Tag Archives: Martech

Salesforce Marketing Cloud explained

“I led the Marketing Cloud selection process for Cigna, selecting Salesforce Marketing Cloud and implemented it in 14 counties including North America”

S. Ernest Paul

Ron Ross, Senior Strategic Account Executive @ Salesforce

The Marketing Cloud Journey

The Martech stack is evolving faster than ever, and to keep up, companies must adopt emerging products with technology advances of data consolidation, personalization, AI, ML, predictive analytics that will transform and accelerate their business. Th eleft brained marketer is now a right brained marketer as well. The Don Draper days have relinquished and Agile Marketing has taken shape. Which means, your technology platforms must be more versatile than just an ESP or a CMS. That’s where Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) comes in.

Originally known as ExactTarget back in the early days of email marketing, Buddy Media for Content creation, Radian6 for social listening, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has evolved from an email marketing software solution into a leading omnichannel marketing automation platform. Oracle Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud soon followed. With a robust suite of tools that covers and connects a variety of different channels in the customer journey, Marketing Cloud allows you to get a 360-degree view of your customers and engage them with the right message at the right time in the right channel.

And this transformation is resonating for brands. Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s revenue, along with Commerce Cloud, grew 28% year over year in 2020 as more brands moved to Salesforce as their innovative, 1:1 messaging engine.
S. Ernest Paul

But while it is easy to recognize at a high level why your business could benefit from Marketing Cloud, really understanding the power of the platform, along with how to implement it and connect it to the rest alleviate some of that burden by taking you through an overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, along with the benefits that the platform can provide and the keys for a successful implementation.

“Proven ROI on Salesforce Marketing Cloud selection & implementation”

S. Ernest Paul

“ Marketing Cloud’s revenue, along with Commerce Cloud, grew 28% year over year in 2020 as more brands moved to Salesforce as their innovative, 1:1 messaging engine.”
S. Ernest Paul

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Capabilities

The first step to realizing how Marketing Cloud can transform your business is to better understand its capabilities.

Personalization

As consumers’ expectations for personalization continue to accelerate, so do their expectations for omnichannel experiences. In 2019, consumers averaged nearly six touchpoints across channels when purchasing an item – and 50% regularly use more than four during their customer lifecycle – which is a staggering increase from 15 years ago when the average consumer used two touchpoints and only 7% used more than four on a regular basis.

Marketing Cloud works to meet those consumer demands by enabling brands to create seamless customer experiences across every touchpoint, including email, mobile, advertising, web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and service. It is a platform that allows your messaging strategies and customer engagement to shine.

Features

Journeys and automation: Unification and marketing automation, behavioral data integration, and triggering
Channel activation: SMS, social, push, ads, email, direct mail, and custom journey activities
Content production and builds: AMPscript for interactive email, mobile optimization, Einstein recommendations, and Content Builder SDK and customization
Capabilities activation: Einstein, journey path optimizer, Social Studio, and Interaction Studio
Unified customer view: Connecting all data sources and providing with a 360-degree customer view to solve data-silo issues

Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Elevate Digital Transformation

Most brands are striving to achieve a full omnichannel setup. But often this is attempted using different and fragmented platforms and stand- alone channels, leading to disparate tracking data without a unified customer experience. Additionally, the effort to unify the offline and online experience is a huge challenge, with separate business departments typically creating silos. Marketing Cloud provides one robust platform that can handle all global and local marketing efforts in one place so that businesses can overcome these challenges.

Benefits which Payoff

Cohesive messages and experiences across channels
The ability to unify offline and online experiences
A scalable platform that provides a constellation of add-ons for every need
Marketing automation strategies to send the right messages to the right people at the right time
Omnichannel capabilities that provide greater control for brands increasing engagement and conversion

Marketing Cloud gives a tremendous boost to business transformation because it provides the opportunity and instruments a brand needs to essentially rethink and redesign its go-to-market strategy.

“Keys to successful implementations, analytics, and support”
S. Ernest Paul

A common mistake that businesses make when implementing Marketing Cloud is to just use the platform to deploy emails, treating it as an email marketing service like MailChimp. With this approach, the ROI will not be realized, as brands are missing out on maximizing what they can achieve with automations, data insights, Einstein, and so much more.

01 Marketing Automation

The need for personalized, 1:1 experiences delivered via Pardot to every customer cannot happen through manually built and scheduled campaigns alone. Customers expect tailored messages delivered in the moment wherever they are, and no brand has the manpower to manage this on its own.

You must rely on automations to help drive engagement, from transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping, etc.) and next-best-action (abandoned cart, abandoned browse) to automated and personalized content blocks within your general campaigns.

02 Data centralization and CDP

While messaging activation is the main output of Marketing Cloud’s capabilities, a solid data foundation is critical to a successful implementation. Make sure you have a well-scaled first-party data asset that is rooted in customer intelligence. A CDP – specifically Salesforce CDP – can be your centralized hub for segmentation, identity management, and consent that pushes data.

“ Your brand still has to be organized to operate in a way to make the most out of the technology you have and reduce operational costs and deployment errors and improve time to deployment.”

out to your Marketing Cloud platforms and provides both a single view of your customers and the ability to personalize experiences.

03 ESP implementation and migration

It’s critical to ensure that the right solution is designed during the implementation, as this will be key to a scalable and successful marketing automation program. Use the implementation process as an opportunity to refresh your existing programs. Be ambitious, set high goals, and use this step to build all your key requirements that meet your business objectives.

Our recommendation is to pick and choose these solutions based on your brand’s needs. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If your business relies on a lot of social behavior, then you will want Interaction Studio to better understand and target based on behavior. But there is also some service crossover if you already have Service Cloud. So, evaluate your business needs and choose accordingly.

05 Operational audit

Just having the technology isn’t enough for success. Your brand still has to be organized to operate in a way to make the most out of the technology you have and reduce operational costs and deployment errors and improve time to deployment. An operational audit offers an in- depth review of your existing operational process across your people, processes, technology, and data. This will help to build an operating model that covers the entire marketing journey across touchpoints based on industry and platform best practices.

06 Third-party integrations

Despite how robust the Marketing Cloud platform is, you will still likely need to rely on third-party tools for specific and targeted tactics. Salesforce’s connectors allow the platform to integrate easily with nearly any external tool, and for added simplicity and ease in the integration, see which platforms can be installed and integrated directly into Marketing Cloud using Salesforce’s AppExchange.

07 Deliverability and inbox placement

Many brands face challenges that limit their email marketing effectiveness, with the most common challenges being inbox placement and email deliverability. Meaning, did your emails reach your customers’ inboxes and do they have the highest probability of being seen? Many times, inbox-placement issues result from poor list hygiene. If you have a large number of inactive subscribers, for example, that will impact your deliverability and diminish your engagement metrics. Starting out with a clean list from the outset is the best way to ensure your messages are hitting the right inboxes

“Keys to successful campaign management and journey management”
S. Ernest Paul

Once you have the pieces of Marketing Cloud in place, you will be ready to start running campaigns. Here are some tips for successfully managing customer journeys and campaigns.

01 Journey creation

Remember, journeys are non-linear. The retail purchasing cycle can be long, rapid, sporadic, and unpredictable. Consumers expect brands to meet them with continuity where they are and on their terms.

Utilizing Journey Builder can help you map cross-channel touchpoints against customer-need states to identify highs, lows, and gaps in the experience across the lifecycle.

02 Behavioral and triggered email campaigns

While emails that promote your latest deals and products are undoubtedly important, to get the most out of Marketing Cloud, you need effective behavior and triggered emails. These are emails like abandoned cart, abandoned browse, and post-purchase transactional emails that provide transparency and encourage customers to take action.

03 Campaign segmentation and deployment

An important part of personalized experiences is not just that customers receive the content that matters most, but also that they don’t get any content they don’t care about. Audience segmentation is critical to maintaining an engaged based and preventing churn. So, not only do you want to avoid overwhelming subscribers with messages, but you also don’t want to turn them away by sending them deals or announcements for products they aren’t interested in buying.

04 Content creation

Leverage Marketing Cloud’s Content Builder for building highly engaging and mobile-optimized content in just minutes thanks to its intuitive and codeless platform. Content Builder allows for brands to use their own templates or built-in templates, and the drag-and- drop method adds flexibility and simplicity to the content-building experiences. The content you create can then be leveraged throughout email, SMS, and mobile, and by incorporating Journey Builder, you can then execute omnichannel journeys.

Connecting Marketing Cloud to the rest of your technology stack
S. Ernest Paul

While Marketing Cloud can serve as a standalone platform, it works best when connected with Sales, Service, Experience, and Commerce Cloud. If you have one view of the customer, with all the data in one centralized place, it’s easier for a brand to engage with them at the right time. Salesforce allows you to connect with your customers in real time in a singular view instead of having the connection broken. It also provides the customer with a seamless experience whenever they are engaging.

Implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud in 14 countries with outstanding results
S. Ernest Paul

Conclusion

Marketing is now an always-on experience as brands try to meet consumers’ needs and stand out in a crowded marketplace. From the acquisition stage through post-purchase loyalty, 1:1 messaging is a necessity and Marketing Cloud is increasingly becoming the platform of choice to power those critical messages. And while the sophistication and intuitiveness of the platform will make these experiences easier to produce, plenty of work still must be done from brands themselves to ensure they have the resources, processes, and capabilities to make the most of what Marketing Cloud has to offer.

Some Content Courtesy of Dentsu

AI driven Marketing has announced its arrival, but privacy concerns prevail

With Cookies going away, and Apple hosting pixels which reveal open rates for emails for Marketing Automation there are concerns – driven by privacy spurred by GDPR and cookie consent – the DMPs are dead. With the latest iOS 15 update the IP addresses which revealed location data also took a nose drive

First party data which brands hold in data warehouses and data lakes are akin to the 11 finger lakes in Upstate NY.

Disparate, with no data governance platforms / frameworks / normalized data or elastic data is still nascent at many brands, with no sign of a Chief Data Officer, albeit staffed with a good sized platoon of data scientists.

The Data ship needs a captain, and the lakes need to be bridged & governed

Fig: The Disparate State Of Data

Few years ago, at the advent of Social listening, the term social selling kicked in and at a Payor a tweet ‘Hello, I am turning 26 on and no longer going to be on my Mom’s insurance’ was a melody.

Just this nugget, a trigger to the Healthcare marketer was exciting. However now with RPA incorporated into social listening intelligence these finds are self-driven.

When I was at Cigna and set up their Social media practice from scratch, the key piece from an intelligence perspective was ‘social listening’. I did set up the Social listening listening along with the publishing and the front line conversations.

Except today, this ’nugget’ would be picked up by AI without any human intervention

Real Time Marketing needs to get Real

Real-time marketing capabilities do emphasize the actionability of marketing capabilities, however the entire chain is not strong enough yet allowing marketers to actively manage their marketing activities and track marketing capability development for products and services improvement, relying on AI -driven insights.

The same Real-time marketing capabilities also help marketers gain situational awareness for their marketing actions, which allow marketers to focus on each customer conversation that matters most to customers with real-time monitoring and big data analytics. By doing so, marketers can make the right decision at the right time

The Buyer’s Journey, The Sales Funnel – allow visitors to evaluate a product & formulate a decisioning rationale to make a purchase and then continue as customers and exhibit possible loyalty. See Fig 1, a couple of paragraphs below.

Marketing Goals have not changed but the goal posts have

The goals for the business and marketers is to generate more conversions (which primarily consists of sales). They deploy various marketing tactics, Marketing automation – segment the population set and send personalized communications via eMail/ SMS etc. They supplement their marketing efforts (MQLs) Marketing qualified leads and then filter it down to (SQLs) for the sales teams to follow up. The brand communication support the effort via various tactics and channels from SEO/SEM/ Targeted Advertising, Social media, Retargeting, Conversion rate optimization, and other methods.

Internal Data clean-up for AI – please can we do this first?

Lately, many brands have been able to clean their internal data, removed and eliminated disparate data warehouses and data lakes, made it possible for the data to be housed and queried. The data science teams have worked hard to make this happen as a result AI has been able to isolate, pick-out customers and gently nudge customers towards marketing and sales cycle, and improving the conversion rates and keeping the cost of acquisition (CAC) within manageable budgets.

Customer Loyalty and Retention reflects the LTV (Long Term-Value
S. Ernest Paul

Fig1: Sales Funnel / Buyers’ Journey / Customers Lifecycle

If the Retention is not holding and the data is elusive customers are fickle they will leave for a competitor, especially now when the COVID tension is high and attention spans are shrinking. We really need ‘Nudge’ to sharpen the experiences and personalize the journeys or we will end up with a Chinese Menu with a million items to choose from – a maze. Now compare that to ta Starbucks menu (Nudge-inspired). Thank you, Prof Thaler @Kellogg for Nudge economics.

Fig2: Customers leaving for a competitor

A New Alliance is being Stitched – CIO & CMO

To stop this leakage and to have the ability to identify, predict and react in near real time a new team/ alliance from within has been born. The key decision makers in defining the Long-Term AI strategy are the CIO and the CMO. Lately the role of the CDO (Chief Data Officer) has taken shape as the origins of all AI driven activity points to the glaciers of data.

Fig3: The stakeholders involved in shaping and championing Data, Machine Learning, AI

The technologies involved before AI kicks-in
S. Ernest Paul

How do artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning relate?

Perhaps the easiest way to think about artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning is to think of them like Russian nesting dolls. Each is essentially a component of the prior term.

That is, machine learning is a subfield of artificial intelligence. Deep learning is a subfield of machine learning, and neural networks make up the backbone of deep learning algorithms. In fact, it is the number of node layers, or depth, of neural networks that distinguishes a single neural network from a deep learning algorithm, which must have more than three.

The nodes at work below are illustrative

If Retention is not sticky and the experience is elusive, the customers are fickle and will leave for a competitor unless of course you are locked into a Xfinity / Comcast deal from which there is no escape for they only tailor to ‘acquisition’ (new customers). I , along with many of us are in the ‘retention’ phase – we get little attention & deals – of course specific to the industry with complete disregard to the sanctity of the ‘Sherman Act’ – my apologies I went on a tangent there).

Data still remains a nemesis
S. Ernest Paul

My creation below illustrates the phases and advances towards AI – however data remains a nemesis. Without it, Marketing and Sales teams are blinded. The Marketers still use Marketing Automation platforms & Lead Generation tools crunch MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) with segmentation / identity / personas / personalization – however the ROI on the the MQLs translating to ( SQLs) Sales Qualified Leads is shabby.

AI can only deliver if the data is reliable

Awareness > Consideration > Decision > Loyalty

The No. 1 goal for most businesses is to generate more conversions (which primarily consists of sales). This can be through their marketing efforts, sales tactics, brand communication, conversion rate optimization, and other methods. Of late, many companies have developed critical competencies in using AI to nudge customers towards sales, and have improved their numbers drastically as a result.

The customers are increasing puzzled with the COVID phenomenon and there is mad scramble to get UX / Design thinking and User-Centric design right.

AI, machine learning, and big data technology can all work hand-in-hand to improve the customer experience and support an optimized customer journey, which leads to more conversions in several key ways.

Let’s talk about how you can start using AI tech in each stage of the funnel.

Awareness

Marketing strategies these days are often heavily focused on the top of the funnel to build brand awareness and attract new customers. For many businesses, recognition is nearly equivalent to the value of their brand. Elena Veselinova and Marija Gogova Samonikov explain in their book Building Brand Equity and Consumer Trust Through Radical Transparency Practices that brand impact is a continuous process that insures purchases, cash flow, revenue and share value. Brand communication and experience creates and builds a loyal base of customers that do not consider any other brand.

Brand Awareness

Creating a strong level of brand awareness takes time and strategy. Companies spend millions of dollars on marketing campaigns and advertising to increase their reach and recognition, but AI tech is able to take the guesswork out of these strategies by analyzing huge volumes of consumer data for more targeted campaigns. For example, predictive analytics software can collect, track, and analyze datasets from past customers to determine which strategies or tactics performed well. These datasets are turned into reports with insights to guide marketing efforts and place relevant content in front of the most interested eyes at the right times.

With AI-assisted marketing, advertising strategies can be backed with data to optimize ad placement. Machine learning systems can even identify the best influencers for brands to partner with in order to reach relevant audiences and grow brand familiarity.

Consideration

The next step of the buyer’s journey is often overlooked by marketers because it can drag on for a long time, depending on the product and the customer’s needs. During the consideration phase, a customer is already familiar with a brand or product but are unsure of whether or not to actually purchase. Customers will typically research the product’s reviews, compare prices to competitors, and look for alternatives during this stage. Due to this, the number of potential customers tends to narrow down considerably as they move from this step to the decision phase.

Brands must work to combat each customer’s concerns and questions standing in the way of a purchase decision. One of the best ways to do this is by offering personalized content that is relevant to each person, making it easy for them to find the information they are seeking.

AI systems can be used to predict a customer’s needs based on consumer data and previous online behavior, and then encourage conversions with a tailored UX or even a completely customized landing page that displays content relevant to that customer.

For example, if a site visitor has viewed a certain product page and played a video demonstrating its features, these actions can trigger an AI system to target them with personalized content that prompts a conversion if they don’t proceed to buy immediately. This content could be something as simple as an email message with more information or a display ad with a special offer for the specific product.

Then there are platforms that use conversational AI tech (such as chatbots and voice assistants) to power automated, text- or audio-based interactions between a business and its customers. These platforms can understand speech, decipher intent, differentiate between languages, and mimic human conversations with great accuracy. Increasingly, they are advanced enough to even understand individual context and personalize the conversation accordingly.

Data Insights

Based on data insights, AI tech can curate content that matches up with the issues that are most important to that person, whether it be product features, immediate delivery, long term savings, etc. Customers respond quite well to personalized offers — an Accenture study reported that 91% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a company that sent them targeted deals or recommendations.

Decision Making

Once a customer moves from consideration to action, AI tools can be used to support a positive sales experience and eliminate any bumps along the way. If a customer encounters an issue while browsing the site, or during checkout or payment, it could be an instant sales killer, if it isn’t handled immediately by something like live chat.

A challenging consideration towards a design response is certainly necessary.

According to multiple studies, one of the most frustrating parts about online customer service is long wait times. By using AI-enabled chatbots, companies can instantly answer common questions and resolve issues or roadblocks affecting the progression of the buyer’s journey. And customers certainly appreciate these quick response times. AI systems can significantly increase conversions with effective personalization and swift customer service.

Loyalty & LTV

The last step of the customer journey is possibly the most valuable. Over half of customers reportedly stay loyal to brands that “get them.” Returning customers also tend to spend more money than new ones, and an oft-reported stat says that on average 65% of businesses’ revenue comes from existing customers.

What can the Business do

Businesses (and customers) can benefit greatly from loyalty programs that are backed with machine learning technology. Starbucks famously uses AI tech to analyze customer behavior, improve convenience, and identify which promotions would perform best based on that person’s drink or food preferences, location, and purchase frequency. Their loyalty program uses this data to send out thousands of offers each day for the products their customers are most likely to buy. Their customer loyalty program grew 16% YoY last year as a direct result of their Deep Brew AI engine.

While a positive shopping experience and great products are certainly important factors in a customer’s decision to buy again, data-driven marketing campaigns that encourage loyalty can also help a company to grow their numbers of repeat sales. Again, AI-assisted personalization techniques can boost the chances of a customer coming back for more, especially if they receive targeted offers or shopping suggestions based on previous interactions.

The Wrap

AI is proving to be the tool of the future for marketers. It allows marketing teams to use predictive insights and analytical data to encourage and assist every micro-decision taken by consumers. AI systems not only help customer

Who is S. Ernest Paul ?

Notable – He was recently recognized in the Top 10 CMO in the Country in 2021

b) He was recognized in the top 100 in Finance in 2021
Finance Magazine | C Level Focus

A thought leader in Data, Digital Strategy, Social Media, Content Platforms , Content Strategy, Digital Marketing, Adtech, Access Management, Identity, Adtech, Search engine Optimization, ML, Neural Networks, AI, and a Marketing Technology editor at Digitalbrine.com and author.

He is also a staff writer at Medium for ‘Data Driven Investor’ and other publications.

Choosing a Customer Data Platform [CDP]

CDPs have become incredibly popular for companies looking to get more out of their data. It’s easy to see why. CDPs help companies unify their data, get a better understanding of their customers and create more personalized marketing campaigns.

Finding the right CDP for your company isn’t an easy process. There are a lot to choose from, but it’s not something that should be taken lightly. That’s why we put together this guide to help you easily identify the best CDP for your company.

CDPs do this by consolidating data from different customer touch points. By breaking down da and bringing together first-party data covering all customer interactions, you can get a detailed, 360-degree view of how customers use your product and what those customers do on your website or mobile app.

A potential customer might start with an organic search on a laptop that leads her to a blog post. The next day, she visits your website again from her phone while commuting to work. Two days later, she signs up for email updates from you. A week later, she clicks through an email for a free trial. Her free trial expires after a week, and then nothing. She doesn’t visit your website again for a month. Eventually, she does come back to your website, and signs up for a monthly subscription to become a new customer.

Without a CDP, that scenario would be hard to track. You’d have all these data points, but it would be stored in multiple places. As a result, you might only know that she took a free trial and then made a purchase. Your CDP brings all of those interactions across different data sources together and consolidates them into a single omnichannel customer profile to help you get a full understanding of customer behavior and engagement.

With that knowledge, marketers can create better marketing campaigns that facilitate customer engagement at the most opportune times. A single customer view enables detailed segmentation (e.g. using demographic or behavioral data) that marketing teams can further use to create personalized experiences and improve conversion rates by targeting the ideal customer profile.

And, CDPs can help with more than just marketing. With a superior understanding of your existing customers and how they use your product, you can improve customer loyalty and retention.

If you’re ready to take that jump and use a CDP to make your company more data-driven, you need to start by comparing different CDPs to find the best one for your company.

Finding the right CDP for your company isn’t an easy process. There are a lot to choose from, but it’s not something that should be taken lightly. Your CDP is going to be handling customer data. Anytime you’re dealing with your customers’ data, you need to be extra sure that their data is safely and ethically handled.

That’s why we put together this guide to help you easily identify the best CDP for your company.

6 steps to choose the best customer data platform (CDP)

Below we walk through 6 important steps that you should go through when choosing a CDP. Following these steps will ensure that you choose a CDP fitted to your goals and resources.

Step 1: Bring stakeholders into the process

Before you even decide which CDPs you’re going to evaluate, you need to bring internal stakeholders into the process. The CDP you choose is going to be working with data from different departments within your company, so it’s important that everyone is bought in.

The question you need to ask yourself at this point is: Who else collects data that your CDP will handle?

There’s a good chance your sales team’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform stores data that your CDP will need access to. A stakeholder from sales should be part of the buying process.

What about your customer success team? There’s a good chance that your customer success team uses tools that handle customer data. A stakeholder from the customer success team will likely be part of this process too.

You don’t need each stakeholder individually evaluating each CDP, but you will need their input on various parts of the buying process. At the very least, talk to each stakeholder and let them know why you’re looking to purchase a CDP and what you hope to get out of it.

Step 2: Define use cases

There’s another big question you need to answer before deciding which CDP is best for your company: What is the reason you’re looking to use a CDP?

It’s easy to get caught up in the fact that you need a CDP because it will consolidate your data into a single customer database, but what are you actually hoping to get out of that? Consolidating your data isn’t going to make you more data-driven. It’s just a step along the way. To choose the right CDP, you need to define your use cases ahead of time.

Take some time to think about what you want your CDP to help with. Then, talk to the other stakeholders about their ideal use cases. From there, try to identify three or fewer ideal use cases. Limiting your use cases to just the top three will make it easier to evaluate all of the CDP vendors.

Here are a few of the most common use cases:

Fully understanding our customer journey
Creating a more personalized customer experience on our website
Creating more targeted multichannel advertising campaigns
Combining online and offline data

Once you’ve defined your use cases, spend some time studying your potential CDPs. Look at their website; read reviews of their products; talk to colleagues at other companies who use these tools. Does your ideal use case fit with what any of these companies are doing? If yes, make a list of those companies. At this point, it’s probably going to be a pretty big list.

Step 3: Determine the tools needed

You need to get a handle on the tools your company uses that will be connected to your CDP.

To get an idea of what tools and functionality you’ll need, start by focusing on your use cases. Which tools do you need to accomplish the specific use cases that you laid out in Step 2? Make a list of those tools.

Next, make a list of all the tools that interact with your customer in one way or another. You’ll want to include website tools, CRM systems, real-time live chat, payment processors, email platforms, and help desk systems, just to name a few.

At this point, go to your other stakeholders and double-check that you haven’t missed any important tools that will need to be connected.

Most often, we see customers start with:

Analytics tools such as Google Analytics
Advertising tools such as the Facebook
Customer success and live chat tools such as Intercom
Business intelligence tools such as Looker
Data warehouses such as Redshift

Once you’ve determined the tools you need, make sure the CDPs you’re evaluating already have those integrations. If one doesn’t have the majority of the tools you use, knock it out of contention. This step might narrow your list by a large number.

Step 4: Gather requirements

There’s more to a CDP than a way to consolidate data and solve your use cases. You also need to think of the other requirements for your CDP. Requirements are different than your use cases because a requirement is more like a feature, rather than an outcome.

For example, let’s say one of your requirements is that the CDP you choose should help you get a solid understanding of each piece of data that you’re collecting. To pull that off, you’ll need a CDP that can help you build a data-tracking plan.

If you’re not sure what other requirements you need to consider, here’s a list of common requirements that our customers have:

We’d like our CDP to help with GDPR and CCPA compliance. If that’s something you’re interested in, then you’ll need a CDP that will that will enable you to suppress data collection or delete customer data when requested, which is a requirement for both the GDPR and CCPA.
Our CDP should help us get a full view of our customer journey. If this is a requirement for your company, make sure that the CDP you’re evaluating has some form of identity resolution, which helps identify users across different channels.
Our CDP needs to have top-notch security. This is becoming a more frequent requirement. Make sure the CDP you’re evaluating has a credible, independent security certification like ISO 27001 or SOC 2. Those certifications ensure that the CDP is continuously monitoring and upgrading their security practices.

Another good place to gather requirements from are the pricing pages of each CDP. Read through the features that are listed on those pages, and make a note of anything that’s going to be important to your company.

For example, you might see that one CDP has an uptime guarantee, while another doesn’t. If an uptime guarantee is important, you might want to make it a requirement.

Step 5: Compare vendors

At this point, you should have a list of just a few CDPs that fit your use cases, have the necessary integrations, and meet all of your requirements. Now, it’s time to compare each CDP. Don’t take pricing into consideration yet. We’ll get to that in the next step.

Start by considering your industry. Find CDPs that have customers most similar to your company. If you work at an enterprise-level company, find a CDP that has a track record of working with companies at that level. If you work at a startup, make sure the CDPs you’re evaluating have experience in that space. Chances are there will be an overlap with CDPs that have a track record in all industries, but that’s okay.

If you’ve determined that all of the CDPs you’re considering have the right experience, it’s time to go a step deeper. Make sure each CDP has:

A track record of accomplishing the use cases that you defined in Step 2.
A solution for data compliance. CDPs handle data, so they should enable your compliance with the GDPR or the CCPA.
The right integrations for your current and future use cases. Is each CDP continually adding new integrations to their integration catalog?
Excellent customer service to help you set up, use, and maintain your CDP.

Don’t forget to look at review websites for user reviews of each CDP too. G2and Capterra both have dedicated pages for CDP reviews.

Step 6: Consider ROI

The ROI of the CDPs you’re evaluating is the final piece you need to consider. ROI doesn’t mean that you should choose the cheapest option. It’s more about which option will give you the best value. How do you determine that value upfront, before you choose your CDP?

Start by using our ROI worksheet. This will help you determine the cost of your engineers’ time. Without a CDP, your engineers have to spend hours building and maintaining integrations for each tool. Those hours add up quickly, which can result in significant costs just to build and maintain one integration. If you have ten integrations that need to be handled by your engineering team, you can see that the hours will quickly become unmanageable.

That cost is one of the biggest reasons to use a CDP. Good CDPs should reduce the amount of time your engineers spend building integrations between tools, which can result in a huge cost savings.

That’s why you need to calculate the costs and consider ROI ahead of time. If you choose a CDP that doesn’t give your engineering team the maximum amount of time-savings, it may not be worth the cost at all.

What CDP do you need?

Choosing a CDP isn’t a quick process. You need to make sure you’re doing your due diligence to find the right CDP based on your specific use-cases and requirements.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to get more value out of your data and get a better understanding of your customers. Plus, your engineering team will thank you for reducing their workload since they won’t have to spend time building and maintaining integrations with your tools.

Courtesy: Segment

The quest to deliver Customer Personalization – Marketing Technology

Brands have to identify and understand each and every customer

Ever been to a restaurant where they know you by name? and the waiter happens to know your preferred drink of choice and like magic brings it to your table while you are getting seated. The ‘Cheers’ kind of experience for those of us who recall the sitcom. These one-on-one personable interactions make experiences special.

We live in a digital world now and demand similar experiences from brands. We want to associate with a brand who knows us. We gravitate towards these brands, rare as they might be. However such a rendezvous brings familiarity & comfort. Trust soon follows. I recently called up my banking institution over the phone, a few taps on the phone initiated by me and there was a friendly voice greeting me personally instantly. Voila! All done with voice print. We expect similar experiences, minimalist, natural, efficient and transferable across devices.

"Patience in today's hyper connected world is on a diet due to clumsy marketing tactics"

What do customers want from brands?

On occasions while dining I have often witnessed all individuals seated at a table nearby simultaneously glued to their mobile phones. Digital and mobile may have taken us all by storm long ago but we do seem to prefer company even if it of the silent variety. This mobile solitude may be amusing to some, not marketers. To marketers, this means real time location data, related contextual information including weather, possibly to trigger a nearby physical store location reminder.

Customers want relevant, meaningful and tailored information and offers from brands who meet their specific needs. Irrelevant offers and emails induce customer paralysis and prove to be counterproductive. In this era of instant gratification and attention span deficit, there is little room for off target customer communications. With a thorough understanding of customer needs, both parties are likely to benefit.

Customers have long declared their expectations. See Figure below:

Delivering on customer expectations enhances customer engagement leading to loyalty for brands, resulting in reduced acquisition costs, a revenue upside and increased retention rates.

The journey begins with data

Brands seeking customer-centric nirvana have to become data-centric, first. None of this degree of hyper-personalization at scale can be accomplished without customer data.

"Data is the new oil. Refining or anticipating customer needs is the beginning of personalization"

This crude oil or rich behavioral customer data, customer interactions, social media activity, demographics, customer life cycle stage recognition and transactional data can be segmented and further sub-segmented. Personalization dividends can be harnessed today without a full blown implementation of technology such as a Customer Data Platform, a CDP. Existing data can be used in cross-sell initiatives, enablement & activation of a few consumer use-cases based on past purchases and behavior. Sometimes using less data is more effective prior to incorporating external purchased data sets.

Incorporation of 2nd & 3rd party external data adds dimensional layers to the refinement process and further enriches customer data. Multiple digital identities, which many consumers use online can be merged into a single record to eliminate redundancy. Iterative cycles of customer behavior and interactions captured via analytics continually refine customer data. Behavior solidarity within customer ‘data sets’ feeds pattern discovery and recognition. With confirmation and accuracy of patterns, machine learning kicks the ‘data sets’ up a notch. With continuous cycles of deep learning & artificial intelligence, predictive analytics begin to unlock future customer behavior.

How far along is your organization in channeling this new oil, 
piping it, refining it, triaging it, harnessing it to extract
measurable value?

Agile, cross functional teams – marketing, tech experts & operations must work together

Working in silos is kryptonite for personalization. Having a cross functional team in a test and learn mode, sharing insights within a ‘not afraid to fail culture‘ is the best environment to productively deliver, preferably in a war room like setting.

The personalization DNA resides in behavioral data. Its application rests on a thorough mapping and intersection of customer journeys, triggers, devices, events, marketing campaigns and collateral aligned to customer segments with matching behavior. A cross functional team serves this proposition well.

Marketing & Operations realignment

Organizations must look at the personalization ecosystem in its entirety, from data management to advanced analytics to customer engagement, through to measurement and optimization. Marketing resources are generally organized by specific skill. For example: Analytics or Campaign management or even by Channel – Social or Search. There is an unintentional siloed ecosystem risk to be wary of. Although optimizing for different elements is important, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. An understanding of how the different parts interact and how to integrate them to support personalization is what differentiates high-performing marketing organizations from poorly performing ones.

Building the customer journey

Grouping customers together with matching needs and behavior is a good place to begin. Armed with a handful of these groupings or segments, align each segment with its own customer journey & map the series of interactions with the company brand. Examples: Visits to a broker, agent, company website, calls to a call center, social media posts, even tracking prospect visits to the company brand’s competitor, etc.

Building customer segments

Hundreds of mini-segments may emerge as a result of combining journeys and customer segments. Each mini-segment may be nuanced and one more valuable than the other. Each should be considered & prioritized by its relative value. For example: Consider a leading insurer who may find it more valuable to engage with its customers who are within their ‘renewal window’ by sending them a reminder that their policy is nearing expiration. Rather than pushing them towards a cross-sell product and risk losing the customer to a competitor, the insurer chooses to send a limited-time policy renewal loyalty-offer.

Harnessing customer signals

The customer provides signals as to their intent with their online & offline interactions. Mature predictive analytics catch these signals and push them into a workflow to be followed up by an appropriate response. Each signal, nevertheless deserves a response, a timely and relevant trigger message, to close the loop.

Signals & Triggers at work

With advanced and meticulous planning, a library of signals and matching triggers have to be maintained and kept up to date. Each trigger with matching collateral can then be dynamically executed. Each of these combinations are continually refined & optimized by analytics. Upon a valid declaration, each becomes a business rule. For example: Consider a leading health insurer who learns of a dependent soon to be in the ‘dependent turning 26 window‘. The customer and/or dependent promptly receives a triggered message with a limited time offer towards a new personal health insurance policy for the dependent.

Pharma & Life sciences regulatory caution is giving way to customer personalization

Regulated industries in Pharma, Life Sciences, Healthcare and others have been increasing personalization related spend. Even with an innate regulatory driven caution, the portfolio trajectory is shifting from clinical trials customer data spend to customer/patient experience related personalization spend.

Customer data & personalization together aid in the identification of high-value patients, who can then be channeled towards physicians and therapists, realizing a tailored & personalized formulary experience.

Insurers have personalization high on their portfolio spend agenda

Insurers are attaining underwriting efficiencies, realizing a not so far off dream of instant insurance for Health, Life and others. They are now providing customers Population health efficiencies and Genomics focused underwriting, all a result of data personalization. The race is on and competition is rife. Personalized internal & external customer data, including IoT customer data can now reside within a CDP or a similar configuration.

Stitching the Personalization DNA within your marketing technology stack or with an addition of a CDP

Achieving growth on a large scale, across all channels and geography requires immense preparation, alignment, governance and most of all leadership and talented human capital.

Rerouting existing operational organizational alignment, restitching operational processes and RPA driven workflows, scaling across the company incrementally and globally requires a well-articulated blueprint with an equally agile playbook.

New marketing technology configurations equipped with a ‘smart brain‘, ready to direct traffic with rules & algorithms, can finally foster a new breed of a one-to-one marketing reality.

Avoiding pitfalls and traps

A series of steps may be necessary to arm an incumbent MarTech stack to minimize ROI leakage from new technology investments.

It is easy to rack up a bill in the millions on data integrations that magnetically pull all this information together into a data lake, prioritizing the most valuable types of data—the kind which drive the high value use cases. Identification of the required latency for each data element is critical at this juncture. Most use cases require real-time information for a limited set of data elements, so most real-time capability can be thankfully decelerated.

Discover business use cases which the technology would drive, not vice versa

Buttressed by an agile development process formulate business use cases supported by KPIs, business drivers and forecasts. Existing digital analytics would aid in benchmarking, revealing delta variances and future forecasting. The marketing process is iterative, optimized and improved with each cycle.

Collaborate closely with the Marketing teams to uncover functional requirements

In close collaboration with the marketing operations team, functional requirements must be well articulated and documented. Juxtaposed against the numerous technology solutions & providers which make up the MarTech landscape, this step is a cornerstone effort. Multiple use cases, storyboards or multiple contexts help in identifying a certain missing technology component. This good catch may lead you to a different vendor choice and selection when augmenting your technology to fit your personalization goals.

Align organizational needs and goals with a technology approach

Major integrated Marketing Cloud suite vendors including Oracle, Adobe and Salesforce do not support the personalization ecosystem end-to-end. Brands may already have one of these suites in place. In that case, a reasonable compromise would be to extend the capability of the existing suite with the best of breed of each functionality element missing from the existing MarTech stack. The downside would be a less than tight integration to the element supporting that specific functionality or service.

A key consideration for the analytics engine – The analytics engine ‘the brain ‘ should be customizable including the algorithms, data features and business rules specific to your requirements. The solution set should allow you control over the inputs to the analytics engine.

Build incrementally and via pilots

A prudent approach would be to set your sights on an iterative and incremental value delivery approach supported by well-defined pilots. With each new element added for a new use case, costs rise.

However, the incremental value attained would likely align with the incremental investment, thus justifying the investment. A phase driven and stage-gated approach would smoothen the decision making for the CFO to fund the incremental spend.

Which Social Media Suite Vendors are the best of breed

There are a a new breed of Social media vendors – pure play Social media suites such as Khoros and Sprinklr. They are not part of the ecosystem of Mega Marketing Cloud Platforms like Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle which tend to serve as enterprise one stop shop Marketing Cloud platforms and integrate with other marketing offering and unify the capabilities and deliver a unified marketing reporting and dashboard experience.

Salesforce started this binge with the acquisition of Radian6 followed by Buddy Media, Exact Target and others to form a ‘Marketing Cloud offering with add-ons from third-party vendors serving as a App marketplace.

I selected Radian6 for Cigna as an enterprise offering for North america and 14 other countries and rolled it out for various segments of the enterprise with reporting very specific to their segment needs such as Customer experience, Product, Security and so on . I then followed that up with a Social media Listening Center of Excellence.

Oracle and Adobe soon followed with similar acquisitions and the Marketing Cloud war was on .

Then emerged niche players like Crimson Hexagon and Seismos and others whose focus was to solve very specific Use cases.

Today there are slim and trim versions of Social Suites unlike Social Studio (part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud). These players focus on Social Media and is their primary focus and most integrate well with other marketing offering to bring about unified reporting with for example Tableau and Qlik.

Social Suites Must Unify, Consolidate, elevate Listening beyond nascent Core Social Capabilities

Brands prefer a leaner Marketing technology stack and continue to pursue social tech consolidation to stitch the disjointed ecosystem of point solutions. To address these needs response, social suites try to centralize social media capabilities across listening, organic publishing, advertising, customer response, and other secondary social capabilities. Since these nimble social suites vendors have shored up core capabilities with M&A and improved lackluster areas such as listening. Going forward, these vendors must pursue one of two paths: continue to address critical challenges within social media or move beyond it to tackle other channels and experiences like customer service or commerce. Regardless of their chosen focus, social suites vendors must deliver on brand customers’ desire to unify social media execution and analytics.

As a result of these trends, social suites customers should look for providers that:

Aggregate ads (paid), organic (owned), and/or listening (earned) data in one dashboard. Marketers can easily see the content impact of social through number of likes and shares but struggle to measure its marketing or business impact. Social suites provide a more holistic view of social media performance by visualizing paid, owned, and earned data together. Some go a step further in tracking social media activity against the customer lifecycle or sales funnel or against brand health and brand satisfaction. Buyers shouldn’t be satisfied with dashboards displaying standard profile and engagement metrics; instead, they should seek vendors that assess social media programs against business objectives like brand health and sales.

Use consumer insights from listening and response to inform marketing decisions. Social listening provides consumer insights to help brands activate, measure, and recalibrate marketing and business programs. Brands also gather critical feedback from social customer service interactions. Consumer insights and customer service feedback provide brands with a rich understanding of the consumers they’re trying to reach. Vendors tightly link their social listening and customer service modules to the rest of the social suite, allowing brands to develop marketing initiatives based on emerging trends and customer feedback. This yields stronger social media programs born out of consumers’ desires and not internal brand motivations.

Offer a fully interoperable platform. Social suites have prioritized uniting acquired or organically built capabilities into a single streamlined user interface. But to act on that data, brand customers also need the ability to pull data from one module into another. For example, some vendors use unified social user profiles and integrations with third-party CRM suites to facilitate cohesive customer service and then leverage that profile data for identifying influencers. Several social suites repurpose content and its associated parameters (e.g., audiences, assets, or campaign dates) across the suite in organic publishing, advertising, and user-generated content via a universal tagging or labeling system.

Market Presence

Market Presence does not necessarily mean top of mind and best of breed. It merely shows market share.

Vendor Profiles

Forresters analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors.

Leaders

Sprinklr competes by offering a formidable and intensely customizable unified platform. This heavyweight vendor, based in New York, presented one of the first broader visions beyond social media: to become a “customer experience management” platform and solve the chaos of using multiple point solutions across digital channels. The vendor’s execution roadmap focuses on solidifying core areas of its platform by adding to its extensive list of channels, use cases, and third-party integrations (though not with other social technology). Armed with new FedRAMP-ready status, Sprinklr is expanding its target market to include public sector organizations. While other vendors go deep in only a few social media modules, Sprinklr delivers across all social media needs at equal depth — listening, customer service, organic publishing, and advertising — plus some secondary social products like influencer management and employee advocacy. AI “smart” features persist across the platform, from autodetecting themes to ensuring compliance against guidelines to recommending customer service responses. Customer references appreciate the new Hyperspace user interface, noting that it’s more intuitive and easier to use than previous iterations. However, the vendor’s pricing model remains a vast array of add-ons and opaque pricing. Sprinklr is ideal for enterprises that have cross-functional needs and can implement a rigorous setup to make the Sprinklr engine run effectively.

Khoros differentiates on customer care and sets its sights beyond social media. Khoros continues to make steady progress uniting its legacy Lithium and Spredfast platforms into a single suite — and now has more work ahead to integrate new acquisitions Topbox (now called Khoros CX Insights) for customer experience analytics and Flow.ai (now Khoros Flow) for conversational AI. This vendor, headquartered in Austin, Texas, caters to enterprise buyers with a lofty vision to provide a single unified platform to “connect and improve digital customer experiences.” Khoros’ emphasis on “people first” and building relationships applies to both customers and employees and is notable for its focus on diverse and inclusive hiring efforts, employee resource groups, and corporate social initiatives. Khoros’ deep capabilities in customer care and brand communities set it apart from other vendors in this space. The vendor’s Intelligence module offers light social listening, augmented by an integration with Talkwalker for deeper listening. The Marketing module offers solid organic publishing but with limited advertising options — though it has unified paid and organic reporting. While the Care and Marketing products remain somewhat gated, users are now able to carry customer data and insights across multiple areas of the platform. A unique Vault product controls and locks down platform user access, and Khoros’ personally identifiable information (PII) redaction feature adds to its strengthened consumer privacy practices. Customer references praised the vendor’s “fantastic” and “phenomenal” account management, emphasizing its strength as a partner. For enterprises with diverse needs across departments that don’t necessarily have shared goals, Khoros is a good fit.

Strong Performers

Sprout Social’s culture-first mindset drives its strong service and unified social suite. Sprout Social’s emphatic “culture as a business model” go-to-market approach translates into strong account management, employee retention, and overall customer satisfaction. This Chicago vendor has a singular focus on solving social media problems and perfecting its craft there. It has taken a deliberate — and slower — approach to organically build a truly unified social suite that sits on a single code base. Sprout Social opts to hone its core capabilities rather than build or acquire an abundance of new feature and functionality. It also offers a simple and clear pricing model to serve companies ranging from small firms to large enterprises. Newcomers to Sprout Social will find the platform easy to set up and use from the start. Foundational user experience, user management, and collaboration and workflow capabilities are Sprout Social’s strengths, culminating in unified dashboards and reporting. Expansion into social commerce is evident with a soon-to-be generally available Shopify integration in the Inbox module and an Instagram bio link-to-shop feature in the Publishing module. But listening is lighter weight, and advertising is limited compared with other vendors. Bambu, the lone product that sits outside the Sprout Social platform, fulfills employee advocacy programs. Customer references gave unanimous high marks for how Sprout Social manages and services their accounts. For social marketers seeking a unified platform that checks the core boxes and is easy for all to access, Sprout Social delivers.

Hootsuite tackles social measurement with a patchwork of new and old acquisitions. Hootsuite’s newest acquisition of Sparkcentral for customer service joins past acquisitions AdEspresso for advertising and LiftMetrix for analytics, plus the already-integrated Brandwatch for listening, in a one-stop shop with separate URLs. Hootsuite hyperfocuses on helping marketers advance their social media maturity and solve the social measurement conundrum with assessment tools, attribution models, and a macro view of social media activity across paid, owned, and earned. Originating in Vancouver, this vendor is garnering positive feedback with its account management and professional services. Hootsuite recently received a new design makeover and continues to refine its legacy publishing and Streams products. It’s working to reconcile dashboards (Analytics vs. Impact), customer service (Inbox vs. Assignments vs. Sparkcentral), and advertising (Ads vs. Publisher) and would benefit from also reconciling listening (Streams vs. Insights) in the platform. Hootsuite also leans on a variety of third-party integrations for ratings and reviews, content discovery, and regulatory needs. The result is a social suite packed with functionality, but disparate and duplicative elements abound. Customer references confirmed that the user experience has improved but still feels disjointed. Hootsuite also offers an Amplify employee advocacy product for companies arming employees with social media content, especially regulated industries or the public sector, with its new FedRAMP certification. Hootsuite’s à la carte menu of social media capabilities is good for social media managers with an array of needs, large and small.

Socialbakers, now Emplifi, delivers primarily social marketing and analytics in a clean UI. Astute Solutions acquired Socialbakers, based in Prague, Czech Republic, and rebranded to Emplifi in July 2021 (after the time of this evaluation), setting in motion a three-pronged vision of social marketing, care, and commerce within a customer experience cloud. This vendor’s roadmap tightly aligns to development in those three focus areas. However, during this evaluation, legacy Socialbakers and Astute Solutions have remained separate platforms with different pricing models. For the time being, the former continues to deliver its core listening, marketing, and analytics offerings under a new product name: Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud. Socialbakers impresses with a streamlined user interface and unified social suite that uses labels to carry data across modules for listening, personas, and content. Customer references confirmed that the UI was intuitive and a reason for buying Socialbakers. Unlike other social suites, this vendor focuses on content discovery rather than creation. Social listening is spread across Content, Audiences, Influencers, and Analytics modules and is designed to discover content, audiences, and influencers — though data is disparate, and users can’t view it all in one place. But dashboards do prolifically compare data with previous periods; customer references appreciate this but stated that they lack flexibility and deeper metrics. Also noteworthy: Its benchmarking product uses aggregated Socialbakers brand customer data to index against competitors. Socialbakers is interesting for social marketers who are seeking an array of data visualizations and are eager for Emplifi to integrate care and commerce in the future.

Contenders

Falcon.io fortifies listening by adding Brandwatch to its everyday social suite. Two years ago, Cision acquired Falcon.io out of Copenhagen to shore up social media offerings for its PR and communications buyers. This year, Cision acquired Brandwatch, a social listening platform, and quickly fused it with Falcon.io, an original social media management solution, to yield a stronger social suite and target more enterprise prospects. However, the assembled collection — spanning Falcon.io, previously acquired Unmetric for competitive benchmarking, and now Brandwatch — yields a more disjointed social suite than its previous unified platform. Independently, Falcon.io’s vision remains firmly rooted in social media use cases that benefit midmarket customers. Falcon.io’s Listen module is augmented by Brandwatch for deeper listening needs, though users must use a separate URL because the integration isn’t yet accessible from the main navigation. Falcon.io’s Engage module for customer service provides chatbot capabilities and other on-par features. The Publish module offers limited organic publishing functionality, with no ability to post simultaneously on multiple social media platforms. While the Advertise module provides users with some advertising capabilities, it’s restricted to Facebook and Instagram. Falcon.io notably offers its own CRM in its Audiences module and leans on its Unmetric integration for competitive benchmarking. Customer references appreciate the persistent labeling system that enables data interoperability throughout the suite but wish some modules — such as Advertise and Benchmark — were better integrated. Falcon.io is a good fit for midmarket companies or enterprises that need standard social media execution.

Meltwater is strong in listening but lacks functional depth in other social media needs. Meltwater aims to connect the worlds of media relations and marketing with a vision of helping brand customers understand, influence, and engage with consumers. The vendor’s niche but targeted approach is a nod to the combined legacies of Meltwater and Sysomos, which Meltwater acquired in 2018. Since then, the company, founded in Oslo, Norway, but based in San Francisco, has continued its active M&A streak. The 2021 additions of Linkfluence, a social listening platform, and Klear, an influencer marketing solution, are helping Meltwater expand to new influencer marketing and consumer insights use cases while reducing its reliance on partnerships and integrations. Meltwater is strongest in its Explore module for listening, with rich data sources that include news and broadcast media, as well as a unique podcast integration that monitors media coverage on audio content. The vendor also offers embedded, white-labeled features, such as audience analysis from Audiense, UGC management from TINT, and data visualizations from Tickr. The Engage module offers organic publishing, customer response, and advertising but lacks some functionality that other vendors provide, such as comprehensive organic and paid post creation and robust customer response. Analyze dashboards aim to bridge Explore and Engage modules by housing owned and earned sentiment, paid data, and competitive benchmarking in a single place. Meltwater is a good fit for PR, corporate communications, and marketing buyers from a wide range of business sizes. Meltwater declined to participate in the full Forrester Wave evaluation process.

Facelift keeps consumer privacy top of mind but lags in feature development. Under DuMont Media Group ownership, Facelift’s mission is to reduce complexity; provide rapid time-to-value; and offer a reliable, scalable, and secure platform for its predominantly European customers. Operating out of Hamburg, Germany, the vendor works to enable all departments to use centralized campaign templates at the regional or local level. Facelift has historically stayed in a social-media-only swim lane but is now pushing into broader digital marketing planning orchestration and more aggressive investment in growth. Unlike some other vendors, Facelift’s commercial model is transparent and easy to follow. Facelift Cloud is strongest in organic publishing: The planner tool provides a bird’s-eye view across campaigns, whereas the publisher tool executes the content. The vendor also offers lightweight listening with proprietary Trendwatch and a more sophisticated option via an integration with Talkwalker skinned inside Facelift Cloud. The Moderation module for customer service and the Advertising module (which copies the Facebook Ads Manager interface) both offer basic functionality. Facelift Cloud’s user experience, user management, and collaboration and workflow capabilities strive for uniform efficiency but don’t allow for much customization. Customer references praised Facelift Cloud’s simple and easy-to-use features but expressed a desire for more-flexible dashboards and reports offering more metrics (both in number and relevancy). For European customers that have straightforward hub-and-spoke social marketing needs and seek strong security and data privacy, Facelift is a solid option.

Challengers

Reputation manages multilocation brands’ reviews, but social capabilities are nascent. Compared with other vendors in this evaluation, this vendor, based in Redwood City, California, has a unique heritage in ratings and reviews management and serving multilocation companies with decentralized needs. With its recent acquisition of Nuvi for social listening, Reputation aims to present a holistic “reputation experience management” platform enabling continuity from central headquarters to local regions. However, its roadmap focuses on integrating Nuvi into the core Reputation platform and enhancing social media functionality that other social suites may already offer. Reputation’s social suite exists as a single module within the larger reputation management platform, with Nuvi sitting outside the platform for now. Nuvi’s social listening platform offers an endless menu of visualizations with notable emotion and attribute analysis, an improvement over Reputation’s existing listening product. Reputation also offers organic social publishing but leans on its bread and butter: ratings and reviews management and the aptly named proprietary Reputation Score. The vendor’s scant customer service options are split between the social suite module and Nuvi, and it doesn’t offer advertising within the platform. Customer references noted some account management challenges as the company scaled. Reputation is best suited for multilocation brands’ niche reputation experience, reviews management, and social marketing needs.

Evaluation Overview

We evaluated vendors against 36 criteria, which we grouped into three high-level categories:

Current offering. Each vendor’s position on the vertical axis of the Forrester Wave graphic indicates the strength of its current offering. Key criteria for these solutions include social listening, social customer response, and social organic publishing.

Strategy. Placement on the horizontal axis indicates the strength of the vendors’ strategies. We evaluated product vision, execution roadmap, onboarding and account management, supporting services, performance, and commercial model.

Market presence. Represented by the size of the markers on the graphic, our market presence scores reflect each vendor’s revenue and customers.

Vendor Inclusion CriteriaForrester included nine vendors in the assessment: Facelift, Falcon.io, Hootsuite, Khoros, Meltwater, Reputation, Socialbakers, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social. Each of these vendors has:

Annual social suites revenue above $40 million. Each vendor had a social suites revenue of more than $40 million in 2020.

Social suites that combine multiple social tech capabilities into a single unified platform. This includes social listening, organic publishing, and customer response, plus at least one other social technology capability (e.g., influencer marketing, social community, or employee advocacy).

We are Digitalbrine, a Full service Digital Agency part of the Beyondiris Consulting family.

Fee free to reach out for consulting or Social media Services.

How to Conduct a Technical SEO Audit

The technical elements of your website’s SEO are crucial to search performance. Understand and maintain them and your website can rank prominently, drive traffic, and help boost sales. Neglect them, and you run the risk of pages not showing up in SERPs.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct a technical SEO audit to find and fix issues in your website’s structure. We’ll look at key ranking factors including content, speed, structure, and mobile-friendliness to ensure your site can be crawled and indexed.

We’ll also show you the tools you need to boost on-page and off-page SEO efforts and performance, and how to use them.

Using a technical SEO audit to improve your SEO performance

Think of a technical SEO audit as a website health check. Much like you periodically review your digital marketing campaigns to get the most from them, a technical SEO audit identifies areas for improvement.

These areas fall into three categories:

1. Technical errors

Identifying red flags in the back and front-end of your website that negatively impact performance and, thus, your SEO. Technical errors include crawling issues, broken links, slow site speed, and duplicate content. We’ll look at each of these in this article.

2. UX errors

User experience (UX) tends to be thought of more as a design issue rather than an SEO one. However, how your website is structured will impact SEO performance.

To better understand what pages are important and which are lower priority, Google uses an algorithm called Page Importance.

Page Importance is determined by type of page, internal and external links, update frequency, and your sitemap. More importantly from a UX perspective, however, it’s determined by page position. In other words, where the page sits on your site.

This makes website architecture an important technical SEO factor. The harder it is for a user to find a page, the longer it will take Google to find it. Ideally, a user should be able to get to where in as few clicks as possible.

A technical SEO audit addresses issues with site structure and accessibility that prevent them from doing this.

3. Ranking opportunities

Technical SEO is as important as On-Page SEO As well as prioritizing key pages in your site architecture, an audit helps convince Google of a page’s importance by:

Identifying and merging content targeting the same or similar keywords;
Removing duplicate content that dilutes importance, and;
Improving metadata so that users see what they’re looking for in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It’s all about helping Google understand your website better so that pages show up for the right searches.

As with any kind of health check, a technical SEO audit shouldn’t be a one-and-done thing. It should be conducted when your website is built or redesigned, after any changes in structure, and periodically.

The general rule of thumb is to carry out a mini-audit every month and a more in-depth audit every quarter. Sticking to this routine will help you monitor and understand how changes to your website affect SEO performance.

6 tools to help you perform a technical SEO audit

Here are the SEO tools we’ll be using to perform a technical audit:

These tools are free, with the exception of Screaming Frog which limits free plan users to 500 pages.

If you run a large website with more than 500 pages, Screaming Frog’s paid version offers unrestricted crawling for $149 per year.

Alternatively, you can use Semrush’s Site Audit Tool (free for up to 100 pages) or Ahrefs Site Audit tool. Both perform a similar job, with the added benefits of error and warning flagging, and instructions on how to fix technical issues.

1. Find your robots.txt file and run a crawl report to identify errors

The pages on your website can only be indexed if search engines can crawl them. Therefore, before running a crawl report, look at your robots.txt file. You can find it by adding “robots.txt” to the end of your root domain:

https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt

The robots.txt file is the first file a bot finds when it lands on your site. The information in there tells them what they should and shouldn’t crawl by ‘allowing’ and ‘disallowing’.

Search crawlers don’t crawl certain parts of its site. These are back-end folders that don’t need to be indexed for SEO purposes.

By disallowing them, the website is able to save on bandwidth and crawl budget—the number of pages Googlebot crawls and indexes on a website within a given timeframe.

If you run a large site with thousands of pages, like an ecommerce store, using robots.txt to disallow pages that don’t need indexing will give Googlebot more time to get to the pages that matter.

What robots.txt also does is point bots at its sitemap. This is good practice as your sitemap provides details of every page you want Google and Bing to discover (more on this in the next section).

Look at your robots.txt to make sure crawlers aren’t crawling private folders and pages. Likewise, check that you aren’t disallowing pages that should be indexed.

If you need to make changes to your robots.txt, you’ll find it in the root directory of your webserver (if you’re not accustomed to these files, it’s worth getting help from a web developer). If you use WordPress, the file can be edited using the free Yoast SEO plugin. Other CMS platforms like Wix let you make changes via in-built SEO tools.

Run a crawl report to check that your website is indexable

Now that you know bots are being given the correct instructions, you can run a crawl report to check that pages you want to be indexed aren’t being hampered.

Enter your URL into Screaming Frog, or by going to Index > Coverage in your Google Search Console.

Each of these tools will display metrics in a different way.

Screaming Frog looks at each URL individually, splitting indexing results into two columns:

1. Indexability: This shows where a URL is indexable or non-indexable

2. Indexability status: The reason why a URL is non-indexable

The Google Search Console Index Coverage report displays the status of every page of your website.

Google Search Engine Console

The report shows:

Errors: Redirect errors, broken links, and 404s
Valid with warnings: Pages that are indexed but with issues that may or may not be intentional
Valid: Successfully indexed pages
Excluded: Pages excluded from indexing due to reasons such as being blocked by the robots.txt or redirected

Flag and fix redirect errors to improve crawling and indexing

All pages on your website are assigned an HTTP status code. Each code relates to a different function.

Screaming Frog displays these in the Status Code column:

Screaming Frog Indexability Report

All being well, most of the pages on your website will return a 200 status code, which means the page is OK. Pages with errors will display a 3xx, 4xx, or 5xx status code.

Here’s an overview of codes you might see in your audit and how to fix the ones that matter:

3xx status codes

301: Permanent redirect. Content has been moved to a new URL and SEO value from the old page is being passed on.

301s are fine, as long as there isn’t a redirect chain or loop that causes multiple redirects. For example, if redirect A goes to redirect B and C to get to D it can make for a poor user experience and slow page speed. This can increase bounce rate and hurt conversions. To fix the issue you’ll need to delete redirects B and C so that redirect A goes directly to D.

By going to Reports > Redirect Chains in Screaming Frog, you can download the crawl path of your redirects and identify which 301s need removing.

302: Temporary redirect. Content has been moved to a URL temporarily.

302s are useful for purposes such as A/B testing, where you want to trial a new template or layout. However, if 302 has been in place for longer than three months, it’s worth making it a 301.

307: Temporary redirect due to change in protocol from the source to the destination.

This redirect should be used if you’re sure the move is temporary and you’ll still need the original URL.

4xx status codes

403: Access forbidden. This tends to display when content is hidden behind a login.
404: Page doesn’t exist due to a broken link or when a page or post has been deleted but the URL hasn’t been redirected.

Like redirect chains, 404s don’t make for a great user experience. Remove any internal links pointing at 404 pages and update them with the redirected internal link.

410: Page permanently deleted.

Check any page showing a 410 error to ensure they are permanently gone and that no content could warrant a 301 redirect.

429: Too many server requests in a short space of time.

5xx status codes

All 5xx status codes are server-related. They indicate that the server couldn’t perform a request. While these do need attention, the problem lies with your hosting provider or web developer, not your website.

Set up canonical tags to point search engines at important pages

Canonical meta tags appear in the <head> section in a page’s code.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.yourdomain.com/page-abc/” />

They exist to let search engine bots know which page to index and display in SERPs when you have pages with identical or similar content.

For example, say an ecommerce site was selling a blue toy police car and that was listed under “toys > cars > blue toy police car” and “toys > police cars > blue toy car”.

It’s the same blue toy police car on both pages. The only difference is the breadcrumb links that take you to the page.

By adding a canonical tag to the “master page” (toys > cars), you signal to search engines that this is the original product. The product listed at “toys > police cars > blue toy car” is a copy.

Another example of when you’d want to add canonical tags is where pages have added URL parameters.

For instance, “https://www.yourdomain.com/toys” would show similar content to “https://www.yourdomain.com/toys?page=2” or “https://www.yourdomain.com/toys?price=descending” that have been used to filter results.

Without a canonical tag, search engines would treat each page as unique. Not only does this mean having multiple pages indexed thus reducing the SEO value of your master page, but it also increases your crawl budget.

Canonical tags can be added directly to the <head> section in the page code of additional pages (not the main page) or if you’re using a CMS such as WordPress or Magneto, plugins like Yoast SEO that make the process simple.

2. Review your site architecture and sitemap to make content accessible

Running a site crawl helps to address most of the technical errors on your website. Now we need to look at UX errors.

Content Writing for SEO – S. Ernest Paul
S. Ernest Paul

As we mentioned at the top, a user should be able to get to where they want to be on your site in a few clicks. An easier human experience is synonymous with an easier search bot experience (which, again, saves on crawl budget).

As such, your site structure needs to be logical and consistent. This is achieved by flattening your website architecture.

Here are examples of complicated site architecture and simple (flat) site architecture from Backlinko’s guide on the topic:

You can see how much easier it is in the second image to get from the homepage to any other page on the site.

The closer a page is to your homepage, the more important it is. Therefore, you should look to regroup pages based on keywords to bring those most relevant to your audience closer to the top of the site.

A flattened website architecture should be mirrored by its URL structure.

To create a consistent SEO strategy and organize the relationship between pieces of content, use the hub-and-spoke method.

S. Ernest Paul describes this method as “an internal linking strategy that involves linking several pages of related content (sometimes referred to as “spoke” pages) back to a central hub page.”

“Conversion rate optimization” guide is the hub, “21 Key Intake fields for Content writers by S. Ernest Paul is a spoke

Depending on the size of your website, you may need help from a web developer to flatten the architecture and overhaul navigation. However, you can improve user experience easily by adding internal links to relevant pages.

Organize your sitemap to reflect your website structure

The URLs that feature on your site should match those in your XML sitemap. This is the file that you should point bots to in your robots.txt as a guide to crawl your website.

Like robots.txt, you can find your XML sitemap by adding “sitemap.xml” to the end of your root domain:

https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you’re updating your site architecture, your sitemap will also need updating. A CMS like WordPress, Yoast SEO, or Google XML sitemaps can generate and automatically update a sitemap whenever new content is created. Other platforms like Wix and Squarespace also have built-in features that do the same.

If you need to do it manually, XML-sitemaps will automatically generate an XML sitemap that you can paste into your website’s (/) folder. However, you should only do this if you’re confident handling these files. If not, get help from a web developer.

Once you have your updated sitemap, submit it at Index > Sitemaps in the Google Search Console.

From here, Google will flag any crawlability and indexing issues.

Working sitemaps will show a status of “Success”. If the status shows “Has errors” or “Couldn’t fetch” there are likely problems with the sitemap’s content.

As with your robots.txt file, your sitemap should not include any pages that you don’t want to feature in SERPs. But it should include every page you do want indexing, exactly how it appears on your site.

For example, if you want Google to index “https://yourdomain.com/toys”, your sitemap should copy that domain exactly, including the HTTPS protocol. “http://yourdomain.com/toys” or “/toys” will mean pages aren’t crawled.

3. Test and improve site speed and mobile responsiveness

Site speed has long been a factor in search engine rankings. Google first confirmed as much in 2010. In 2018, they upped the stakes by rolling out mobile page speed as a ranking factor in mobile search results.

When ranking a website based on speed, Google looks at two data points:

1. Page speed: How long it takes for a page to load

2. Site speed: The average time it takes for a sample of pageviews to load

When auditing your site, you only need to focus on page speed. Improve page load time and you’ll improve site speed. Google helps you do this with its PageSpeed Insights analyzer.

Enter a URL and PageSpeed Insights will grade it from 0 to 100. The score is based on real-world field data gathered from Google Chrome browser users and lab data. It will also suggest opportunities to improve.

Poor image, JavaScript, CSS file optimization, and browser caching practices tend to be the culprits of slow loading pages. Fortunately, these are easy to improve:

Reduce the size of images without impacting on quality with Optimizilla or Squoosh. If you’re using WordPress, optimization plugins like Imagify Image O ptimizer and TinyPNG do the same job.
Reduce JavaScript and CSS files by pasting your code into Minify to remove whitespace and comments
If you’re using WordPress, use W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache to create and serve a static version of your pages to searchers, rather than having the page dynamically generated every time a person clicks on it. If you’re not using WordPress, caching can be enabled manually in your site code.

Start by prioritizing your most important pages. By going to Behavior > Site Speed in your Google Analytics, metrics will show how specific pages perform on different browsers and countries:

Check this against your most viewed pages and work through your site from the top down.

How to find out if your website is mobile-friendly

In March 2021, Google launched mobile-first indexing. It means that pages Google indexes will be based on the mobile version of your site. Therefore, the performance of your site on smaller screens will have the biggest impact on where your site appears in SERPs.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool is an easy way to check if your site is optimized for mobile devices:

If you use a responsive or mobile-first design, you should have nothing to worry about. Both are developed to render on smaller screens and any changes you make as a result of your technical SEO audit will improve site and search performance across all devices.

You can test your site on real devices using BrowserStack’s r esponsive tool:

Standalone mobile sites should pass the Google test, too. Note that separate sites for mobile and desktop will require you to audit both versions.

Another option for improving site speed on mobile is Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMPs). AMP is a Google-backed project designed to serve users stripped-down versions of web pages so that they load faster than HTML.

Google has tutorials and guidelines for creating AMP pages using code or a CMS plugin. However, it’s important to be aware of how these will affect your site.

Every AMP page you create is a new page that exists alongside the original. Therefore, you’ll need to consider how they fit into your URL scheme. Google recommends using the following URL structure:

http://www.example.com/myarticle/amp
http://www.example.com/myarticle.amp.html

You’ll also need to ensure that canonical tags are used to identify the master page. This can be the AMP page, but the original page is preferred. This is because AMP pages serve a basic version of your webpage that doesn’t allow you to earn ad revenue or access the same deep level of analytics.

AMP pages will need to be audited in the same way as HTML pages. If you’re a paid subscriber, Screaming Frog has features to help you find and fix AMP issues. You can do this in the free version, but you’ll need to upload your list of pages.

5. Find and fix duplicate content and keyword cannibalization issues to fine-tune SEO

By this stage, your content audit has already begun. Adding canonical tags ensures master pages are being given SEO value over similar pages. Flattened site architecture makes your most important content easy to access. What we’re looking to do now is fine-tune.

Review your site for duplicate content

Pages that contain identical information aren’t always bad. The toy police car pages example we used earlier, for instance, are necessary for serving users relevant results.

They become an issue when you have an identical page to the one you’re trying to rank for. In such cases, you’re making pages compete against each other for ranking and clicks, thus diluting their potential.

As well as product pages, duplicate content issues can occur for several reasons:

Reusing headers, page titles, and meta descriptions to make pages appear identical even if the body content isn’t
Not deleting or redirecting identical pages used for historical or testing purposes
Not adding canonical tags to a single page with multiple URLs

A site crawl will help identify duplicate pages. Check content for duplication of:

Titles
Header tags
Meta descriptions
Body content

You can then either remove these pages or rewrite the duplicated elements to make them unique.

Merge content that cannibalizes similar keywords

Keyword cannibalization is like duplicate content in that it forces search engines to choose between similar content.

It occurs when you have various content on your site that ranks for the same query. Either because the topic is similar or you’ve targeted the same keywords.

For example, say you wrote two posts. One on “How to write a resume” optimized for the phrase “how to write a resume” and the other on “Resume writing tips” optimized for “resume writing.”

The posts are similar enough for search engines to have a hard time figuring out which is most important.

Googling “site: yourdomain.com + ‘keyword” will help you easily find out if keyword cannibalization is a problem.

If your posts are ranking #1 and #2, it’s not a problem. But if your content is ranking further down the SERPs, or an older post is ranking above an updated one, it’s probably worth merging them:

Go to the Performance section of your Google Search Console.
From the filters click New > Query and enter the cannibalized keyword.
Under the Pages tab, you’ll be able to see which page is receiving the most traffic for the keyword. This is the page that all others can be merged into.

For example, “How to write a resume” could be expanded to include resume writing tips and become a definitive guide to resume writing.

It won’t work for every page. In some instances, you may want to consider deleting content that is no longer relevant. But where keywords are similar, combining content will help to strengthen your search ranking.

Improve title tags and meta descriptions to increase your click-through rate (CTR) in SERPs

While title tags and meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, there’s no denying they make a difference to your curb appeal. They’re essentially a way to advertise your content.

Performing a technical SEO audit is the ideal time to optimize old titles and descriptions, and fill in any gaps to improve CTR in SERPs.

Titles and descriptions should be natural, relevant, concise, and employ your target keywords. Here’s an example from the search result for Copyhackers’ guide to copywriting formulas:

The meta description tells readers they’ll learn why copywriting formulas are useful and how they can be applied in the real world.

While the title is also strong from an SEO perspective, it’s been truncated. This is likely because it exceeds Google’s 600-pixel limit. Keep this limit in mind when writing titles.

Include keywords close to the start of titles and try to keep characters to around 60. Moz research suggests you can expect ~90% of your titles to display properly if they are below this limit.

Similarly, meta descriptions should be approximately 155-160 characters to avoid truncation.

It’s worth noting that Google won’t always use your meta description. Depending on the search query, they may pull a description from your site to use as a snippet. That’s out of your control. But if your target keywords are present in your meta tags, you’ll give yourself an edge over other results that go after similar terms.

Conclusion

Performing a technical SEO audit will help you analyze technical elements of your website and improve areas that are hampering search performance and user experience.

But following the steps in this article will only resolve any problems you have now. As your business grows and your website evolves, and as Google’s algorithms change, new issues with links, site speed, and content will arise.

Therefore, technical audits should be part of an ongoing strategy, alongside on-page and off-page SEO efforts. Audit your website periodically, or whenever you make structural or design updates to your website.

Courtesy: CXL

Medallia is the best of the pack in the Customer Experience in Martech

Medallia Experience Cloud is a customer feedback management (CFM) solution that

consolidates real-time data into a single platform that can be customized and scaled for each unique business unit. To better understand the benefits, costs, and risk associated with Medallia Experience Cloud, Forrester Consulting conducted a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study based on interviews with six customers with experience using Medallia Experience Cloud as their customer feedback management platform. This summary is based on a full TEI study, which can be downloaded here.

Based on the TEI analysis, a representative organization deploying Medallia Experience Cloud has experienced a quick payback period with the following three-year financial impact: $35.6 million in benefits and $5.1 million in costs, a net present value (NPV) of $30.4 million and an ROI of 591%. Readers can use this representative organization to understand the economic impact of deploying Medallia Experience Cloud and apply or adapt it to their own situation and experience.

Quantified Benefits

The following risk-adjusted quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the companies interviewed:

› Improved customer experience leading to an increase in net income of $20.1 million. Organizations were able to meet the needs of today’s customers by making product and channel improvements informed by real-time customer feedback data from the Medallia Experience Cloud. These improvements drove growth through an increase in both customer retention and average basket size.

› Operational efficiencies resulting in a savings of $13.8 million. Organizations were able to improve organizational operations by aligning business and strategic initiatives with the insights gained from the Medallia Experience Cloud. Additionally, call volume to service desks was significantly reduced due to its enabling of organizations to systematically identify and reduce customer pain points.

› Cost avoidance of the previous solution. Organizations avoided the cost of running and maintaining legacy solutions by moving to Medallia’s cloud-based platform.

Unquantified Benefits

Examples of additional benefits that the interviewed organizations mentioned as significant but were not quantified for this study:

› Faster closed loop cycle. Organizations were able to more quickly close the loop with customers through preferred channels and recognized a positive impact on both customer churn and employee morale. › A shift in overall organizational culture towards CX. Employee access to real-time customer feedback information brings the customer experience to life and helps keep the entire organization focused on meeting customer needs and expectations

Key Investment Drivers And Results
S. Ernest Paul

Organizations shared the following challenges prior to Medallia Experience Cloud:

› Inability to provide meaningful CX insights. Surveys and other solutions provide data points but do not facilitate the insights or analytics necessary to understand and meet the needs of today’s customers.

› Inability to effectively handle organizational scale. Legacy vendors and solutions could not reliably process the necessary volume of data quickly or effectively, preventing organizations from moving quickly to reduce pain points and incorporating customer feedback into strategic initiatives.

Organizations achieved key results with Medallia Experience Cloud:
S. Ernest Paul

› Develop actionable insights to improve CX and drive product improvements. A VP of customer insights in the telecommunications industry stated: “We were able to reduce the number of calls to our service desk, because we’ve addressed and eliminated many of the reasons, the root causes, of why people were calling us: technical reliability, product functionality, billing issues. This has categorically changed the game for us.”

› Effective scaling and flexibility. Medallia’s experience with global deployments and large enterprises made the implementation and scaling an easy, collaborative process.

› Drive a shift in organizational culture. The ability for a single platform to collect all CFM data, its accessibility to anyone in the organization, and the direct connection to actions for closed loop feedback drives a shift in organizational culture towards meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

Composite Organization

Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected, covered in greater detail in the full study. The composite organization has the following characteristics:

Description of composite. The composite is a global conglomerate with $9 billion in annual revenue, growing at a rate of 2% year-over-year (YOY), prior to its investment in Medallia. Its main revenue streams include membership fees and 750 retail stores, along with other B2B and B2C lines of business (LOBs). It has 2 million total customers and 18,000 employees, which includes 750 key accounts with 150 account managers, along with 4,500 contact center agents.

Deployment characteristics. The global conglomerate composite organization has deployed the Medallia Experience Cloud for transactional and relationship surveys, both internally-facing (employees) and externally-facing (customers). The composite organization initially rolled out Medallia’s Best Practices Package for Retail to its 750 stores. For Years 2 and 3, the program expanded to cover the full enterprise, including the 4,500 contact center agents and 150 key accounts.

Economic Impact

› Increased income due to improved customer experience. Using customer feedback obtained through the Medallia platform, organizations were able to make product improvements leading to additional sales, and website improvements to remove pain points and barriers to purchases. Organizations were able to improve overall NPS, realized an increase in customer retention rate as well as increased average basket size per customer leading to an increase in income of $20.1 million.

› Operational efficiencies represent $13.8 million in savings. Unification of data across the organization and throughout the customer lifecycle allowed organizations to better define strategic initiatives, better focus resources on those initiatives and reduce overall service desk tickets by analyzing customer feedback to reduce pain points.

› Cost avoidance of previous solution. Organizations noted a total of $1.7 million in cost savings related to licensing and management of previous CFM solution.

Unquantified benefits. These are some of the benefits not quantified in the financial analysis but were mentioned as significant.

› Faster closed loop cycle. A senior director of customer insights in the retail industry told Forrester: “Medallia’s closed loop feedback mechanism has proven to be effective, along with the simplicity of the dashboards.”

› A shift in organizational culture towards CX. Exposing employees to real-time customer feedback promotes a deeper understanding of customer needs and expectations, and enables organizations to introduce solutions that have a meaningful impact on Customer Experience.

Medallia does not come cheap
S. Ernest Paul

Costs

The composite organization experienced two cost categories associated with the Medallia Experience Cloud investment. Over three years, the composite organization expects risk adjusted total costs to have a PV of $5.1 million.

› Medallia Costs of $2.6 million. The organization paid Medallia for an annual software subscription, ongoing managed services, and implementation services for initial and Year 1 costs.

› Internal costs of $2.6 million. These include day-to-day management, implementation costs, and training associated with the new platform

The costs could go up id the add-ons are utilized

The value of flexibility is clearly unique to each customer, and the measure of its value varies from organization to organization. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might choose to implement Medallia Experience Cloud and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, for example:

› Ability to adapt the CFM solution to fit evolving needs. Medallia is willing to work with clients to find solutions or benchmarks to unique business challenges.

› A/B testing. The Medallia Experience Cloud allows customers to quickly A/B test customer experience solutions or pilot business process changes before rollout.

› Text analytics search. Changes in customer sentiment can occur quickly, and the text analytics feature allows organizations to identify and adapt to unexpected developments.

Financial Summary

Flexibility, as defined by TEI, represents an investment in additional capacity or capability that could be turned into business benefit for a future additional investment. This provides an organization with the “right” or the ability to engage in future initiatives but not the obligation to do so.

SUMMMARY

The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the ROI, NPV, and payback period for the composite organization’s investment in Medallia Experience Cloud. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis.

COURTESY: FORRESTER

Why a Consolidated Martech Stack makes sense?

One of the more jarring tasks of many businesses I’ve worked with is selecting from the vast pool of tools to use. This is where having a marketing technology stack becomes fundamental to your business’ marketing strategies.

But what is a marketing technology (aka ‘martech’) stack and why does your online business need one? Let’s discuss and break it down:

What is a Marketing Tech Stack?

This is marketing jargon that you will definitely hear more of if you haven’t already. Essentially, a marketing technology stack is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a group of tech-based tools that marketers and businesses use to improve their marketing activities. But it’s more dynamic than merely using several tools individually for their own siloed purposes. Instead, marketing technologies are ‘stacked’ to create an integrated series of tools that allows you to build seamless customer relationships across several different channels.

Not only will the right martech stack iron out your processes, but it should focus on the impact of your marketing activities and drive more efficient marketing spend.

Why should I invest in a Marketing Technology Stack?

Like I said earlier, the martech space is made up of thousands of online tools and technologies. The sheer amount of vendors offering the latest and greatest in marketing innovations is overwhelming. Just take a look at ChiefMartech’s latest edition of the marketing landscape for 2020, with over 8,000 solutions to choose from. (For some perspective, ChiefMartech reported only 150 solutions just 10 years ago!)

Put simply, the martech space is colossal. And marketers are pressured to keep up with the growth. According to Korn Ferry, “27% of CMOs were concerned with staying ahead and taking advantage of digital technology trends.”

With thousands of solutions to choose from, it’s vital for marketers and business owners to understand how the right tech stack will impact their businesses and which technologies will be fundamental to reaching their goals.

First of all – as with other areas of your marketing strategy – one size does not fit all when it comes to building the right martech stack for your company. Your chosen technologies will be impacted by factors like your budget and the type of business you have. One key factor to consider is your target market; for instance, B2C companies will likely require slightly different technologies than a B2B company since they each typically use different channels and techniques to acquire and engage with their customers.

What Elements Make A Great Marketing Tech Stack?

So let’s take a look at the technologies I consider foundational to a tech stack, regardless of your target customer.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): this is often a focus for you B2B-ers. CRMs track all customer relationships and marketing attribution for you and your sales force. Ultimately, CRMs are essential to gaining in-depth insights of how your marketing efforts impact your sales pipeline.
[Tools to explore: Salesforce; HubspotCRM; SugarCRM].
Content Management System (CMS): by now, for most of you, this is a basic element of your tech stack that you’re familiar with. A CMS is the technology that powers your website, blog, landing pages etc. These web properties are often where you want to engage your customers.
Advertising and SEO: this element is pretty vast, but search engine optimization and advertising is key to your customer acquisition strategies regardless of the type of business you run. Many marketers use a combination of software for keyword research, display ads, ad tracking, and attribution.
[Tools to explore: SEMrush, Google Ads; HasOffers].
Email: Email marketing is still a very cost effective way to support sales, build brand awareness and gain trust with your customer base. Email marketing capabilities might even be readily available in other platforms in your tech stack; like in your marketing automation or inbound marketing platform, for instance.
[Tools to explore: MailChimp; Constant Contact; SendGrid].
Social Media: technologies for this space help monitor your social conversations, schedule posts or curate content. Specific networks like Facebook and LinkedIn also offer social media marketing opportunities that may be a valuable addition to your own tech stack.
[Tools to explore: BuzzSumo; Hootsuite; SproutSocial].
Collaboration: these are some of my favorite tools to add to a tech stack. Collaboration software focuses on working efficiently and transparently with your team. There are a number of project management tools to choose from, or even tools that focus more on the customer journey.
[Tools to explore: Trello; Asana; Slack].
Analysis and Reporting: regardless of the technologies you choose to integrate with in your tech stack, you must always be able to access your data to measure your marketing efforts. For the most part, businesses will at least have basic website analytics tracking in place, which is a great way to start. But depending on your situation, you could explore building a full data warehouse to pull together data from various systems to make your reporting more accessible and rounded.
[Tools to explore: Google Analytics; KissMetrics; HotJar].

Your marketing technology stack is critical to your organization’s success. It enables you to manage your brand efficiently, coordinate and execute campaigns, leverage existing content, and attract and convert customers in an increasingly complex marketing environment. However, putting together the right set of tools and technology may be extremely challenging. With so many competing options, features, and interoperability concerns to consider, piecing together your martech may feel like navigating a minefield. However, the right marketing technology can make all the difference when it comes to the behind-the-scenes task of managing your brand and marketing operations.

2021: How Your Marketing Tech Stack Needs to Change
S. ERNEST PAUL

Instead of a shiny penny approach where marketing leaders are trying out every new tool that emerges from the market, businesses focus on creating tech stacks that are smarter, more streamlined, increasingly connected, and dramatically more powerful. Here is what you need to know about marketing technology to lay the foundation for smooth brand management and marketing operations.

Top Marketing Tech for Your Business

Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, there is no doubt that you have struggled with lead generation. Both landscapes are increasingly competitive, and lead generation can pose one of your biggest challenges. However, lead generation starts with traffic, and there is an entire collection of tools you can use to help you take care of just that.

#1. From siloed tools to all-in-one solutions

As more marketing channels emerge, marketing teams will continue to specialize rapidly. However, more channels mean more to coordinate and manage. As individual disciplines branch off, marketing teams risk building unintentional silos that may ultimately undercut efficiency and brand consistency. All-in-one solutions consolidate and may eliminate the need for disparate point solutions. They are also powerful for aligning cross-functional teams—like marketing and sales—to work together in harmony with greater speed and efficiency.

#2. Tools that connect and interact well with one another

As the need arises, API-first tools empower businesses to add, remove, or swap out solutions with greater ease. Of course, APIs fuel the free-flowing exchange of data between tools, systems, and channels—another area that is top of mind for marketing leaders for the year ahead. This step-level for your marketing tech stack is all about connection. You need to merge it, find patterns, and learn. As marketing becomes more omnichannel driven, channels and software islands need to be connected through API integrations and data warehouses.

#3. Leveraging data to create personalized customer experiences

Businesses focus on creating increasingly personalized experiences for their website visitors and customers. They invest in improving data pipelines to trigger powerful, real-time experiences and communications between prospects and use existing users with sales teams based on visitor, user, and company information or activity. By planning to leverage data-rich tools to better understand the customer and their journey, businesses can deliver more tailored content and experiences to the right customers at the right time.

Strategy First, Technology Second

Keep in mind that a tool is not a strategy. It may allow you to compare different software packages by their features; however, the real value marketing software offers lies in the strategy and approach it enables and how it affects customer experience (the desired end-result). Before you build or update your marketing stack, it is crucial to devise your marketing strategy. This approach should be shaped around your product, desired audience, and how to reach them. Analyze your current marketing practices carefully and identify where they match the strategy and where they block it. Do the work, map your plan, and only when you have a defined need should you consider purchasing something new. Find out where you lack processes and where you need to do things differently and then choose technology based on that. Mapping out this process will give you a better understanding of the required tools needed for your business. Martech is all about devising the right strategy for your business and only then identifying the technology that will help you execute on that strategy.

Beyond the Fundamentals of a Marketing Tech Stack [with recommended tools]

The type of business you have will determine which technologies you might find important and how they should be organized. That said, there are certain technologies you should consider as foundational to your marketing technology stack as you build it. Your marketing stack can be broken down into three key stages:

Stage 1: Attract
Stage 2: Engage
Stage 3: Analyze and optimize

Although there are multiple sub-phases within the above, these three are the most common phases almost every business can relate to.

Google Ads – ad tech

When it comes to driving qualified traffic to your website, Google’s search, video, and display ads are the quickest way to get the results you need. Not only can you target people who show a specific interest in what you are selling, Google Ads acts as your first point of contact for lead nurturing tactics like remarketing, email marketing, and conversion optimization.

Demandbase – ad tech

Demandbase enables businesses to deliver personalized online ads to specific people at specific companies across the web while refining the message to convert them into customers.

Unbounce – landing page builder

There is no point in spending hours creating targeted ads only to send prospects to a generic, soulless landing page, as this is one of the quickest ways to lose potential leads and sales opportunities. Unbounce lets you quickly and easily create custom landing pages that will help convert more website visitors into customers. You can create and publish landing pages in minutes—with no code required. The powerful A/B testing functionality allows you to experiment with your messaging, design, and forms to understand the best ways to convert visitors.

Sprout Social allows you to manage your entire social media marketing strategy from one place. It can help you attract and engage with hundreds of thousands of customers and prospects. With Sprout Social, you can streamline your publishing workflows, schedule posts at optimal times, and turn social data into meaningful insights. All of this is geared towards optimizing your social media strategy and better connecting with your audience.

Marketo – marketing automation

Marketo allows users to automate their marketing processes like identifying top prospects, creating personalized campaigns that scale, and finding and connecting with the right customers. It is probably overkill for a smaller business. However, if you are moving from a startup to scale-up, Marketo is ideal for those looking to grow and market to a larger audience with a high degree of segmentation.

HubSpot – marketing automation

The breadth of the HubSpot platform is incredible. Its products run the gamut from advertising, blogging, SEO, email, social media, call-to-action, and beyond. This low-cost, or free in some cases, platform is particularly popular with small businesses who cannot afford the wealth of software options that other more mature companies can.

Outreach – sales engagement

Marketing teams have always been good at generating and nurturing leads. However, they might not always be that great with handing those leads over to sales and making sure they are acted on. They often have little insight into whether reps have, in fact, advanced inbound leads or not. Outreach is a type of tool for teams who are serious about sales and marketing alignment. It tracks your reps’ interactions with prospects and customers and recommends prescribed sequences of communications based on that. Instead of logging marketing into one system and sales into another, both teams can use Outreach’s dashboards and tools, making sure no leads fall through the cracks.

Aircall – cloud calling

Every marketer knows that if given only five minutes to show the product to all new users and answer their questions, they would nail their monthly recurring revenue targets. The problem is that setting up so many screen-shares each day is a tooth grinding process. Aircall allows you to start a phone call instantly from pretty much every major software system out there. Getting visitors from chat into a face-to-face demo can all be arranged automatically in a matter of minutes to speed up the sales cycle drastically.

Tableau – business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) software is an increasingly powerful tool in a marketing team’s arsenal, as it allows teams to track every dollar and every movement throughout the marketing funnel. However, the real power comes in connecting multiple data sources to gain invaluable insights, otherwise lost. Tableau is recognized as the cream of the crop for its visual-based data analysis. Their data visualization is head and shoulders above what traditional BI vendors offer. You can perform reasonably complex data visualization in a very intuitive, drag-and-drop manner, so your team does not need to be fiddling around with SQL and so forth.

LeanData – lead management

Conversions are not a nice, neat, and organized path from point A to B. The conversion process is often more like a winding road of intersections, tangents, and loops that involve an entire host of marketing touchpoints. To understand your marketing program’s real ROI, you need to know which individual components got measurable results. Without these, it is all too easy for marketers to invest in under-performing marketing channels that yield inadequate pipelines and revenue. LeanData connects with your Customer Relationships Management (CRM) to provide the most accurate, channel-by-channel view of your campaign performance so your team can decide how to spend money in the most effective ways. Different marketing attribution models may suit different business needs depending on the buyer’s journey length and complexity. LeanData features fully customizable attribution models that can be finely tuned to your business.

Optimizely – conversion rate optimization

Optimization and experimentation need to be a crucial part of any marketing strategy in 2021. Optimizely allows you to create variations of your existing website with multivariate, multi-page, or A/B tests and then tracks how customers respond to the different versions. The best part is that it is absurdly easy to use. You do not have to code anything to adjust your website with this tool. Optimizely has a visual editor that allows you to make changes by clicking instead of coding, which is perfect if you do not have a full-time development team at your disposal.

Ahrefs – SEO

Ahrefs is a suite of SEO tools that help websites, blogs, and companies do in-depth research on their competitors, grow their search traffic, and monitor their niche. What keywords or topics should you be trying to rank for? How many links do you need to build to rank for your chosen keywords? Ahrefs allows you to do all that and much more.

Zoom – webinars

Conference calls and one-on-one meetings are Zoom’s bread and butter, but it is also a fantastic tool for hosting webinars that will drive people to your website. Zoom provides a useful, easy, and effective way to hold webinars as it hooks into your CRM very nicely, and the video quality is unparalleled. The user experience for the business and participants is next level.

Madkudu – lead scoring

Marketing teams are not just responsible for filling the sales pipeline with quantity, but quality as well. There is no point in attracting hundreds of leads who would never be a good fit in the first place. Lead scoring is one of the best ways to guarantee that the leads they hand over to sales are of high quality. Madkudu is one of the most powerful lead scoring tools available and helps you calculate tons of valuable information, most of which is not visible to your sales team. Beyond only job titles and employee count, Madkudu can evaluate the predicted: revenue of each company; the size of specific teams; tech stack and tools a company uses; whether their solution is B2B or B2C; has a free trial; raised venture capital; and more, meaning your sales team can hone in on leads showing the best determinations of success.

Intercom – customer engagement and lead generation

Intercom’s conversational relationship platform can serve as the backbone of your entire marketing technology stack. You can use it to send targeted messages to visitors on your website, build chatbots to engage qualified leads 24/7 on your website automatically, and CRM. Intercom’s power comes through tracking and monitoring customer data so you can better understand your audience and properly serve them with the right content and messages. Intercom solves one of your biggest headaches when constructing your tech stack integrations. Even if a platform promises great results, it may do more harm than good if it does not integrate with the rest of your tools. Intercom has over 100 integrations with Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, and many more, so you can rest assured that everything will play nicely together.

Clearbit – data enrichment

Clearbit Reveal can be used to help de-anonymize website traffic. When a prospect visits the website, Clearbit uses its IP address to detect its company, industry, location, and the technology the company already uses. You can thus customize your communication with each individual and avoid those spray-and-pray tactics from years gone by.

Five Considerations for Your Marketing Tech Stack

As technology evolves, marketing tools become increasingly more granular. In the past, one tool could solve three different issues. But today’s marketers need an advanced solution for each channel, task, and function. You will soon find that, with more tools, simple processes become complicated and inefficient. Now, rather than selecting tools based on price or feature set, marketers need to consider various factors before making their decisions. As this is much easier said than done, here are five important questions to ask before purchasing a new software:

1. Do you just want something new or will it deliver results?

At one point or another, shiny object syndrome has gotten the best of us all. Make sure you are not buying a tool just because it is new and exciting. Instead, consider the current tools you already have. Is there a way to reach your goals without using this technology? Do not buy a product just because you can. Adding another tool to your tech stack will only waste resources and add unnecessary stress to your team. Remember, more tools do not always mean better results.

2. Does this integrate with the tools I’m using?

The most important consideration to make when constructing your tech stack is integration. Even if a platform promises impressive results, it can do more harm than good if it does not integrate with the rest of your tools. A new website management tool may promise to double the number of leads you generate. However, if it does not integrate with your CRM, it may require four different people to move leads from one system to another. Not only will this cut into productivity, but the manual data entry will dirty your marketing database and require an additional tool for database maintenance.

3. Have I researched all my options?

Even if a tool checks all the boxes, it is still important to consider other options as well. You should do some more digging and check out some online reviews. There are many high-quality tools on the market, but even though one might seem like a good fit, it does not necessarily mean that another will not be better.

4. Do I have the skills and resources to operate this system?

It is important to buy tools that are easy to run using the resources you already have access to. Some of the best, most advanced technologies may turn into a full-time job. If you are a small team, going with a less sophisticated option will make more sense. Choose a solution that will help you reach your goals without too much effort.

5. Should other departments have input on this buying decision?

It is always considered best practice to share resources and information across departments, especially when purchasing a new tool. Without input from all stakeholders, you will not be able to make an educated purchase. Be sure to consult with all parties involved before handing over your credit card.

Data integrity is a prerequisite for the subsequent technologies – M, AI and Predictive analytics to perform well. The A/B texting has to continually be performed to constantly optimizing campaigns.

Every organization is different from scale to audience to product and geography. The Martech stack has to keep all these factors in consideration
S. Ernest Paul

In Conclusion

Building the right marketing tech stack for any company is no picnic. It can be quite a gargantuan task. But it’s all about integrating the right technologies together so they’re working cooperatively instead of independently. Not only will you get a full, comprehensive view of your customer journey and marketing efforts, but you’ll uncover how to optimize your hard earned marketing dollars.

The ROI Of Adobe Experience Cloud

Executive Summary

Growing digital expectations and competition for empowered consumers and business buyers is forcing organizations to invest in new capabilities that enable them to optimize the value of their customer interactions. Businesses across every industry are looking to digital experience technologies in order to deliver contextually relevant and personalized digital content, with 51% of global software decision makers revealing that they are increasing spend on digital experience solutions over the next 12 months.1 These investments in experience are well-founded:

This study examined the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by adopting Adobe Experience Cloud and transforming into an experience-driven business. Adobe Experience Cloud — consisting of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Target, and Magento Commerce Cloud — is an integrated cloud platform that serves as the foundation for delivering experiences across marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, thee were nine customers interviewed across seven industries with an average of nearly five Adobe Experience Cloud products implemented, above average product adoption scores, and years of experience using these solutions within their marketing, customer experience, and analytics functions.

Prior to using Adobe Experience Cloud, interviewed organizations struggled to get a 360-degree view of their customers using disparate, homegrown and third-party marketing and digital experience technologies that were poorly integrated. Furthermore, organizations had no way to empirically test what impacted the customer experience, thereby leading to organizational gaps in what stakeholders knew would help to engage, convert, and retain customers across the customer life cycle.

Key Findings

The following risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed customers, as realized by the composite organization built for this study. Similar to Adobe customers interviewed for this study, the composite organization has an above average Adobe product adoption score using multiple Adobe Experience Cloud solutions including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and Adobe Target.

Financial growth: Interviewed organizations leveraged Adobe Experience Cloud to drive CX transformation that resulted in the following superior business results across the customer life cycle:

A 14% year-over-year (YOY) growth in new unique visitor site traffic by Year 3 of the analysis. Organizations drove significant improvements in customer acquisition and brand engagement metrics by leveraging behavioral analytics to optimize sites for organic search and using lookalike modeling and advertising retargeting to identify, activate, and engage new high value customer segments. Furthermore, improved content velocity and effectiveness using Adobe Experience Manager helped drive earned media traffic growth. Over three years, the uplift in profit from increased traffic for the composite organization totaled a PV of just under $5 million.

A 25% increase in web and mobile conversion rates. Interviewees built a testing culture, enabling them to deliver personalized and optimized messaging, promotions, and content to targeted audiences at scale. Collectively, these capabilities improved customer engagement and lead quality, ultimately resulting in incremental closed business. For the composite organization, Adobe Experience Cloud drove a 25% increase in conversion rate by Year 3 of the analysis, generating a PV of over $11 million in incremental profit over the three-year analysis.

A 10% uplift in average order values over three years through improved targeting and messaging to high value segments. Using Adobe Audience Manager to identify and activate high value audiences and a combination of Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager to provide consistent, highly personalized omnichannel engagement, the composite organization was able to grow average order values by 10%, generating a PV of $3.7 million in additional profit over three years.

A 10% YOY growth in loyalty program membership and a 60% three-year increase in upselling loyalty program members. Adobe Experience Cloud helped organizations exceed expectations for customer experience metrics, improving customer engagement and helping drive loyalty and rewards program membership growth. Improved loyalty program membership in turn enabled organizations to personalize each loyal members’ experience on the website using Adobe Target, helping drive upselling and repeat purchase metrics. Loyalty program membership growth and improved upselling conversion rates generated a PV of over $2.8 million in additional profit for the composite organization over three years.

Operational productivity gains: Interviewees boosted customer digital engagement and streamlined marketing, customer insights, digital analytics, and experience team business processes using Adobe Experience Cloud. The following risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed organizations:

› Repurposed 2.5 FTE analyst and digital marketing resources to testing and personalization activities. By streamlining several formerly manual, labor-intensive data analysis, reporting, segmentation, and multivariate testing activities, the composite organization was able to save time and refocus the equivalent of 2.5 FTE analyst and digital marketing resources to personalization and cross-channel optimization.

Web, mobile, and product page content changes that would take nearly a week could be implemented in hours using Adobe Experience Manager. By consolidating redundant content management systems (CMS) and leveraging Experience Fragments in Adobe Experience Manager to propagate content changes across channels, organizations increased content velocity. In addition, Adobe Experience Manager helped marketing to implement content changes in a fraction of the time of their legacy systems without the involvement of IT. Over three years, the efficiencies from content management totaled a PV of over $370,000.

Marketing used Adobe Campaign to build campaigns in half the time it took with their legacy tools. Using Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Target, organizations reduced campaign execution time from at least five weeks to two-and-a-half weeks. Over three years, the efficiencies from faster campaign execution totaled a PV of $3.9 million.

A 40% reduction in contact center call volumes from self-service customer care. Organizations were able to empower customers with contextually relevant self-service digital content that helped resolve customer service requests faster, improving the customer experience and reducing contact center call volumes. Over three years, customer care center calls were reduced by 40%, saving the composite organization a PV of $1.7 million.

Customer acquisition and technology cost savings: Organizations were able to retire and consolidate legacy content management and analytics tools, saving both technology and IT administration time and labor. Furthermore, organizations accrued a variety of media, agency, and customer acquisition cost savings by bringing audience management in- house and optimizing their campaign and media spend. The following risk- adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed organizations:

› Customer retention improved by 2% saving nearly $1.5 million in customer replacement costs. Organizations were able to avoid unnecessary customer acquisitions costs by improving customer retention and improving brand loyalty. Over three years, total savings from improved customer retention totaled a PV of $1.5 million.

› A 2.5% reduction in customer acquisition and agency costs freed up capital of CX transformation. In-house advertising suppression, retargeting, audience management, and personalization capabilities using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Target, and Adobe Audience Manager reduced customer acquisition costs while concurrently limiting reliance on outside agencies, saving the composite organization a PV of just under $2.7 million over three years.

› Over $2 million in cost savings from the retirement of legacy technologies. Organizations eliminated poorly integrated and redundant content management systems and analytics tools. For the composite organization, this saved a PV of just over $2 million in technology and people costs over three years.

Costs. The interviewed organizations experienced the following risk- and present-value adjusted costs, which have been included in the financial analysis for the composite organization:

› Adobe software licensing costs. Software licensing and other fees paid to Adobe for use of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Advertising Cloud, which totaled a PV of $2.6 million over the three-year analysis.

› Professional and managed services fees. These are engagement fees paid to professional services firms to assist with the initial proof-of- concept, full implementation, and ongoing management and maintenance of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, which totaled a PV of $3.6 million over the three-year analysis.

› Internal resource costs. These are internal resource costs to support and manage the initial proof-of-concept and full implementation of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. In addition, this cost category includes the ongoing analytics, digital marketing, testing, personalization, IT administration, and development resources required to manage and harness the full capabilities of Adobe Experience Cloud. These costs totaled a PV of just under $3.6 million over the three-year analysis.

› Training costs. These are the training costs for new and existing Adobe power and self-service users. Training costs totaled a PV of over $460,000 over the three-year analysis.

Forrester’s interviews with nine existing customers and subsequent financial analysis found that an organization based on these interviewed organizations experienced benefits of $35.1 million over three years versus costs of $10.3 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $24.8 million and an ROI of 242%.

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester has constructed a Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) framework for those organizations considering adopting Adobe Experience Cloud.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. The study took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Adobe Experience Cloud can have on an organization:

DUE DILIGENCE

Interviewed Adobe stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Adobe Experience Cloud.

CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS

Interviewed nine organizations using Adobe Experience Cloud to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.

COMPOSITE ORGANIZATION

Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewed organizations.

FINANCIAL MODEL FRAMEWORK

Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organizations.

CASE STUDY

Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling Adobe Experience Cloud’s impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication that enterprises have regarding ROI analyses related to IT investments,

A CDP is even more critical for the Martech Stack in 2021

The rapid shift to digital channels during COVID-19 grabbed headlines through out 2020. But for marketers, it was only one change among many in an eventful year.

Google Chrome joined Safari and Mozilla in announcing it would end support for third-party cookies, eliminating a tool marketers had long relied on to accurately attribute ad spend and market. The passage of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) in November left them with more data privacy rules to address. And marketers were expected to handle all of these changes with budgets that had been reduced due to a sudden economic recession.

To understand how marketers have responded to these changes and what that means for the future of CDPs in 2021, through surveys of 300 U.S. marketers in the travel, hospitality, finance, retail and healthcare industries in November 2020

Research found that CDPs have been vital to marketers’ efforts to address the many challenges of 2020. These experiences have solidified the CDP’s position in the center of organizations’ marketing stacks and increased marketers’ confidence that the technology is here to stay. In our 2021 report, 68% of respondents said CDPs will remain a must-have technology in 2025, compared to only 57% in 2020.

The pandemic shifted marketers’ priorities

All of the organizations in our survey (100%) saw at least some
marketing budget cuts due to COVID-19, and 41% saw cuts over 20%. Though the pandemic made organizations more reliant on digital channels for reaching their customers, most marketers couldn’t afford to invest in new tech solutions. More than three-quarters (77%) of organizations cut tech initiatives in 2020 due to COVID-19.

At the same time as budget cuts were forcing them to do more with less, marketers shifted their priorities to address new challenges caused by the pandemic. For marketers without a developed first-party data strategy, the demise of third-party cookies made it harder to manage ad spend across digital channels. Tighter budgets made customer acquisition and retention more difficult. And finally, the restriction or elimination of in- person experiences put incredible pressure on marketers to offer a unified customer experience across channels — particularly digital ones.

Results suggest that marketers are using their CDPs to address
these challenges head-on. For example, in 2020 report, respondents focused on various forms of real-time functionality as the most useful capabilities of a CDP. Now, the emphasis has shifted to managing data across multiple channels and resolving customer identity — which are important for delivering seamless digital experiences in a post-cookie world.

2021 may see a rise in CDP investment

Despite the drop in tech investment overall, there wasn’t a drop-off
in CDP investment during COVID-19 — likely because CDPs are so important for addressing marketers’ pandemic-related concerns. Eighty-nine percent of marketers we surveyed had a CDP, and nearly a tenth (9%) had adopted a CDP since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

Key takeaway

Marketers understand that CDPs are key to unlocking the full potential of first-party data. The right CDP will anchor a robust customer data supply chain that frees your organization from excessive reliance on third-party data. It will also enable accurate attribution of ad spend and market, enabling more effective ad spend management. Finally, a CDP will support a unified customer experience across channels, built on first-party data acquired with customers’ consent.

Recommendation

With third-party cookie loss, a first-party data strategy is no longer optional. As tech spending rebounds in 2021, look to invest in a CDP that is equipped to meet the challenge of third-party cookie loss, while also supporting better customer experiences.

State of the CDP 2021

In 2021, marketers will make up for lost time by increasing their tech investments. Eighty-nine percent of organizations will spend more on tech in 2021 than they did in 2020, and almost one-third (32%) will spend significantly more. Perhaps because they were hit harder by the pandemic, travel and hospitality marketers were most likely to say they’ll spend significantly more. The big question: Where will marketers allocate these funds in 2021?

The importance of integrations

As first-party data becomes more central to marketing strategy, CDPs are becoming more central to martech stacks, too. That means they need to integrate with more solutions across the organization — and they need to do so easily and quickly.

As a result, marketers are demanding more from their CDPs. Integration with more third-party solutions shot up from the No. 4 improvement marketers want in their CDPs in 2020 to No. 1 in the 2021.

Unfortunately, many marketers feel their existing solutions aren’t delivering. Almost two-thirds (62%) of respondents said it’s difficult to integrate new third-party solutions into their martech stacks. And 63% said they have struggled to achieve marketing goals due to the difficulty of integration since March 2020.

A barrier to cross-compatibility

When it comes to more and faster third-party integrations, one major barrier stands in marketers’ way. A majority (53%) of marketers strongly agreed that their martech stacks are walled gardens — meaning they consist mostly of solutions from one vendor that are designed to work together. Products that are part of a walled garden will almost always have limited cross-compatibility with third-party solutions.

It’s no surprise that many marketers are actively seeking new solutions that won’t limit their options: Seventy percent said they’ve discussed adapting their martech stack to incorporate third-party solutions more easily

Key takeaway

With marketers under pressure to do more with less, speed and efficiency are at a premium. Marketers need to be able to integrate new solutions into their martech stacks fast. Unfortunately, tools that are part of walled gardens — including some CDPs — can’t deliver the fast, seamless integrations marketers need.

Recommendation

It’s time for marketers to break out of their walled gardens. Look for a vendor-neutral CDP that will integrate quickly and easily into your existing martech stack, and also work with any new solutions you add to the stack later. By building the stack you want based on your organization’s particular needs — not the options available from one particular vendor — you’ll take the first step toward unlocking the full power of your customer data.

The changing privacy landscape

Data privacy regulations continued to evolve rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some organizations are still getting up to speed with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect on January 1, 2020, just months before the pandemic hit and derailed marketing budgets. Now they must also address CPRA, which passed

in November 2020 and amends and expands CCPA.

Marketers realize that managing these new regulations — on top of existing data privacy rules like HIPAA — requires the use of sophisticated tech solutions. Data privacy protection was the top outcome marketers are looking to drive with technology in 2021.

A powerful tool for ensuring privacy

CDPs are uniquely suited to meet marketers’ need for greater control over customer data. For example, by enabling the management of data flows based on geography, CDPs support compliance with data privacy rules
for different states and countries. Powerful encryption and data recovery capabilities secure sensitive information against breaches and cyberattacks. And these are only some of the ways CDPs help keep customer data safe.

It’s likely that marketers will rely even more heavily on CDPs for data privacy controls in the future. Marketers who have CDPs agree that data privacy is the most important area for the technology to address, narrowly edging out predictive insights and customer acquisition.

It’s likely that marketers will rely even more heavily on CDPs for data privacy controls in the future. Marketers who have CDPs agree that data privacy is the most important area for the technology to address, narrowly edging out predictive insights and customer acquisition.

AI is key to 2021 marketing strategies

The pandemic has made delivering great digital customer experiences
— and doing so efficiently, at low cost — more important than ever. To
keep up with the competition, marketers must predict customer behavior and take proactive action to drive the outcomes they want. And that means effectively deploying AI and machine learning to generate predictive insights. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say AI capabilities are extremely important for achieving their marketing priorities for 2021, and 99% say they’re at least somewhat important.

Closing the AI expertise gap

CDPs are the foundation of AI and machine learning capabilities because they help ensure the data that is collected is complete and accurate, which is critical for AI and machine learning to be effective. Marketers already understand this: Customer analytics and predictive insights is the second most important solution area they want CDPs to address. Many marketers are already seeing AI success.

A majority (62%) say their organizations are very effective at deploying AI for predictive marketing insights.

However, gathering the right data to feed AI and machine learning algorithms isn’t trivial. And while marketers are mostly confident about their ability to build the data foundations necessary to deploy AI, not all feel like they have the right expertise. Among respondents who say their organizations aren’t very effective at deploying AI for predictive marketing insights, the top reasons are lack of expertise among marketers (30%) and IT (29%). It’s likely building the data skills and capabilities necessary to support machine learning and AI will be a major focus for marketers in 2021.

Key takeaway

AI will be an important growth area in 2021, as many marketers are still learning the ropes. The right CDP will help you close the expertise gap both by ensuring you collect the right set of complete, unified customer data and by offering built-in predictive capabilities that are easy for non-data-scientists to use.

Recommendation

Without the right customer data, no algorithm can deliver results. Look for a CDP that will help you build a strong data foundation for AI and machine learning by collecting and orchestrating the right datasets for your business. Adopting a CDP with easy-to- use, marketer-friendly data and machine learning capabilities will help you make smarter marketing choices and drive overall success in 2021.

However, gathering the right data to feed AI and machine learning algorithms isn’t trivial. And while marketers are mostly confident about their ability to build the data foundations necessary to deploy AI, not all
feel like they have the right expertise. Among respondents who say their organizations aren’t very effective at deploying AI for predictive marketing insights, the top reasons are lack of expertise among marketers (30%) and IT (29%). It’s likely building the data skills and capabilities necessary to support machine learning and AI will be a major focus for marketers in 2021.

“Customer analytics and predictive insights is the second most important solution area [marketers] want CDPs to address.”

The elusive revenue connection

In 2020, CDPs became more integral to marketing operations and data teams, addressing more use cases, incorporating more data and linking
to more third-party tools across organizations. This has made it even more difficult to quantify CDP ROI, since impact is diffused across so many solution areas. It’s no surprise, for example, that organizations still struggle to quantify CDPs’ impact on revenue: Just 7% of organizations measure CDP ROI based on revenue, the same percentage as in the 2020 report.

In the 2020 report, respondents cited data quality as their top way to measure CDP ROI, which isn’t ideal. Data quality is important, but hard numbers about monetary impact are key for securing leadership buy-in. The 2021 data shows that marketers have made some progress tying CDPs to operational savings, which is now the No. 1 way to measure CDP ROI, up from No. 2 in 2020.

Time to value is a major differentiator

Perhaps due to the increasing sophistication of ROI measurement, or the difficulty of integrating CDPs with the martech stack, average time to value for CDPs has increased. In the 2020 report, more than half (53%) of companies saw ROI from their CDP in six months or less. But in the 2021 report, less than one-third (30%) of companies did so.

A majority (57%) of marketers expect to see ROI from martech solutions within six months or less. That means only some CDPs are meeting marketers’ expectations for time-to-value — the rest are lagging behind, possibly due to slow integrations.

The CDP of the future

CDPs are a relatively new technology, and marketers are still working out which use cases make the most sense for them. But in 2020, marketers made significant progress toward more effectively integrating CDPs into their marketing operations.

CDPs were central to solving the biggest challenges of 2020, including budget cuts, new data privacy legislation and a sudden shift to digital channels due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The prospect of third-party cookie loss in particular brought CDPs to the fore: A first-party data strategy anchored by a CDP used to be “nice to have” — in 2020, it became absolutely vital for marketing success.

In 2021 and beyond, CDPs will be increasingly foundational to the martech stack. They’ll adapt flexibly to new regulations, continue to underpin customer acquisition and retention strategies and enable powerful AI and machine learning capabilities. To set themselves up for success, marketers should look for CDPs that:

Are vendor-neutral: Faster, easier integration will speed time to value and increase overall ROI.
Offer predictive insights: User-friendly AI capabilities will empower marketers to deliver standout customer experiences.
Protect data privacy: Capabilities like data encryption and consent management keep organizations compliant with regulations like CPRA. After the challenges of 2020, now is the time for marketers to plan strategically for the future by investing in tech. Equipped with the right CDP, marketers can make 2021 a record-breaking year for their businesses.

Marketers struggle to fully leverage integrated customer data, which has driven hype around the opportunity of customer data platforms. Tempered expectations of the effective scope of customer data platform (CDP) use cases are pushing this market toward the Trough of Disillusionment on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for digital marketing and advertising.
■Effective use cases for customer data platforms often depend on or overlap with capabilities in IT systems such as master data management, which contain customer data but are typically managed outside of marketing.
■Although the diverse vendor ecosystem is composed of vendors with rapidly evolving capabilities, pure-play CDP vendors compete against those with legacies in either technical data management or marketing, such as multichannel marketing hubs. Vendors frequently add new features and capabilities, but buyers struggle with a single CDP label used by vendors to cover the entire spectrum of use cases when most only excel at a subset of these.
■Most CDP vendors originated as solutions for B2C use cases, and only a handful of solutions support the account-level aggregations and ABM tactics required for facilitating B2B marketing orchestration

How to Make a CDP Work for Your Organization

Whether you’re choosing a CDP for the first time or switching to a new CDP, don’t rush the process. Take the “crawl, walk, run” approach when considering the right Customer Data Platform and plan for the long-term. You’ll want to ensure that you choose a CDP that your organization can grow into: a scalable CDP that supports a wide range of third-party integrations, real-time capabilities and strong data governance.

Take the “crawl, walk, run” approach when considering the right CDP and plan for the long-term. Click & Tweet!

Navigating the CDP landscape alone is an overwhelming process for an organization. We help you evaluate which CDP technology best aligns with your organization’s roadmap for improving the customer experience. Our Customer Data Platform (CDP) consultants work with clients to help break down data silos, ensure data quality and activate use-cases, all the while respecting increased concerns for customer privacy.

Recommendations

To best evaluate the CDP marketplace using data and analytics technology:

■Identify whether the majority of your use cases are operational by solving for inefficiencies in data management or data delivery, or analytical, such as growing customer spend or reducing churn.
■Consult with key stakeholders in your organization before deciding whether to deploy a CDP. Determine your brand’s willingness to source technology externally versus building and maintaining in-house and clearly document your needs for marketing orchestration and native execution.
■Conduct an inventory of existing skills in order to evaluate the marketing team’s ability to collaborate with IT and other stakeholders for data science, customer modeling, data management and execution. Select marketing solutions that complement and integrate with other enterprise systems such as data warehouses, CRM tools, or personalization engines.
■Evaluate the level of risk tolerance in your organization for emerging technologies by determining whether a CDP — or related technology system — is an ideal fit.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2023, 70% of independent CDP vendors will be acquired by larger marketing technology vendors or will diversify through M&A of their own to enter adjacent categories such as personalization, multichannel marketing, consent management, and/or MDM for customer data.

The Marketing Cloud Journey

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Capabilities

Personalization

Features

Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Elevate Digital Transformation

Benefits which Payoff

01 Marketing Automation

02 Data centralization and CDP

03 ESP implementation and migration

04 Social Studio, Interaction Studio, and Advertising Studio integrations

05 Operational audit

06 Third-party integrations

07 Deliverability and inbox placement

01 Journey creation

02 Behavioral and triggered email campaigns

03 Campaign segmentation and deployment

04 Content creation

Conclusion

Fig: The Disparate State Of Data

Real Time Marketing needs to get Real

Marketing Goals have not changed but the goal posts have

Internal Data clean-up for AI – please can we do this first?

How do artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning relate?

Awareness > Consideration > Decision > Loyalty

Let’s talk about how you can start using AI tech in each stage of the funnel.

Awareness

Brand Awareness

Consideration

Data Insights

Decision Making

Loyalty & LTV

What can the Business do

The Wrap

Who is S. Ernest Paul ?

6 steps to choose the best customer data platform (CDP)

Step 1: Bring stakeholders into the process

Step 2: Define use cases

Step 3: Determine the tools needed

Step 4: Gather requirements

Step 5: Compare vendors

Step 6: Consider ROI

What CDP do you need?

Brands have to identify and understand each and every customer

What do customers want from brands?

The journey begins with data

Agile, cross functional teams – marketing, tech experts & operations must work together

Pharma & Life sciences regulatory caution is giving way to customer personalization

Insurers have personalization high on their portfolio spend agenda

Stitching the Personalization DNA within your marketing technology stack or with an addition of a CDP

Avoiding pitfalls and traps

Discover business use cases which the technology would drive, not vice versa

Collaborate closely with the Marketing teams to uncover functional requirements

Align organizational needs and goals with a technology approach

Build incrementally and via pilots

Marketing Cloud versus pure play social media suites

Social Suites Must Unify, Consolidate, elevate Listening beyond nascent Core Social Capabilities

Social Strategy Leaders

Market Presence

Vendor Profiles

Evaluation Overview

Using a technical SEO audit to improve your SEO performance

1. Technical errors

2. UX errors

3. Ranking opportunities

6 tools to help you perform a technical SEO audit

1. Find your robots.txt file and run a crawl report to identify errors

Run a crawl report to check that your website is indexable

Flag and fix redirect errors to improve crawling and indexing

3xx status codes

4xx status codes

5xx status codes

Set up canonical tags to point search engines at important pages

2. Review your site architecture and sitemap to make content accessible

Organize your sitemap to reflect your website structure

3. Test and improve site speed and mobile responsiveness

How to find out if your website is mobile-friendly

5. Find and fix duplicate content and keyword cannibalization issues to fine-tune SEO

Review your site for duplicate content

Merge content that cannibalizes similar keywords

Improve title tags and meta descriptions to increase your click-through rate (CTR) in SERPs