Step inside Vista’s marketing pivot with David Goldberg, product owner for Audience-Based Marketing Activation and Attribution. Discover why DnA teams are busy priming Vista’s empathy muscle and how that packs a punch for customers needing stellar brand design.
The nexus of change
Today’s Vista is a tech company, tunneling into a customer-centric approach. We’ve revamped our customer care offering and embedded a customer-friendly ‘everyday fair price’ philosophy. Now marketing is under reform.
My work is at the core of Vista’s growing capability to personalize and measure how we reach small business owners. Around our data product team is a halo of stakeholders from three business functions – marketing, technology, and analytics.
The marketing side is about identifying what’s meaningful to the Vista customer, serving highly relevant, engaging solutions, and ultimately, improving the return on our marketing investment. For technology, it’s consultancy. What martech will put the customer first and do it better than the rest? How can we help with Vista’s need to safely collect, store, show and scale applied data? On the analytics side, the focus is adding a customer lens across reporting and creating a new stable of performance measures.
All of which takes us to a watershed moment, when Vista bids farewell to historical reporting based on ‘how channels perform’. We don’t want to look inwards – the tactical goal is to collect and surface the right data to create smart solutions for myriad customers.
What evolution looks like:
Evolution Part 1: Moving from conversion metrics to customer impact
- Adding a customer and audience lens to Vista’s channel and business reporting
- Surfacing non-transactional data around marketing campaigns
- Campaign-level reporting without a customer lens is consigned to history
Marking progress
We’ve been dedicated to foundational basics for 12 months – establishing the tools, processes and strengths to nail customer-first marketing at scale. This is super-critical to embracing a new marketing era, but we can’t say Vista is in full-flight doing personalized marketing just yet.
Switching from campaign to audience-level marketing isn’t a breeze. Primarily because integrating empathy into marketing and measurement is complex. How do you coalesce these characteristics into reporting? How do you visualize them? But as a business, we are building that empathy muscle to ask: How did the audience we spoke to feel, act and perform? Did this campaign make us seem credible to this customer group? Moving from focusing and reporting on ‘marketing performance’ to our effect on customers is a paradigm shift that’s infusing company thinking – and it’s propelling change.
What I’m proud of so far:
- New attribution logic shows each channel’s role in an end-to-end customer journey. We now use our understanding of communication preferences to be a better partner – especially on the design side. Suppose a restaurant owner gets an ‘ideas’ email a day after touching a VistaCreate In that case, we’re meeting them with accessible, cutting-edge, industry-specific services for their brand, not forcing a generic experience.
- New pipelines share customer data to marketing endpoints like Google, Facebook and Criteo in a secure, governed way – and we’re building a front end internal stakeholders can use. It’s exciting technical work, and not just because I had my hands on some of the coding. This is key to the DnA mission of providing real-time self-service at scale – here, to empower quick, data-driven marketing decisions.
- We’re more fearless about testing at scale due to new measurement tools with automatic reporting. We’ve saved hours per test versus the old world of tickets and time delay and expect answers no matter how many experiments are in progress.
- Busy business owners don’t want to receive a raft of erroneous advertising. We’re improving engagement by sending fewer, more strategic, personalized ads.
- We’re on track to deliver a significant bottom-line impact in year one, and just getting started.
Taking the lid off 2022
My role as Product Owner involves connecting dots – sharing progress is as important as making it. We’re partnering with teams to socialize learnings and best practices throughout the organization. Think: learning circles and multidisciplinary roadshows across countries, channels and centralized teams – we want to reach out to and benefit everyone at Vista. Plus, we’re creating core governance with a library of documentation.
Putting that and other big industry topics like data privacy aside – there’s a lot we need to take care of this year. The prize is fully integrated reporting through a customer lens over marketing and business channels. And it’s going to require a ton of coordination to push Vista’s customer-centricity to the next level.
Evolution part 2: Empowering every Vista stakeholder by
- Embedding audience-specific reporting that highlights unmet customer needs, opportunities, and inefficiencies
- Enabling self-service audience marketing actions via a seamless suite of tools
We’re equipping Vista with the right tools, and that’s vital. But what’s so striking about transformation is that it’s always a mindset thing first – you’ve got to be determined to pull it off. And we are.
And the future?
As I move from my role as Data Product Owner, I find myself managing the futures, careers and ambitions of over 20 analysts. I sit on our Omni leadership team and have a direct line into the strategy of our team. I look forward to nurturing the next generation of awesome Vista talent.
My replacement? Cristina García, coming from a global digital media powerhouse I know my products will reach the next level. I can’t wait to see how our Data Product teams in Omni evolve!
Delve into more Vista transformation stories on our blog or explore current job openings at DnA.