

'The Why Behind the What' Discussion

During the presentation, we discussed whether or not we think SC Johnson should have individual branded websites. We spoke about the importance of understanding the target market before anything else in order to see where people are coming from and why they visit specific branded sites over others.

Jennifer explained that target audience needs are very important, especially when chemical products are involved, and people need to be able to find information about those products somewhere online. By understanding and testing out who is visiting the branded websites, there's a higher chance of driving traffic, cutting unnecessary costs, and ultimately, creating a strategy that fits.

Question For Jennifer

When asked, "what do you like best about working in strategy as opposed to more specialized fields of marketing?" Jennifer replied confidently with, the challenge of being uncomfortable. You get to work with a ton of different people and industries as well as different kinds of strategies.

Something that's very important to me is always being able to learn something new and challenging myself and working in strategy at an agency, you get to do that all the time.

Takeaway: Be Passionate and Get Inspired

To conclude, Jennifer gave one piece of really great advice, "if you have a passion for something, really go for it because it’s important to figure out and decide what motivates you". (Stoll, 2022). Jennifer explained that if you really like working on a brand, big creative ideas, and really understanding consumer motivations, then you will probably enjoy a strategy type of role.

That advice I will take with me in my job search adventure as I believe that I could see myself being passionate about those exact things and would motivate me to pursue a career in digital strategy moving forward.

References

Where Experiences are Engineered. (2022). Valtech.Com. https://www.valtech.com/en-ca/.

Stoll, J. (2022, March 9).

Leveraging Digital Marketing Strategy to Elevate the Customer Experience [Slides]. Jennifer Stoll. https://tinyurl.com/2e8ms3h2.