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The Comoto Family of Brands accelerates omnichannel marketing with first-party data

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The Comoto Family of Brands accelerates omnichannel marketing with first-party data

Retail is an ever-changing industry, but the last few years have been particularly disruptive. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered dramatic shifts in consumer behavior that left many retailers struggling to keep up. These factors, combined with the growing influence of Amazon, increasing consumer privacy regulations and deprecating third-party cookies, are only exacerbating the need for transformation in retail that emphasizes customer relationships.

The companies that have been most successful in adapting to these challenges share one critical commonality: they prioritize the collection and use of privacy-compliant first-party customer data as a competitive asset. The Comoto Family of Brands is one such retailer.

In a recent MarTech session, Comoto’s Dana Green joined BlueConic’s Jackie Rousseau-Anderson to discuss how they are using a customer data platform to unify customer data across multiple brands and systems and activate it across channels to deliver more engaging customer interactions.

Putting data at the heart of customer engagement

As America’s largest power sports aftermarket retailer, Comoto is home to Cycle Gear, J&P Cycles and RevZilla.com. With over 150 stores nationwide and e-commerce sites for all three brands, the company manages a complex ecosystem of customer data housed in a multitude of systems.

“Data has always been foundational to our strategies,” said Green, “but it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of information you have.”

That realization led Comoto on an introspective journey to transform how they access and use customer data to unlock the potential of their marketing channels. BlueConic’s customer data platform (CDP) has been a core component in its transformation.

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Choosing the right optimization strategy

When it comes to optimizing their e-commerce sites, Green and her team have traditionally relied on Comoto’s UX and Research teams to provide a testing plan based on qualitative customer research. Using BlueConic’s A/B testing and optimization capabilities, the company can marry qualitative and quantitative methods for a more in-depth understanding of its customers.

“When making big updates to our website, we typically have a theory that we’re looking to improve upon. With BlueConic, we can perform A/B testing on our site to validate the research we’ve done with our customers and supplement it with hard data,” said Green.

She noted that even simple A/B tests could produce some big wins. “Our customers have a true enthusiast culture when it comes to riding, but what they shop for often depends on their riding style. So, we decided to test a shop-by-category module on our homepage that resulted in a very positive incremental lift. Just having the ability to provide someone with a custom experience based on the categories they are most interested in is an easy win for us that has a surprisingly big impact.”

Green and her team have since used BlueConic to ramp up their A/B testing efforts. “We have a lineup of things that we want to test at this point. For the most part, whenever we finished a test, it usually begs another question.” But she also cautions others to start small, as tests can get complicated. To tee up tests for success, she recommends:

  • Testing something that’s going to have enough traffic to get a good read on what you’re trying to answer.
  • Making sure you’re clear with your hypothesis and what you’re trying to solve.
  • Defining clear success metrics.

Moving from touchpoints to journeys

Green and her team have also been able to use the learnings from A/B testing as building blocks for the larger, end-to-end customer experience. “The real power we’ve been working on is transitioning to creating lifecycles. So, not just optimizing our site, but making sure we’re connecting that experience with our other channels,” said Green.

The customer lifecycle orchestration capabilities in BlueConic enable Green and her team to move beyond channel-specific campaign workflows and instead orchestrate cross-channel lifecycle marketing programs that are responsive to each customer’s unique journey based on the real-time, unified customer profile data.

“When we’re sending an email — how are we thinking about the experience in which they’re landing on? Or when a paid ad is driving to the website, what can we do to personalize that experience?”

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She also noted that sometimes very seemingly simple components, like adjusting to where somebody lives or their primary interest areas, can be a really compelling way to develop a connection with customers.

“We have a blog called Common Tread that features amazing content. The data available in BlueConic not only enables us to understand how and when consumers engage with us on Common Thread, but also tailor our communications based on their individual interests. If they are an adventure rider and we just posted an article on an adventure bike, for example, we can promote the article and introduce them to the Common Thread experience.”

Operationalizing a CDP

Green noted it’s not enough to simply add a CDP to your business infrastructure and expect to immediately reap the benefits. Like any marketing technology, success (or failure) with a CDP often comes down to an ability to effectively manage change within the organization. For Green, education and communication have been key.

“We achieve some of that just by inviting more folks throughout the business to our quarterly reviews on what we’re working on,” said Green. “We used to be set up so our email and onsite teams would meet separately with BlueConic,” she continued. “Now, we meet together so we can work on our combined strategies across both channels. So just making sure to that the communication between the teams is connected has been a really easy, simple win.”

Since the addition of a CDP also fundamentally changes how companies can and should work, Green stresses the importance of alignment on the goals, use cases (immediate priorities and long-term road map), timing and expected outcomes for a CDP implementation across all levels of the organization.

“Our tech team is very busy with a lot of big priorities, which I’m sure a lot of people can relate to,” she explained. The ability to access the unified, actionable data in BlueConic and use it to create compelling experiences on the site without tapping the tech team has been a huge help for us. That way, we can keep moving and grooving and trying new things without being held up when our tech partners are focused on other priorities.”

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For others who are embarking on their own customer engagement transformation journey, Green has some advice: “Just make sure that you pick a partner that’s going to listen to your business problems and what you’re trying to achieve as a business. Only then can you truly unlock the full potential of your investment.”


About The Author

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BlueConic, the leading pure-play customer data platform, liberates companies’ first-party data from disparate systems and makes it accessible wherever and whenever it is required to transform customer relationships and drive business growth. Over 350 companies worldwide, including Forbes, Heineken, Mattel, Michelin, Telia Company, and VF Corp, use BlueConic to unify data into persistent, individual-level profiles, and then activate it across customer touchpoints and systems in support of a wide range of growth-focused initiatives, including customer lifecycle orchestration, modeling and analytics, digital products and experiences, audience-based monetization, and more. BlueConic is a global company with offices in the US and Europe.

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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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