Aaron Conant  0:18

Happy Wednesday, everybody. My name is Aaron Conant. I'm the Co-founder and Managing Director of BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge-sharing group with 1000s of brands who do exactly that we network. And now we share together to stay on top of the newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it is shaping digital, we’ll host close to 240 of these virtual events this year, we're probably going to hit the 20 Dinner mark for this year and probably close to 100 next year. So that's where I'm traveling to right now around LA. But if you're in a tier one city, don't ever hesitate to reach out and just kind of get the list of upcoming events, we're usually playing them just a couple months out or so just the best way to stay on top of the newest trends is, you know, only limited to 30 to 60 days out. But you know, here at tier one city would love to have you at an event you can connect in person, you know, I'm talking with 30 brands a week one on one as well, just to stay on top of those trends. And when the same topics come up over and over again. That's when we we host an event like this. And so a couple housekeeping items as we get started. First off, any point time you have any questions, you can just jump in and ask we are going to jump around to different people and get their input as a whole. I'm going to keep letting people in here as we go. But if you can't come off mute, if it's easier, you can drop questions into the chat, we'll get them answered that way as well. The last thing is we started this about three to four minutes after the hour. And just so everybody knows, we're gonna wrap this thing up with about three to four minutes to go in the hour as well. Maybe even five minutes ago, we want to make sure you have plenty of time to get on to the next meeting without being late. With that, I'm gonna go ahead and kind of kick it off, you know, across the board, everybody knows 18 months, everything's been kind of crazy. And the idea of content comes up over and over again. And then you know, this idea of what you're using it for, for for an experience as a whole. And so that's kind of the title, you know, cut through the clutter with composable experiences. You know, I think, you know, we got some great friends, great partner supporters, the network over at Deloitte Digital, working with a lot of different brands in the network come highly recommended across the board. And Tim Juravich jumped on the line today, give us overarching what they're seeing from their broad perspective across the their large number of clients, but also answer as many questions as we can throw at it today. So, Tim, I'll kick it over to you, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Deloitte Digital, that'd be awesome. And then we can kind of kick off the conversation. So good. Love it.

Tim Juravich  2:40

Well, hey, everybody, thanks for the time today. My name is Tim Juravich, partner at Deloitte Digital, and I run our experience in engineering practice within our Deloitte Digital Studios. You know, it's really we've gotten together to help solve some of the the bigger problems where you know, brand plus experience plus business problems are where value is created. Personally, for myself, I spent years before Deloitte working in startups and emerging technology, building new experiences in the MVP world, where every second counts, in an experience, every piece of content counts. And for the past eight years, really been helping my clients here at Deloitte talk through the conversation of we're just having at the beginning of the call around digital transformation, or really can't do one-time digital transformations, it's about constant evolution, it's about adapting to change and being flexible, you know, with that are in. So, you know, part of the conversation that, you know, we are super passionate about passionate about is this idea of composable experiences. And we're not just talking about, you know, some of the technology bits of Hey, is it had this experience? Or is it a, you know, use a platform experience? But how do you get the right message for your brand in the areas that matter the most? So it's a really complex, challenging conversation and, you know, a lot of fun to unpack as, as we're seeing that really taking hold across the industry. So I'll stop there, but we're definitely gonna have a lot more conversation on this as we go.

Aaron Conant  4:12

Yeah. Awesome. So quick reminder, you have questions you want to jump in, you have comments, just jump into the conversation. We'll jump around a little bit. If you can't come off mute drop any questions or comments into the chat? You know, I want to start with this content piece. You know, from your standpoint, in what you guys are seeing, you know, how are you currently creating, you know, recreating experiences in content today, right, where people are consuming it faster than they've ever consumed it before. People need more of it than they've ever needed before. You know, to keep up. How are you creating it, repurposing it trying to keep up with that pace of consumer demand? I mean, we've been in technology change as well.

Tim Juravich  4:51

So I'll jump in and definitely love to have some numbers. And I know Arvind, he put a note here in the chat of the specific use case around consumable consumable composable experiences. So, you know, really, what we're, what we're seeing is, hey, we are you know, we're a retail facing brand. And, you know, we we have found that we need to start to talk about, you know, in store pickup, especially the beginning COVID, we need to start to talk about our brand values. Oftentimes, the first thing that comes up when we're trying to change a content story from something that's either hyper-personalized, something that just changes with the needs in the market, oftentimes it comes into, well, you know, we have, we have a marketing solution, we can change some of the content, our website, but if we wanted to break outside of the box of what we have today, change the kind of the experience flow to create a better connection with our customer. That's, that's really where it starts to fall apart. So sometimes when we think about proposal experience, it's about understanding somebody at a one-to-one level, which is increasingly complex. With the third-party technology that's out there from a cookieless standpoint, it's only getting harder. So when we talk about composable experiences, and what we're seeing from a content experience, is, you know, content is becoming, you know, incredibly more valuable. And in some cases, something that feels like a commodity, we need to understand what are those areas around, you know, content generation, the experience, where if you invest your time and converting, converting new clients and revenue, or retaining them, you ultimately have a much better shot at, you know, creating a successful relationship. So really, we're talking about is adapting to what you're seeing in real-time, both in the content layer, but as you think about the technology itself, adapting to the change of the market?

Aaron Conant  6:52

Awesome, because I think that's a spot right, where I think we are getting to like Digital 2.0. And we got there faster than we thought we were gonna get there. Right, where it goes beyond how much content can I generate? How fast can I generate it? And how fast can I pump it out? There? It is, am I generating the right content? And am I delivering it in the right fashion? And am I measuring the right KPIs? And, you know, on the back end, where I mean, I love to hear your thoughts, Tim, and then I'd like to jump around a little bit, as well.

Tim Juravich  7:25

Well, I mean, it is a, you know, one of the largest trends right now, and for good reason is adopting a product mentality to your business. And the same is true with content offerings. And, you know, even if you think about discounts, what are we giving for coupon codes? How are we getting people through the journey, all of that as a product? You know, really what we're saying is, you know, for everything you do, it needs to drive, drive value. And so across the board, what we're finding is, instead of looking at some of the the vanity metrics of, Hey, are we getting views and clicks, what is actually creating a deeper relationship, in most cases, you know, nobody is the same. But as your experience from your brands really starts to stand out, relying on what your platform vendors may do right out of the box, is, is almost always going to be limiting. But if you start to understand what the ROI is, if you owning it, you know, we're seeing that across the board as a as a huge driver of revenue, and again, into this high level, but something we definitely want to talk through together.

Aaron Conant  8:31

Awesome. So let's jump around a little bit. You know, Arvind, I don't know if you can come off mute, maybe you can, like how are you looking at content today, and then the delivery of it, or metrics around it? You know, we'd love to hear how you kind of approach it? Sure,

Arvind  8:45

I can, I can talk to it briefly. Hopefully you can hear me. So around. So I'm overseeing marketing and brand for senior living company here in Canada based out of Toronto. So it's a public company. And it has assets all over BC in Ontario. And we just creating in the process of creating a new brand for senior living retirement livings because there we've we've identified through our research there several cohorts of senior seniors. And there's one segment or cohort of seniors who are being underserved today. And those are, those are of a profile who we call as active achiever. So basically that they're of a certain age, say 8587. But they're physically very capable, and and still looking to get more out of life. They're active achievers, and they really move they're looking to move into a senior living congregated setting where they can pursue their hobbies and still live a richer quality of life and not be bogged down by various chores of life like cooking and cleaning and those kinds of things. Right. So that's, that's the person I'm trying to target. So bring it back to personalization personalization is really amped up in this You brand because all about personalization right from the time they come to the website, because we need to quickly identify them through some one on one question or conversation, and then take them down a funnel where we actually serving up content, which is relevant for this audience. And that's what this new brand and this website that we're looking to develop is all about. And then using that information throughout the, throughout the whole funnel process through our sales process, and through various CRM systems. So I think the biggest friction for us is really storing all this information through various various various interactions across touchpoints. And keeping it all in one place. So we have every time we interact with them, it is whether it's in person or through digital services, on digital, it's easier, obviously, to use that information. But as we using it offline, in actual real life experiences, well, how do you bring those those those relationships to life? So that's, that's really a struggle as we try to scale it across 8090 of our homes.

Aaron Conant  11:09

Yeah, yeah. Let's see, Tim we'd love to hear your thoughts there. And I want to jump around a little bit. Wow. Yeah.

Tim Juravich  11:14

Yeah, that's a super, you know, great, great, great story going through that, too. And, you know, and realize one of the challenges too, is, you know, sometimes you have caregivers and others that, you know, are doing some of the research, they may be doing this, you know, in in a family setting, this is usually a family discussion, family decision. Yeah, and, you know, I'd say one of the one of the things that certainly, and you hit on it is, you know, it's not just an SEO or top of the funnel, or just the lead gen, you're really looking at, and then across the business. That just a question you asked, you know, a month ago, you should know the answer to three months later, as you're going through the relationship process. Yeah. And I think the biggest thing that we found is the especially in the marketing world, right now, when we think about some of the tag managers where you might collect this data, some of the kind of more out of the box CRMs, where you can store this, you still run into some of the first party identity issues of, hey, is this is this visitor, the person that came before? are we connecting the dots between, you know, a call and email throughout. So I think that super, super great transformation that you're going through, and I'd say the it is, it is something that some of the giants are still dealing with as well, owning that first-party relationship, and not relying on the vendors for some of those touch-points that really matter, is something that we're seeing very much across the board. And so we are seeing people do more first-party identity first, you know, first-party cooking, we are seeing them own more of their analytics, not from an overall standpoint, but making sure they can also store those analytics in a repository that does not require the third parties to connect the dots, because that can be a costly and intensive process sometimes.

Arvind  13:12

thanks for sharing that. And good to hear that. Obviously, we're not the only ones trying to solve for this is there. And this is purely for my arrest. Is there a particular company you solve this for in terms of a website where I could go and see this in play today?

Tim Juravich  13:32

Sure yeah. So there's, there's a number of them, I'll call out waste management, WM.com. Waste Management is one that we put through a similar experience of, you know, some, some people may be residential, and they may be commercial, and, you know, picking a trash providers and top of mind, but when it is you make a decision fast. So this is one where, you know, it's a, it's an Adobe program, it's had this we meant to keep ever all of the pieces of content always driving a conversation. Because it's not, hey, I need a trash provider. But it's, Hey, I'm moving because I've had a life change, or it's, it's summer, and I need a dumpster because I'm cleaning things out. It's the life events, which is where we started to drive really the conversion and the content discussion.

Aaron Conant  14:18

Thank you. Hmm. Awesome. Let's keep jumping around a little bit. You know, want to ask, you know, Bethany, if you can jump in, that would be awesome. I just didn't ask to unmute. You can't. No worries. Be be great. If you could jump in. Also, you know, jump out here to Scott. I don't know if you can jump in. But just ask to unmute. You could be awesome. You know, while they unmute. You know, Tim, from a technology standpoint, I mean, that's where the blend comes in. Right where we talked about personalization is technology in the background. You don't have somebody staring at it wondering See who's going to show up? And then you know, watching experience? You know, it's tech. Where do you see people are at today as a whole? I mean, a lot of conversations I have everybody thinks they're behind. But are you really behind? If everybody's the same mile marker you are? Yeah, I think a lot of people compare themselves to digitally native companies, we'd love to hear what you have going there. And then we'll jump out to Scott right after this.

Tim Juravich  15:23

But let's say even the digitally native companies, they're still the idea of, you know, where does content come from? Is it organic, created from a community? Or is it created by an organization to drive a conversation? You know, most of the cases, there's some companies that over indexed on hey, we're gonna do one to one content, you know, every person that comes through, we're gonna create one to one content? Well, the the biggest thing in all of this is the ROI, you know, is that is the value in creating, you know, really complex content that can be used in million million different places, valuable, of course, but for some companies, and one of our high tech clients, they found that by keeping it consistent, it created higher conversions, you know, on their homepage, the hero image, creating it consistent, created higher conversions, as opposed to it trying to rapidly guess, try to personalize and change. So, you know, there is a large conversation in the world right now around personalization in general, but also, technology, you know, do I go fully headless, and build everything? Well, no, there's a part of your journey where you should, for sure, and that's where, you know, we're even seeing these larger companies reassess their plans, because content at scale, owning experiences scale, it's costly, it's, it's too much. But a specific stage in the journey where you can create a deeper relationship, you can convert, you can change it from a, you know, no to an Add to Cart. That's where personalization matters and owning the experiences really mattering.

Aaron Conant  17:03

Awesome. Let's jump out, you know, Scott would love to hear where you're at, in this, you know, kind of unique time that we found ourselves as far as, you know, digital digitization of content, measurement, personalization, you know, experiences as a whole, that next level of, you know, what do we do that we go beyond just putting the same image in front of somebody, but actually making the experience for them that's tailored to them?

Scott  17:31

Yeah, I think, for us that, that, you know, COVID has accelerated all of that, you know, our business has been around, we're celebrating our 50th. Year this year. And when we started, it was, you know, catalog business, right. And so as we get into internet-based, more internet-based business, we have a lot of legacy legacy customers, if you will, Legacy businesses that are used to, you know, in the old days, probably faxed in their orders, and now now calling their orders, but but resist the digital side of it. But at the same time, we have a tremendous amount of customers that are Gen Z and millennials that that want the digital side, right? So for us, it's, it's this balance. And for me, it's kind of just looking and listening to these things. But how we find that balance with profiling our customer, like Who are we speaking to? What experience? Are they looking for the example that was used earlier? 85 to 87, you can kind of profile, it's a fairly, relatively speaking, narrow, targeted audience, right. And you can speak to that those needs. In our, in our situation, we're kind of hitting a very broad spectrum of customers. So needs and requirements are different. And but we were trying to figure out how we communicate with them from a digital perspective, not just content, but also experience. And then going further for us, because it's, it's still somewhat new, if you will, is then how do we how do we answer the why question. So whatever we might see digitally as a digital experience, what is, you know, what's the why behind that? You know, why are they why did they come back? Why did they repeat purchase? Why did they place an order? Why did they leave? Why did this marketing kind of campaign drive activity? And this one didn't, you know, is it a plus b equals c or is that, you know, a plus b equals F, like, I mean, you know, and trying to understand the interrelationships of those all in trying to address a personalized experience, right, why they're coming to our site and want to work with us. So it's, we're trying to kind of look Get those components and understand them and understand how how they play in our industry, if you will, and our customer base understanding that it's going to be different, depending on you're talking to a 60 year old owner, versus a 25-year-old guy who's a co-owner, who's, you know, got five employees, but maybe doing the same amount of revenue is someone who's got, yeah, been around for a lot longer.

Tim Juravich  20:28

So. And that is definitely one of the conversations that that that I've been having a lot is, you know, clients that move to a full a full self-service model, you know, this is direct to consumer, it's touchless, you don't have to talk to anybody? Well, for a lot of organizations, that's where the relationships, the bond formed for a longer-term, you know, a longer-term relationship, the, you know, I could cancel it anytime I don't have to order mate, if it's not top of mind, then I'm not going to continue the relationship, you know, everybody's acting on that differently. And especially one of the biggest areas that's been impacted by that is, you know, you know, we have a younger generation that, you know, even myself, I would very rarely pick up a call, you know, a phone call to tell somebody that I want to make an appointment, or I want a service. But if I could fill it out online, not just a lead form, but complete the transaction the first time, that's great. But then I want to create a relationship after that everybody's journey is not linear anymore. There's there's weaves weaves, in turns. So that is, you know, perfectly the, the profiling of it is, is really not a, you can't call out three or four cohorts of people anymore. It's, it's much more complex than that, especially the journeys of likes and wants from decisioning through purchasing. It's quite complex now. And have you been? Maybe just to, you know, kind of keep going on that a bit. Scott, from, from your perspective, have you all been looking at, you know, the reliance on some of your platform vendors, are you looking at, there's a world where you need to start to own more of that from a, from a data from a decisioning. standpoint? I'm just curious about what you're saying.

Scott  22:16

Yeah I mean, we really are relatively new at it. Which is odd, right? 50 years, but we're kind of, we like to see other people develop, we're not we're not first movers, in terms of technology in general. And we kind of like to wait and see and see how things work. So we're a bit cautious or conservative now approach. But traditionally, we like to own our own data. And we like to do, we'd like to control that whole experience and user experience internally. And I think we'll, you know, we'll have to challenge that belief system as we go forward, right, at a pace in which in order to kind of keep up not with our competition, but with our customers, right, and our customers expectations, we'll have to kind of challenge our, our approach or traditional approach to see, where do we bring in partners where we bring in data systems to analyze data to help us do that, and make, you know, make quicker, more informed decisions without having to dive into data that might take six weeks to analyze, right? Like we could quickly see cause and effect and try and answer those wise. So yeah.

Aaron Conant  23:39

So a couple things come to mind here, Scott, thanks for jumping in. One is around the digital experience, you're talking about oni data. And I was just thinking of where they dropped kind of a question just in the chat here. We could have done it on a poll, I guess, if we, you know, had this stuff ahead of time, but I'm going to drop one in the chat. If everybody want to looks at psoriasis, how competent you feel and your ability to quickly adjust your digital experience to the needs of your customers. You know, just a one to five, you know, people can kind of just drop in numbers there one to five. Why people are doing that, you know, it brings up another point Skyridge you're saying it's like there's a blend, right? Like, what is that blend of? I need to bring in somebody to help out. And I need to hire internally. Right. And I'll kind of kick that over to Tim, because you guys deal with a lot of people like what do you see? It's not all it's not all one way but what does that blend normally look like? How much do you need to own? And how much do you need to bring in vendors? Because it's the balance, right?

Tim Juravich  24:39

I would say in a lot of conversations, especially in the high tech space, there's a there's a lot of jumps to hey, we're gonna go you know, headless and own everything. And now a lot of them are kind of pulling back on that, you know, from a from a technology standpoint. What we're what we're really seeing is you know, people bring Seeing the idea of, you know, what used to be, you know, the CDP and sounded very expensive to, hey, we're really just talking about analytics and a CRM system like, we can do this ourselves with the technologies that are there. But we will need to get a little more tech savvy around, you know, when we talk about analytics, tagging, it's not a set and forget, it's a, you know, really need to understand what does, how does this data connect from a lead to an analytics and analytics call? So what we're what we're really seeing is, across the board, I'd say, between 70 and 80%, using the platforms that exist out there using the vendors and others that, that do what they do very well. And really challenging yourself on that, that 20% of, you know, hey, is there something here that, you know, we don't necessarily need to build, but we might think about differently. Instead of, you know, using just our, our analytics vendor, maybe we're gonna bring that data somewhere where we can actually crunch it against, you know, some of the offline sales that we've been doing, we might try to create some content, not from, you know, hey, redo our website. But hey, let's just bring content from another, another provider, maybe even use some affiliate content to see if something could be more relevant to them. There's, there are peaceful ways to inject that into your experience that we're seeing, you know, for that 20%. That's where the value really, really occurs for most companies.

Aaron Conant  26:34

Awesome, love it. I'm gonna jump out Alex, I don't know if you can jump in. But you drop the three in there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. And I also want to jump out to Sean next, but Alex, we'd love to hear your thoughts around, you know, a three, how are you approaching it? I mean, I didn't have anybody put a five in that I saw. And so, you know, we'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Sure.

Alex  26:57

Yeah, I kind of three, we're a small company still relatively small. But we work in the fashion retail space. So there's lots of competition. And to sort of answer your earlier question to we, I sort of see content in two buckets. One is sort of the base level, customer journey, you know, FAQs, and how-tos and you know, sort of priming people priming their expectations for what to expect from us. And so that's sort of like a base level of content. And then the sort of nice to have is more editorial, more storytelling. And I think one of the bigger challenges is that to do that second level of storytelling requires a lot of resources and a lot of production and, you know, aligning things. And obviously, measuring the impact. Um, I would say, the reason that I put the three out of five is because usually on the marketing side, we are, well ahead of our technical capabilities, or, in any case, the sort of tech side of things, and the the implementation is much slower than what then how fast we can move in terms of, you know, finding the right solution or coming up with the creatives. But it's like, you know, having the pieces talk to each other, or, you know, the tracking pixel be deployed on the site, that stuff tends to take longer. So usually, that's the stumbling block for us is sort of actual technical implementation rather than the idea or the design or the creative itself.

Aaron Conant  28:46

Yeah, awesome. With Tim, we'd love to hear your thoughts there as well. I mean, I think that's, it's not easy. It's not easy to create content, but it's easier than connecting everything on the back end. Right? That's, and then an avenue to give you good enough data where you can actually make a decision on what to do next, or, you know, I mean, anyways, I'll kind of kick it over to you.

Tim Juravich  29:07

Yeah, no, I, and you hit on something really, I think important, in there, too, which is, you mentioned, you know, you're a smaller organization, one of the biggest things that we found is, and I think this, this is true across marketing, and you're really all portions of the business, but marketing and commerce, eCommerce are generally stretched across multiple organizational challenges that you deal with. And so the ability to adapt, you know, we've seen some of our clients that are, you know, hey, they're in, they're in the, they're really focused on lead gen or growth. Okay, we're gonna have to do a cross-functional team, because if it was led by just marketing, you know, the tech folks are gonna say, Well, you know, in 18 months, we'll get a technology set up for you get this get going. Or if it's, you know, if it's technology lead, you know, it may not really give you the insights you need. So, we've been seeing, you know, large organ is that, you know, just to hit on something really specific here for a second, but large organizations that their pages take second, you know, 1520 seconds to load because they've tried to put every pixel in the world on it. And it's now impacting the user experience, because they're trying to get data in all the right places. So there's a really delicate balance between, you know, that, you know, keeping things small, and breaking down those silos that is super critical, but I do I do love how you put the two classifications of content. You know, we all know that price isn't always the driver for talking about a commerce relationship. It's about what got you there in the first place. And that editorial content for sure is, if you're going to invest there, you better better make sure it drives the value. So it's a great way to walk through Alex.

Aaron Conant  30:53

I'm gonna jump over Aaron, I don't know if you can jump in. That'd be that'd be awesome. To hear your thoughts a saw you just dropped the three in there as well.

Aaron  31:04

I think, you know, Based on what, Alex said and also what Tim just pretty aligned with, I think we're probably a mid mid-sized company. So, you know, we're sort of, you know, like that in between, we have full-funnel content. And we develop top funnel for educating people about the brand, we're in the fashion industry, accessories industry. So there's a whole educational angle, to sort of drive new customer eyeballs from a prospecting perspective. And then we have our mid-funnel, you know, dragging them along, as they come along with us to go and talk more about the function of the bags and the accessories. And then we have the, you know, the very basic sort of PDP imagery that we use on forum just to grab, it's really for them to go ahead and purchase because we've kind of educated them through the funnel. And, you know, one of my pain points is getting all the funding to create all the content, because there's constantly needs to like, have bells and whistles to video to show what's in the bag, how's the bag made, it's made from recycled X and recycled Y and why’s the bag So terrific. So it's a, it's a huge challenge to just have enough content, not just for our homepage, but for PDP for email for SMS, I mean, all the, you know, retention, all the different needs that we have there just in the last two to three years, it's just you know, the amount of content that our teams develop, above and beyond our seasonal photoshoots. It's just, it's just incredible. Now, one of my biggest challenges is really, when we develop some of these great content, we do it in advance, and so the time the market time, it comes into being ready to be used, sometimes a funding has gone from top-funnel, so we're sitting with this content, and we didn't have to repurpose, because we spent all this money on it to put it in mid-funnel and lower fund or, you know, leverage someone out on YouTube, you know, even though it was meant to be for on for CTV and things like that. So sometimes the funding dries up to sort of dry some of that top-funnel, just because the nature of the business is forever as forever changing suddenly during COVID, which is hard to keep track of, you know, the businesses. So I totally, you know, from what what both you guys said, I agree with and also having other stakeholders within the company, part of the process, still help us ensure we have funding in terms of marketing dollars out there to to, to leverage the content that's being created? Yeah, I mean, we've got all these different prospecting, retention, and everything in between that to bring to bring on to retarget our current customers and bring on new customers are a mouthful.

Tim Juravich  33:45

Yeah, that's a that's great. And I think you know, that the funding aspect is a really, really key one, and it'd be curious from others to, you know, even in a small organization, you know, hey, funding for creating content and funding for creating, hey, we feel like, you know, we have a differentiated product here, we've just released something new. And if we could tell that story, we know it can drive sales. Well, some other products may not get that kind of love, and that's totally fine. I'd be curious, you know, how much, you know, you know, funding cycles in impact, everybody. But I'd be curious, you know, from some of those on the on the call here, you know, when you think about funding, are you are you battling against some of the pay? Well, you, you asked for this, this entire quarter, wait till next quarter, or some of your organization's starting to think about, you know, hey, what's the ROI? Are they starting to use? Use terms around that? Just be really curious to see what you're all saying.

Aaron Conant  34:48

I just invited Sean and John would love to hear your thoughts here and we others can jump in as well.

Sean  34:53

Sure. I'm Sean, the visual brand strategist, and I'm fairly new to the company, but one of the things that we're in the middle of completely overhauling our, the company's website and all of our web touchpoints. So multi-year project, you know, Lincoln is 105-year-old company. And, you know, the way that we, you know, this is all I'm sort of in a learning phase. So a lot of this that you're talking about is new to me, and I'm, I'm doing a full dive into this at this point in my career, but one of the things that we've been talking about is that the advertising that we've been doing up until now is sort of 80 2080 80% of our advertising is towards older people, and older audiences. But most older people already have insurance and financial products in place. And we're trying to appeal to reach out to younger audiences, people in their late 20s and 30s. And, you know, that's a real challenge. Because there's a, there's a, there's a perception out there that, you know, we're a stodgy company, and, you know, so we're really trying to brainstorm around how to, to reach out to them and kind of looking at everything. So that's, that's sort of where I am right now.

Aaron Conant  36:22

Where do you have the funding to provide? So I came out of pharma, right? 130-year-old pharma company, so highly regulated, with older demographic using your product? Right. And that's a tough shift to make. Now I go, and I look for funding. And it's kind of, you know, an uphill battle of where it comes from, for multiple different aspects, right? Is it the content piece, like, you know, Aaron was saying, or is it the technology side? That's, you know, actually distributing it? And or, you know, doing the metrics on the back end? And the analysis and the personalization? Like, do? are you tackling that funding portion? That's only so much money out there?

Sean  37:04

Right. Do you mean, when you say funding, I mean, where are we putting our resources?

Aaron Conant  37:15

It's, it's weird as a, you know, it's, it's, we're, what department for me, a lot of times I get the question, what the department is coming out, the coming out of marketing is coming out it is their new digital organization that's getting its private funding?

Sean  37:33

Well, I'm not, I don't have to have eyes on on a lot of that information. But one of the challenges that we have that might be related to what you're saying is that the company is very siloed. And there isn't a lot of transparency between these silos. And we're trying to break some of those down. And, you know, right now, there isn't a lot of communication between, you know, our UI developers it and you know, where we're coming from in the corporate marketing brand side. And so it's a challenge moving forward, I think that there's not, there's not a lot of financial challenges, as far as putting the money into these efforts. I haven't sensed that, but it's just a lot of it is, I think that even the people at Lincoln, they've been doing things the same way for a long time. And, you know, they're making an attempt to sort of bring in people and, you know, we've done a brand refresh. And, you know, there's a lot of sort of resistance within the company even. But, you know, we're trying to take a very long, long-range vision and start shifting towards younger people and I don't know, that's, that's, that's it.

Tim Juravich  39:03

I mean, it is a it is it, you know, a challenge when when you are going through a, you know, multi-year transformation there because, you know, every decision starts to feel like, Hey, we're adding weeks and months, we're not aligning, we're getting further apart. Yeah, and, and we've definitely seen you, hey, some of the things that drive people together is, hey, we're gonna align on this design pattern, you know, we're gonna rely on hey, here's the templates. But sometimes, you need to, you know, be able to have the ability to say, Hey, we got to push out and say, hey, if we're, if we're if we're thinking about you know, kind of the leads getting people through putting people through the journey a little bit differently. Hey, man, there's there's got to be a spot where we really need to, you know, own it from from a marketing standpoint, we really need to push it. So we've definitely seen the, you know, getting the company line on hey, let's follow the standards. And then where there's really the value, where you think there really could be the change, that's the area to double down on and, you know, make the case. But it is a, it is a complex thing. Because, you know, as you go to a younger generation, it's not just, you know, through through companies and employment, it may be through employment that people come into a good financial group, it may be, you know, through leads through some non-traditional methods that you may have not used in the past. And that's, you know, you're blazing new territory there.

Don Keninitz  40:28

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Awesome.

Aaron Conant  40:32

Thanks Shawn, for jumping in. I'm gonna jump out next. Chad, I don't know if you can come off mute. But if you could, that'd be awesome. Just asked to unmute here, Chad, you know, how are you looking at this space as a whole? Yeah, it can be anything from just content to digital transformation, you know, across the board, you know, the journey. And I don't know, if I saw you in the chat here, if you had a one, two or three, and, you know, kind of where you're at in the, the asset side, but, you know, we'd love to have you jump in here.

Chad  41:02

Yeah, sure. Apologies. I did not, I did not respond in the chat. So, alright. But But yeah, so definitely, we face challenges around content, you know, kind of echoed that sentiment, where it's just, we kind of preface what my response I worked for a national parking operator. So, you know, we are very much in in the moment type of company. So and it's a, it's a lower margin product as well, and a lower ticket items. So a lot of that acquisition marketing, we're trying to sort of roll up and figure out how we can really extend the lifetime value of a client to make sure that, you know, where we're justifying the spend up front and the investment in, you know, all of the user experiences and creating journeys and reengagement. So super important, but also, again, you know, echoing one of the sentiments, you know, the challenges we're facing, definitely, we're not, it's as far as IT resources, because we are relatively decent sized company, but we're, we still don't have the resources needed. We're, we're very product focused, and Product functionality and feature focus when it comes to the IT department and development resources. So we're kind of, you know, forced to work with what you have. And I'm probably guilty of putting too many pixels in my GTM. Because I don't have like the judge the web development, you know, expertise to know how badly I'm hurting our pages, development and load times. But, but yeah, so those are, you know, the challenges that we face, but also at the same time, really exciting, you know, pleased to be in because we do have so many transactions, such rich first party data to create look alike audiences that have been really successful in advertising and reducing that cost per acquisition, because, you know, we really are getting pretty close to what our ideal customer is, or at least our machine learning is getting to know what our ideal customer is. So I actually did like the the waste management reference, because it seems like, it's when you need it, you need it fast, and it's going to happen. So, three marketing, we don't have a very long window, right? You need marketing, you know, we're trying to get that reservation at to guarantee that revenue, but, you know, in 48 hours, you're probably not going to need it. So it's hard to justify that marketing spend, unless you're, you know, looking for reactivation campaign or anything like that.

Tim Juravich  43:42

And that's super well said, Chad, you know, one of the biggest things for organizations that are, you know, time in place is that you're there, you're fighting the top of the funnel, you're fighting the SEO game, or, you know, the paid paid search. And, you know, to do that, you need to have a, you know, performance, you know, web experience, but also really just compete on the right terms. But, you know, one of the things you hit on that I think is is really critical is that, you know, I think a lot of people are looking at, you know, email, email marketing is going away. Well, no, I mean, we still use emails. I mean, my Gmail is out of control 1000s of emails that I can't even unsubscribe with. I'm sure some of us are the same. But but some of the some of the tactics that we've seen people uses, hey, it's hard for us to do something on a web experience. But it's really easy for us to segment an email distribution list. It's really easy for us to try a new offering to learn something, you know, if you have the right, you know, tech and even some some relatively open source or free technology can give you the, hey, did somebody open the email? Did they click that they spend some time looking at it? Even understanding what what some users from a first party standpoint are interested in, could really change it, change the dynamic of how you engage with them going forward? So I think you hit on, you know, some of the pieces of you can't look at in that in your world, you can't necessarily look at the editorialized content, but you can look at, you know, how do you change the journey? Just by getting some better signals? You know?

Chad  45:15

Yeah, and we're a marketing cloud overall, discuss kind of what we're using for marketing, automation, stuff like that. But we're a marketing cloud driven marketing organizations. And, you know, like you said, the amount of things that you can do, I lament most of the time, because we just don't have the tech resources to integrate SDKs and, you know, create complex journeys, or maybe they don't need to be complex. But, you know, get those emails, more conversational at the right time. You know, we're building those out. But I think there's a lot more potential.

Aaron Conant  45:50

Yeah, we're gonna call one more thread that Chad brought up, which was the IT resources side, right? Because that comes up all the time. I've got 45 different projects to do. I put them in it. And I think you were saying this, you know, the beginning? Yeah. If you give it to the IT department to run, it gets pushed out, you know, three years. So they say, Hey, which one of these do you want? Like, there's not one at the mall? How are you see people balance that?

Tim Juravich  46:17

It's, it's a tricky one. Because, you know, in a lot of organizations, you know, especially, you know, more mature organizations that get into the world where they have a digital organization, they have an IT organization, and then they've mark an organization. It's like, where do I go, if I want to update the website? Well, all of us, um, the challenge is, you know, always the budgeting, because that turns into a multi month, how do we connect dependencies and things throughout. So, you know, some of the biggest things that we've seen We've been seeing is, you know, really kind of getting down to the fundamentals of, you know, we'll call it the metamorphosis of marketing, you know, because we love our alliteration, the idea that there are pieces inside of marketing that marketing organizations or even digital organizations can own more of their tools. And, you know, some of the tools that you might get are GTM, and others, and you can use them as much as you can. But what we've what we've seen is a world where, you know, arming marketing organizations with the right, you know, technical aptitude, some of the leaders really buying into the idea of pay for us to continue to drive marketing numbers. I think we fundamentally across the board, we see any business that's sticking with our current plan, it's, it's changing, good or bad or otherwise, because of technology. So looking at your technical aptitude from a marketing standpoint, knowing where you might want to make a dent, we've seen that IT organizations are more than willing and welcome for marketing to take a chunk out of it. And to own some of it, but in really targeted areas and I think we've talked about identity, we talked about tagging, we're talking about in some places content or using content partners at organizations are now more welcome to partnering on that, especially when you could bring a technology leaning solution to them.

Aaron Conant  48:17

Awesome, always see if I can jump out here too. And others of you have a view of, you know, kind of questions here. We're almost at the end of this. You know, Dennis, I don't know if you can jump in. He can just hit the unmute. You know, you can jump in, you know, wondering like, what's the biggest thing that you're you're trying to solve for right now? If Dennis can jump in, it's all right. No worries. Yeah. Tim, if I kind of spent it towards you and others if you have a Dennis you want to jump in

Dennis  48:45

here and I can jump in I've got multitude of problems. We're we're launching new SAP, we launched a new a Kenya last year. We're trying to do new down, we're redoing all of our websites with Magento two, we bought three new brands in the last year. We're like ridiculous. And so we're trying to manage all this stuff with all these different systems all these we already had legacy brands that were kind of a mid major about $500 million and so and then try to keep everything running and then with with with with lack of stock and all the other stuff that because I deal I'm eCommerce on the sales side, and then we're trying to manage all this other stuff in the background. We're just like, barely floating. We're missing any waves or anything, that's for sure.

Aaron Conant  49:35

Anytime you bring in change in an ERP system, and you're throwing that into the mix of a digital transformation, kind of hold my breath. I mean, we entered a Perego and we always shut down a company there for a little bit. So

Dennis  49:47

I'm not sure that we might not still do that, especially with SAP implementation in less than seven months that we're trying to get this done. So I just and then we on the m&e, No, we need to update our data. And we've got new digital analysts that are working on that. And we've had copywriters and all kinds of stuff, and just build out a new marketing team so crazy. Yeah,

Aaron Conant  50:16

I'm gonna get over to you with a couple things, you know, just, you know, thoughts on where Dennis is at, which is pretty intense. But also what, you know, people on the line today, what's the next thing they should do? Right in evaluation, you know, they have their little checklist of, Hey, these are some key takeaways as a whole from from this call and everybody you know, thanks for you know, kind of say this, we get close again, thanks, everybody for coming in awesome conversation. You see anybody on the line today you want a conversation with you want to connect with, shoot us an email, that's what we do networking, knowledge sharing. Obviously, the team, Deloitte Digital are great friends, partner support is the network across the board, you know, be the chance if it's worth it, have a follow up conversation with Tim and the team over there. They're, they're fantastic and helping a lot of brands out in the network. On the other side, if you need connections to anybody, or any service providers, we've got a shortlist we got close to 10,000 brands in the network. And that's everything from Amazon direct to consumer depend tools to international expansion, drop shipping companies we got, we have it all. So don't hesitate to shoot us an email on that spot. But Tim, you know, kind of final thoughts here, as we wrap it up,

Tim Juravich  51:22

I would say, you know the moving of multiple technologies at once. Not uncommon, and we've all been in those, those positions. And man, it is scary. As you know, some of the biggest things, as you call it out, though, is they some of those systems like an ERP system, there's going to be a lot of conversations on how that occurs. Some of the biggest pieces that we definitely understand from a, you know, from a quoting process is, you know, hey, that tool, yeah, the tool does blank, well, does the tool do blink correctly for what we're trying to change with an organization, ultimately, you know, the biggest thing you know, as you think about where you're at, understanding, this sort of goes to some of the next steps for all of you, you know, and just really the way that we look at this, as you know, there's, there's not a linear journey that any of our customers go through as much as we'd love to, unless you're truthfully like an as a service product where people can trial, and then they're just in relationship with you for multiple months. Almost everybody is in a much, much more jumbled journey. But if you think about some of the areas where you really want to differentiate, you know, we have awareness and acquisition, consideration and purchase, servicing and loyalty, you know, some of the areas in which you are really focusing your business, what we generally say is, like, you know, I think we all always feel like we could be doing more, we should have the data, we should be able to do blank. But we always say like, Hey, let's pick a spot. Like right now for us service. You know, we want to have self service. But we also want to make sure that people know if they want to call, let's get them routed properly. That's no more about them. You know, that that in itself is a large initiative across organizations. But where can you in that journey really focus on where can I drive the most value for our customers? Where can I invest? And, you know, really, we always say, like, test and learn, put a tactic out there, do something over email, do something with some of the tools you have today, to prove a case? Because no matter what if you have the data that says, hey, when we've done blank, it increases conversions. 40% It's a money making idea. People don't turn it down, or if they do, you at least have fuel for the next conversation. So I'd really focus on the parts of your journey that you would really want to drive from an ROI standpoint, test, get a get some metrics, and know that there's a lot of great technology and approaches out there these days that they can make it happen for you.

Aaron Conant  53:57

Awesome. Well, thanks again, Tim. for your time today. Thanks for you know, being lend us your insights, but also a lot of splitting on the hot seat over and over again for the past 15 minutes ago. No, here Yeah, I can work with the team, we can get you out a list of you know, just connecting everybody on the call here. We just always like to make sure people don't hit Reply All if we do put everybody on an email. So anyways, we'll get the team together to put that on that fantastic conversation today. Thanks again, Tim for jumping in and letting us throw all those questions at you thanks for everybody who's able to jump in and have a conversation is all around a blast. Hope everybody has a fantastic Wednesday everybody take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Alrighty, Thanks again, everybody.