Mark Nardone, Executive Vice President at PAN Communications, sits down with one of PAN’s clients, Acquia, which provides a cloud platform and data-driven journey technology to build, manage, and activate digital experiences at scale. Lynne Capozzi, CMO at Acquia, is responsible for overseeing all global marketing functions for the cloud-based platform.
Our Q&A discusses Capozzi’s content marketing program. We get to the bottom of what keeps her up at night, coming to grips with the undertakings of the digital transformation, the rise and impact of influencer marketing, their commitment to content personalization and tips on measurement for today’s up and coming content marketers.
1. What is the number one pain point that your brand is facing with your content marketing program today?
Our team recently tackled a website replatform and redesign, which as anyone in marketing knows is a huge undertaking. Content migration was perhaps one of the biggest challenges that our content marketing and web team encountered in this project. After a content audit, our team was tasked with moving six years of content to a new site — a complex and time-consuming effort that required an all-hands-on-deck approach. Every member of the digital marketing team, from our vice president to content authors, analytics managers and front-end developers, has contributed over the last few months.
Within the content migration project, we uncovered a few problem areas. First, our site organization and structure required a complete SEO overhaul. We realized late in the game that content migration was something we should have devoted more efforts to way before the site relaunch. We also realized we should have installed a DAM (digital asset management) product at the start of our migration. It would have made our lives easier. Hindsight is 20/20, as they say!
In spite of those challenges, we did manage to get a lot of things right. We made the new site match our new philosophy — solution-based, easy to use, and more appealing to marketers. Now we have a great marriage of content, branding and design. Through the design of the site we used our own best practices and our personalization solution, Acquia Lift, to deliver more CTAs and more cross-promotion of content to help our visitors find what they need faster and get more use out of our site. The new look and feel has re-energized our site experience, and it’s been a great jumping point for us to get new messaging out the door.
2. How has the recent digital disruption affected your approach to content marketing?
Digital disruption has turned the world of marketing on its head. We as marketing professionals have gone from ‘spray and pray’ brand guesswork to full-blown data-driven customer journeys. The biggest change we’ve seen in the realm of content marketing is the role of data. Data has changed how we as marketers strategize and develop content, write and promote content, and of course, measure content performance. With smarter data, we can make our content messages smarter — more personalized, more targeted, and more engaging than ever before. It’s all about being data driven.
3. Where do you see influencer marketing coming into play for your brand in 2018?
Influencer marketing has been around for some time now, but it’s a relatively new strategy for us. We’re actually partnering closely with the team at PAN to develop a formal strategy centered around influencers. In 2018 we are making a concerted effort to get our message and products out to more marketers and digital decision makers — we see growing out or influencer marketing as a key component to our success. I see great opportunity in this area with our PAN team by our side.
4. How does your brand’s omni-channel marketing strategy integrate engaging content for your customers?
First and foremost, we want our content to be relevant and informative to our customers. This is another example of where we rely heavily on data to personalize our content recommendations for customers based on what they have responded to (and what they haven’t responded to) in their journeys thus far. That commitment to personalization is something that is baked into the overall content experience for our customers — across different channels, devices and regions.
5. What is one tip you would provide a marketer looking to measure the impact of their content?
This one is really important to me. As marketers, we’re working with an overabundance of data, but it can be hard to tap into. My recommendation would be to conduct a holistic review of content performance, which includes analytics, content, social and demand generation teams – because, as we all know, content is shared in so many ways, across so many different channels and devices. These teams each bring a specialized view of data and can unlock new findings and insights around making content more engaging.
CMO Insights is PAN Communication’s marketing leadership series. We examine the pain points of today’s CMO, how to effectively and emotionally impact the customer along their path to purchase, trends at the forefront of today’s digital landscape alongside insight from experts. Interested in continuing the conversation? Let’s discuss @MarkCNardone.
