We're back with our popular Speaker Spotlight series! Over the past year, we've gathered frequently asked questions from attendees and posed them to several of our speakers. We'll be sending portions of their answers out through the Gilbane Digital Content Conference email and will be posting them in their entirety, here.

Connect with Calvin

Recently, we had a chance to speak with VP Marketing at LingoTek, Calvin Scharffs, and ask him one of the questions posed by our attendees.

Q. Which marketing technologies have you integrated with your CMS?

A. Lingotek has integrated a really terrific marketing technology stack. We start with our CMS, which is running Drupal 7. Inside of Drupal 7, we run several modules that help with SEO/SEM, including Metatags module and Pathauto. Metatags helps us manage, at a page level, all of the meta data required for SEO. Pathauto lets us create specific URLs for each page, so they are search engine friendly. We then run Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and Google Remarketing for all of our web tracking and Adwords functions. For marketing automation we run Pardot, including integration into all our website forms. Traffic and forms are tracked and eventually pushed into Salesforce, where we qualify as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Leads are then followed up with by our Sales Development Reps. All digital footprints are recorded for the reps to know what the customer is looking for and looking at.

Next year we would like to implement some personalization tools that would display specific content based on the customer's preferences. This would help bring the customer down a customized buying journey at a quicker pace.

Connect with Melissa

Taking a moment out of her busy schedule, Melissa Webster, program VP, content & digital media technologies at IDC, answered a question about emerging trends IDC research has revealed.

Q. What is one of the interesting trends that is emerging from your research at IDC?

A. We're seeing a strong and growing focus on the content supply chain – the ability to create, source, curate, manage, adapt, and deliver content at scale across the dizzying array of channels. Certainly, organizations are challenged with creating lots more of it, because of personalization. But there's also a strong emphasis on improving the quality of content and its effectiveness: Organizations are realizing they create a lot of content that goes unused or underutilized. We're seeing more companies hire or appoint a content strategist to bring holistic oversight to content development and inculcate best practices around planning for reuse. We're also seeing social leaders growing into content marketing roles -- often, they are the folks with the most urgent needs for new content and every social channel has its own vernacular. Sometimes these folks grow into a content strategy role, if it's a B2C company. Budgets for content aren't growing very quickly, so the ability to creatively source new content – from social media, content marketing networks, partners, and so forth – is another area where we're seeing growing interest. Finally, every organization we speak to wants to do a better job measuring the ROI of the content they create and deliver.

Connect with Arjen

Recently, we spoke to, Arjen van den Akker, director of product marketing at SDL. We asked him to answer a question posed by one of our past attendees.

Q. Will your next CMS be “headless”, or not? Why?

A. Interestingly, SDL and some other vendors have been offering a headless CMS for years. We just didn’t call it that way until recently. What has changed though throughout the years, is the actual technology to expose content to the outside world. A proper CMS has an API that exposes content; whether that’s a contemporary microservice or something else. You can call that headless.

But just going for an API or headless approach doesn’t solve your problem of managing websites and other digital experiences, since your content editors need WYSIWYG editing, personalization and other “head” related features. So the paradox is actually that you need both traditional CMS capabilities AND headless. Luckily it’s a paradox that can be solved - if you’d like to learn more about this, please attend SDL’s speaking slot at the Gilbane Digital Content Conference.

Connect with Diane

We asked Diane Berry, managing principal at OutsideView Market Strategy one of several questions posed by our attendees.

Q. How is your CX strategy changing the way you collaborate with other internal functions and external partners?

A. CX requires the right content at the right stage in the customer journey. And yet, despite budget increases for content marketing, only 51 percent of marketers told Forrester that their content marketing is only somewhat effective at generating business value, in a recent survey. Only 14 percent said it is very effective, while 27 percent rated it “neutral,” six percent rated it ineffective and one percent rated it as not effective at all.

Effective content must have these 5 characteristics:

1. Differentiated
2. Believable
3. Educational, enlightening, enjoyable
4. Consistent (with your value prop and key themes)
5. Simple (to generate and understand)

I'll focus on number 5, which requires collaboration with internal functions to document and share the troves of information gathered during the customer experience, from business development to sales to services and support. Simply capturing and sharing this information throughout your organization provides a simple way to continually generate fresh content that resonates with customers - because it is all about their journey, or someone like them.

Connect with Niki

Recenly, we spoke to Niki Vecsei, director communities strategy, digital marketing at
Transamerica, about how CX strategies change how we collaborate.

Q. How is your CX strategy changing the way you collaborate with other internal functions and external partners?

A. Customers don’t care where the information comes from within the company. As long as the information resolves an issue or helps them move along the path of efficiency and success, they will interact with it. With that in mind, content and collaboration can no longer live in silos and should be enabled across departments and teams. Interdepartmental collaboration does not just streamline workflows and cut down on duplicate projects but also furthers cohesive messaging, branding and experience for the customer.

Join us November 29th at 4pm for Track E3 to hear of our real-world case studies, learn how one company built a Community Interlock across all areas of the business, including Marketing, Engineering, Product Management, and Customer Success. With a minimum time investment, the Interlock yields rich community content, programming, and a feedback mechanism to share customer sentiment cross-functionally.

Jesse Kalfel, senior director, creative services and consulting SAP global marketing at SAP, took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about 2017 and the types of content he'll be emphasizing.

Q. What types of content will you be emphasizing in your marketing, or your intranet, in 2017?

A. It’s a fact that as marketers we have a challenge when creating and delivering content. For most of us, we have developed a Digital Brain. What does that mean? Attention span and focus is down. Impatience is up. Our attention span is about as long as a goldfish – just above three seconds. And this applies to all channels as to how we find and receive information: web, blogs, social channels, collateral, video, email, and more. That’s why content has to become snackable. Snackable content is bite-sized nuggets of information that can quickly and easily digested, understood, and shared. It is a piece of information meant to capture your audience’s attention. And keep it. What’s more, we all need to forget everything we thought we knew about how people make buying decisions. The truth is that over 70% of the buyer’s journey is completed without talking to you first. Consequently, if you offer products or services, you need to rethink how and what kind of information should be communicated. Better make it snackable.

*The views expressed here reflect those of the speaker and not the Gilbane Digital Content Conference.