Why Optimizely might be the most important platform for modern marketers today
Marketing over the past decade has fundamentally changed. Customers are engaging across all channels from store to web to social. Content has exploded and will more so increasingly through GenAI. Marketing teams work ever more distributed, fueled by the pandemic. And the accountability for marketers to own demand and own the customer experience is muddled through other teams like product and engineering.
Marketing teams have been evolving to address these changes. Modern marketing teams today have hired data scientists and operations teams to understand pipeline, ideal customer profiles, and conversion rates. You also find more developers in marketing owning more of the digital experience. The days when marketing was all brand and creative and not much else, are long gone. ?
Optimizely is a good microcosm of this evolution. First founded in 1994 as a content management system (CMS), it allowed marketers to build websites during in the Internet boom. When the website turned into a commerce engine, namesake Optimizely was founded in 2010 with the goal of giving marketers superpowers, using A/B testing as an incredibly powerful way to understand customer behaviors. Huge increases in website traffic made it possible. Conversions started to matter. Then over the years, more product teams and developers got involved in the decisioning of the customer experience, and so Optimizely’s solution evolved to provide testing on features. ?
The website turned from a nice-looking brochure to the center of the business. For many companies it became the “single largest store”. The need for personalized digital experiences required marketing teams to cobble together various technologies to provide these experiences, all while not losing control to other teams in the organization.
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For many large enterprises, there was only one escape route: Adobe. Many big companies want to do business with other big companies. The combination of top-down mandate and creatives that have depended on Photoshop made people look the other way when it came to the sticker shock and the lengthy implementations. ?
The alternative was to pursue a portfolio of stitched together solutions. Techie terms like microservices, API-first, composable and others started to enter the conversation. Was the marketer really in control of this conversation? No. In fact it made vendor management much more difficult and empowered the tech-led teams while sidelining marketers.
Optimizely’s significance and importance needs to be understood in this context. Neither of the two above alternatives solves the problem for marketers. Yet marketers require an anchor platform just like sales has Salesforce or HR has Workday. A platform that orchestrates the content supply chain across marketing functions, providing a shared consciousness. A platform that makes it simple and fast to create and launch digital experiences and that based on understanding of customer attributes and behaviors personalizes and optimizes experiences to move the metrics that matter. A platform where each solution by itself is best-in-class and yet is extensible. A true anchor platform a marketing team addressing customer and marketer experience.
Optimizely One, the first operating system for marketing, was released less than a year ago. Since then, every quarter more companies have become Optimizely One customers. The positive response has even surprised me. The tailwinds of IT stack consolidation, cost consciousness, and a general need for simplicity have been a boon for us. Customers are not really looking for more vendors, customers are looking for strategic partners in the long term that are dependable and consistent and deliver a high ROI. The market will be challenging for point solutions. Many are already flip-flopping their strategy. Our strategy has been consistent for the past five years. The suite always wins. Also in marketing, and the time is now. Our biggest challenge is to ensure that enough companies know about (the new) Optimizely. Fortunately, we have a great marketing team that is using Optimizely One to change this.
SVP, Product Strategy & Operations @ Optimizely
2 个月Also obviously biased but adding 2 more points to Shaf's point: - When composing with Optimizely One you're building a marketing tech stack from best-in-class tools (i.e. they're category leaders in their own right)... this is very different from other players in this space who claim to have everything but are often just "checking the box." - One of the biggest barriers to mainstream AI adoption is the quality and state of your data and our AI, Opal, works on all the data you have within Optimizely One... this is very different from others that not only require you to pay a heavy integration tax just to get the tools barely working, let alone having all your data in one place for AI to do its magic.
Chief Revenue Officer and Executive Vice President at Dayforce
2 个月Good thought piece Alex, and makes sense even to non marketers. Go Optimizely ??.. write the best chapter my friend !
President at Optimizely, ex-CEO, founder of Welcome
2 个月Good post. Obviously biased but a few quick thoughts: -We get a tremendous value out of the suite. But we also pick and choose some other tools to integrate into (Marketo, 6Sense) so I see Opti One as “composable if you need, but pre integrated for you when you want simiplicity and speed.” I can’t imagine having the hire devs to integrate basic things like CMS with DAM or CMP or Experimentation. -Shared consciousness - which essentially is just a fancy word for extreme visibility - is not just a feature or goal. It’s part of our team values. People are empowered if they see everything transparently. But beyond that it leads to better and more consistency customer experience (if we have silos internally, ext customer experience will be disjointed). -For a long time as marketers, we thought we need to invest in content. Now I have too much! I need less content, but better content. Less waste but more conversions. “Governance” is such a boring, enterprise-y word, but I think it summarizes on one the benefits of our CMP. Get that content supply chain under control and reduce chaos. Great post!