Communication is as much as listening as it is sharing: Alia from Lattice

Alia Le Cam has always loved the creative aspects of marketing, but she wasn’t sure where to set her foot. She started out as a generalist but finally found her love in storytelling.  Today she is the director of communications and public relations at Lattice.

1. Give us a little bit of the backstory about how you came to the field?

I graduated from college with a double major in Marketing and Economics. I loved the creative aspects of marketing but beyond that wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do so I started my career as a marketing generalist. I explored a few different career tracks within marketing and realized that what I was most drawn to was initiatives and activities where I was able to lean into the storytelling around the brand/product and find ways to make it both relatable and interesting to others.

2. What was your first interaction/experience with data? What did it mean to you then?

Very early in my career, real data seemed to belong mainly to down funnel teams, once visitors shared information and were converted into leads. I was lucky to work for companies that placed high emphasis on building brand awareness and reputation vs trying to deeply tie each individual action to a pipeline generation metric. I shared data I have easy access to (views on a page, press release syndications) but generally operated fairly independently from real insight data.

3. How did you start using data/metrics in delivering your campaigns? Can you share a few anecdotes? 

Data in Communications has a reputation of being notoriously fluffy. It’s easy to wow internal stakeholders with numbers like potential viewership on a last press release (235M eyeballs!) without it making a real impact on the business as a whole. One of my goals has been to develop ways to tie very top-of-funnel actions happening in the Communications and PR worlds to business and pipeline metrics the company cares about. For example, communicating 

4. Did you come across any challenges in communications and did you feel data helped you in any way to solve the problem?

One of the biggest challenges in the Communications world is where to prioritize your time. Trying to boil the ocean (doing a little bit of all the things) is useless so strategically deciding where you focus your resources, whether it’s time, energy, budget, etc, is key. 

5. What is the most important metric/data point for you as a comms person?

This really depends on the goal of the communications activity. Some of the key metrics I track for communications campaigns are clickthrough rates (CTR), XX, and sentiment. On the broad Communications side, my team tracks SoV (Share of Voice) and XX. All of these metrics give us a deeper understanding of how a campaign is performing and whether it’s successful or not.

7. How do you see data in comms and marketing evolve in the coming days?

The evolution of cookies and trackers and now policies and laws like GDPR and CCPA are greatly changing the traditional marketing game. Typically data collected from these types of activities gave teams valuable insights into activities that created the largest business impact and pulled the most valuable leads and connections into the marketing funnel to convert over to Sales teams.

9. Is there any metric you wished you had access to?

Today tools like Google Analytics allow us to see broadly see where incoming traffic to our website is from but not necessarily how it relates to other activities users are doing across the web. For example, if someone reads a story about Lattice and then opens a new window to visit our website, we’re unable to see what sparked the reason for the visit. This data would help validate press and brand-building actions because we’d be able to have insight into exactly how articles are driving traffic and interest.

10. Would you like to share three things that worked for your brand or your two cents for the budding comms professionals?

● Communication is as much as listening as it is sharing. It’s important to spend time listening to what’s happening in the world around you to best understand how you can join the conversation, or if you should.

● Understand your audience and what speaks to them. Whether it’s attending the events they go to or forming internal relationships with teams that make up for the ideal audience, having a close connection to what resinates (and doesn’t) helps build the most impactful messaging.

● Finally, journalists don’t care what you’re selling. Sure, we’d all love the in-depth product write-up on why we’re market leaders in a top-tier publication. Journalists, however, have their own interests, focuses, and data metrics they care about. Do your research before pitching to make sure your news, which should be newsworthy and not marketing,