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How to bring empathy to your customer experience strategy

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How to bring empathy to your customer experience strategy

“You have two assets without which you cannot have a business – customers and employees,” said Natalie Petouhoff. “Yet they’re not on the balance sheet and we don’t design experiences to maximize their potential.”

Dr. Petouhoff works on customer experience business and value consulting, as well as sales enablement, with the executive team at Genesys, a cloud CX platform. Her new book, co-written with Genesys CEO and Chairman Tony Bates, argues that empathy is key to solving CX and EX (employee experience) challenges.

Empathy in Action, available next month from IdeaPress, is not a quick-read-and-discard effort. It’s a substantial volume which bolsters cheerleading for empathetic marketing with detailed advice on how to push a business up the maturity curve, from transactional marketing, through interaction and engagement, to empathy. The book shows how to remove “blind spots,” how to increase customer and employee lifetime value, and how to focus on empathy-based business value — increasing financial success by focusing on the customer and employee; putting them, indeed, on the balance sheet.

How to bring empathy to your customer experience strategy

A history of efficiency

It almost goes without saying that the history of business is not a history of empathy but a history of efficiency. “What businesses have done – and this historical footprint goes back to the first industrial revolution – is focus on efficiency, to the cost of the employee and the customer,” said Petouhoff. “Henry Ford made one model, right? There was no choice or personalization. We’ve kind of carried that forward, this historical footprint of efficiency and effectiveness at all costs.”

While everyone is talking about CX (and increasingly about EX too), the promise hasn’t yet delivered. “Part of the reason it hasn’t delivered is the perspective from which we create those experiences. We’re all customers and employees and we’ve all had those experiences that make us stop and say, ‘What on earth are they thinking? This is horrible.’ The point of the book is to say, stop doing that – it doesn’t make any sense.” Employees are voting with their feet right now. Customers, Petouhoff observes, “are voting with their mouse.”

“Most of us have taken a very business-centric point of view about how to create an experience, whether it’s for the customer or the employee,” Petouhoff said. Businesses continue to focus on offering products and services, often commoditized, rather than great experiences. There are exceptions, of course: “You look at businesses like Airbnb, Netflix or Tesla – they’ve created the experience economy. We all expect great experiences and yet it’s so interesting how difficult it is for companies to get out of their own way.”

The true meaning of empathy

In order to understand the concept of empathetic experiences, it’s first necessary to understand empathy. Don’t confuse it with sympathy. Sympathy is about feeling sorry for someone else’s misfortune. Empathy is about stepping into their shoes. You can be sympathetic without being empathetic (“I’m sorry for what you’re going through — I can’t imagine what it’s like”).

In other words, empathy doesn’t reduce to caring and compassion. “The word ’empathy’ to us means taking a look at something from another person’s point of view,” said Petouhoff — and the book underlines this: “It is the conscious decision to focus on the needs of another person from their point of view, not yours. For a business it means that all of its people, processes, strategies, leadership and technologies are aligned around its customers’ and employees’ point of view — not the company’s” (page 301).

And yes, getting to that point requires some serious transformation.

Getting into the empathy business

One bitter pill brands need to swallow involves shifting their focus from cutting costs to increasing revenue. Both are routes to growing profits, but the former often comes with customer attrition — and, more now than ever before, employee attrition. Other blind spots include prioritizing investors over customers, failing to invest in the technology that can deliver personalized experiences at scale, failure to leverage data effectively, static business plans and equally static management style.

A useful model to start thinking about what needs to change is Petouhoff and Bates’s “Force-Multiplier Flywheel.” Somewhat reminiscent of HubSpot’s flywheel model, proposed as an alternative to the traditional funnel, this version incorporates detailed advice on how to drive empathy. The four segments of the ever-spinning wheel are labeled Listen, Understand and Predict, Act and Learn. The inputs to Listen are a set of empathy-based business values — empathy-based corporate value, empathy-based culture, empathy-based leadership and empathy-based technology — and the output from the flywheel should be ongoing empathy-based disruption.

There’s a further model which, in turn, supports the way a brand can refine and develop the flywheel. This one is called the OODA Loop and it’s based on a strategy developed for training fighter pilots. OODA — observe, orient, decide and act. Most of those categories should be self-explanatory, but “orient” in this context refers to benchmarking your current customer and employee experiences against those of your competitors.

One increasingly obvious component of empathetic customer experiences is a sense of community, something B2C brands can build, of course, through social media channels, but also something of growing importance in a B2B space that is more and more about long-term customer relationships and helping to solve customers’ problems. “I’m working on a community here at Genesys called Beyond – it’s in its infancy right now,” said Petouhoff. “We have content for managers and agents, but my next act at Genesys is to build that online community with thought leadership and content, a place where people can come and learn.”

Read next: Why community could be the next big thing in marketing

The pandemic as context

Among the countless other things the pandemic has accelerated during the last two years is a sense that marketing needs to be empathetic, that it needs to speak — in an appropriate tone — to people’s needs and concerns; that it doesn’t exist just to push a lead down the funnel in the direction of a sale. In other words, transformational tops transactional, and even in the B2B space buyers are looking for relevant and empathetic engagement, not just a sales call.

Read next: What a long strange year in digital marketing

Bates and Petouhoff could not have foreseen this when they set out on their journey. “I was hired in October 2019, ” she said. “I met Tony and started talking to him about ‘I would really like to write a book that would change business forever.’” Bates asked her what that would look like. “Empathy — whether you’re in a relationship, whether you’re a friend, whether you’re a business — it creates trust and it creates loyalty. Now here comes 2020. Maybe we got lucky, I don’t know.”

About The Author

The holiday season is upon us
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.


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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]

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YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples

Introduction

With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.

Types of YouTube Ads

Video Ads

  • Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
  • Types:
    • In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
    • Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.

Display Ads

  • Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
  • Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).

Companion Banners

  • Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
  • Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.

YouTube Ad Specs by Type

Skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
    • Action: 15-20 seconds

Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads

  • Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
  • Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Vertical: 9:16
    • Square: 1:1

Bumper Ads

  • Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
  • File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 640 x 360px
    • Vertical: 480 x 360px

In-feed Ads

  • Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
  • Resolution:
    • Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
    • Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
    • Square: 1080 x 1080px
  • Aspect Ratio:
    • Horizontal: 16:9
    • Square: 1:1
  • Length:
    • Awareness: 15-20 seconds
    • Consideration: 2-3 minutes
  • Headline/Description:
    • Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
    • Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line

Display Ads

  • Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
  • Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
  • File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
  • File Size: Max 150KB.
  • Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.

Outstream Ads

  • Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
  • Logo Specs:
    • Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
    • File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
    • Max Size: 200KB.

Masthead Ads

  • Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
  • Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
  • File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).

Conclusion

YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!

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Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists

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Why We Are Always 'Clicking to Buy', According to Psychologists

Amazon pillows.

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

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A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots

Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.

To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.

Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots

Salesforce’s evolving architecture

It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?

“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”

Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”

That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.

“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.

Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”

Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot

“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.

For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”

Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”

It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”

What’s new about Einstein Personalization

Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?

“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”

Finally, trust

One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.

“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”

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