The Future of Digital Marketing - Bob Egner from EPiServer

My name is Bob Egner. I'm the head of product management at EpiServer and came in yesterday. I just wanted to mention I really enjoy coming to Norway for a couple of reasons. One is you have great weather here. It was nice. I was expecting something a little more dreary for spring. So thanks very much for organizing that for me. The second thing is I really enjoy working with the EpiServer team here in Norway. They're one of the best we have in the world. They do a fantastic job looking after all of your needs and helping you understand how EpiServer software and technology can help you solve real business problems that you have. I was asked to talk a little bit today about some of the thoughts that we have and issues that might drive what we're doing with our products and solutions moving forward. And so I wanted to start off with a little bit of background about the process we use to think about the needs of our customers and how we turn that into a set of solutions that we're building. I'll talk a little bit about some trends that we continue to watch These are important areas that are somewhat stable. They change a little bit from year to year, but for the most part they've been fairly consistent. And then I'll talk about some roadmap themes and some specific areas that we're working on building out further. Now to get started with the conversation, I just want to remind everyone, in case you haven't seen it in the global news, that the U.S. is in the middle of our political high season. So we've got this very exciting presidential campaign that's gotten started. And when I was thinking about what we're doing, what to talk about today, it reminded me of this quote that I think is largely attributed to Bismarck from Germany from the 19th century, that if you know how laws and sausages are made, you're suddenly not very interested in either one. So the process here is a little bit like this meat grinder. We drop a lot of things in the top and then something comes out the other end that hopefully turns into great software for you. The areas that go into the product when we start looking for input, really starts with this essential area. What are the problems that our customers and partners have that we need to be able to solve in order for them to be successful? That's really the focus and the way that our business will continue to move forward. So we start with input there. It comes from a variety of sources. One that I would highlight that we've introduced just last year as the EpiServer company got a little bit larger is this idea of a customer advisory board. We're quite interested in being on the front edge, being aggressive at pushing EpiServer forward all the time. So we take a lot of input from them and they challenge us all the time to do better and greater things with our products. From our partners' perspective, we've introduced the concept of partner inner circle. And this is the same sort of scenario. It's partners that are very aggressive at trying to push the EpiServer product forward. And so we take that input. We also have a very special relationship with EpiServer MVPs. Most valuable professionals. And these are developers that have a very close relationship with our development team and provide a lot of feedback about how our software works, how it should work. And these, I think, are the three most important audiences that we get input from feeding into the planning exercise we go through. We do take a lot of input from industry analysts. I myself spend quite a bit of time with analysts like Gartner and Forrester. There are several others in different regions around the world and some that are not. And we take their input because they're sort of an extension for us at understanding what's happening in the market and how we should be thinking about our product. We look very closely at technology trends, new developments that are happening in the industry. For example, virtual reality has been a big buzz topic at consumer electronic shows earlier this year. And so we're always trying to look at and understand how that technology might affect the way that people would expect to interact with our products. Of course, we keep an eye on competitors also. We like to know what they're up to. But really it's not from the perspective of trying to do the same thing they are, but at least see if they've got some clever ideas that we might be able to take and build on and make something even better out of it. Armed with all of that input, we go into this basic prioritization process where we focus on three key areas to determine where we will work next. The first one is in the upper right, what is best for the user experience. What will make life better for people who are using our product and be more productive and effective or maybe more cost efficient in the way they work with EpiServer software. Next is what's important from a technology standpoint. We've put a lot of effort into thinking about and designing our architecture to make it very scalable so you can use small components or stack a number of components together and get a bigger solution out. We've also taken this approach of being very open with our architecture. I mean that's the way that the internet was made, openness and connectivity. And so that's a key element for us. And that drives us in many cases to taking an approach where we will make small add-on modules, little things that you can plug into the EpiServer platform to extend the functionality. We try it. We hand it out to our customers and partners and let them try it. And if it seems like it's working, we'll take that into the main product over time. So even the example that you saw earlier today with Facebook Instant Articles is a great example of that. It's a great example of that same process continuing to move forward. We also focus on what's important for the business. I mean EpiServer is a company after all, so we have to make sure that we're doing the right things to be able to scale and grow with the opportunities that present themselves in the market. So as we work through that prioritization process, out pops a roadmap. Now the roadmap is the set of problems that we would like to solve for our customers and why that's important and how that should be staged out over time. And then we move from there to develop something that we call a prioritized backlog. Now this is actually the work list, the tasks that we hand to our developers to be able to work and build out solutions. So from that simple overview, we're just taking all kinds of input in at the top, prioritizing according to a formula that we have, and then providing some guidance for where we ought to be developing and building solutions out. So I thought I next would step you through some of the areas that we're thinking about in terms of the things that we're going to be doing. So I'm going to start with the business problems that we're thinking about in terms of these business problems that are important to solve. These are a little bit high level, but I think they're very consistent over the past few years, and we think there's a lot of opportunity to provide even greater value. The first one that I'll highlight is this idea that it's a mixed media world. And if you come from an advertising or marketing background, you probably know these terms about owned media, paid media, and earned media, and the definitions are up there for you to see. But the new element, which is actually not that new anymore, is social media. Coming in, and when this came in initially, it was viewed as this sort of free place that you can go put content and see what kind of engagement you can get with audiences and sort of bypass an advertising channel. You might get a message out in that channel. You might use an engagement point there to drive traffic to some other engagement point that you would have. But really our focus here is to help our customers become great wherever they choose to be. As opposed to getting great in just one of these medias. Over time, we've also seen that social media has become somewhat more closely related to paid media. In fact, it's very effective to put ad spend into social media largely because it's an opportunity to become very targeted. You can identify target and make your ad dollars, your ad spend go even further by getting it in front of exactly the right people in social media. So between paid media and social media, there's this kind of spread in there that's interesting to look at. Also, we see that paid media supports and drives even more traffic in social media. YouTube, for example, is a great idea of a social media platform that has really become a brand advertising platform. And one of the things that we see our customers struggling with all around the world is this idea that they'll put a lot of effort into creating a brand. In some cases, just creating interesting videos to try to drive traffic and you pop it up on YouTube and nothing happens. It's not that exciting. You turn on the ad spend and suddenly you're driving a lot of traffic to the videos, making a lot of impressions and getting conversions that move that traffic through to the next step. So you're either making an impression or you're able to derive traffic coming through that social channel. There's some interesting data points that have been floating around recently that sort of suggest that YouTube is kind of crack cocaine for marketers. Microsoft introduced a Surface tablet recently. They put some interesting and clever videos up on YouTube, but until they turn ad spend on, they were getting a very low number of impressions. The day they turned the ad spend on, they had an increase of about 1,300% views of their creative content on YouTube. There's a number of videos. There's a number of analysts that provide other interesting data points in that area of how to make more effective use of social media by supporting it with your paid media and combining those two together. Now, I also want to talk a little bit about the fact that customers control which media they decide to work with or how they operate. The data points that we get from Forrester shows that there's close to three devices per individual. And maybe you in this room have a similar feeling about things. You might have something as old school as TV. You might have something as new as tablets or smartphones or some combination in between. And the way that you work and interact with content online, all of your digital touch points are really in the hands of the consumer to decide which channel they're looking at at any point in time. It's a lot of flexibility and a lot of power for consumers. But it also creates a challenge for marketers who are trying to get their content online. It's a challenge for marketers who are trying to get their message out to specific individuals. You could either say, hey, well, I'm only getting my message out in this certain channel and hope that the audience I'm trying to reach goes there. Or you might decide that you've got to spread your message out amongst multiple channels. And that's where that hub concept that Evan talked about earlier fits into the way we think about our strategy. So I think the other thing that's really important to look at here, a lot of the work for digital touch points. Our customers in various parts of the world is really focused on a commercial endeavor. They're trying to sell something, not necessarily transactional e-commerce online. But one of the things, the data points that I think is really interesting to look at is in the U.S. in 2013, one of six consumers had a digital touch point before they went into a store. This year, 2016, two out of three have had a digital experience before they go into a physical store to purchase something if they're purchasing in the store at all. And so I think the real takeaway from that is it's a little bit less about e-commerce and it's much more about e-influence. The organizations that are trying to set their ad spend or their ad budget based on their online sales I think are making a mistake and they need to focus their online spend based on everyone that they're possibly selling to. Now, I have some interesting feedback from Gartner as well. Gartner is another organization that we talk to on a regular basis. At Gartner, we take away this key theme, which is relevance is essential. Now, you've got the Gartner quote up here about what the world will be like in the future. We've heard these data points coming out over the past few years that unless you're looking at a way to engage with a visitor in a very personalized way, meaning a very relevant way, having the right message for what they're interested in at any point in time, you potentially will not be successful with those customers. Why? Because they have so many choices. And what Gartner advises is this idea of a pyramid, a way of becoming more and more relevant over time. And we've built out of a lot of technology that focuses on solving this type of problem of how to deliver the next best experience to any visitor who's coming into your own media or that you're interacting with in social media or in paid media. And the visitor, the customer who might be coming and interacting with your content, has a lot of choices, and they'll frequently shift channels as well. So there's data points floating around about the number of times people change channels or interact with different channels during the day. The most recent one I saw for a U.S. audience was 27 interactions in different channels during the course of the day. I saw another interesting data point that Apple released actually earlier this week that said the little interesting thing about this is that it's not just about the number of people that are coming in. And then there's the entry button, the start button on iPhones are, on average, pressed 80 times a day. So there's a constant and regular stream of visitors looking for specific information. And you know, in your own case, exactly what's on your mind when you push that button. You're looking for the information that you need to have. You're expecting it to be available right now to load extremely quickly. And it's got to look great on any size screen that you're dealing with. So those are kind of the key things. So there's a lot of key things that we've been focused on thinking about, input that comes from analysts and factoring into our product portfolio. So from that standpoint, let's take a look at what we're thinking about in terms of future direction. Now, I'll just restate a little bit of our corporate vision. And this is something that we've streamlined and put up on our website. But it's the idea that we're trying to help our customers instantly realize their brilliant ideas. And that in many cases, the complexity that I've talked about when you step back and think about the technology that underlies everything means you have to have systems that work and present content in a lot of different channels. That content needs to be fairly consistent. You need to be able to support visitors that move through different channels. You need to constantly tune and understand what they're working with. And you need to think ahead of what would they like to see as the next step so that you're prepared to deliver that in a very quick order. All the work that goes into being able to do that is what we're doing to support our customers, providing that technology and the way of working that makes them able to instantly realize brilliant ideas. So with that in mind, let's take a look at a couple of areas that have been key parts of our vision, what we've been working on for the past couple of years and what we'll plan on working on for the next year or two ahead. When I put these together, I sort of wished I had a soundtrack here. I think I need angels, you know, like a choir. A choir of angels singing, what's the vision? In this one, the first one starts off with this idea of one screen to create and manage experiences. There's a number of different tasks that people who are working with content need to think about working with content or working with products out of a catalog. How to place that, manage and launch content in individual components or in groups of components. How to distribute to multiple channels and how to measure the effectiveness of what you're doing there. I think we've made a lot of great progress in the EpiServer platform over the past few years where we've created this palette, this one screen where you're able to drag and drop and place different pieces of content, product information, assets that you might have and group and organize those things in a very flexible way. You're not tied to just text in certain areas or just images in other areas. You can really freely create a style in the layout. In the way that you think will make most sense to the visitors, make it easiest for them to navigate. But one of the recent advancements we made and we actually introduced in fall of this year, of last year, is this idea of projects. And when we talk to our customers and the way that they're working with content, we frequently find that there's multiple things that they're working on at the same time. Grouping those together into a project and being able to launch it or push it into production at the same time as well as rolling it through the system. And then we can pull it back if for some reason you need to pull it back. And all of the collaboration that goes into that has been a key part of our product development. You might have seen some interesting features coming out recently in that area. The next step for us is to put a goal around the project. And this starts in large part from our e-commerce business where the goals are a little bit easier to determine. How much merchandise did you sell? And so then you can create an objective for that project and the combination of a collection of content with a business goal. And that business goal really creates what we call a campaign. So it's a metric and a way to view the effectiveness of the collection of content or the campaign altogether in a campaign dashboard. With that in mind, let's take a look at what's coming up next in this area of one screen. We've got a number of pieces of functionality that we've introduced recently that you can see here. Projects, collaboration between projects and interesting notifications API for developers. A way to think about campaigns that start with a goal. And then we're moving into this area, if you remember the meat grinder picture, the prioritized backlog of the things that we're working on next. Are these areas around workflows and approvals being tied into the way collaboration works? Some very important changes in the way A-B testing works. We have introduced this capability for A -B testing at the page level in the past. We've rethought how that needs to work in terms of the editorial experience so that you're prompted to test certain areas based on traffic or engagement that you would get from visitors. So it's the system actually making a recommendation for you as well as being able to test anything. So you can A-B test images, products, content. So the usability and the ability to test anything is, I think, a great improvement as well as something that we'll introduce later on this year, client-side goals. If you think of normally A-B testing is arranged around something like the visitor hits a button. That's the completion of the goal in your A-B testing around that point. We'll introduce a JavaScript library so that you can set goals based on the way the visitor interacts on the client side. So from the browser, did the visitor scroll down the page a certain distance? Did they start a video or watch it play out? And including that in A-B testing we think will be quite powerful as well. We have an idea of extending commerce campaigns into content campaigns as well. So you can create and set goals and manage what you're doing there. And then a variety of new areas that we would like to build out further in terms of campaign dashboards. Some of the Google app and Facebook instant article concepts that you saw today starting off as add-ons. But we think it will be important to move those into the main product, especially Google app when Google app starts becoming a ranking signal that Google uses in their ranking algorithm. Let's look at the other area. We'll take a couple of minutes to talk about experiences delivered from the cloud. Now this has also been an area of attention from the market standpoint. A lot of organizations are thinking about moving systems that they have today in their own data centers into a cloud. There's a lot of flexibility that can be offered in that approach. And we've taken the idea and really built it up to the point where all of the EpiServer technology and the infrastructure required to run it can be purchased together. And you basically get the APIs available in the cloud to build your application on top of it in any way you would want to. It's a quite flexible business model. It's very focused on what business users would be interested in in terms of the results they get as opposed to the infrastructure cost that goes into it. So a very streamlined way to deploy a business model that scales based on use and experience delivery based on the performance of the cloud for any region around the world. The first offers that we started coming out with were in last year where we have this scale that you pay based on the number of page views or the number of content items that you're using in the cloud solution. And scales from there, you can add the commerce capability into it as well and bring it up to a much higher level. So we've focused here very much on the concept of capacity planning. Do you have enough computing resources to be able to serve the traffic that you need in the cloud? And then your local region or around the world is speed and performance where it needs to be, the security element and managing security risks. Then the business continuity. How do we make sure that the systems are staying up all the time and taking that headache away from our customers and moving that into this cloud environment? So let me wrap up talking about the area that I think is actually the most interesting one from my perspective. It's this idea of guiding digital experience optimization. And I think that's something that we've gotten into in many situations in the past is you spend time looking at analytics. You might use Google Analytics, for example, and you see a lot of data, but it's not very clear how you interpret that data into the actions that you would take next. And so we're always looking for ways to make that easier to work with. You saw us introduce Google Analytics Gadget in the past couple of years, so you can see analytic information on the same page as the content you're working with. But we think we can do a lot more and move forward there. Measuring and interpreting the impact of experiences and using that to give you additional tools to explore journeys and expand what you're doing as far as goals for visitors who come to your site. Suggesting actions for improving the experience on a regular basis. You can imagine every day you come into the office and the system might tell you, based on yesterday's traffic, you should change these three things based on the past month's traffic. You should change these other areas of the way the system is working. And being able to deliver the idea of always introducing for the visitor the best next step that they should take. So the next experience that most suits their needs. Now, as we worked on building out this area, I think one of the things that was important for us to look at is are we really taking advantage of technology in the right way? If you look at the work that marketers go through today, there is a lot of work that we're still putting on the market. How they're able to be on marketers to be able to think about their campaigns, authoring, what their content strategy is, how they manage campaigns. How they set up personalization for specific visitor groups or segments that they're trying to target, and the messaging for each one of those. How they tie that into email and testing. And the work that goes to the computer, to the machine, is really taking that data and then putting it up to the glass, getting that content up to the screen. It's really a quite small part of the overall project. project. And what we'd like to do is be able to empower marketers even further so that you're thinking more about the strategy and the creation of content and managing the experiences that you're delivering and put more workload onto the machine itself. In terms of optimizing the experiences that are delivered based on behavior of past visitors coming to the site or future visitors that would come in into the same segment, automating the process of creating personalized experiences and tying into other marketing technologies that you might have like marketing automation. The way we're going about doing this is by taking, this is just a quick diagram of what our architecture looks like. So this is a software stack focusing on two key areas in here. First of all, we have information about the profile of the visitor that comes to the site today. That's the way that the personalization technology works in the EpiServer platform. But what we're adding there is something called data analytics. And data analytics is basically a record of what happened. So visitors come to the site, they click around, know something about the visitor, either from past visits, referring links that brought them to the site, what pages they looked at when they're on the site, all of that information that helps you understand what's in that visitor's mind gets recorded in the data analytics. And then we have a second layer that's a logic layer higher up in our software stack that focuses on data science. And data science is the prediction that you make, what should I do based on the data I have. So data science is where the algorithm goes data analytics, as you could think of as just a pool of big data that you're constantly collecting, cleansing and being able to use to make decisions moving forward. So we think that technology and those basic changes really are going to change the makeup of the software stack over the next couple of years and give a lot of additional capabilities to our partners and customers to do some interesting things. Looking at this area, we don't have a lot from a history, standpoint to draw from. And so most of this is really new development that we're working on. If I focus on the prioritized backlog for a moment, we'll be introducing data analytics, this capability to collect and store large amounts of data that should be introduced in the first half of this year. And then we'll move into the first two applications of this. This is the data science part. The first one is segment advice. If you think about the segment of visitors that you're trying to reach based on all of the information that you know, you might make some smart decisions about that. What we find in the prototypes that we've been running with beta customers in various parts of the world is that when you see the pool of data and give it to a machine to find the segments, it frequently is finding different segments, segments that convert based on parameters that you might not even be thinking about. For example, we have a retail grocer in the U.S. that ran through this exercise with us, and they found that the conversion rates were based on people who had iPhones who visited their site between 11 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon. So it was something that was completely unexpected to the visitor, but they were able to uncover that important detail by going through this segment advice process. Behavioral content is another interesting area where we would be taking information about visitors and the content that they interact with, and then using that to predict what content you should present to the next visitor coming in. It's sort of like recommendations that you might have seen in the e-commerce space where maybe you go to Amazon, for example. You're looking at a product, and underneath you've got a set of small images. People who looked at this product also looked at these products, or people who looked at this also bought those products. That type of recommendation being applied to content we think is an interesting way to try to drive visitors to the content that's the next best piece of information they should be looking at. We also can envision a way to enrich profiles, so we think there's a lot of data in the data that we're trying to get to. So we're looking at things like data analytics and other data pools around in the ecosystem of technology that you might be working with, and connecting and tying those things together we think is important. That's what profile enrichment is. We even have some connectors that we've been working on to take information from social media networks with permission and pull those into the data analytics so that we can expand and enrich the understanding that we have about each visitor based on their interactions online. We think those underpinnings give us some great capability to focus on recommendations, account-based marketing, where you're targeting messages based on visitors coming to sites from the same customer organization. Think of B2B scenarios. Predicting where you should deliver content next, even if it's in different channels. And then being able to work to some of the financial metrics like goal attribution, trying to attribute how much you spend in various channels for paid search, for example, or paid advertising on YouTube to try to get traffic into a position where they're achieving their goal quickly. So those hopefully give you some ideas of the things that we're working on towards the future. And just to quickly summarize here, I think we've been building out technology that puts us in a great position to be able to continue to help you moving into the future. That combined with the local team we think really sets us up for an exciting tomorrow. Thanks. Thank you.