As we wind down 2020 (thankfully), I want to take a moment to reflect on Season 2 of Sync! that’s coming to a close. In a normal year, Sync! would have been a two- or three-day experience and once that weekend ended we’d put Sync! back in the closet until the next year.
But, finding a glimmer of positivity into how COVID-19 affected Sync!, we were able to expand the content over multiple “seasons” so that Sync! evolved from a once-per-year event to an experience that stretched over the course of the full year and allowed us to take feedback and adjust our agenda based on the needs of our attendees.
We broke our digital version of Sync! into seasons because we wanted to mimic what we all experience with TV shows: there’s a natural development to the storyline as you go from season to season.
For Sync!, this meant that in Season 1 we dived into a lot of topics and trends that globally affect how content is efficiently planned, created, and delivered to support marketing and customer experience goals. Simply put, we leapt headfirst into the trend of “Content Operations.” In Season 2, we wanted to go down a level and answer the natural question that arose from Season 1, how do you actually accomplish all those goals using Aprimo technology?
We had sessions from practitioners, partners, and our own product experts that demonstrated how advanced outcomes are achievable today! Let’s take a look at a few:
Achieving Personalization Through Scaling Content:
This was a popular topic! It’s also very broad and so we did two sessions on it: one on how to leverage AI to create and manage content for personalization and then a second on how to use AI to optimize and deliver content to the right person at the right time.
The first session was delivered by Aprimo product experts Petra Tant and Anjali Yakkundi on how to use our concept of “Experience Building Blocks” to get content created and logically stored in your DAM so it can be found and reused on all channels. The big upside to all of this is also that you can decrease your content costs while also creating more content. Pretty exciting stuff.
Second, we talked about ‘Content Intelligence’ which means knowing what your content is and how it should be properly used. We also partnered with Aprimo alum, now of Salesforce, Doug White to demonstrate how using something as powerful as Salesforce Marketing Cloud (and the embedded Einstein AI) enables you to finally deliver the perfect message or content to the right person, at the right time, on the right channel.
Reorienting Marketing Ops from a Service Function to a Strategic Resource:
This was the title of a session led by Monash University’s Amin Foda, but it also describes the talk delivered by Kathy Greene of Citizen’s Bank.
Amin’s talk focused on how his team leverages Aprimo to uncover and enable marketing leadership to present the “hidden work of marketing,” which is a culmination of all the versions, meetings, and reviews required to get a finalized piece of content into market. Sound like a familiar challenge to you and your peers?
Kathy then talked about how Aprimo has helped her function be a strategic resource and is supporting a marketing model that balances speed with compliance. By automating their workflows and centralizing reviews on a single solution, work gets done faster and the system creates an audit trail that makes it easy to stay in compliance.
Creating a Content Operations Ecosystem Through Integration:
We learned in Season 1 that Content Operations is going to be a major differentiator for brands in 2021. What we learned in Season 2 was that Content Operations ecosystems work best when they’re integrated and data flows freely.
But we hear quite often that some people either don’t know where to begin or think that integration requires a skillset their company doesn’t have access to when they want to do something like streamline and automate the transfer of data or reduce the amount of clicks it takes to accomplish a task.
We had Aprimo MVP and advocate Peter Scoins of Stanley Black & Decker help us with two sessions: one on how he has integrated Aprimo DAM into a high performing eCommerce ecosystem to deliver content faster and in the right format to whatever channel or user needs it. The other session was in conjunction with Aprimo’s product experts on how to “bring DAM up from the basement” and devise an appropriate integration strategy that is a good fit for your company.
So Long and Thanks For All the Content
Wow, it’s hard to believe that we’re at the end of 2020 and Season 2 of Sync! is a wrap.
We’ve had so much great content over the year and we’re so thankful to all our customers, partners, and experts who have contributed to making it so successful. We also want to thank all of our attendees that were so generous with their time and provided us really great feedback to deliver an incredible virtual experience.
However, you choose to spend your holidays this year, I hope you stay safe and I look forward to updating you on more great content in 2021 with Season 3 of Sync!
Wait, did I just leak that we’re doing a third season?!
CONFIRMED: We’re doing a third season of Sync!
Look for updates soon!