Whenever somebody figures out how to crack the content personalization nut, they’re going to make a lot of money and they’re going to make a lot of people a lot of money.
Phil Crumm is the VP of New Client Strategy at 10up. After several years of WordPress consulting, Phil joined Automattic as a VIP Engineer, where he helped make sure that WordPress-powered sites ran quickly and securely.
Thirsting to delve back into the WordPress world, Crumm and 10up linked up and the rest is history. As a Senior Web Strategist, Crumm uses his software engineering skills to wrangle projects.
In this episode of Velocitize Talks, Crumm shares his vision for the future of martech consolidation, content marketing and personalization, and why WordPress is the ideal enterprise platform.
Martech consolidation (3:57)
It’s getting to a place now with offerings like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud platform, Microsoft Azure and others, where some of those tools have become commodities. It means new players can innovate in ways that push the rest of the market forward.
The 2020 Marketing Technology landscape includes 8,000 solutions, a 5,233%+ increase in the last decade. According to MarTech, this year will see a massive consolidation in platforms, expansion and diversification of martech apps.
While on one hand this pushes the industry to become more innovative, Crumm says it also means “it’s becoming a lot harder to differentiate within that space because you can no longer hang your hat on the two dozen data science PhDs who you happen to employ.”
It will come to martech consolidation and working together to complement each other’s integrations. A dynamic space will keep the customer happy with a wide variety of solutions.
No content, no brand (5:03)
It’s hard to build a business model solely off of content.
Learning how to use content as part of a customer journey to support a brand’s position is no longer optional. Ninety-four percent of marketers agree that original research elevates a brand’s authority; 80% of buyers view over five pieces of content prior to making a purchase decision. Crumm points to brand marketing investment as the main area of growth for his clients and across many different industries.
Crumm views brand marketing as “a way to get their story, their message, and their leadership out there to help build brand credibility, to help build brand recognition, and to help reach customers in ways that feel a little bit less sales-y.”
Non-friction (6:34)
There is an attractiveness for technologists to lose the plot a little bit and become very focused on the technologies that we’re using while losing sight of the problems that we’re trying to solve.
Technology friction has always been an issue Crumm has lamented. When advising clients, Crumm identifies the problem and the best solution without losing sight of how to be frictionless. Crumm’s How Laptops Need to Be a Little More Like Phones led him to the iPad Pro. He declared it the best purchase he has ever made.
Enterprising WordPress (7:48)
WordPress is starting to get to a place where it is becoming not only a lot more accepted in the enterprise space, but often favored.
POLITICO Europe engaged 10up to craft and refine the WordPress admin experience for editorial, production and sales. 10up’s engineering team also integrated a custom AI engine with WordPress to create a feedback loop. This facilitates continuous machine learning for its news content to automate and improve content classification and tagging.
Crumm finds that when your customers come from the news or content creation space, they love to use WordPress as that is what they’ve worked with. As an open source CMS (Content Management System), WordPress has the ability to create a powerful and scalable network for an enterprise organization that allows it to continue to grow, and all website requirements to grow with it.
All intents and purposes (9:31)
We all know that we want it, we all know that it’s going to be tremendously valuable, and the issue so far has been putting the pieces together in a way that makes it manageable and scalable.
Google Analytics provides a Cohort Analysis report that tells you how well your website is performing and gives in-depth insights into user behavior on a website. It also analyzes trends and patterns in user behavior to help you understand who is converting and who is not.
Crumm has talked to a number of CMOs who “dream of a platform that knows what your purchasing intent is, knows what cohort you’re in, knows what product you’re looking for, where you are in that purchasing pipeline, and if you go to a landing page running in a paid social campaign; you will see something that’s tailored to you.” He has seen some promise in Salesforce’s offering of automatic cohort recognition and analysis and looks forward to the evolution of this space.
To learn more about 10up, check out their website and follow them on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter at @10up. To stay up to date with Crumm, follow him on Medium, LinkedIn and Twitter at @pcrumm.