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Category: Marketing & e-commerce (Page 36 of 77)

Creating the Global User Experience

I was gratified to have the opportunity to do a presentation on the Global User Experience at the Gilbane Conference, as well as moderating several sessions in the technology track. For those that missed my presentation, I’ve posted a short recap here and a further exploration of the topic.

A common theme throughout the conference sessions was digital experiences and the role of mobile, web, content management, and other technologies in providing superior experiences to customers. That’s to be expected as creating superior customer experiences is a strategic imperative for most organizations, and also the current focus of most content software solutions in the marketplace, including content management systems. What is often overlooked (and the subject of my presentation) is that the CMS doesn’t just support delivery of the customer experience—it also has to support the behind the scenes players that create the customer experience.

Providing a compelling digital user experience is a complex undertaking no matter what the nature of the business or enterprise. It requires a range of talents including authoring, curation, story telling, design, and development, testing and deployment—and the tools to effectively support those diverse skill sets.

The heart of that experience is a modern CMS; in fact, delivering compelling digital user experiences is virtually impossible without one. But selecting the right CMS is challenging—after all, there are many to choose from and it can be difficult to differentiate products—most promise to deliver superior digital user experiences.

But one thing that is often overlooked is that creating great customer experiences requires an orchestrated approach by the “other users” of the CMS: editors and developers. It also requires the integration of tools and content that may reside outside of the CMS. In other words, the quality of the customer experience is directly related to the quality of the experience that a CMS provides to content creators, developers, and integrators.

Digging a bit deeper, content creators are actually a diverse collection of roles and skill sets, not just authors and editors. What’s common across those roles is that many are not full time professional content authors, which makes the quality of the content creator experience vitally important. Content creators want to use tools that are easy and familiar with a short learning curve. Most of all, they want to be able to focus on telling stories and creating great content, not mastering complex tools.

Developers, like content creators, also value ease of use and familiarity. They want to use tools, languages, and frameworks that they are familiar with and that work well in the technology environment in which they live. Most importantly, they want and need to be involved in the process of selecting a CMS—failure to include IT will lead to increased time to operation, and a risk that the chosen solution won’t work well in the enterprise’s IT environment.

The integrator experience involves the developers, partners, and vendors that have to integrate the CMS with enterprise systems and applications (the installed base), but also with solutions from other vendors that help provide the customer experience. If integration is difficult, it will take more time or, worse yet, not be done. Poorly done integration drains energy, productivity, and innovation leading to later, less desirable results.

The solution to providing the global user experience is a well-architected CMS that provides comfortable and easy-to-use core functionality while easily integrating with enterprise and third party tools and applications. The selection of that CMS requires a concerted and cooperative effort on the part of all stakeholders that will ultimately use the content management system. Selection of a CMS is not a technology decision, it’s a strategic business decision that warrants the time, effort, and participation of all business and technology stakeholders in order to render the best decision.

Speaker Spotlight: Karl Wirth – Real time and relevant content

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Karl Wirth, CEO and Co-Founder of Evergage. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Karl Wirth | Gilbane Conference
Speaker Spotlight: Karl Wirth

Co-Founder and CEO

Evergage

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge? Development and maintenance cost? Content control? Brand management? Technology expertise?

I believe the best overall strategy is delivering relevant content to audiences. Thanks to Big Data and technology, organizations now have the ability to serve their users and visitors dynamic, personalized content, based off of their behaviors and actions. Increasing relevancy and interacting with people in real time will capture attention, drive engagement, and ultimately increase conversions.

Real-time behavior-based personalization:

  • Is always relevant
  • Drives customer engagement
  • Compels action
  • Increases conversion rates

The biggest challenges that we have observed are:

  • Lack of resources – a customer success manager or marketer may not have the time to utilize a new technology
  • Budget constraints – organizations may not have budgeted for a new marketing tool
  • Content control – content may be managed by different departments creating inconsistencies and ownership confusion

The truth is that the days of static and irrelevant content are over. In our customer-driven world, organizations should invest to get to know their customers and tailor content to their actions.

Catch Up with Karl at Gilbane

Product Labs


Wednesday, December 4:  3:30 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.

Find out more about this session and our other conference sessions here.

Be sure to follow Karl @Evergage

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What is Content, Context, and Educational Marketing?

You can see our series of speaker spotlights and general updates about our upcoming conference in Boston. Here, I’ll be highlighting a few conference sessions and why we have decided to include them.

You could say that our conference has assumed content marketing since our initial focus on web content management has always attracted marketers. But there is certainly a lot more attention now paid to the crafting of content, as well as to matching content to context whether that is channel context, customer context, buying-cycle context, or better, at least these three. In spite of the wise-cracky session description, you will hear thoughtful and reliable commentary on one of the biggest buzz terms of the year.

C5. Content, Context, and Educational Marketing

Wednesday, December, 4: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.

Content Marketing is certainly hot. But what is it? Is it new? Is it old? Was there ever a time when marketing was content-free? Has it always been content-free? Is there some new kind of content that makes marketing different? Is it a strategy, a methodology, a parallel universe? Snarkiness aside, it is easy to see that carefully created or chosen content can help improve success rates of different kinds of marketing objectives. This session takes a serious look at what content marketing is today, how you can use it, and how it is evolving.

Moderator:
Jose Castillo, President, thinkjose

Speakers:
Kipp Bodnar, Director of Marketing, Hubspot
WTF is Context Marketing?
Doug Bolin, Associate Director, User Experience Design, Creative, DigitasLBi, and Adjunct Professor, Mass Art
Beyond Content Marketing, The Emergence of Edumarketing

 

Speaker Spotlight: Frank Schneider – Multi-modal interface essential to mobile customer engagement

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Frank Schneider, VP of Customer Experience Solutions at Creative Virtual USA. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Frank Schneider | Gilbane Conference

Speaker Spotlight: Frank Schneider

VP Customer Experience Solutions

Creative Virtual USA

 

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

As technology becomes the backbone of every organization, it forces the cross pollination of roles, especially now between marketing and IT. With a shift towards data-based marketing and new relationships forming between marketing, sales and customer service, the advent of the “Marketing Technologist” is real. This shift is fueling the need for marketing automation, sales enablement, content management, knowledge management and even translation. Marketing Technologists have emerged as the perfect conduit between platform adoption and management, and the traditionally non-technical roles of sales, marketing and customer service.

With customer service becoming the new marketing and marketing’s ability to directly influence the sales pipeline, Chief Marketing Technologists are sprouting up as the perfect solution to balance a variety of needs including marketing and CRM software, content marketing, social and mobile, data and analytics, web and app development, ad networks and customer engagement programs. From social media monitoring to SEO analysis to translation management and ecommerce, Marketing Technologists are fast becoming the “must have” in every organization that is competing in a global economy.

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations? If so, should it have a new name to match an expanded role? If not, what should be at the center?

Content marketing is evolving to become the center of digital strategy. Consequently, every organization should endeavor to employ the new role of Chief Content Officer or some derivative thereof. Managing the ebb and flow of content and messaging via multiple channels has created the need for a more comprehensive content strategy across departments and media. Channel management between web, social, and mobile have not only created opportunities to deliver messaging, but an urgent need to provide fresh material for public consumption.

Organizations must take cues from traditional publications hiring copy editors, writers and reviews to constantly curate fresh content that furthers the company’s mission, corresponds to the marketing goals and satisfies the needs of their audience. However, you do need someone leading the charge – a person that understands the mission of the content team, rallies the resources and takes ownership of getting it done. Furthermore, they need the tools to get it done. Now more than ever, technology will play an ever increasing role in how content is aggregated, curated, manage and delivered.

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels? What is the biggest challenge? Development and maintenance cost? Content control? Brand management? Technology expertise?

A proper macro level strategy for content delivery across multiple channels should be comprised of several key elements.

  1. Consistency. Whether it be call center agents looking for an answer or policy or a customer checking a web page, the right answer, right messaging, and proper branding should be pervasive and consistent, no matter the medium or device. Nuanced variable can be in play in regards to format, UI, and design, but at the end of the journey, customers need to feel that your content delivery allowed for a seamless experience.
  2.  Correct and Compliant. Along the lines of the first element, “correct” can mean many things. First, the item must incorporate content that is not just correct in regards to the answer from a company perspective, but answer precisely the question the customer has (in regards to what began the content search or inquiry). Furthermore, this correct answer must incorporate personalization factors; in other words, the answer must be particularly right for that customer or that profile of customer. Lastly, content must be compliant… from HIPPA, to SEC guidelines, to CPNI… content delivery must adhere to compliance guidelines will protecting the interests of both consumer and business.
  3. Automated and seamless. Content delivery across all channels must be deployed with a strategy towards, and enabled by technology and tools for, automated cross pollination and management of content. The idea of multi-channel strategy, that is, the ability to deliver in multiple channels (web, mobile/tablet, call center, IVR, social/community, branch), must mature from brainstorming strategy to refined omnichannel capability. An ominichannel content delivery system allows for authentic smart delivery of content, no matter the channel or modality.

Catch Up with Frank at Gilbane

Track T: Re-imagining the Future: Technology and the Postdigital Experience

T1: Are You Leveraging All the Mobile Technologies Required for Competitive Mobile Engagement?
“Come As You Are: Multi-Modal Interface is Essential to Mobile Customer Engagement”
Tuesday, December, 3: 1:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.

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Responsive Design and the Future of Digital Experiences

Digital experience designers are familiar with the approach of responsive design even if they haven’t used it. If they have used it they know it is not quite as easy as it first sounds, and the popularity of responsive design courses suggests there is a still a lot of learning going on. But even if you don’t need to understand the code, if you are a marketing manager you need to know what you can expect responsive design to accomplish and what level of effort it entails.

C2. Responsive Design and the Future of Digital Experiences

Tuesday, December, 3: 2:40 p.m. – 3:50 p.m.

Responsive design has been around since the early days of the browser wars, but as mobile channels grew it became both more important and more complex. Gone are the days when new digital channels, form factors, and other device characteristics can be anticipated and digital strategies need to reflect this new reality. This session will provide multiple perspectives on what responsive design can do, what its limitations are, and what its future challenges are.

Moderator:
Tom Anderson, President, Anderson Digital

Speakers:
Scott Noonan, Chief Technology Officer, Boston Interactive
In Koo Kim, Senior Manager, MOBEX, NorthPoint Digital
Scrap the Big Launch, Fly a Kite: How to Create and Maintain Control of Smarter Mobile Apps with Real-Time UI Updates, A/B Testing, and Personalization
Christopher S Carter, General Manager, aLanguageBank
Are You Prepared to Create Content for the Internet of Things?

Speaker Spotlight: Scott Brinker – Technology is marketing’s interface to the world

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Scott Brinker, Founder & CTO, ion interactive, inc., and author of the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Technology is marketing's interface - Scott Brinker | Gilbane Conference 2013

Speaker Spotlight: Scott Brinker

Founder & CTO

ion interactive, inc.

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

Marketing has been sucked into a digital world.

In this world, the majority of interactions that marketing has with its audience happen through channels that are mediated by software. Software has become the eyes and ears by which marketers observe people in their market — through tools for analytics, attribution, and social media listening. Software has become the hands and mouth by which marketers touch and talk with their prospects and customers — through web content and experiences, mobile apps, and social media outposts.

Let’s face it: technology is now marketing’s interface to the world.

Marketing technology is no longer an option but a necessity for brands that want to market in a digital world and engage with a digital consumer anytime anywhere & every time everywhere.

To thrive in this environment, organizations absolutely need “marketing technologists” who understand how to select, configure, operate, and extend these marketing technologies that provide that interface. They need people who blend technical talents with marketing insights and ideas to produce compelling experiences throughout the buyer’s journey.

The titles don’t matter. Some call these folks creative technologists, or marketing IT, or growth hackers. What matters is that the organization is finding and nurturing this next generation of marketing talent. They’re integrating them with the broader marketing organizations. They’re giving them a seat at the table in defining marketing strategy and the operational roadmap to execute it.

Catch Up with Scott at Gilbane

Opening Keynotes
Tuesday, December, 3: 8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C1. Q&A with Real Live Marketing Technologists
Tuesday, December, 3: 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Follow Scott on Twitter – @chiefmartec.

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Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – Gilbane Conference Spotlight

While not everybody agrees that web content management should be the hub of digital experience management implementations, there should be no doubt it is an essential core component. Certainly the WebCM / CustomerXM / DigitalXM, etc. vendors that started in web content management have an opinion, though there are many nuances in their positioning which are important to understand. Even more interesting is what they have all learned in the past few years while incorporating or integrating other technologies to help their customers build modern digital experiences for customers and employees. Vendor visions and expertise are at least as important as those of analysts, consultants, integrators, agencies, and even your peers.

C7. Building Next Generation Web Content Management & Delivery Digital Experiences – A Panel Discussion

Wednesday, December, 4: 2:00 p.m. – 3:20 p.m.

You probably need to attend every session in the conference to even learn all the questions to ask before embarking on a next generation digital experience strategy and design. In this session a panel of competing vendors will discuss what they see as the critical components and challenges based on their customer’s experiences and feedback, and on their own vision of what is possible. Vendors have lots of valuable experience and information and this is your chance to hear from knowledgeable representatives minus the PowerPoint pitch.

Moderator:
Melissa Webster, Program VP, Content & Digital Media Technologies, IDC
Panelists:
Arjé Cahn, CTO, Hippo
Robert Bredlau, COO, e-Spirit
Ron Person, Sr. Consultant, Business Optimization Services, Sitecore
Russ Danner, Vice President, Products, Crafter Software
Loni Stark, Director of Product, Solution & Industry Marketing, Adobe

 

Speaker Spotlight: Mayur Gupta – Web Content Management – Not the Only Cog in the Wheel

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed a couple of our frequently asked questions to speaker Mayur Gupta, Global Head, Marketing Technology, Kimberly-Clark. We’ve included his answers here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Mayur Gupta on Web Content Management at Gilbane Conference

Speaker Spotlight: Mayur Gupta

Global Head, Marketing Technology

Kimberly-Clark

 

 

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations? If so, should it have a new name to match an expanded role? If not, what should be at the center?

It’s a great question. Often as marketers and technologists, we get excited with naming conventions & terminologies and get swayed away by new, shiny objects. Back to the question though, I strongly believe that there is no CENTER or HUB for digital experience management anymore, the entire ecosystem is the center. What does that mean? The challenge as well as the opportunity in the marketing technology landscape lies in the inter connectivity (data & context) between the different technology layers and components. It’s like a bicycle wheel with many cogs, Web content management or Digital Experience Management is just one of them, if you move the wheel forward or backward, you’ll have another cog appearing to be the center. For instance, data analytics & CRM is equally central to driving personalized consumer experiences but either of them (WCMS or Analytics) in isolation is incomplete. The simultaneous diversification and consolidation of various technology providers and platforms is an effort to address this challenge — making the ecosystem as the center instead of a particular technology or platform.

Is there a “Marketing Technologist” role in your organization or in organizations you know of? Should there be? What should their responsibilities be?

I head the global marketing technology capability @ Kimberly Clark, so in that regard yes we do have the “marketing technologist” role in our organization and we are expanding it each day. We are one of the very few Fortune 500 companies that have acknowledged the massive transformation in business at the intersection of Marketing & Technology, so I have a lot of respect for my leadership for being one of the pioneers in this space. Having said that, “marketing technology” as a role is just a nomenclature, what is critical is the concept of “marketing technology” as a capability, regardless of organizational boundaries, titles and ownerships.

Marketing technology is a progressive outcome of the dramatic evolution in the digital landscape within the last decade, with an extremely demanding, strong and in-control consumer at the epicenter. This evolution and innovation has reduced the conventional gulf between consumer experiences, marketing strategies and technologies that enable them to the extent that technology itself is the experience now. We can no longer define brand strategies in isolation from technology or build technology roadmaps without connecting it to consumer experiences that enable brand strategies. And, that is the role of a “marketing technologist” – connecting & combining brand strategies, creative consumer experiences with emerging and innovative technologies. Besides the technology landscape itself, marketing technology demands a more agile, nimble and lean perspective to technology innovation and adoption and therefore it requires more of a behavioral, mindset and cultural shift as compared to the conventional ways of technology delivery.

Marketing technology is no longer an option but a necessity for brands that want to market in a digital world and engage with a digital consumer anytime anywhere & every time everywhere.

Catch Up with Mayur at Gilbane

Track C: Content, Marketing, and the Customer Experience

C1. Q&A with Real Live Marketing Technologists
Tuesday, December, 3: 1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Follow Mayur on Twitter – @inspiremartech.

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