Tech-Bloat To Tech-Optimization, Investing To Win In A Cut-Back Economy

I wanted to give a little bit of background on this topic. The topic 'Tech-Bloat To Tech-Optimization, Investing To Win In A Cut Back Economy' is a pretty big topic. It's also a topic that we've inadvertently touched on a number of occasions today. Just acknowledging that it has been a pretty tough year in retail and e-commerce. And with consumer confidence, obviously no one has a crystal ball about what's going to happen one week ahead, let alone 12 months ahead. So we all have to be resilient and maintain our focus in our business strategy. But I think one of the theories that we have that we've discussed a lot with our customers and our prospects or guests today is the theory of tech bloat, particularly post-COVID, which is that a lot of businesses went into Covid unexpectedly, probably not very well set up to take advantage of the e-commerce wave. A lot of businesses then and Dan, you kind of hinted at this before, kind of panicked a little bit and bought a lot of martech to assist them take advantage of that wave online. And now we sort of step back and we got all a lot of stuff in our business that we don't really use, and it's really underutilized. So our CEO, Joanna, this morning shared a slide. It said when she joined the workforce in her career in 2001, there are about 150 MarTech platforms globally. Right now there are about well, it's actually 11,038. So there is an enormous challenge as a digital marketer in the room about how and when and what to use to run your business. So a quick, I'm into the show of hands at the moment. Show of hands, if your business that you work for, you've started/you represent is less than one year olds. Right. Three years old? No one? Five years old? Oh there's one. If your business is less than five years old. Less than ten years old? Few. And let's go mega. Less than 50 years old. Right. So undoubtedly, you walk into that business and you have some form of tech debt that you have to deal with. You are probably not starting from scratch with the perfect nirvana of how to create the best business. So what we wanted to tackle in today's panel is really how brands approach that problem or opportunity, depending on how you want to view it, and really rationalize and prioritize the projects that they work on. So I'm hugely honored to be joined by three very amazing panelists, which I'm going to get to introduce themselves one by one. So we've got Brent, Sophie, and Lester. Brent, do you mind sharing where you're from and a little bit about your role as an intro? Yeah, sure. So I'm actually an academic. So I'm from the University of Melbourne. I teach digital marketing there and I've been teaching it since 2008. I was designing websites in the late 90s, so I feel pretty old. So they weren't teaching or marketing there when I started there. We just started the Master of Digital Marketing at Melbourne Uni and they're looking for folks like you to teach into that class. So that's about me. Sophie? So my name's Sophie. I'm the Digital Marketing Manager at Village Roadshow Theme Parks on the Gold Coast. So we oversee a number of really iconic theme park brands. Most of you have probably visited them at some point. We've got Warner Brothers Movie World, Sea World, Wet 'n' Wild, Paradise Country, Australian Outback Spectacular, and Topgolf as well as Sea World Resort. So we have around 3 million people come through our gates each year. So my role predominantly is to help those people connect with our brand from a digital perspective. And Lester? Hello. I'm Lester Martinez. I am currently the Head of Performance Marketing at Blooms The Chemist. I'm a bit like an atypical kind of person you might see in a conference like this being a pharmacy brand. We're a national pharmacy brand. We've got about 116 odd stores nationally. Yeah. So I've got vaccinations and health care, rollercoasters, and curriculum. I got a very good spectrum on this panel today. If you would like to see a photo of me on a roller coaster, Sophie can provide that. I'll email it to you. Yes. It's terrifying. Terrifying. Sophie, I think it might be a good place to start with you. I'm interested, how do you start the process of evaluating what is the best martech stack for your business? Yeah, absolutely. And it is a process. So you touched on it earlier, I think theme parks took a really big hit during Covid. We were shut down and we had this tech stack that it was okay. It had got us through that kind of time. But now post-COVID, we've got the time and luxury now to spend the time reviewing our tech stack and making sure that we've got the right tools to get us to the next sort of 5 to 10 years. So the driver behind us reviewing all of our martech stack was multifaceted. So like you mentioned earlier too, we had a lot of tech bloat. We were paying for all these features that we weren't utilizing or didn't need. We were on these legacy products from older platforms that we've been on for 7-10 years and it was just time for a change. So we really spent the last 12 months reviewing pretty much every piece of our martech stack to make sure we've got all the right tools that are working together. So some of the recent projects that we've done, obviously we've transitioned over to Emarsys earlier this year. We've changed our social media scheduling platform, our UGC platform, our guest management system for Siebel Resort, and we're currently reviewing our CMS system. So a huge big chunk of work has been done by our team in the last 12 months. But it's just one of those things that people put off because it sounds like a lot of work, but you almost have to treat it like you would with your health insurance, your car insurance. You review that annually before it ticks over. So it's kind of the same thing with your tech stack to be onto it and monitor it and make sure that it's working for you. We've saved thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars per month just on those five changes within our tech stack. So it's been absolutely worth the effort for us to put that work in. Lester, same question. How do you start that process of evaluating the martech stack? Yeah, it's a very similar story to Sophie. Really like around the tech debt and the legacy that you've got to relook at and I guess for us it was very much driven about two things. One is the tech debt obviously and having a review of whether or not that's still fit for purpose. And I think coupled with that is, we kind of had a renewed focus on what we were doing as a business and what our actual purpose was. And at Bloom's, we're aiming to be a purpose driven brand and that purpose is to help build a future where everyone everywhere has access to good health and wellbeing. And so that is almost like a lens that we look at when we're looking at our tech stack and going, "Okay, well, how does this actually further that purpose? Like is it actually providing that access to good health and wellbeing?" And if it's not, then we shed it. Sophie, you mentioned you have 3 million visitors in the parks every year. You have and I think last year you acknowledged like there's some different brands up here on this panel from compared to the retail, fashion focus. What are some of the unique challenges? And you hinted at them before that you face, particularly in the theme park industry, around evaluating martech. Yeah. So I touched on it before as well that we've made five major changes to our martech stack and a lot of the challenges that we had were in terms of personalization, segmentation, customer experience, those kinds of things. And everyone has their own unique set of challenges within their businesses. But the challenge then and scoping out all these new martech providers is then how do all of these new potential solutions fit in with your existing stack? So that in itself can be a challenge as well. So we found that a lot of the platforms that we were investigating for various reasons couldn't be easily integrated with our ticketing solution, for example, because we've got a unique custom built ticketing solution for the theme parks. Our app as well as a white-label solution, so we had some integration issues there and everyone here will probably know what I'm talking about with integration, sometimes things just don't go together or that's just the way it is. But we've had to find workarounds for those sorts of challenges. Another challenge for a lot of businesses is to get executive buy in as well. Like these are big contracts and you need executive approval at the end of the day. So my biggest piece of advice with that as well is when you're doing these tech stack reviews and you're putting together all of these scoping documents, stop building your cases for support for executive alongside those because then you're saving yourself a chunk of time as well. And you've got all that documentation there ready to go up to executive for approval when you're ready to pull the trigger on changing a piece of your martech stack. So that's probably a big takeaway for today as well. And also, a lot of these contracts obviously roll over in the fin new year. So now is the perfect time, we've got eight months until FY 24 ends. And now is a perfect time to start reviewing all of those tech stacks and getting those scoping documents and cases for support together, because it's a lot of work. I'm not going to lie. But you've got the time and luxury now to do that before your contracts roll over next year. So that's another big bit of advice. But yeah, a few challenges, but it's far outweighed the effort for us. Brent, we even just had a chat at lunch that a lot of people at university have this dream of becoming a digital marketer and you probably have these images of being the head of marketing at L'Oreal and doing photoshoots every day. Unfortunately it's not the reality. We work with data and integrations and it's a very different set of skills that we require as marketers now. Do you see any major disconnect between what we're teaching as a theory around the tech optimization versus the reality in the real world? Yeah. I think there's two two sides to the story. I think what the universities are teaching or what the training institutions are teaching, that's perhaps not so relevant in the industry. And the SWOT analysis, for example, I personally don't like that model and it's frequently not used that well anyway. But the other side of the coin is things that are perhaps taught in universities that haven't fully propagated and industry yet. Some of the big brands are doing this obviously, but it's not mainstream yet and these mainly surround the buyer. What buyers are doing online essentially and it revolves around the marketing funnel. So marketing funnel and data frameworks are over 100 years old. They're pretty old and they're very linear. We think that they don't fully explain what's happening online. So the reality is consumers online, well the way that we think about this in a way, they're either doing two things: they're are exploring or evaluating, and that's a cycle. So there's some sort of trigger that initiates them online that initial need, that they need to go online and look for something but then evaluate, explore, evaluate, explore, evaluate, explore and then at some point, there's a trigger that kicks them out of that into the purchase. So that's how we view online behavior and digital marketing. Google has a new framework they call, I think the 'Messy-Middle Model' which comes close. They have some great data. So yeah, Google that if you want to. Google Google to find out about that one, that's probably cutting edge, I think. So I guess to cut things short, what we're trying to teach at universities is what's to come with regards to understanding how consumers behave online and that goes beyond the marketing funnel, I think. Lester, I'm curious, you obviously have you mentioned was it over 200-300 stores? 116. 116, apologies. We'll get there too to 200, don't worry. Growth target for this year. How have you approached building the tech stack to cater for the online-offline omnichannel experience? That's a difficult thing to nail, right? What's been the approach for you in Bloom's? Well, to be perfectly honest, we're still very much on that journey. So we haven't got that right. I'll be talking to City Beach at some point, definitely to do some learning from those guys because it sounds amazing. But I think for us, it's starting to look at some of those initiatives that tackle that. So we've got an internal data management project happening, we've got a pretty giant CX project happening as well that's going to help inform what we really do to bridge that gap, to bridge that online-offline gap. I think as far as the stack goes though, when you're planning for that and you haven't quite managed to get there yet, it's really understanding where you where you want to go, what the aspiration really is and starting to forward plan from that. And it's not being to caught up in, "Okay, well, we need this right now for this particular kind of purpose." Having that little bit of foresight to really understand where you want to go is really important. So, for example for us, as part of our Emarsys package platform, we've got the relational database add-on. We haven't used that yet but we know that it's going to be profoundly important for us in order to grab some of that other data pieces that we know that we've got and implementing that into Emarsys to leverage all of the data, insights and stuff that we can get from there. So one of the use cases that we've got for that at the moment, which is probably what we'll go with, is trying to leverage some of our health services data that we might have. So obviously wrapping that around a really robust consent framework but the use case might be okay, we know that you, a particular person who has the consent to opt-in so we can communicate to them, they had a blood glucose check service, for example. We also know that they have been purchasing health management products or blood pressure medication, that kind of thing. We also know that they may be male, age 50 and above, right? We know that those combinations of things leads to that person being more highly likely to suffer from sleep apnea and they may not know this, so how can we then either from a commerce point of view, be able to suddenly surface that back to them and go "Hey, have you thought about your health, your sleep health?" But at the same time, how can we then push that back to the pharmacist and inform them of that information and maybe strike up a conversation next time that person is that person is in the pharmacy to go, "Hey, have you thought about your sleep health?" So that's where we're thinking about bridging that gap. And Sophie, just quickly it might be an interesting question, without notice almost that you're both using the relational data on capability. Do you mind sharing and this is for everyone's awareness, the ability to ingest any third party data into the platform for personalization. Are there any specific use cases of interest from a village roadshow perspective? Yeah, absolutely. So just looking at the relational data segmentation side of things, it's enabled us to create really granular segments straight from our database. So we've really like empowered our digital marketing coordinators to be able to learn SEQUAL. So it's been a really good professional development opportunity for them as well and obviously you can segment off the contact record super easily as well, but it just gives you that next level of real granular segmentation. That's awesome. So I guess acknowledging the tough year that a lot of businesses have had in this situation. Obviously, you want to double down on what's working well. So if you've been through a very large project that sounds like a very big year. You need a Christmas break. Five big projects in the last 12 months. What are you doubling down on? What is working and where are you sort of seeing the green light? Yeah. So obviously where we're seeing some really big efficiencies and value for the business is Emarsys. Big shout out to Emarsys. I'm just going to use them as a bit of a use case. Just to give you a couple of little stats. Our open rates on emails have gone up from about 30% to 45%-50% in a lot of cases, which is really well above industry standard and getting nearly 50% open rate on a segment of 300,000 to half a million people is really impressive. The drag and drop email builder functionality has reduced our EDM times by half, so it is saving a lot of resourcing there. No HTML coding required. It's just drag and drop. Our revenue impact rate is something that we're really excited about because our revenue impact rate is sitting at 81%, which is the total revenue attributed to all campaigns made in Emarsys and Will and all the team told me that's incredibly high so we're really proud of that stat. You should be very proud. I think a lot of existing customers looked at each other just then. Yeah, but it's not just revenue and time savings and things like that that we're seeing. Benefits with Emarsys, like I mentioned before with the relational data segmentation. It's been a really good upskilling opportunity for our team, empowering those digital marketing coordinators to learn SEQUAL and to having done a SEQUAL course on their resumé is a great professional development opportunity for them. So yeah. So value for us isn't always measured in revenue, but that's just some of the highlights that I just wanted to mention about Emarsys. So just out of curiosity, 81% of your revenue now comes from Emarsys' campaign sent from the platform. When did you go live on Emarsys? We only went live on Emarsys in around June. So we started the transition probably in March and then fully transitioned over in June. That's amazing. Yeah, we're super, super impressed. That's really good. Lester, same question, what's working? I mean, obviously the CFO and IT, everyone's telling you you probably can't have what you want and we have to do more with less. I think Joanna was the one this morning that said, I'd love to put a dollar on the top and hundred come out the bottom. Doesn't always work like that. But what's working well? What are you doubling down on in Blooms? Definitely. We're doubling down on Emarsys. We're nine months into our implementation. Everything's going fantastically. We've seen some pretty great uptake on a couple of key metrics for us. So I mean, like for us 17% increase, one bad customer is a pretty big deal for us. Also, this is relative to the fact that our legacy, a previous stack didn't even give us any way for us to be able to do this. So we're already adding value in the sense that the business had never had this kind of capability before, which is pretty amazing. And I think as well like just building on what Sophie said around value and how we can look at that, the efficiency of having an omnichannel platform in Emarsys has been really a massive unlock for us. So I've worked in other businesses where you have one platform and it's just the email campaigns person doing that. With the Emarsys, because it's omnichannel, I've got all three of my team members on Emarsys. One from CRM ads perspective, one from an email perspective, and my content person works across both of them. On top of that, we've actually democratized the access to our wider marketing team as well. So we're finding efficiency and value in the entire team, being able to use it across multiple use cases and not just a singular thing, you know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. Brent I'm curious, some of the leader panel before they talked about their team a lot actually, even in times of resilience, they want to continue the professional growth and the development. What do you see is some of the important soft skills that graduates and academia should be coaching early on in the career for successful digital marketers? Yeah. Okay it's more than showing up and enthusiasm. You know there was some research, I was reminded of when you asked me that before when we were chatting, there was some research that came out recently suggesting that people who are enthusiastic are perceived as more intelligent than those that are less enthusiastic. So I was thinking about that. I had my final lecture yesterday with my students, trying to give them advice more than "Don't be the best, be the only." That kind of stuff. But yeah, I think I don't know what else to add other than enthusiasm matters. But I just want to make a quick point about how we do teach digital marketing at universities. There's a lot of competition at the moment between the universities for teaching digital marketing. A lot of universities have recently come up with postgraduate qualifications like masters of digital marketing. The problem is the quality of teaching there is not so great, I don't think, at any university at the moment. And to compensate for that, they're trying to recruit people who work in the industry like you folks to teach into these courses, which I think is a great move forward. But not only that, the design of these courses should be done with one hand with industry together and kind of a partnership because as you know, as soon as a textbook on design marketing comes out, it's pretty much out of date. And you can't rely on academics to teach everything that's new and current because most of them don't work in industries. So I think that's where the challenges are. That's a challenging job for you. Stuck in the middle, right? I have a great team of tutors, so I'm like… Yeah. And so did you just create a big shout out to the industry for leaning into teaching moments? Honestly, we're always looking for digital marketers. Okay, well, our industry needs us, guys. So there you go. All righty. So we talked about prioritizing projects. I think Lester what you talked about was around being true to the core purpose of the business as well. We looked at areas that are working really well and how to generate stakeholder engagement, so for you to get those projects over the line ahead of time. I'm curious, we're talking about tech-bloat to tech optimization. If we look a couple of years into the future, like what are you guys seeing as some exciting pieces of technology that would be relevant to your business? Maybe they're not available now, maybe they are. But curious to understand what you're saying or what's on the roadmap at least? I'll go first. We can obviously expect AI to become a lot more sophisticated, like AI powered chat bots. We're investigating some solutions at the moment for our contact center, some AI sort of conversational style chat bots so those customers can get that 24 hour access. And I'm really excited to see this morning on the Emarsys the roadmap, the conversational channel roadmap, I'm very excited about that. We've also been investigating machine learning. So solutions for predictive forecasting, predicting pass holder churn, customer lifetime value, all of that sort of stuff. So I feel like if you're not investing in or at least investigating AI and machine learning, then you're left behind because that's where the future is. Definitely. Are you on WhatsApp, Sophie? Are you one of the 3 billion users? No, I'm not. My we found a non-user. Lester, the same question? Yeah, I'd say a similar thing. I mean like AI's at the tip of everyone's tongue at the moment and I think just building on that, what I think will be interesting is the industrialization of AI as it matures in the market. Like it's no longer in the realm of tech giants or tech based or tech-focused kind of companies. It is the barriers to entry decreasing rapidly for traditional businesses or non-technical businesses. And so I think as that happens, it's going to be really fundamental for a business to have all that data like down pat and and getting that all right so that you can actually leverage AI on top of that kind of thing. So I think, yeah, as far as future crystal ball gazing, I think, yeah, industrialization of AI and it'll become more part of how business operates. Alrighty. I think we might wrap up there. I think it's a really good insight into this wider topic that we've definitely touched on a couple of times today, which is around tech-bloat and tech-debt to to tech-optimization. So please join me in thanking Lester, Sophie, and Brent for their insight on this topic as well. We really appreciate.