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We partnered with Sojourn Solutions to help us address the challenge of driving technological transformation to enable us to work smarter, including outlining processes for developing marketing campaigns, lead generation, and lead scoring across the organization. Our latest joint initiative, the automated email renewal solution, was a massive success – to the point that my CFO asked us to roll it out across our organization. Chad Lloyd, Director of Sales and Marketing Operations, Naylor Association Solutions   Naylor Association Solutions, with corporate headquarters in McLean, Virginia, works with trade and professional associations across the nation, including the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), the United Motorcoach Association (UMA), and many more, helping them maximize membership engagement and generate more revenues. Naylor’s services and business units include member communication (creating various publications for associations), event management, and association management. Challenge Naylor’s challenge was on the technology side, because its previous outreach efforts to get renewals from existing advertisers, as well as its approach to advertising prospects, involved a high level of manual operations performed by Naylor’s sales reps. “It was basically an outbound telephone sales operation,” explains Lloyd, “and most of our existing customers were simply agreeing to renew on the phone without any upsell. We were paying sales commissions, but getting little ROI” from the sales-reps-on-the-phone approach.  Solution Lloyd and his team, working with Sojourn Solutions and Eloqua, developed an email automation system that helped them run their renewal campaigns. The application took customer data from Naylor’s MIS (management information system) and CRM and put it into the field merges within Naylor’s automated renewal emails in Eloqua. The integrations allowed for the sharing and accuracy of relevant customer data, making the automated emails personalized to the particular advertising customer. Results Renewals came in faster via the automated renewal campaigns, generating more revenue without any involvement from the sales reps. Prior to launching the renewal campaign, 95% of Naylor’s renewals were processed in an average of 87 days. After the launch, Naylor was capturing 95% of its renewal revenue in an average of 24 days (63 days faster). “We shortened the amount of time to get renewals, and therefore recognized those revenues much faster, which made our finance people very happy” explains Lloyd. A success story now being spread across Naylor. Naylor’s CFO recognized the efficiency and increased revenues that Lloyd was driving with the automated email renewal campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the CFO then asked Lloyd to help roll-out the successful automated email solution across the Naylor organization. “We’re bringing this new capability to other parts of the business, and also expanding it to our highest-spend advertisers and new advertisers,” he says.

Mike Comey  is the Head of Loyalty Insights, Loyalty Solutions at FIS , a Fortune 500 fintech company with about 55,000 employees operating in 200 locations throughout the world. FIS serves customers in 3 main areas: (1) merchant solutions, helping merchants process payments from customers; (2) banking solutions, helping banks with core processing, ATM networks, loyalty programs, and more; (3) capital markets, which means investing and financial transactions. Comey and his team at FIS (about 5 marketers) work to help banks promote and implement loyalty programs (giving bank customers points, merchandise, and/or cash back for using bank-issued credit/debit cards). Mike shared his Eloqua success story at a Sojourn virtual Eloqua User Group meeting, and this post spotlights his share.  On the marketing challenges FIS faced The FIS flagship loyalty product is the program of choice for over 3,000 financial institutions. If the scale wasn’t big enough, these loyalty programs also present massive operational complexities. As Comey explains it, “we do all the back-end from the scoring of the transactions, awarding the points, allowing for all the redemption channels and enabling our institutional clients to customize the programs as they see fit.” All the different program components add a great deal of complexity to what Comey’s team has to do in terms of dynamic content, program communication, and how they display program offerings. And since the end users of the programs are the clients of banks, FIS constantly confronts the need for accuracy and precision with information. “We’ve got a strong obligation to ensure we don’t make mistakes, and that we don’t display information that a cardholder shouldn’t see, “ says Comey, “our job is therefore quite complex and time-consuming as far as marketing challenges go.” Finally, Comey’s team is tasked with promoting the different redemption channels, communicating to cardholders what rewards (i.e., merchandise,  travel, etc.) are available to them. All of it represents a massively complicated challenge. How the FIS team deployed Eloqua and won an award Before deploying Eloqua in 2016, Comey’s team was using a rudimentary email platform. “We’d send about four emails per month and had virtually no customer segmentation. It was just very clunky, hard to use, and very slow,” explains Comey. “So when we launched Eloqua, it was life-changing. We were able to better manage all the complexities in our programs, but also open up new possibilities for how we reach out to cardholders, with different types of messaging and ways we track and analyze data.” The early gains FIS saw using Eloqua were so strong that the company won a Markie award in 2017 for rapid transformation. As Comey says, “We had lots of energy and we just built, built, built,” which led to its own set of problems.”  Confronting “the monster”  Unfortunately, FIS was creating a monster as it grew its utilization of Eloqua. “We were using these three main pieces — canvases, segments, and emails — to try to account for all the complexity we have,” says Comey. “We would create different canvases based on email content and based on bank clients that have different program offerings. Sometimes we’d create a different canvas for different product types or we’d do a lot of triggered emails. So if a cardholder has a certain transaction, then that would trigger a certain type of email.” FIS also developed customer segments using Eloqua. “We would try to do some sophisticated marketing segmenting around customer attributes and propensities,” says Comey.  Every time FIS faced an obstacle or hurdle, it would simply “build, build, build”  something new to overcome that challenge in the short-term. But it was done ad hoc, not in any systematic and standardized way. “Unfortunately, we weren’t operating with any efficiencies and we weren’t thinking holistically,” says Comey. “We would just take every problem and create a new canvas, a segment for it. And over time we’d created a monster.” What really changed the focus for Comey was when he started losing marketers from his team due to burn out and exhaustion, largely caused by managing the monster.  “The amount of time we were spending on Eloqua was just overwhelming,” says Comey. “We’ve got such a complex product so the learning curve for team members is a big challenge here. Being able to learn Eloqua is another challenge. When our people started leaving, we just knew we needed to change something.” Taming the monster: FIS works with Sojourn to develop solutions Comey reached out to Sojourn with one question: “how can we unravel this monster so that we’re not doing all this repetitive work that’s exhausting our people?” Sojourn analyzed the issue and developed a solution that helped FIS get away from all the one-off, ad hoc work it had been creating — and instead begin working more systematically, in standardized ways that would scale.  For example, Sojourn analyzed all the canvases and segments FIS had created and then worked to reduce them in number (by standardizing them). As a result, FIS was able to move from having 120 promotional canvases down to just a single monthly canvas.   “That single change saved us over 600 hours per year, just on the canvas side,” says Comey. When it came to segments, it was a similar story. FIS had 107 different segments in 2019, but Sojourn helped FIS bring that down to just 16, saving FIS even more time and work. Regarding emails, Sojourn helped FIS “trim the time it took for us to create each email from six and a half hours down to less than two,” says Comey. In total, Sojourn helped Comey’s small team save some 3,000 hours, reducing its workload dramatically. “Every hour that we spend doing operational work is an hour that’s not spent analyzing data, finding new ideas, and coming up with creative new campaigns,” says Comey. “I cannot emphasize enough how much Sojourn has helped make our operations more efficient,  so that we’re actually maximizing what we’re getting out of Eloqua.” FIS has allocated a lot of resources into its use of Eloqua — between the platform itself, the team hours, the vendors — “and we’ve got to ensure that we’re maximizing every dollar we spend,” says Comey. “Sojourn is helping us do exactly that.” Today, Comey’s team has more time for analyzing and leveraging data, as well as doing creative and high-level/strategic work. “We’ve also gained more time to think about how we can leverage Eloqua even more,” Comey says. “Being able to save a combined 3000 hours has been transformational for my team here at FIS.”   Check out our Campaign Execution Services  to help improve your marketing automation campaign efficiency, effectiveness, and overall performance. Or,  contact us  to discover how your organization can get the most out of your Oracle Eloqua platform.

Multi-touch attribution  enables marketers to connect (attribute) touchpoints and marketing activities to revenues. Having this MTA capability not only informs better marketing tactics and decision-making, but also enables marketers to “prove” their value more effectively in the C-suite.  Progress Software , the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications, has moved from a single-touch attribution model to MTA. As Carmen Gardiner , Progress’s Director of Marketing Operations, explains it: “A single touch model just doesn’t give you the visibility you need to make marketing decisions, especially in the enterprise buying cycle. MTA measures a wider range of buying touchpoints, not just around a single individual but also includes buying groups. MTA shines a light on the success of the tactics and channels that you’re investing in, giving you more insight into how those tactics, those campaigns, and that spend is really affecting the buyer’s journey.” The catalyst for change at Progress Progress’s MTA journey began with a change in C-level leadership a few years back. The new team “was used to getting multi-touch attribution,” notes Gardiner. “And we simply didn’t have it.” So driving MTA became a mandate for Gardiner and her marketing ops team.  What did leadership expect? They wanted Progress “to have the data to know what’s working and what’s not, and be able to show the reasoning behind asking for [marketing] spend,” explains Gardiner. “MTA would help explain why we might need money for top of funnel programs. You’d have data to show that it’s an integral part of the buyer journey and not just focusing on that last touch point.” Big challenges Whether it’s driving MTA or any other initiative,  change management  is all about dynamically integrating technology, processes, and people around the new way of working. “Technology was the hardest part for us,” explains Gardiner, “because MTA was a new concept at Progress,” which had been using single touch attribution. “We had challenges getting the scripts to play well with our CMS [content management system]. We even lost a vendor over that. We had to jump over that particular hurdle because you can’t get touchpoints without scripts on your website.” Getting the processes right was another challenge. “It’s so hard to change your thinking when you’ve been thinking for 20 years in terms of campaigns: we had to change to touchpoints. We just weren’t used to tying those touchpoints to spend and connecting that with our budgeting,” says Gardiner. Progress tackled technology and processes before the “people” part, which sounds eminently sensible. “If you don’t have your technology and your processes down, your people aren’t going to understand it, use it, and buy into it,” says Gardiner. Progress started its MTA journey with a small group. “We have three marketing groups,” says Gardiner, “and so we started the one that needed the visibility the most.” As Gardiner notes in our second post, Progress may have (in retrospect) been better served by bringing its people in even earlier, as Progress worked to get those challenging technology and process parts of the solution off the ground.  Bizible for MTA Bizible  was not Progress’s first choice for MTA but was its final choice. “It’s working really well for us. It’s given us greater visibility into the contribution of the top and bottom of funnel programs, the first touch, the pipeline acceleration. It’s opened marketing’s mind into the possibility of being able to report on things that aren’t last touch and allowing them to better understand which mix may lead to better conversion.” Bizible enables Progress to see where the gaps are: “When you do funnel conversion stats, we can see where we need to get people/leads in at the top or need something in the middle of the funnel,” says Gardiner. “It’s not ‘one-and-done’ tactics, but a mix that eases people through their buyer’s journey.” Progress can see that full-funnel journey, and where its funnel might be “leaky,” in order to plug those leaks. Impact of MTA  MTA has moved Progress, especially its enterprise team, away from campaigns and towards touchpoints. “Instead of doing events, because campaign reporting told them events were great, they now look at the touchpoint attribution models. They can see which channels and tactics are better at different parts of the funnel. So they get a better, multidimensional picture of the buyer’s journey and see how their combined efforts contribute to pipeline and revenue.” The way marketing decisions get made is now more data-driven, focusing on getting the mix of marketing tactics/activities right: “decisions are based on a multidimensional understanding of how tactics and actions are impacting every piece of the funnel. Marketers feel better, for instance, going to C-level executives and asking for more AdWords spend because they can actually show the impact of that spend,” says Gardiner. Marketers at Progress are also conducting more experiments because they’re able to pull the levers and tweak tactics/actions at different stages of the funnel, then measure and iterate upon results. They can “fail small” and learn during a data-driven process of continuous improvement. Examples of real MTA impact Gardiner points to Google AdWords as a good example of how Progress has used MTA to have a more experimental approach that leads to smarter marketing decisions and more ROI. “We were spending a lot of money on Google AdWords in places where we shouldn’t,” notes Gardiner, “but the MTA reporting allowed us to see where our sweet spots were, which investments were actually affecting top of funnel and converting into leads. And so we started spending our money in certain areas [that were working] and stopped spending our money in other areas [that weren’t working]. For some areas that were kind of in the middle, we figured out how we could improve results. We tweaked our ads and experimented. We didn’t just cut our AdWords budget: we increased its performance by about 30%.” Content, which is often deployed around the top of the funnel, is another area impacted by MTA. “Our content teams and product managers love that we can now show the impact that blogs, press releases, and content have on the buyer’s journey. Before MTA, they had no way of showing their impact on the business. So two whole departments now have a seat at the table, asking what kind of content resonates with people? And at what stages in the funnel? They can use MTA to better determine the topics to write about and what content people want.” All of that drives full-funnel ROI. In our next post , we’ll explain what lessons Progress has learned during its MTA journey, lessons that other organizations like yours might apply for themselves. Continue reading here . Interested in learning more about how your organization can begin a journey towards multi-touch attribution? Contact us  today.

As you may have read in our first  of two blog posts about Progress’s journey from single-touch to multi-touch attribution , the result of the change was a large improvement in the efficiency of its marketing function, which also boosted the credibility of marketing within the C-suite. In this second post, we’ll share the 10 key lessons Progress learned during its (still ongoing) MTA journey, as told to us by Carmen Gardiner , Progress’s Director of Marketing Operations. Here they are: C-level sponsorship is a must.  “An MTA journey isn’t a small initiative for a single department to do in a month. It’s got to have C-level sponsorship throughout, and it’s got to be prioritized,” explains Gardiner. “You’ll need to have resources tied to it, with stakeholders committed across the company, from marketing to sales, IT to web to finance and beyond.” Seek early buy-in across the organization.  “Every time you think you’ve got every stakeholder in the room, you’ll discover that you don’t. Seek to get everybody on board as soon as possible, because people have to feel a part of the process for it to work,” says Gardiner. “If I could go back, I would’ve brought people on board sooner rather than later. We felt that it was a good idea to have the technology and processes down before we bought people in, but [in retrospect] I would have brought them in sooner. It took some people a long time to wrap their heads around touchpoint attribution and not campaign attribution.” Select your vendor very, very carefully.  Progress went with Bizible as their MTA vendor, but only after some pitfalls with another vendor. “Keep in mind, from the start,  what you want to have at the end of the journey because, depending on the vendor, MTA can be defined differently,” says Gardiner, “There are a lot of MTA vendors that fall into different categories, that will give you different information, different results. So think carefully about what you want at the end of the journey and then find a vendor that’s going to deliver that.” Measure and celebrate key milestones along the way.  “The MTA journey is a long road and people are going to get tired,” says Gardiner. It’s important to stop and celebrate small wins. Measuring progress is also essential. “One of our product clients wanted to see multi-touch attribution and to know about Google AdWords. We showed them multi-touch attribution and then we tied spend to each keyword, each UTM campaign. So not only could they say they spent 10 grand on AdWords and this was what they got back, but they could dig into every little AdWords campaign, and then figure out what was working and what wasn’t. They were able to refine based off that level of reporting.” Self-service works.  Ideally, you shouldn’t need to be a professional data scientist with an advanced degree to use the tools. “We made it so anybody could go to the BI [business intelligence] dashboard and take a look at it from the different facets,” says Gardiner. “They could look at it from first touch, W-shaped, full path, and get the answers they needed based on the questions they wanted answers to. Self service is really, really important. If people are just allowed to go in there and play, they’re going to be curious, ask questions, and learn.” Expect resistance, work to mitigate it.  “There was some resistance to the change,” says Gardiner. “I was told by one marketer, ‘I don’t understand this, I’m not going to use it.’ We should have brought marketing in much earlier because it’s like walking into cold water.” Yes, people might resist at the beginning, so you should expect that, but be patient and keep communicating the why and the how of the MTA change initiative. Blend the new with the old.  Progress didn’t just eliminate the old way of working and introduce the new one overnight, which would have created massive confusion and frustration among end users. INstead, it rolled out the new while staying with the old. “We would run a team’s marketing metrics meetings for six months and show their campaign data that they usually have. And then marketing ops would give them the Bizible/MTA data and we would interpret that for them,” explains Gardiner. “So they could compare and contrast the datasets, because neither of them is wrong. And after a while, our users got used to the idea that neither was wrong. Neither one is going to give you the golden bullet,” but you can gain insights from both. That “blend of old and new” approach helped prevent confusion and drive adoption. You need a mixture of touchpoints.  “Multi-touch attribution,” says Gardiner, “is just going to help you answer specific, measurable questions like, is my Google AdWords spend helping me affect the top of the funnel? It won’t answer bigger questions like ‘how did my campaign go?’ MTA helps you decide what tactics are best for each stage of the buyer journey. You need a mixture of touchpoints, not just one. Events, for instance, are great but an event might be third base [in a baseball analogy], but you have to get to first and second base before that, right?” Don’t be afraid to fail.  “You’re not saving lives, you’re learning along with everyone else. Don’t tell people that MTA is going to give them some magic path. it’s a tool they need to learn how to use well, like any other tool.” It’s also important that leadership gives space for people to fail and learn from those failures, in a process of continuous learning. MTA is a journey, not a destination.  “You’re not going to be done, ever. There’s always going to be something more that you want to know, a gap you’ll want to fill. And I’m sure the technology will continue to evolve as well,” concludes Gardiner. Achieving peak performance is a bit like chasing the sun. You may never reach it, but the journey is eminently worthwhile. Reach out to us  to learn more about how your organization can begin – or optimize – a journey towards multi-touch attribution! Update: Listen to Carmen Gardiner share 5 of these lessons – and more insights – with Sojourn’s Dan Vawter via our (now) on-demand webinar “ 5 lessons learned: How Progress improved its marketing with multi-touch attribution. “

When COVID-19 struck in March, 2020, Quest Diagnostics wasn’t completely prepared (nobody was), but its marketing team had been collaborating with Sojourn Solutions to streamline its marketing technology. As a result, Quest was able to rapidly scale up its customer engagement during a global health crisis, when demand for its testing services skyrocketed. During a recent webinar hosted by Oracle - 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Marketing Automation  - Quest’s Christopher Crowe, Director of Digital Marketing, and Karin Pindle, Senior Marketing Automation Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, told the full story. The Problem: Too much complexity, too many silos Crowe began by describing the disjointed, complicated state of their marketing ops prior to its collaboration with Sojourn, which kicked off in 2018. “Back then, Quest had multiple marketing automation platforms with minimal integration with our CRM,” explained Crowe, and all this complexity created a number of problems, including: Limited internal capability and a reliance on external agencies, which was costly and inefficient; Silos were limiting Quest’s ability to gain insights from its data and manage leads -- more cross-team sharing of leads and insights was needed; A multiplicity of platforms and silos were creating confusion and a lack of efficiency for the in-house marketing teams. Best practices and lessons learned weren’t being shared effectively. Things had to change, and they reached out to Sojourn to help streamline marketing operations in order to drive more integration (of tech and teams) and more efficiency. The chosen solution: One MAP (Eloqua) Quest and Sojourn examined where the diagnostics company was, i.e., an inefficient and confusing place, and mapped out where they wanted to go in the future. Crowe sketched out what they wanted: A centralized “center of enablement” that all in-house Quest Diagnostics' marketers could draw upon for resources and support, one that would support cross-team collaboration as well as sharing of data, leads, and best practices; A reduction in the time and the cost involved for launching campaigns, including less reliance on external agencies; Clear lead flows into the appropriate CRMs, helping Sales and Marketing alignment; Increased maturity to support more campaigns and more campaign complexity. What became clear after these discussions about goals was that Quest “needed a single MAP flexible enough to offer all this functionality and also integrate with CRMs,” said Crowe.  Quest and Sojourn agreed on migrating the organization to Eloqua , largely because, as Crowe explained, “Eloqua checked all the boxes for us in addressing our needs,” providing a single, centralized source of truth and customer engagement. Crowe noted that “the Eloqua campaign canvas is so user friendly that our people could get comfortable using it quickly.” In addition, healthcare companies like Quest must comply with strict regulations around patient privacy: Eloqua has great tools for HIPAA [the patient privacy act] compliance compared to other MAPs. Implementing the solution With the goals of the collaboration clearly defined and a chosen MAP in Eloqua, Quest and Sojourn began implementing the solution. They started migrating the multiplicity of data and campaign assets contained in multiple MAPs into Eloqua. As Pindle explained, this required numerous steps, such as the consolidation and streamlining of Quest's in-house marketing processes, bringing the entire, confusing array of multi-MAP instances into Eloqua (with just a few Eloqua instances) as “a single source of truth,” cleaning the data, and improving lead management so more and better leads could be funneled to Sales. Pindle explained exactly how Sojourn approaches MAP migrations with a clear 4-step process: (1) plan and organize to identify exactly what data/assets need to be migrated and when; (2) set up, with APIs saving clients 75% on time and cost to migrate data/assets; (3) testing -- “we use humans to test everything,” Pindle explained; and (4) go live -- “we monitored Eloqua for Quest to quickly resolve any issues that might arise.” Of course, the migration and transformation process took time, but by the time the pandemic struck in 2020, Quest was in a great position to pivot and scale up its customer engagement with Eloqua.  Results: Quest Diagnostics pivots & scales B2B Marketing during a crisis Crowe explained that the 3-year collaboration with Sojourn and Oracle has made Quest a more streamlined and more productive marketing operation. The newly-implemented Eloqua MAP “helps us get the right message to the right customer at the right time,” said Crowe. ”Even though we’re running a much higher volume of campaigns and we sent 40 million emails in 2020, our campaign costs have gone down, so we’re doing more with less.” Campaigns are now easier for our people to create and develop using Eloqua, said Crowe, and they were able to ramp up customer engagement at a time when customer demand for their testing service was surging. In the end, says Crowe, ‘we’ve seen significant gains across multiple revenue measures” and “we continue to use Eloqua to create rich customer experiences.” Today Quest has greatly increased its in-house capability, relying much less on expensive agencies to fill gaps in its capabilities (gaps that no longer exist). What’s next: Driving more efficiency Chris Crowe and Quest Diagnostics, with the ongoing help of Sojourn Solutions, continue to drive benefits and cost efficiencies using Eloqua, strengthening lead generation and alignment between marketing and sales, while enhancing personalization and CX in its approach to customer engagement. Quest has effectively navigated an unprecedented pandemic and is ready to handle whatever happens next. Want to learn more about how your organization can drive more efficiency and future-proof your marketing operations, just as Quest Diagnostics did? Reach out to us here .   About Quest Diagnostics New Jersey-based  Quest Diagnostics  (QD) is a leader in healthcare testing, offering an extensive menu of testing services that include COVID-19 testing. The Fortune 500 company has some 44,000 employees around the US, and engages a wide range of customers in both the B2C and B2B spaces.

Founded in 1851, UK-based Reuters  is the world’s largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide each day. Reuters provides business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, global media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers.  Brief overview: A disjointed Demand Gen infrastructure The media company had a fractured demand generation digital infrastructure when a large part of its business was “spun out” to become Refinitiv . To plan and execute campaigns, Reuters required time-consuming, error-prone manual operations, and struggled to track campaign performance and gain full visibility into its customers’ journey.  Reuters had 10 different websites and 120 forms. Every time Reuters had an email campaign, for example, it had to build a new audience (email list) manually from scratch by pulling email addresses from disjointed systems and loading spreadsheets into Eloqua. Moreover, there wasn’t a single strategy and plan that addressed the multiple stages of the buying journey, let alone alignment with sales.  When  Juan Mejia  arrived as Director of Demand Generation in February, 2020, Reuters’ goal was the transformation of its disjointed infrastructure - integrating its digital assets, unifying its website, and connecting all customer data to its Salesforce CRM and Eloqua MAP. Ultimately, Mejia and his team completed the project in about 6 months, during a global pandemic, and in a remote work environment.  Reuters’ digital transformation strategy Because a large part of Reuters’ business was being “spun out” into an independent entity ( Refinitiv ), almost everything on the demand gen side needed to be rebuilt and reconfigured. Reuters’ infrastructure was disjointed, lacking the integration required to provide either a unified vision of the customer journey or alignment with Sales.  “We had no visibility into our customer’s journey across the funnel and we couldn't measure anything,” said Mejia. All the measures Reuters used were isolated within different channels and disconnected systems. “We’d send out a campaign and since our 10 websites with their 120 different forms and our various social media assets had isolated metrics, we couldn't connect the dots to determine how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) we were generating or where those leads were coming from or what content might have driven them.” The strategy was to ultimately create an always-on program.  In the beginning of 2020, Reuters was restructuring their marketing team and created a new team for Demand Generation. As part of that process, they carried out an assessment with an external consulting company that allowed the new Director of Demand Generation to decide how to help shape the infrastructure.   Objectives of transformation The objective was to create and deliver an end-to-end always on digital demand generation strategy. One that drove incremental marketing impacted revenue for the business using all digital channels and stages of the customer journey. Reuters also worked on sales and marketing alignment by defining a new integrated marketing and sales funnel. This would allow the teams to better understand performance across the entire process. Ultimately, Reuters needed to transform its disjointed demand gen infrastructure into an integrated demand generation engine supported by its Eloqua MAP connected to its Salesforce CRM. The team also needed to integrate all the other systems and platforms involved, including: website, paid media, online events, interactive content and more. Reuters simply had too many manual operations for launching campaigns. The objectives included unifying Reuters’ 10 websites into one, enabling it to collect all customer data in both CRM and MAP as “a single source of truth” to enable campaign planning, execution, and reporting/attribution. Reuters also had to standardize its customer tracking and reporting, allowing it to continuously monitor and improve demand generation efforts. “We created an Always On program that aligned to the stages of the buying journey for each of our products including: email, website, social media assets, paid search - all of which were consolidated and connected to our Salesforce CRM and Eloqua MAP,” said Mejia. Working with Sojourn Solutions, the Reuters team integrated and standardized/harmonized its assets and infrastructure, gaining a unified view of its customers across channels (omnichannel visibility), as well as automating its campaigns. Reuters could measure channel effectiveness and boost ROI (for example, evaluating the efficiency of paid search).  Results Reuters built an integrated, automated demand generation engine that fuels improved campaign planning, execution, and attribution, as well as closer alignment between marketing and sales. By aligning all channels through a newly-mapped customer journey, they created an always-on program that includes paid and organic media, website, email automation, and more, delivering on a 70% growth in marketing generated revenue between 2019 and 2020 . The newly-built Reuters demand gen engine provides: Targeting . Data has given Reuters a better understanding of its customers and enabled improved targeting. “Where before we’d send campaigns of 200,000 emails, all with the same message,” explains Mejia, “now we can get more targeted by messaging micro-segments of 5,000 customers.” Alignment.  Pre-transformation, someone from Sales would make a request and marketing would merely execute the order. Marketing is now a data-powered partner that consults with Sales on strategy, tactics, and funnel optimization.  Automation. Most of the campaigns Reuters ran pre-transformation were product specific (often email blasts). Now Reuters has shifted to “always-on” nurturing campaigns based on customer behavioral data. As Mejia explains: “the always-on is essentially an ongoing, customer-informed journey where we respond to customer intent signals with relevant content.” Attribution.  Reuters can now connect demand gen investments to ROI. “Before the change,” says Mejia, “we might have been losing money for months without even knowing it.” Now Reuters can track results, as well as optimize spend and tactics on the go. Marketing has also gained more credibility and influence with senior leadership. Timescale and milestones Eloqua Design and Implementation Launch, Phase 1 & 2: Q2 & Q3 2020  Lead Scoring: Q2 2020 Integrated Sales & Marketing Funnel Design & Implementation: Q2-Q4 2020 New Multichannel Campaigns Launch: Q2 2020 New Integrated Website Launch: Q3 2020 Always On Launch: Q3 2020  Automated Data Cleansing: Q4 2020 Integrations for ON24, Splash, Hive9, Tableau: Q4 2020 SFDC Sales & Marketing Dashboards: Q1 2021 Reporting Insight, Measurement and Enhancing: ONGOING Customer summary  “We've built a demand generation machine nearly from scratch, completely changing the role of demand gen. Before, we were a tactical team that just responded to business requests and had very limited ability to demonstrate value. Today, we’re a strategic partner who creates significant value for our customers and for Reuters.” -- Juan Mejia, Demand Generation Director, Reuters To learn more about how your organization, like Reuters, can build a demand generation engine to improve revenues and marketing performance, reach out  to us today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, accurate measurement, and better marketing ROI. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives engagement and revenues. Our “Data & Insight" series focuses on building that mature data infrastructure.   Data & Insight have become more important than ever, especially given today’s rapidly changing market and customer behaviors – as well as today’s more complex digital environments – including the crumbling of third-party cookies.  The essential role and “fit” of Data & Insights into the Marketing Operations triangle of people, processes, and technology is anchored in use cases, which are prioritized based on business needs. Data & Insights are meaningless unless they support a specific, measurable, and revenue-connected goal. Yes, strategy comes into play at a higher level where you define where your organization wants to go and how you want to get there.  Your use cases inform what Data & Insights you need and how you’ll leverage them. Without use cases, you’d be operating in chaos and/or at status quo, only able to react instead of proactively driving measurable results with data and insights.  Data use cases: Driving revenues and continuous improvement The ultimate goal of leveraging data and insights is being able to predict and grow pipeline and revenue, and continuously improve your marketing effectiveness. One of the dependencies of continuous improvement is the ability to measure and benchmark exactly where you are at any given time. Another key expectation is gaining a unified view of contacts that reflects all interactions across all channels.  For many Marketing organizations, getting from here to there with their data infrastructure requires a significant investment in time and resources. It’s a heavily cross-functional approach that can require a massive paradigm shift in how Marketing organizations operate within themselves and within the larger business organization. There could be countless use cases under the umbrella of these larger, strategic goals, depending on where you are in your data maturity. Status quo as the biggest obstacle The biggest challenge to improving and maturing your data and insight capabilities is the status quo, because an organization’s desire to change must be greater than its desire to stay the same. The legacy mindsets that say, “that’s the way we’ve always done things” represent huge hurdles to overcome, especially when compounded with other challenges such as a low value associated with data in general, little to no action on insights, silo’ed functions, and beyond. Even if you somehow move past the “inertia” challenge, without a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork in place, you’ll still be faced with finger-pointing, lack of cross-functional communication and/or lack of communicating marketing’s value to the larger business organization in terms they can understand (i.e., pipeline and revenue).  4 steps to an improved data infrastructure Change is never easy and rarely linear, but you need to begin somewhere. Here’s how: 1. Business cases will be needed as the context for any defined data and insights initiative. Each business case should identify and ideally quantify the pain points and costs created by the data and insight challenges you currently face – and when I say “quantify,” I mean that the numbers must show value that’s in alignment with business impacts such as time savings, cost savings, lead creation, pipeline growth, and/or revenue impact. After you’ve brainstormed those business cases for your organization, they should be prioritized.  2. In a best-case scenario, change to the status quo would need to be driven by an executive-level Champion who brings a cross-functional mindset to driving measurable impact and who defines business case priorities, including the clearing of obstacles as needed. Since data is cross-functional in how it’s collected and leveraged, initiatives involving data must be cross-functional and have top-down support. 3. Once a business case has been presented, and received approval, a formal project plan should be built, resources assigned (having been addressed in the business case), and timelines agreed to.  4. I’d strongly suggest reaching out to us for a complimentary data review with our Sojourn team in order to help you identify opportunities to create the most value from your data and systems, and get on the right starting path to improvement. An example of Data & Insight transformation We worked with a healthcare client a few years ago that engaged us for a digital transformation project. One of the executives felt that a CDP would be the best way to solve their many challenges around data and insights.  Once we came into the project and studied their goals and resources, we realized that the organization was lacking a full integration of their core systems (MAP, CRM, ERP) causing: (1) lots of unneeded manual work such as data exports for targeting, analysis, reporting, etc. and (2) leaving many silos across the client’s functions and teams, as well as their martech and their data. Our recommendation was a plan to optimize their core systems integration, providing them with a nearly 360 degree view of their customers. In the end, we saved them an annual cost of roughly $750K in new technology, resources, and projects that the business wasn’t in a position to correctly implement and support anyway. By integrating their core systems and teams, they also developed more cross-finctional capability in how they leveraged data and insights to engage their customers and generate pipeline/revenues.  Optimizing your Data & Insight capabilities You must understand where you are now in order to get where you want to be. I’d recommend starting with some sort of Assessment (directional), Discovery (deeper directional), or Health Check (more diagnostic) in order to: (1) baseline/benchmark your current state of play regarding data and insight capabilities, and  (2) build consensus and adoption to move forward aligned to an agreed-upon maturity roadmap for data and insight. For more insight and help in improving your data quality and data management maturity, reach out  to us today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, better marketing tools/approaches, and more revenue generation. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives engagement and ROI. Our “Data and Insight Series” focuses on building that mature data infrastructure.   “Data & Insight maturity” can be defined as an ongoing journey towards improving and increasing a Marketing organization’s capabilities in leveraging data and insight. To achieve a high level of data and insight maturity, both data and insights must be fully incorporated into all decision-making and practices. Getting from where you are now to where you want to be is a process . . . Step one: Understanding where you are today  In helping our clients grow their data and insight maturity, we’ve created defined levels of maturity, with key milestones and metrics associated with each level of maturity. Our maturity model includes four levels and it helps give our customers a common baseline to understand where they’re at today based upon their assessment responses. The model also identifies what is “ideal” within each level, providing a clearly defined path for improvements, and a set of metrics to help quantify those improvements.    Improving maturity: some areas of focus More data and insight maturity means having more capability with your data, which helps you drive revenues and pipeline. Here are some specific areas where organizations typically focus their maturity efforts: Data integration. If your data is not integrated and made available to others across the organization and your systems, it’s not ready for prime time – you’ll need to plan and build key integrations to most effectively leverage your data to drive success. Data analysis and optimization. What data do you have available to fuel analysis? Is your available data accurate and relevant? Garbage in typically means garbage out. What additional data might you need to gain more accurate, fuller insights? Data Privacy and Data Compliance. Are your data practices compliant with existing and emerging data privacy requirements such as GDPR? If not, you could be facing penalties, and also end up losing the confidence/trust of your customers, who are increasingly concerned that their data privacy gets respected and protected. Approaches to growing data and insight maturity Of course, every client organization is different. Knowledge and experience count a lot when it comes to working on improving your data and insights maturity. That said, a “typical” diagnostic approach would be to start asking the right people the right questions, which would include: What’s going on now with your data and insight capabilities? What’s working and what’s not working? What’s on your “wish list?” What specific capabilities do you want to develop or improve?  What are Marketing’s priorities? What are Marketing’s use cases aligned to these priorities? What are the organization’s priorities? What are the organization’s use cases aligned to these priorities? How are you measuring success? How would you like to measure success? With these answers in hand, and after some deep analysis and follow-up, we can begin to map out what’s important, what’s not as important, what are the potential quick wins/”low-hanging fruit,” what needs to get put on the maturity roadmap, what resources are required to drive change, what timelines should be considered, and what investments are needed.  Finally, you’re able to move from planning your roadmap to achieving measurable improvements in your data and insights maturity. It’s important to begin this journey with a clear destination in mind. Your overall business strategy and goals will inform the use cases you solve for, and those use cases will inform the choices you make around technology and data, and how tech and data get deployed. Driving maturity: Pulling it all together Your stakeholders need to be working from the same playbook, meaning that your Marketing Operations people and your Marketing-at-large people are aligned around the maturity roadmap/plan and how it’s being executed, which should (of course) align with your business strategy and specific use cases. This is typically best addressed through a structured approach to change management and continuous communication, as well as by the stakeholders agreeing upon a common set of metrics and processes.  Ultimately, the goal would be to develop a cross-functional data governance model to monitor and improve your data and insight maturity.  It’s a journey, not a destination While there are key milestones along the way to data and insight maturity, based on your roadmap, the work should be considered ongoing in the same way that your customer experience and even your company performance is an ongoing, iterative process of improvement. Once you’ve reached one level or milestone, there’s always more to be done, even if that’s “just” monitoring and maintenance.  It makes good business sense to prioritize projects and actions on your maturity roadmap, always aligned with your business goals and your Marketing goals. There must be a clear and agreed-upon vision of what success looks like and clear accountability from the top down to drive the maturity process forward.  For help in improving your data quality and data management maturity, reach out  to us today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, and better marketing tools/approaches. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives engagement and ROI. Our “Data and Insight Series” focuses on building that mature data infrastructure.   The previous posts in this “data and insights” series described the importance of data in driving marketing ROI and detailed how your organization can develop a mature data infrastructure to support quality data and insights. In this post, 6 recommendations are offered that will have an immediate impact on your data quality and data maturity.  1. Improve the value of data with a data governance model.  You can achieve data governance in phases, so that it doesn't need to be super complex right from the start. A lot of organizations get stalled, and initiative dwindles, because they try to overcomplicate data governance. Three important things to focus on initially are: (1) Build a cross-functional team made up of people who have a stake in quality data. (2) Enable and empower the data team with decision-making powers, so they can identify issues and make needed changes to ensure data quality and effective data governance. (3) Map the data landscape you have, which requires having working sessions where the cross-functional team sits down together and everyone pulls up their systems and brings up the data points that are in play for them. Each team would also bring up its use cases for data and you can start discussing sources of data and their quality.  You’ll need to break data soilo’s wherever they are. So, for example, maybe marketing has their campaign data and customer segments built on certain data fields, say “country.” What happens when your ERP system changes from a three digit country code to a two digit country code, or vice versa? Your ERP is likely integrated with your CRM, so the new country code comes into your CRM. Your CRM is also integrated with your MAP. The country code change can completely blow up every single logic and country code that marketing uses in its MAP. That's a more common and chaotic scenario than you might think.  That’s why having cross-functional data governance protects the integrity and quality of your data and the systems it flows through. You need to map out your data systems, get people talking across functions and systems about any pending changes and how they might impact everyone’s use cases and data flows.  2. Perform an annual (or periodic) health check on your data and data quality, supported by a robust data health dashboard for ongoing monitoring and support.  Ideally, if you have a cross-functional data team in place, you're able to do the health check across the entire business and across all your systems. Marketing, for instance, may have data within its lead scoring program that suddenly stops getting captured for lead scoring purposes. Well, you're probably not going to notice that until a health check reveals it – during a health check, you'd actually look at the penetration of values across your key fields and you’d see that something’s gone missing. The health check helps you identify and remedy problems with your data and systems before they significantly impact everything you do. 3. Create a systems integration roadmap, allowing for “accepted levels” of integration within each phase, and communicate progress.   If your organization uses a MAP, CRM, and ERP, and your marketing team wants more customer-level data that lives within your ERP, marketing may find itself manually extracting all that data. These manual processes take so much time and effort, and can potentially diminsh the quality of the data too. So you need to know beforehand whether there's an integration in place (or not). An integration roadmap gives you that information. It tells you where you are with your core system integrations and what you have planned to expand those integrations. Knowing that can save you on needless investments, where people say, “we're not getting the data we need, so we need to invest in a CDP.” Maybe you don't need a CDP, but actually just need to better integrate what you already have – and let's put a plan in place to do that. 4. Implement controls on all data input and output sources to ensure data compliance, as well as data integrity.  When it comes to data input, people often ask, “how do we fix the data that's already in the system?” They don't necessarily think about how to fix data before it gets into the system. So looking at your form captures and your upload templates, etc., can help you ensure that you have quality controls in place before data flows in.  You could define validation rules on your forms or pull down master templates for your uploads. And it’d be exactly the same for your outputs. Make sure that not just anyone can export your data sets – you need controls in place, permissions within your user controls. That’s more important than ever because of increasing data compliance requirements. 5. Stay current on key business and/or functional team use cases to ensure data and insights are aligned.  This recommendation requires talking to people regularly in cross-functional planning meetings in order to understand and align with their use cases. Marketing operations, for instance, needs to remain aligned to the business use cases across their stakeholder teams. If that alignment is lost, then the data and insights you're capturing are going to lose value and confidence levels will erode.   6. Get a seat at the table re: martech/tech purchase decisions that will generate data within your Data Governance model.  New tech can change everything. New data could also overlap where data is already being collected. Data may need to be integrated into a BI tool or a data lake. If data comes in and is integrated with multiple systems, there has to be consideration of the impacts.  When you're looking at responsibilities around data management insight, you have to communicate with the stakeholders across functions. Planning across functions is far better than people getting surprised by unanticipated impacts that disrupt data quality and operations. For help in improving your data quality and data management maturity, reach out  to us today.

Data is the fuel that powers modern marketing, enabling better understanding of customer needs that leads to better engagement, better content, and better marketing tools/approaches. Data by itself is useless, however, without a mature data management infrastructure of people, processes, and technology in place to turn raw data into actionable insight that drives better engagement and improved ROI. Our “Data and Insight Series” focuses on building that mature data infrastructure. In this post, we examine a customer success story involving data and insight.   Getac, a multinational B2B technology company that specializes in rugged computers, mobile video systems, mechanical components, automotive parts, and aerospace fasteners, has adopted a 1st-party cookie strategy in order to improve its ad targeting. This move has resulted in a 55% increase in data targeting efficiency which has led to a greatly improved marketing ROI. Getac's 1st-party cookie strategy allows it to target ads more effectively by leveraging customer data collected from its own Getac website.  The 1st-party data is then used to target ads to users who are more likely to purchase the products or services that Getac offers. The result is a more efficient and effective advertising campaign that generates more leads and sales for the company, allowing Getac to get more bang for its marketing/advertising buck. A brief refresher: 3 types of customer data First-party data/cookies  originate directly from customers, and are collected within a brand’s domain/company website (usually through enabling tracking) in order to support a website transaction, or as a support or service requirement.  Second-party data/cookies  are typically someone else's 1st-party data: it’s data your organization has purchased from another organization or that’s been shared with you through a data partnership arrangement. Third-party data/cookies  are collected outside your brand’s domain/company website from a variety of sources, such as a customer’s (cross-domain) browsing history. This data is typically collected from 3rd-party cookie tracking, a functionality that is now quickly disappearing (more on that later). Why Getac adopted a 1st-party cookie strategy Getac had been using 3rd-party cookies, but found that they were not as accurate or effective for their ad targeting needs. Third-party cookies are placed on users' browsers and enable the tracking of users' online activity beyond the visit to a first-domain website (in this case, the Getac website). Emerging security and privacy regulations, along with changes from big operating systems (like Apple and Google), have ensured more data privacy, but have also resulted in 3rd-party cookies increasingly being blocked, making a user’s digital activity anonymous. Adding to these big challenges, Getac couldn't segment against its website visitors because Eloqua tracking scripts weren't set up correctly or applied to all pages. As a result, there was not enough information on known contacts to understand what website pages they had visited for future Lead Model proposals and Sales conversations. Getac simply couldn't launch multiple, planned nurture campaigns in order to support their buyer journey because they couldn't set up a decision step and use targeted data to push people down the nurturing/learning path. Those challenges resulted in limited visibility into customer intent signals and more wasted ad spend due to poor targeting. How Getac’s 1st-party cookie strategy works Getac set up their strategy in the following way: 1. 1st party cookies are placed on a website by the website itself and allow the website to track a user’s online activity. As mentioned before, 1st-party cookies are not impacted by cookie blockers, so they provide more accurate and identifiable data than 3rd party cookies do. 2. Getac set up Eloqua's 1st party cookie integration , which was easy to set up and offers a seamless experience for collecting and leveraging 1st-party cookies. To implement tracking for 1st-party cookies, Eloqua users would simply open an SR (service request) with Oracle cloud support. As part of your SR, you would provide all of the relevant information: your instance name, the tracking domain you want to use, and whether it’s secure or not.  3. Getac thus added new capabilities around 1st-party cookies: it could now segment its website visitors and understand their online behavior. 4. Based on its enhanced understanding of, and visibility into, users' online behavior, it could now launch more personalized and targeted marketing campaigns. The results of Getac’s 1st-party cookie strategy As the old saying goes about data, “garbage in means garbage out.” With increased data accuracy brought about by its 1st-party cookie strategy, Getac achieved more accuracy and quality in its data. The 1st-party strategy also enabled Getac to improve its website visitors segmentation with more granular and accurate data collection. As a result of its enhanced ability to collect and leverage higher quality user data for targeting purposes, Getac was able to plan and execute better targeted marketing campaigns. The ultimate result of all these enhancements to data quality brought about by Getac’s 1st-party cookies strategy was more leads, higher quality leads, and more sales. Getac's 1st-party cookie strategy has resulted in a 55% increase in data targeting efficiency. This increase in efficiency has allowed Getac to more effectively target prospects who are more likely to be interested in the products or services that Getac offers. The company is no longer wasting ad spend because they know which target customers are showing more propensity to buy. How you can benefit from a 1st-party cookie strategy First-party cookies are more accurate than 3rd-party cookies and they are not impacted by cookie blockers and emerging privacy regulations. Eloqua's 1st-party cookie integration is easy to set up, and Getac’s experience shows, so you can quickly start segmenting your website visitors and better track/understand their online behavior. You, like Getac, can then launch targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to generate leads and sales. You don’t have to waste money by targeting ads to buyers unlikely to engage and purchase. John Wanamaker  (1838-1922), who pioneered both the modern department store and modern advertising, once bemoaned that, “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted, but I just don’t know which half.” Getac’s 1st-party cookie strategy has helped them resolve the age-old ad targeting dilemma that Wannamaker and millions of marketers have faced for over a century.   For help in improving your data quality and ad targeting with 1st-Party cookies/data, reach out  to us today.

As someone who has been writing online content for the last two decades, I’ve often received lengthy “SEO (search engine optimization) briefs” listing numerous keywords to be placed into the content a specified number of times at specific places, including in the title and subheadings. “SEO requirements” have, over the years, dictated the length of content, the number of keywords within, the number of links included, the title of the content, and much more. Inorganic SEO requirements don’t help readers While content creators like myself have generally understood the importance of SEO and search rankings for online content, working with rigid SEO requirements can feel like a straightjacket that limits content creativity and doesn’t result in helpful, readable content for consumers. Almost all content creators want to make organic, creative content that truly helps people who neither know about, nor care about, SEO requirements. People simply want content that’s valuable. SEO has long sought to “figure out” what Google’s mysterious, all-important search engine algorithm requires for a high ranking. And if you think writing that sort of SEO-first content is tedious (trust me, it is), try reading this formulaic stuff – it can read like a bored robot wrote it on a bad day. Google’s update: Creating content for humans, not search engines Google created the “give the algorithm what it wants” problem and is now seeking to solve it with its recently launched Helpful Content Update . The new update began its roll out on August 25th and took until early September to conclude. The tone and content of Google’s Helpful Content Update announcement was music to the ears of every content creator and marketer who prefers to create content for real human beings rather than algorithms. “We know people don’t find content helpful if it seems like it was designed to attract clicks rather than inform readers,” said Google’s announcement. “We’re rolling out a series of improvements to Search to make it easier for people to find helpful content made by, and for, people.”  Google is well aware that search engine optimization has become more of a rigid, formulaic game than a way to create content that actually serves and informs people. Users of Google’s search engine have noticed the problem for many years and have been complaining to Google about an array of misleading tactics driven by SEO “tricks,” including misleading headlines, content filled with repetitive, distracting SEO keywords, and content that performs well for SEO but that lacks any real insight or value for readers. Bottom line? People go to Google’s search engine for information and actionable insights, not to get tricked, and Google is now advocating for its human users. “This ranking update will help make sure that unoriginal, low quality content doesn’t rank highly in Search,” says Google, “and our testing has found it will especially improve results related to online education, as well as arts and entertainment, shopping and tech-related content.” Human-Centricity: It’s been a long time coming These changes to Google’s search engine rankings that prioritize people over algorithms, that reward the helpfulness and originality of content over its adherence to some “check-the-box” approach to SEO, have been long overdue. The changes are great news for marketers and content creators who put helping people above “tricking” a search engine algorithm. The changes are also great news for people who use Google search to actually find useful, insightful, and original content. Who does the change hurt? Anyone who has been creating and posting content with the primary purpose of driving search engine visibility and traffic, rather than helping people. These SEO tricksters will now need to perform the hardest trick of all (for them): actually helping people by creating valuable content. Advice for adapting to Google's Helpful Content Update  Google helpfully provided the Search Engine Roundtable  with two sets of questions content creators and marketers can ask themselves about their content in order to determine whether it will perform well with the new content update.  Answering “yes” to some or all of the questions is a warning sign that you might be taking a “search engine-first” approach (not a “people-first” approach) and should therefore reevaluate: Is the content primarily made for search engines rather than humans? Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results? Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics? Are you mainly summarizing what others have said before without adding much value? Are you writing about things simply because they seem trending and not because you’d write about them otherwise? Does your content leave readers feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources? Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? Google also added that “people-first content creators focus first on creating satisfying content. Answering “yes” to all or some of the questions below means you’re probably on the right track with a people-first approach to content.” Here’s the second set of questions: Do you have an existing or intended audience for your business or site that would find the content useful if they came directly to you? Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge (for example, expertise that comes from having actually used a product or service, or visiting a place)? Does your site have a primary purpose or focus? After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal? Will someone reading your content leave feeling like they’ve had a satisfying experience? The bottom line on Google's Search Rankings update The update from Google search offers marketers a clear message: create content that prioritizes value and usefulness for people rather than applying rigid SEO requirements. Google has, after a long time coming, finally gotten it right. Of course content should be created for people, not search engines. That’s a win-win-win for content creators, marketers, and anyone who seeks value from content.

It’s been 22 years since Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine co-wrote a seminal book about a (then) relatively-new concept called “customer experience.” The 2000 publication of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business  helped define and drive CX as a central concept in marketing and business. The book was based on over a decade of pioneering research conducted by Forrester’s CX research team, of which the co-authors were a part.  Manning and Bodine’s book helped define CX and what it meant for business organizations: “Customer experience is how your customers perceive their interactions with your company,” they wrote. “Once you understand that, you can manage your business from the outside in.”  Now Vice President and Research Director at Forrester, Harley Manning recently wrote a fascinating retrospective  on the Forrester blog about the lasting impact of the seminal book he co-authored. In his retrospective, he notes that many things have changed in the realm of CX since 2000, especially around digital technology and the still-developing concept of “digital-first CX,” but that many aspects of Outside In  still apply as powerfully today as they did in 2000.  Here are Manning’s five foundational truths of CX that remain ever-relevant: 1. You need your customers more than they need you. Customers can make or break your business, depending on the CX you deliver. The CX “revolution” Manning helped spark involved the idea that CX includes the product, the purchasing cycle, marketing engagement (online and offline), after-sales, and everything else that potentially impacts customers. Today, every marketer understands that multiple touch points (i.e., customer interactions) are the norm and that every single touch point is critical for building a strong CX. In his retrospective article, Manning says that too many businesses continue to treat customers as if their time and feelings don’t matter: “They barrage customers with an onslaught of spam emails, deploy customer service phone menus designed to prevent people from getting to human help, [and] goal customer service reps on ending calls quickly (as opposed to solving the customer’s problem)." That approach is anti-CX. 2. Superior CX creates superior customer loyalty. A great CX doesn’t need to be a “perfect” CX. Customers, after all, are human and understand that life can have the occasional pothole, the bad day in an otherwise good month. When brands have a clear, consistent CX strategy that gets driven across the entire organization, customers appreciate and reward the long-term CX discipline with their loyalty. When the occasional “mess ups” occur, they’re more forgiving because of the good times that have come before. CX, after all, is an ongoing, evolving relationship between brand and customer. Manning’s retrospective on the Forrester blog describes the continuing importance of CX as a way to turn “purchasers” into brand devotees. Manning defines these brand devotees as “a type of super-loyal customer who is loyal because they are having a great customer experience . . . One-hundred percent of the devotees of a brand intend to stay with it, 100% intend to buy more from it, 100% are willing to forgive it when it makes a mistake, and 100% are willing to pay a premium price for the brand (versus just 11% of non-devotee customers).” 3. Superior customer loyalty leads to superior business results. Inside Out  clearly defined the business benefits of a positive CX: businesses get “higher revenues resulting from better customer retention, greater share of wallet, and positive word of mouth, plus lower expenses due to happier customers who don’t run up your service costs.” Manning’s retrospective echoes Outside In  by reiterating the business benefits of a strong CX: “look at the business results of brands that have a high percentage of devotees. For Tesla, each devotee is worth 149% of a non-devotee. Its stock price went from $17 per share at its IPO in 2010 to over $800 per share as I’m writing this in July of 2022. That’s a return of well over 4,000%.” Simply put, maintaining and building a great CX is the best way to build any business. 4. Delivering superior CX requires business discipline. Outside In  was so impactful because it highlighted the strategic nature of CX, and how building a great CX took internal coordination, alignment, and strategic discipline around delivering on customer expectations. The seminal book made it clear that all organizational departments, as well as every single policy, process, and technology are components of a holistic CX ecosystem. CX wasn’t just the job of customer-facing departments, like sales and customer service, but involved everyone and everything in the business.  “A customer ecosystem is the complex set of relationships among a company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions,” the authors write in Outside In . You need a strategy to drive CX, as the book explained: “employees and partners need a shared vision: a customer experience strategy. Without that beacon, employees are forced to set out on a random walk, and their decisions and actions will inevitably be at odds with each other, despite all the best intentions.”  That need for a strategy to underpin CX hasn’t changed at all since 2000, says Manning, but has only become more challenging as CX touch points and digital channels proliferate. 5. Emotion is the key to CX differentiation. CX certainly includes filling in the potholes in the customer journey, but CX goes beyond just fixing potholes and removing friction. In order to be a superior CX, there must be an emotional component. That need for emotion hasn’t changed since Outside In  was published. As Manning writes in his retrospective: “emotion has a bigger impact on customer loyalty than either effectiveness or ease. Sometimes it has a bigger impact than both effectiveness and ease combined. That’s because effectiveness and ease are table stakes,” but emotion brings CX to a higher level. As Manning writes at the end of his retrospective, “the late, great poet laureate Maya Angelou expressed [the importance of emotion in CX] best when she said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That’s as true for customer experience as it is for everything else in life.”