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4 key building blocks to success

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4 key building blocks to success

Tech has turned marketing from a bit of a dark art to a tool for strategic business growth, but not without repercussions. Even more, consumers expect brands to not only remember — but to predict — their preferences, interests, likes and dislikes. 

The omnichannel struggle is very painful to orchestrate and manage. Companies need a unified and seamless approach that eliminates siloed user experiences, making things more efficient internally and effective externally.

Marketing professionals now wear many hats. We need to be part marketer, part operations officer, part technologist, part data analyst, part revenue officer, part experience officer, consensus builder, diplomat, etc. We have to do more with less, as Gartner’s 2022 CMO Spend Survey found. 

While marketing’s budget is rising (with over half of it going to digital channels), that same study reports that 61% lack the in-house capabilities to deliver their strategy. Part of that is because of the tech budget, or rather its constraints. A lack of resources — human, financial and time — poses challenges.

But managing all the cross-channel, interconnected moving parts can be overwhelming, particularly when working on many channels and trying to analyze all those disparate technologies. 

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How do you orchestrate ecommerce, campaign management, digital asset management (DAM), customer relationship management (CRM), customer data platforms (CDP) and personalization tools?

This is where a unified system — a  digital experience platform (DXP) — can help make your marketing ops more efficient and effective. It does so much for you, not only saving you time and money but optimizing your marketing operations in the process.

What is a DXP?

Today’s customers expect seamless experiences as the baseline — so a DXP might sound very appealing. In a nutshell, a DXP promises an integrated way to manage all your tools and technologies in one place, from rich content to customer relationships to marketing automation and even internal workflows. 

With so many tools, metrics and systems to keep track of to successfully deliver great customer experiences, a system that brings everything together might sound too good to be true. 

But if you are ready and set up to use a DXP properly, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for:

  • Updating content across all your channels and platforms.
  • Carrying and inputting CRM data across multiple touchpoints.
  • Helping you deliver consistent, personalized experiences to customers and internal stakeholders.

DXPs promise holistic, cross-platform seamlessness — but you must be prepared

While the promise of an integrated way to manage all your tools and technologies in one place is appealing, you need to be prepared. Ask yourself, is your company ready for this dynamic shift and prepared to invest long-term?

Many companies work very hard to prioritize customers getting that seamless experience. Yet, internally, they’re in a state of chaos because they don’t prioritize seamlessness holistically. It is critical to craft integrated and consistent solutions that are modular but connect the dots (and fill the gaps) of the digital experience. 

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This requires a shift in mindset. The organization must embrace a holistic, integrated approach and strong scenario planning to better predict what your business and stakeholders may need. 

Dig deeper: Reinventing the digital experience platform

The 4 key building blocks to success

Being prepared can mean many things, but in my experience, it comes down to four things.

DXPs- 4 key building blocks to success

1. Internal and external alignment

A DXP functions best when there are clear priorities, tasks and functions across the company. You need all stakeholders to align on:

  • What you’re doing.
  • Who it’s for.
  • Why you’re doing it.
  • How you’ll do it (internal audit).
    • Before building out your DXP apps and toolset, evaluate exactly what you have now. Then map out which ones you are already using, the functionality within them and what you are currently using them for. 
  • When you’ll do it.
  • What success will look like.
  • Roles and responsibilities.

Remember that buy-in and alignment require a data-backed strategy.

2. User-centered thinking

Always ask, “How do we meet our audience where they are in a way that’s relevant and easy for them to understand?” This comes down to empathy for:

  • Your audience, employees, partners, stakeholders, etc.
  • Their needs, pains and concerns.

Meet them where they’re at in their journey and deliver the right content to the right person at the right time, in the right place.

DXPs are massive, complex systems. It’s easy to get lost in the mechanics of integration and automation. With every new piece of functionality, you must remember the people you’re trying to serve and what their needs are.

Don’t let the system bog you down or make you lose sight of that. It’s about every stage of the interaction. The best user experience is one you don’t even know you’re having.

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3. A consistent brand experience

If you’ve achieved alignment and created the map for the DXP, unifying your brand experience across all touchpoints will be a logical next step. Brand consistency is crucial as it can increase revenue considerably.

Why bother? 

  • Build loyalty and recognition.
  • Branding will increase client trust in you.

Your brand is your business’s most valuable asset, but it’s an asset you never wholly own. Your customers also play a part in the opinions they form of you. A consistent experience is more than look, feel, voice and tone. 

Externally, it’s about making sure that across touchpoints and platforms, every piece feels like it’s part of the same whole. Internally, it’s enabling your employees with the tools to do their jobs more effectively.

Let’s say a customer buys something in-store, signs up for an email list, gets an email, clicks through it, lands on a blog article and ends up on a product page where they’re pushed to your Instagram account. All throughout, the visuals and language need to be consistent. You need clear rules to make it easy for your team to uphold these standards. 

Still, the key to a consistent brand experience for all your stakeholders stems from that alignment and user-centered thinking. It’s about being true to those goals through everything you do, how it gets expressed and how it’s implemented.  

4. Creating a culture of feedback

DXP integration can make it easy to build opportunities for feedback into your processes across the board. However, designing a feedback culture isn’t something that just happens — it’s intentional. Build clear feedback processes to improve operations and performance.

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No doubt, over time and probably right away, too. You’ll learn how to make significant improvements. Encourage your internal stakeholders to provide feedback on how these initiatives and tools are helping them in their day-to-day, but also what could be improved. Remember, it’s not enough to simply collect feedback. Action needs to be taken based on employee input. 

Is it time to invest in a DXP?

Suppose you’re only investing in creating a seamless experience for your customers, while internally, you’re running around like chickens without heads. In that case, you’re doing yourself, your partners and employees and even your customers a disservice.

Eventually, something will fall through the cracks. You and your people are also today’s customers (for other companies), and you likely value seamlessness.

Are you experiencing any of the following?

  • Siloed data across multiple platforms prevents you from really understanding what your customers are doing.
  • The customer experience across your digital and physical channels is not personalized and disjointed.
  • Decisions made are not data-driven and are based on guesswork.
  • The cost of the tech stack needed to be efficient and effective is hard to justify.
  • The cost of new customer acquisition is too high and you want to focus on retention and growing share of wallet.

If you’re hearing these points and nodding your head, your company is probably ready to invest in a DXP. Good luck!

Dig deeper: Does your marketing team need a digital experience platform (DXP)?


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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.



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About The Author

Theresa FormanTheresa Forman

Theresa is a Partner and the Chief Strategy Officer at Acart, an independent creative agency that understands the evolving intersection between strategy, media, creative and tech in ways that help transform brands.
Theresa has been a B2C and B2B marketing professional for more than 25 years, honing her craft in the consumer-packaged goods, tech, e-Commerce, and advocacy sectors. She has spent a career crafting strategies and go-to-market initiatives that have driven brand and business growth internationally for start-ups, SMBs and global enterprises. She brings a unique blend of business savvy and strategic thinking to her work. She spent the first 15 years of her career on client side, understanding first-hand the challenges and opportunities that executive-level marketers are up against, and has now spent the last 15 years in the ad industry counseling C-level clients on driving business and brand growth.

As an executive who has sat both on the client-side and agency-side, she has an unfair advantage in that she has catered to many distinct target audiences across many different sectors and industries, and as a result, brings an unparalleled breadth and depth of experience and insight to her engagements.

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MARKETING

How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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