Presented by: Ed Breault, CMO, and Lisa Sharapata, Senior Director of Brand Experience, Aprimo 

Adapt or die in business is for real! Marketing organizations need to evolve. This presentation let us discover how Aprimo breaks through barriers to map, create, reuse, remix and measure the content experience to not just survive, but thrive!

Key Points:

• How to be adaptive and take an inside out approach
• Building responsiveness into your content operations
• Leveraging predictive demand to optimize the economics of winning

Session Notes

With over 50 years of marketing experience between them, Ed Breault and Lisa Sharapata took the stage as a team with chemistry and gave a clear demonstration of what teamwork looks like. The powerhouse duo’s casual yet fun style of presenting brought a humble element to their story of bringing Aprimo back to life and to success! 

The Walking Dead

• In 2016, Ed and Lisa were tasked with helping Aprimo back into the market and bringing it back to life after having been ‘dead’ for five years.  
• How? Through adaptive, responsive and predictive content experiences. 
• They knew they had one shot to get things right. 

What Was Different When Aprimo Started Up Again?:

• So much of the market had changed. 
• Amazon GO was creating a frictionless shopping experience. 
• There was the existence of Carvana: The Car-Vending Machine. 
• You could now buy a coffee through an app, and just picking it up at the store. 
• Peloton meant getting personalized content within our workouts. 
• BUT, now we have to be accountable with this content (i.e., Peloton had a class-action lawsuit for not managing their digital rights properly). 
• There’s no more B2B or B2C, it’s B2P: business to people! 
• We’re people with influence on business decisions for commercial outcomes. 

Content Experience Models 

1. Adaptive
   • Being able to change constantly with the economy
   • Weathering macro-changes, political changes, economic changes 
   • A strong foundation is a key to this; they had to get the underpinnings of how they manage content under control and have the ability to change no matter what the next big new channel or content medium is
   • The key was building for change 
   • You can never change your strategy, but you can change your execution 

2. Responsive

• Taking advantage of what's available now
• BUT you can’t just jump to responsive, you MUST be adaptive first because responsive without adaptive is just ad-hoc 
• No CMO will want to run a “marketing shit-show” 
• Bring in agile methodologies and created a mindset for change

3. Predictive: Aprimo is thriving here

• Intent marketing
• Interpreting first — and third-party demand signals
• From a practitioner's standpoint, it is our job to fully understand the audience
• When you build an intent model, it must be based on "what could potentially happen?

Coming Soon:

4. Prescriptive

• This is inspired by the Spotify effect.
• One-to-one experiences, programmatic, and expective experiences.
• Programmatic prescriptive their brand strategy.

Lisa’s Definition Of Content

• Meaningful information in an understandable format

Anything from a product brochure, ebook, a blog, video etc.

​To Get There

• Aprimo needed to think about the experiences they were trying to create and then reverse engineer to do the behind-the-scenes work to get there. 
• They had to deal with an old, traditional, suboptimal process where everyone was throwing their content out to channels and it was creating a “horrific” experience. 

So What Did They Do? 

• They started to consolidate all the things they were putting out into the market.
• They had to bring in a ‘brand counsellor’ (like, they joke, a marriage counsellor) to help with decision making, level setting, and mediation between leaders. 

But Something Was Missing

• Yes everyone was on board with changes, but this process wasn’t customer-centric. 
• This needed to be mapped out alongside the content lifecycle. 

Content Life Cycle

• Ideate
• Plan/Budget 
• Create
• Manage
• Distribute
• Analyze

Customer Life Cycle 

• Awareness
• Interest
• Consideration
• Decision
• WIN! 
• Loyalty
• Advocacy
• Growth

Doing this helped make things quantifiable. 

Not Just The Boy Scouts Model

• Being responsive doesn’t just involve being prepared, it’s being prepared to perform well. 
• The framework had to touch on customer goals, how they feel before/after, messaging, KPIs, etc.  

Activations

• What content do you need there?
• Aprimo would think holistically, so there’s Nurture Stream when someone onboards and more. 
• They work with their service team to pull information that we gave them in the upfront all the way through with the hope to create advocates. 
• They also brought in Drift - a bot named Moby, and now when someone is on a certain page, the bot will serve up relevant content based on what they may be looking for. 
• All the streams they build-out (through Uberflip) are based on what people are searching for and want. 
• The key is making sure the content is meaningful.
• All of the streams are based on what people are searching for.
• You can then see how utilized your content is what’s used the most, downloaded the most and more.

Results 

• 1,100% more engagement on new Uber content pages 
• 9% increase in conversions 
• 167% increase in CTR
• 9 to 11% increase in conversion

What Does ABM Success Look Like?

• When you can do to your board of directors, and say “we’re gonna get these accounts in our pipeline, and win them.” 
• This helps to light the dark funnel through intent data, predictive demand. 

Ed’s Challenge - The Bonsai 100

• Named after the largest pipeline in Hawaii 
• A commitment that within 100 days, he would pull 100 accounts 
• Covert 40 opportunities into their pipeline 
• Close 20% of them 
• And increase the engagement score by 25%  
• He was hugely successful seeing who was in the market and what he found

Key Takeaways

• There’s no more B2B or B2C, it’s all B2P: business to people! 
• The key is making sure the content is meaningful.
• Their content experience model helped to ensure success and a strong brand strategy.