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How Sky and RS Group built testing and experimentations programs that actually deliver

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Testing and experimentation are cornerstones to building a great customer experience—but how do you make sure you’re testing the right things? We received some robust insights at a panel discussion hosted by Optimizely at a recent CX circle London event

The panel consisted of two testing and experimentation experts—Natasha Senior, Senior Digital Manager at Sky and Stewart Ehoff, Head of Experimentation at the leading provider of industrial and electronic solutions, RS Group.

During the session, the duo filled us in on how they get ideas for testing, what tools they use and the biggest item on their testing agenda for 2023. 

Here’s a round-up of Natasha and Stewart’s expert insights and best advice for anyone looking to take their testing game to the next level in the new year.  

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How has experimentation evolved in the last couple years? 

Natasha from Sky has seen experimentation expand from a purely marketing-focused initiative to a cross-functional tactic. At Sky, they use experimentation across the business to reduce contact center calls, improve web accessibility, and even optimize their offline customer experience. 

“Experimentation is becoming the heart of everything we do. People think it’s just one department that owns it—like product, tech or marketing—but it’s not. It’s our whole business culture.” — Natasha Senior, Senior Digital Manager at Sky

And Stewart from RS Group agreed, highlighting how experimentation continues to grow as an organization-wide practice. 

“Over the last three years, experimentation has been more widely adopted, so there’s a lot more talent in the space,” said Stewart. “I hope that one day, experimentation will have the same level of importance as SEO—where you simply wouldn’t build products, services or solutions without it.”

How Sky and RS Group built testing and experimentations programs

Where do you get your test ideas from?

For Stewart, it’s important to involve as many key stakeholders as possible to build a strong and effective experimentation roadmap. That’s why RS Group is on a mission to expand experimentation ideation horizontally across the business. 

If people don’t understand the power of experimentation, it can limit the number of good testing ideas produced—because those ideas truly can come from any department. 

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“There needs to be an outreach process in place, where you take your stakeholders through the value of experimentation and educate them on the possibilities,” said Stewart. “This will give you more ideas to test and learn from, which is great for experimentation!”

For Sky, the best experimentation ideas come from outside the experimentation team—specifically, from their contact center, which has a front-row seat for how the business’ tech affects its customers.

“We try to visit the contact center once or twice a year to sit with the advisors. They often give us great testing ideas because they’ve sat talking to the customer all day, every day,” said Natasha. “Their insights are invaluable.”

How have Optimizely products helped you build a culture of experimentation? 

Experimentation teams are great at creating (and—as we’ve seen—sourcing) ideas for experiments and understanding which of these are worth pursuing; but they tend not to have the deep tech expertise required to integrate these experiments into a business’ tech stack.  

Optimizely’s Feature Experimentation product has helped RS Group embed experimentation across the business and ensure experiments are built, not by their experimentation team, but by their engineers. Instead, Stewart’s experimentation team is set up to empower other teams to use their testing tools and methodologies to drive their own outcomes.

“You can’t build a culture of experimentation by simply sticking a web snippet on a page and having a few people run some tests. It has to be deeper than that. Testing has to be fundamentally ingrained into your tech stack.” — Stewart Ehoff, Head of Experimentation at RS Group

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Most of RS Group’s experiments are delivered server-side, built by their engineers. 

The same goes for Natasha’s team at Sky, who have a long-standing partnership with Optimizely.

“Learning how to use Optimizely Full Stack is part of every developer’s training when they join us,” said Natasha. Just like RS Group, Sky’s experimentation team isn’t involved in building experiments, instead, it’s ingrained in the development team’s way of working. 

What tools are you using to increase your experimentation capabilities?  

Alongside Optimizely, Sky uses Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform to create problem statements and build hypotheses for experiments. 

“Your problem statement can’t go anywhere without data,” said Natasha. Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics cloud platform provides Sky with unique customer behavior insights to help build a pipeline of robust, data-driven experiments that the entire company can get behind. 

Contentsquare’s integration with Qualtrics, a Voice of Customer (VoC) feedback platform, enables Sky to validate errors flagged in customer feedback by rewatching affected sessions in Session Replay.

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“A/B testing tells you whether a test has worked, but not why. Contentsquare and Qualtrics give us the ‘why’ we need to effectively iterate our testing. — Natasha Senior, Senior Digital Manager at Sky.

For RS Group, the process of improving experimentation practices is still in its early stages. “One of our biggest challenges is around how to increase our understanding of our customers and the problems they’re having to ensure our testing is rooted in strong data and hypotheses,” said Stewart.

Currently, RS Group uses VoC surveys, feedback from customer services and Adobe Analytics to obtain the quantitative data they need to understand their customers. They also work closely with their user experience research team, which is a “wealth of knowledge and information,” said Stewart. “That’s why bringing experimentation and user experience research together is so powerful.” 

What’s next on Sky and RS Group’s experimentation roadmap for 2023?

Sky plans to install Optimizely into their telephonic systems using Optimizely Agent. “We want to start doing A/B tests end-to-end,” said Natasha. “If someone lands on sky.com, uses the bot and then calls in, I want to track and experiment on the entire journey.” 

Contentsquare will help by providing rich, contextual insights into how customers feel at each stage of that digital journey—from start to finish, page by page. This will help the team at Sky make informed decisions about which tests will have the biggest impact on improving the digital experience of their customers.

Alternately, RS Group is focusing on process and automation to get experimentation velocity to the next level. Stewart’s team has spent this year building an experimentation program management system in Airtable to help align stakeholders from different business units. “The program will help us expand our testing roadmap and begin automating our experiments,” said Stewart. 

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“To scale properly, we need to reduce the manual time spent analyzing experiments, writing emails, responding to Slacks and building experiment scorecards.” So, for RS Group, it’s all about building repeatable, scalable and automated experiments that save time.

Watch the session on-demand 

Feeling inspired? There’s more where that came from. Watch Natasha’s and Stewart’s session from CX circle London on Contentsquare’s on-demand page to get more inspiration for your experimentation strategy.

And if you’d like to learn more about how Contentsquare can help you skyrocket your experimentation program, get in touch with us today. We’d love to show you how our digital experience analytics platform gives you all the tools you need to build informed tests that truly deliver.


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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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