Embracing Change and Innovation in Marketing!
Leaving behind everything familiar, she embarked on a journey of adventure and growth, setting her sights on Canada as the place to broaden her skills and experiences and ultimately become her new home. Studying at Sheridan allowed her to explore various fields—accounting, finance, and marketing—which eventually contributed to her understanding of business. However it was marketing that truly resonated with Sonica van Wyk, giving her a passion for finding new and innovative ways to connect the mechanics of business with the art of meaningful impact.
As her career progressed, marketing became more than just customer communications. She discovered the excitement of understanding consumer behavior, crafting creative campaigns, and seeing marketing strategies make a real impact. Continuous learning, innovation, and relationship-building have also become drivers for growth, both personally and professionally. During the challenging days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she joined Scintica, embracing the opportunity to help the company adapt to shifting landscapes and redefine its approach to audience engagement.
She believes that every person in a company contributes to shaping the company’s brand, not just marketing efforts alone. Her vision for Scintica extended beyond traditional strategies, focusing on creating systems that elevate customer satisfaction and loyalty, build industry-wide reputation, and strengthen connections with a diverse audience.
From Small-Town Roots to Global Brand Strategist
Born and raised in a small farming town in South Africa, she grew up in a family of 5, dreaming about the potential, opportunities and adventure out in the world. After finishing high school and studying in South Africa, she made the bold decision to pursue her dream and move to a new country, ultimately choosing Canada.
From a young age, she loved business. She was naturally drawn to her parents’ company and especially the business relationships she saw them foster with their most loyal customers. This passion continued into adulthood. In Canada, she began her career in inside sales and sales support roles, exploring different aspects of business, which ultimately led to her passion for marketing.
While studying, she took courses in accounting, finance, and marketing, all of which provided her with a strong foundation in business principles. Later, after becoming more fascinated with marketing, she pursued certifications from the Canadian Marketing Association, and came to see marketing as the perfect blend of business and psychology.
Her journey into the preclinical research and imaging industry began around 2003 when she joined VisualSonics, a small but rapidly growing company. She found herself drawn to the specific complexities and intricacies of marketing within the medical and scientific fields, where she faced challenges in product positioning and messaging. This new environment, where science and business intersect, gave her a sense of excitement and fulfillment.
Her career path consisted of several research and imaging companies with a specific modality focus. Then Sonica joined Scintica during the challenging COVID-19 pandemic and now faced a new set of challenges. She was now challenged with transitioning from a focused modality company to a reseller and distributor of multiple brands. No longer was her focus on a single product and brand to promote, but she faced the task of building and promoting the Scintica brand while simultaneously helping partners launch and distribute their products while building a skilled marketing team to deliver these goals successfully.
For Sonica, this was an invigorating challenge—balancing multiple brands, establishing a strong brand identity for Scintica, and all along aligning it with the company’s mission to link researchers with the ideal research tools and solutions, equipping them to make a significant impact in their field and advance their science and work.
Her journey reflects her resilience, adaptability, and commitment to fostering brand growth in complex and evolving industries.
Leveraging Data-Driven Insights
Sonica believes that data and analytics are essential to driving marketing strategy, especially given the diversity in research areas and user profiles. Each campaign and message must be carefully tailored to specific audiences. For instance, the content developed for cardiovascular researchers differs from that intended for oncologists or neuroscientists. A well-crafted marketing strategy ensures that the messaging aligns with scientific standards, emphasizing not just product features but the scientific value and research support behind them.
When executing campaigns, Sonica and her team closely monitor the data feedback to assess the campaign’s effectiveness. The metrics they track include audience reach, content relevance, engagement, inquiry rates, and performance within the sales funnel. This feedback loop is crucial for refining future campaigns by determining what resonated with the audience, assessing whether the content was suitable, or identifying if the target demographic needed tweaking. Equally important is ensuring that the information shared is relevant and valuable to the audience. In today’s fast-paced world, where everyone has countless demands and limited bandwidth, respecting consumers’ time builds trust and increases the likelihood of meaningful engagement.
Her target audience spans a wide demographic range, from individuals in their mid-20s to those in their 80s, each with varying preferences for content consumption. It is crucial to consider factors such as age, preferred media formats, and familiarity with digital tools in all marketing activities.
For example, some older audiences prefer printed materials, while younger generations might favor digital formats like emails, PDFs, webinars, or even quick video snippets like TikTok. A data-driven approach enables her to continually adapt and refine their outreach, ensuring that each campaign is optimized to effectively reach and engage the intended audience.
Driving Innovation and Customer-Centricity in Marketing
During the COVID era, digital transformation became imperative as traditional marketing channels like conferences, trade shows and in-person events were unavailable. Sonica led her team to adeptly navigate this shift, focusing on innovative digital strategies to reach diverse audiences effectively.
Recognizing consumers’ varied needs and interests, her team carefully crafts targeted campaigns for different research areas and tailors messages that connect with each specific audience.
Historical and real-time data and analytics play a central role in their strategy. The insights and knowledge gained, allow her team to refine their approach continuously, adjusting audience targeting or content based on the results. This strategy is at the heart of ensuring the right message reaches the right audience in the most efficient and impactful way.
Sonica encourages open communication and brainstorming sessions to foster collaboration within the marketing team and with other departments. Sales and product management teams provide valuable insights into customer feedback and product needs, reinforcing a cohesive brand experience that goes far beyond logos or fonts. The marketing team frequently interacts with customer-facing teams to understand the real-world challenges their target audience faces.
Sonica’s holistic approach to branding emphasizes that every interaction, from the person answering the phone to customer service and technical support, is an integral part of the company’s brand identity and customer experience. This collaborative, customer-focused strategy helps create meaningful connections with the market and ensures that marketing efforts align with genuine customer needs.
Navigating the Overload
Sonica recently reflected on how much information people have access to on a daily basis today compared to 20+ years ago. She noted a shift in how we consume content and become aware of new products. In the past, advertising was limited to specific channels, but now, everywhere we turn, there’s an opportunity to encounter new products and services through various platforms. Whether it’s a phone, social media, email, browser, walking down the street, in a mall, or passing a window, the messages are constant and everywhere.
She recognizes the challenge of making a product stand out among this overwhelming flood of information. In the digital world, emails flood our inboxes, social media demands attention, and there is constant communication through chat programs, webinars, and phone calls. It’s so easy for a message to get lost in the noise, and marketing teams face the difficulty of ensuring their content rises above all this clutter.
One major hurdle she pointed out is the changing landscape of email marketing. With privacy regulations like GDPR and evolving laws in the US and Canada, it’s becoming more challenging to get emails to land in a user’s inbox, and more messages end up in spam folders. Due to an industry-wide effort to protect user privacy (e.g., Apple Mail’s Privacy Protection and Gmail’s image blocking), the lack of detailed data on open rates makes it more difficult to gauge the effectiveness of email and other campaigns.
Sonica suggested that to overcome these challenges, businesses must focus on their website content, analyze traffic, and determine where users are engaging. More importantly, she stressed the criticality of delivering the right content at the right time, tailored to the user’s specific needs. The key is being everywhere, across all channels, to ensure that your message reaches the consumer. With so many platforms available, it’s easy to miss an opportunity if your content delivery is not timed correctly.
Interestingly, Sonica also observed a resurgence of interest in traditional mail. She shared that this more personal, tactile form of communication is still surprisingly effective, as it grabs people’s attention in a way that an email simply can’t. It has proven successful in cutting through the digital clutter and engaging people in a more meaningful way.
Receiving a physical letter in the mail is more personal, feels special, and the slower pace of opening and reading it offers a more relaxed, focused experience, a stark contrast to the digital overload.
Growing Challenges of Customer Feedback
Sonica pointed out that obtaining customer feedback has become a complex task, as people have survey fatigue or no longer have time for surveys. In the past, surveys were the go-to method for measuring satisfaction, but that approach is less effective today.
To help address the challenge, she emphasized the need to gather feedback from every possible touchpoint, such as interactions with salespeople, technical support, or at events like trade shows. As this type of feedback is usually collected verbally from customers and responses to emails, tracking these insights across various channels remains challenging due to a lack of integrated systems.
To understand customer satisfaction, Sonica explained that her team tracks various actions, such as social media engagement and website interactions. By analyzing how content performs on social media, how and when traffic is driven to their website, and whether visitors take further actions like filling out a form or requesting more information, they can draw conclusions about the relevance and success of their campaigns. However, without the use of advanced tools within the company to track these interactions seamlessly, Sonica acknowledged that this process may not be as scientific as it could be.
Words of Wisdom
When asked about advice for aspiring marketers, Sonica emphasized the importance of following one’s passion, being inquisitive and never stop learning about people and how we relate to the products and services we consume.
She highlighted how marketing tools, techniques, and technologies are constantly evolving, citing AI as a key driver of change. Instead of fearing AI, Sonica advised young marketers to embrace AI as a tool to support their work, helping to improve content creation, data analytics, and campaign performance.
She also stressed the importance of empathizing with the consumer’s perspective. Marketers should always think about the product or service from the consumer’s point of view, considering factors such as the timing, content, and relevance of the message.
One example. Sonica shared how she still prefers reading step-by-step instructions for DIY projects, while younger audiences might prefer videos. Marketers need to avoid bias based on personal preferences and focus on providing solutions to the consumers’ problems.
Finally, Sonica encouraged aspiring marketers to stay passionate, have fun, and continuously learn. The marketing landscape is always changing, and it’s important to stay adaptable, open to new trends, and willing to experiment with new ideas. Even with years of experience, Sonica remains committed to growth, creativity and staying ahead of emerging trends, from, email marketing to AI and even occasionally shaking things up with a proven method such as direct mail.