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

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.

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.

In another installment of Speaker Spotlight, we posed three of our frequently asked questions to speaker Jake DiMare, Senior Project Manager at ISITE Design. We’ve included his answers to those questions here. Be sure to see additional Speaker Spotlights from our upcoming conference.

Speaker Spotlight: Jake DiMare

Senior Project Manager

ISITE Design

Do you think “web content management” should be the hub of digital experience management implementations?

My personal perspective is the customer is at the center and everything else orbits around them. Thus, if I must use a label, customer experience management makes the most sense to me. That said, and to extend the metaphor, I do think content management is the hub of technology in the ‘low customer orbit’. I believe customers make decisions about where to focus their attention in the digital world based on the content available and so it stands to reason the technology that delivers your content must be rock solid.

What is the best overall strategy for delivering content to web, multiple mobile, and upcoming digital channels?

To borrow an acronym from NPR (National Public Radio), in my humble opinion, the best strategy is COPE or “Create Once Publish Everywhere”.

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

Frankly, ‘Marketing Technologist’ has been an imperative, existing role within digital agencies and on the client side for over a decade. Whether the need is recognized and respected is the real question… And so the title and associated job description are laggards. Predictably, the result is many people within an organization will wear the marketing technologist hat.

In the most practical sense, if your organization engages with customers through any digital channels, whether you want it or not, somebody at some point will play the role of marketing technologist. The size of your organization will certainly dictate when this becomes a full time job or jobs, but the following responsibilities will always need attention:

1. Coordinating internal and external digital strategists, designers and engineers for the purpose of designing, building and maintaining digital properties.
2. Working with content strategists to ensure a seamless transition of content across channels.
3. Coordinating with traditional marketing to ensure digital channels are aligned with overall initiatives.
4. Measurement and optimization of customer engagement through existing digital channels using analytics and reporting.
5. Looking forward to determine how to engage audiences with emerging technology.
6. Understand and grow customer engagement management.
7. Work with brand strategists to ensure the overall digital customer experience is aligned with brand values.
8. Accountable for digital projects.

Catch Up With Jake at Gilbane

Track E- E5. Incorporating Content Strategy into Your Project: Why and How?
Wednesday, December, 4: 9:40 a.m. – 10:40 a.m.

Hear more from Jake when you subscribe to his blog, The CMS Myth.

We have just sent out a batch of acceptance notices to those who submitted a proposal to speak at our conference in Boston this year. As we mentioned in a recent post, we had a record number of proposals this year and are only going to be able to include about 20% of them.

It will be another week or two before all acceptance notices are sent.

We will be emailing everyone who wanted to speak whether we can fit you in or not, but will be holding off until we are pretty sure about everyone’s status.

Thanks for your patience!

Thank you all for the Gilbane Conference speaker proposals. We received a record number this year even with a condensed timeframe for submissions. We also have a larger percentage of high quality proposals, fewer blatant sales pitches, and a greater percentage of proposals from women (Hmmm… correlation or causation?). We are now busy evaluating, organizing, and mapping proposals to the topic areas our audience needs to hear the most about.

If you have submitted a proposal it will be a couple of more weeks before most of you are notified.

Miss the deadline?

For all of you who missed the deadline for speaking proposals for this year’s conference, our policy is that we always accept proposals – in fact we accept them all year long if you use our  submission form – however, proposals received after the deadline for each conference miss the first review by the program committee and some of the early decisions. If we have two good proposals on the same topic the on-time proposal gets preference. Also, decisions are largely made on a rolling basis once the deadline passes, so if you have missed the deadline it is still a good idea to submit as soon as possible.

If there is a particular topic we need more proposals for we will post about it on this blog, so stay tuned.

It’s no secret that marketing continues to increase spending on technology, which raises the question of which technologies they are spending on. The answer is “lots” – the marketing technology landscape has become much larger, more varied, and more complex. One sign is the evolution of some web content management systems to solutions for web experience management, web engagement management, digital experience management, etc., which involves integrating with marketing automation, predictive analytics, social and many other marketing tools and back end systems.

Not all this is new. In 1999 more advanced businesses were already integrating e-commerce, web analytics, personalization, and marketing automation, but it was much harder then and there were far fewer options. I hesitate to say it is easier now, but it is in many ways – the technology is much better and we have much more experience with it. What is certainly not easier is navigating the technology landscape which is extremely dynamic, and contains categories with too many vendors. Both CMOs and CIOs need a marketing technologist function in some form, and would certainly benefit from input from analysts, and a <plug> vendor and analyst neutral conference </plug>. The illustration below may be scary, but should be very useful. Thanks to Scott Brinker for first pointing this landscape out. Scott also has his own similar graphic.