“GREAT CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES ARE LIKE GREAT CONVERSATIONS – IT GOES TWO-WAYS. A CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM HELPS YOU LISTEN TO AND LEARN ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMER.”
Hi, please tell us about your current role and the team/ technology you handle in the company. How did you arrive here?
I’m a product marketing manager at Widen. I help shape the voice of our product and bring it to market. I work collaboratively with product management, marketing, sales, and customer success to grow a loyal customer base. I rely on a variety of technologies to help make this happen including, marketing automation, project management, digital asset management.
I’ve worked in the B2B marketing technology space for over eight years. I started as an intern writing blog content. My role evolved over the years to include content strategy, messaging, and campaign management.
How are DAMs evolving in a CDP-powered world?
Great customer experiences are like great conversations – it goes two-ways. A customer data platform (CDP) helps you listen to and learn about your customer. But your brand also needs to know what to say, and how to say it. That’s where your digital asset management (DAM) system comes into play. Your DAM not only stores your content but data about your content that helps your systems and people know how to use it. For example, you might include metadata for customer segmentation and details of the customer journey.
How have customer service methodologies evolved in the recent months around marketing technologies? How would you compare these with Pre- COVID times?
Empathy for your customer has never been more important. This translates to additional flexibility as COVID-19 has impacted industries differently. Some industries like tourism are struggling with lower demand while others are to keep up with booming demand, like home improvement. We’re working hard to help understand how organizational priorities have shifted and how we can help them reach their desired outcomes with our software.
Tell us more about your recent findings on the ecommerce marketing and branding tactics?
We’re seeing three trends influence commerce and behavior: as consumers we’re spending more time on our devices than ever before, we’re leary of being “marketed to”, and we’re conscious about security and where we place our time, attention, and dollars. These three influences add increased pressure on marketers to connect with their customers in more meaningful ways.
As a DAM user, how do e-commerce customers benefit from your services / solutions?
Without a unified approach to DAM and product information management (PIM), businesses are stuck operating in departmental content silos that leaves teams manually handing off and updating information in multiple systems. Not only is it slowing down time to market, but it increases the risk of publishing out-dated, or missing information on e-commerce sites.
Similar to your physical supply chain, your digital content supply chain needs to be effective and efficient. Our approach to DAM acknowledges that brand and product content are interwoven and dependent on content from multiple departments. As a DAM user you can easily find specific images, videos, guides, and other content for your marketing campaigns. Or you can search for a product, find all the related product data, rich content, and digital assets.
Regardless of how you find the content, DAM makes it easy to send that content to your e-commerce system(s) in the right format.
Also Read: ITechnology Interview with Don Schuerman, CTO and Vice President of Product Marketing at Pegasystems
How do you see a DAM-centric customer support modernization playing a big role in digital transformation processes?
Customer support will always center on the customer. As more of those customer interactions become digital, it will be increasingly important for businesses to develop systems and processes to keep up with the volume and variety of interactions customers expect.
DAM will continue to serve as the hub that centralizes content, sends it where it needs to be, and automates inbetween.
What are the most popular chatbot-based interactions that you have come across in the recent times?
I’m not sure I can speak to the most popular chatbot-based interactions but I can say anecdotally that I hear about more negative chatbot experiences than positive ones. I recently had a negative experience with a beloved fast-casual burrito joint that’s chatbot programming didn’t account for the possibility of them charging my credit card without providing an order number. Since I didn’t have an order number, I was in an endless loop.
Tell us about your remote workplace stack and how it helps you stack on top of your game? Which tools are you currently using and are a big fan?
Our marketing team relies heavily on Slack, Zoom, and Asana for communication and collaboration. We use our DAM for finding, proofing, and sharing content. We also recently rolled out Lattice for people management and planning 1:1s.
Also Read: ITechnology Interview with Rohit Tandon, GM for ReadyAI and MD at Deloitte Consulting LLP
Your predictions for 2021 related to the industry / technology / leadership styles.
2020 was about survival. 2021 will be about recovery and reinvigorating teams. Leaders will need to revise their vision and show their teams how to move forward. This will include rebuilding trust for organizations that had to make drastic cuts. Budgets will still be conservitate throughout 2021 so leaders will look to consolidate technology and focus on automation. This search for efficiency will propel digital transformation at organizations. And why will be better positioned to scale as their growth returns.
An advice to every E-commerce marketing team that would help prepare for the current pandemic era.
Focus on your systems and data. Any attempt to scale across e-commerce channels effectively requires a solid foundation of accurate, structured data. This means moving away from managing product content in spreadsheets and shared folders. Establish source systems, where the data is entered once and in a way that can be integrated across tools. This will help you remove version confusion and automate workflows. Once you have a “golden-record”, you can then syndicate that content to downstream channels and account for each channel’s unique requirements.
Thank you, Nate! That was fun and we hope to see you back on itechnologyseries.com soon.
[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com]
Established in 1948, Widen builds high-performing software that empowers organizations to create impactful, measurable, and consistent brand experiences. Its platform spans brand management, marketing resource management, and product information management solutions and has enabled over one million marketers, content creators, and technologists at over 660 global brands to better connect with audiences. Customers include Progressive, Zippo, Energizer, Trek, Zeiss, Salvation Army, Citizen Watch, the Atlanta Falcons, Carnival Cruise Line, Yankee Candle, FINCA, and many more.
