 Okay well good morning everybody. I'm happy to see all these faces bright and early hopefully the after after after parties didn't keep you out too late and you made it here to those of you that went congratulations thanks for showing up. So yeah we're excited to be here at DrupalCon Portland 2022. My name is Mindy League I'm the UX director with Elevated Third and Elevated Third is a digital marketing agency specializing in enterprise with Drupal and with that means as we utilize open source technologies to better work with partners and marketing platforms to deliver results for our B2B clients. Speaking of B2B clients we're here today with one of our clients that we worked with for implement a personalization strategy. This is Katherine Baller with Comcast Technology Solutions. Thanks for joining us. Of course thanks for having me and good morning everyone. I am digital marketing director at Comcast Technology Solutions and let's see I've been there about eight years now really had the opportunity to build both the digital strategy and the digital team from the ground up and yeah excited to talk about how Elevated Third and I partnered on a personalization strategy and some of the learnings and findings we've had today. Awesome so this is a fireside chat so we decided to take the slides down get comfortable and just have a little conversation. So we're going to be asking questions with Katherine. We have some pre-informal related thoughts that we wanted to share with you and then at the end we'll have open time for Q&A so we are going to get started asking about the approach that really first of all I want to ask what is Comcast Technology Solutions. How is that different than Comcast and tell us a bit about your history with Drupal. Yeah so Comcast Technology Solutions or CTS we are a B2B division of Comcast Cable and we have four internal business lines that serve five markets and what we do is essentially take the technologies that Comcast, NBCUniversal and Sky builds for itself and bring it to market for others. So a good example if you're familiar with the Xfinity brand we white-labeled the X1 platform and resell to other global cable operators and we've been with Drupal gosh as long as I've been with Comcast we've built websites and portals on the Drupal platform. Excellent so this is your first Drupal con so yes you're experiencing the Drupal community and how's that experience been with open source how's that benefited? Yeah so Comcast as a whole really leans into open source technology it's something that we believe makes our products better makes our customer experience better and it really helps to attract the right kind of talent for Comcast too and bringing it down to the CTS level I've seen a lot of benefits as far as agility, flexibility and just the speed at which we're able to solve complex problems so it's been great leaning into that kind of collective development ethos. Yeah that's awesome we'd love to hear that. How did you know that CTS was ready to move into personalization for your marketing program? Yeah so CTS since we're a B2B organization it really followed fast behind an account-based marketing strategy so once we realized you know we know who we want to go after we want to go after companies that look a lot like us they'd be a good fit for the technology have the same sort of pain points it really helped to just step in a personalization next and the fact that we have different business lines different markets and a whole host of solutions it really it made sense to personalize that experience so it's not overwhelming as customers and prospects come to our website and try to figure out how we can help them. Yeah that's a great takeaway that can't disturb everyone on with all those business lines how about any advice you have for organizations or people here that are just wanting to get started with personalization? Yeah a lot probably I could probably talk about that the whole time but some major themes to it I think are taking a look at the data so from two perspectives both what you have to work off of as far as your customer and prospect data making sure it's something that is dynamic is maintained and really something you can activate in a meaningful way and also the data on the results side so for us it was a little bit of a bolt-on after we had started running personalization where we realized you know we have a good view into our channels and some of those experiences but it was hard to merge the two together and really determine how can we be proactive in our maintenance so the data is really important another huge learning I would say is when it comes to when you starting it's super overwhelming to think about all the ways you can personalize for everyone but don't let it overwhelm you start small and really be thoughtful and intentional about the way you're going to market with personalization and use that to drive further ideas improvements again leaning into that data to find out what exactly is driving impact for your customers or your prospects. Yeah that's good advice think with the end result first and then work backwards so how about Drupal can you tell us how that fits into your MarTech stack? Yeah so Drupal I would say is probably a very key piece to the technologies we use it allows us to be agnostic about what ABM platforms you can tie into it it's something that especially using smart content you can lean into a lot of other options and we've pivoted we've had a couple of different ABM platforms we've used over the years we have you know a whole host of other integrations that we've added and Drupal has really proven to be a flexible back end for us so I mean it's it's absolutely key it also allows you to kind of decouple ABM and personalization so a lot of ABM platforms they have their own personalization solution and that could be a great way to start especially if you're still working on the back end and what exactly you want to integrate and how you want to put that tech stack together but for us it was not a long term play because we see you know it fits an ABM and that's kind of where we're at now but we're starting to shift over to how do you take that into a full CTS wide experience so not just for your target list not just for the companies you know you're going after but any user that comes to your website so Drupal's been key for that yeah it sounds like it and you mentioned all the business lines all the different segments you had to build like how we're trying to stand up to all that what about for your goals within your organization how it what matters the most to CTS when it comes to your go-to-market personalization strategy yeah that's a good question I would say in general I mean every every business is motivated by the ROI and the revenue you bring in which makes personalization kind of a tricky thing to nail down because it's not something that you can say well I personalize that experience and that drove this opportunity and this revenue that came in as a result because you don't know you know if that's what did it or how you know how it came together and for our business lines too there's there's a little different pieces of it that matter to them as well from looking at the where they are in their stage of business so we have some business lines that are more about growth they're bringing in the net new companies they want to land new accounts get into new verticals and then on the flip side we have ones that are more mature so it's really about how do I retain the customers I have make sure they're going to sign that renewal and stick with us so personalization has a play in both of those when it comes to those in that new accounts we can use a combination of that targeted ad serving bring people in serve them a great customer experience showing them why we'd be a good partner for them and we can activate that in a meaningful way through intent that we can surface on our offsite different signals that they have or that the sales team may loop us in on to know hey now's a good time to put this called action in front of them and see if they bite when it comes to the mature business lines personalization also has a play there and looking at intent as well because they have you know we can look at competitors when are they looking at our competitor websites or researching products that may be competing with ours and they're up for renewal and we actually had a good kind of internal case study on that front where a client a content provider one of the major content providers was actually in a dispute with Comcasts on the cable side and so it did trickle down where they're a flight risk their renewal is up we suffered a some intent we're able to activate a personalized experience that our sales team or account team could send over and have them come on our site and remind them why they partner with us and how we customize their solution so there's a whole host of ways you can use it on all sorts of businesses can you tell us what technology you are using to help understand their intent yeah so we since we have so many different business lines a whole bunch of products we really need a broad solution when it comes to intent so that's something we do right now through the demand-based ABM platform we can set up you know different keyword groups different topics have some based on competitors some based on our own product lines it was really flexible so it's been a good a good solution for us so elevated third help integrate that with our smart content right module right plug there that we were able to work with demand base the worry we are already capturing intent and user behaviors yeah personalized for them yeah and so made it really seamless to be able to activate it in the back of our site so easily awesome great well can you share learning since it you would have done different or how you might next time you yeah a personalization strategy yeah definitely some learnings I touched on some of the data earlier but in addition to that I think don't the big thing for us was like not biting off more than you can chew we're not starting to do too much too fast so we really started with a brand campaign it was within the marketing department we had control over it didn't have to rally the buy-in from the businesses quite yet and use that as our case study and then from there we actually probably went a little too deep so our advertising suite who they sell a product that Comcast developed internally to route linear TV ads and manage it and then we took it expanded it to digital destinations and took it to market in our ad team they're going after several different verticals and we went a little wild with our first personalization project with them not only to be personalized based on verticals but then we're like going into the subcategories of those verticals so for example we had a quick service restaurants is one of our verticals we had seven different creatives for that one segment of their market and it was way too much way too fast and we sunk ours into it that probably didn't need to be we probably could have driven the same results without having that much and we did it with other verticals as well so that was that was a huge learning was do not jump in all at once be intentional look at the data and activate what is driving impact and maybe going down to the QSR's you know the quick service restaurants we didn't need to do a chicken version and a hamburger version and as you know a pizza version it was it was kind of out of control that's funny so so then that segmentation was a little too much so can you explain your your revised approach to segmentation how did you think about your audiences from there yeah so overall at CTS obviously the different markets we serve is an easy way to segment the other way that we could activate a lot was based on where they're at in that customer journey so with our target list and the people were going out or the companies were going after it is a host of upstals within current customers to completely net new accounts so that was just a good way to to do it and we started expanding our approach a little differently when you think about the size of the audience too so we started with that one to few or a target list where we had you know a couple hundred per business line that were really focused on and serving ads to and driving those personalized experiences and now we're kind of going both ways so the digital team is going out a little bit seeing what's working that we can expand to those broader customer segments and starting to bring in some you know maybe look alike audiences that might be just as valuable as the target list ones and then we also have our marketing team going more narrow so down to that one-to-one ABM approach so really sitting down with sales saying what are their top ten accounts that you want to lay in this year how can we help you and there you're able to activate a lot more you'll look at okay what personas are missing from this buying committee you have a tighter feedback loop from sales so you have a lot more to action and we're just getting started with that so I don't have a lot of insights there quite yet but that's kind of the way we're approaching it now it's evolving can you tell us about the content requirements as you thought about your campaigns and how did you tailor those messages yeah so this is I think something that can feel overwhelming for content marketing teams thinking about oh if I'm going to start personalizing this content I'm exponentially increasing what I'm what I'm gonna have to put together and what I'm gonna have to activate it's we have a small content team internally there's just a couple of people we have two writers so we can't spend all the time hitting every single piece of content we want we really have to prioritize what we what we do and one way we found success there is to start with a core piece of content see how you can repurpose it for different personas different formats how you can start to change it too based on where they are on the journey so maybe something that's more of a research paper would be that top top a funnel kind of piquing the interest but then how do you draw that down to bring in someone in for a sales conversation so I don't know that we have it totally nailed yet but the content marketing team has been a great partner to have in the personalization space and yeah we'll just keep going from there see but you started with the framework like a content strategy oh yes yeah so this was one that actually started with elevated 30 years ago we defined our personas we started putting together the content calendar and how you can start to plan out pieces that are thoughtful and intentional as far as reaching the right folks the right personas the right top of funnel mid funnel etc so that was a good place to start is to kind of define that calendar excellent plan to have a plan so with my background in UX I'm particularly interested in personas and how you use those within your marketing strategy how have those changed since you started using them yeah yeah personas have definitely changed a lot and I think that was something that initially when you're kind of thinking about it it's like you're checking the box I'm going to name the personas that we want to go after and now that I have them to find great we can start using that as the framework moving forward we've discovered that it's has to be living and breathing the times change especially with COVID right the different pain points came out our products change the world changes it's all you know you have to take all that in the account we also realized you don't need to name them the cutesy names sales Joan does not care they don't they don't know what you're talking about when you have the Baron and you know the nice names that maybe you like as a marketer it did not translate well into an alignment with sales so we went back to them you know born old names like this is a tech persona there's a business persona and really having to refresh those pain points under each and the way you message them has to be done on a calendar so it would save them on a probably at least a half year basis we've been going back and looking at them and revising in categories in our content against them too and starting to see okay well this one changed the pain points change now here's the content that aligns with that let's go back and take a look at that and see if there's any tweaks we can make to make it more valuable going forward awesome so now how did you rally all your teams the disparate groups that you have there to get them going with this personalization strategy and the shift and your go-to-market yeah I would say that's still a work in progress it or it's like always a work in progress it is it comes off as extra work to create these personalized experiences so you have to make it easy for everyone one way we kind of prove the value of it too is starting with a you know a first case study a first personalized experience the low hanging fruit which for us was a brand campaign where we message differently to different markets and then from there we started taking a look at our home page our front page of our site how can we use personalization there and we really took the chance to take that hero image and use it for various targets or different target lists and show them what should matter most of them or what we think would align with them the most and it really helped rally I think some of our teams so one of our products is our voice suite and we had a fraud mitigation service launch well they only have a couple dozen targets which is maybe 2% of our entire target list but by putting that front and center for those targets on our home page we drove more than a hundred visits to that that service that landing page from those companies so just small things like that can start driving results and you'll start to have those conversations with the different teams that are involved and you know evangelize it share the wins I know you mentioned COVID earlier and I know that you rolled out this personalization strategy right and then the pandemic how did that change what you were planning to do yeah COVID was a big a big shift the big test of being agile too with the onset of COVID my team the digital team automatically had a lot more on her plate everything was going virtual there was a lot more it felt a little overwhelming at first and so we had this plan to launch our brand campaign with the personalized experiences based on market and of course COVID hit there goes our IP address tracking no way we can activate on that the good thing was since we have smart content it was actually a pretty easy pivot we're able to instead be really targeted at the upfront of the ads and who we're serving them to making sure they're in the right markets and using those UTM parameters on the links to activate the right experience so we were lucky in that we had that flexibility because had we been baked into an ABM platform I don't know if we would have been able to prove any success during a lift there a lot changed a lot changed during that time everyone had to pivot quick so yeah tell us about your personalization journey just what that was like for CTS yeah I would say our journey was messy it's not one of those you know very linear processes where you can kind of look at oh yeah we're ramping and you know exactly where you're going and how we're getting there is proven obviously with COVID coming in that was a huge shift we we started small with what we could control like I said we did that brand campaign we started with the front door of our website built the internal momentum around it and then even before that I guess you know we were building the tech stack out at least a year ahead of that so it was kind of a slow thing there are steps forward there are steps backwards and it wasn't an easy an easy thing to progress I guess looking back on it too now you know so at the end of last year we rolled out a framework that I think would have been helpful earlier in the process where it's more of a consultative approach so now we sit down with our business or sit down with our marketing manager with that business and we have questions and then we start to define what are the segments based on what could be most impactful define goals against each segment and then launch a campaign and then after that you can take a look back and see am I meeting those benchmarks those goals we didn't start that way we started a little messy and we just tried to try to get it some momentum going and really just kind of evangelized it you mentioned your setting goals with your business lines how do you measure the success how do you understand that and recommendations for how to look at KPIs and metrics yeah this is a this is a tough question I don't think I have it totally nailed you either so we have obviously you know what matters to our businesses is revenue but we also don't have the adoption of using our serum our sales force to track all that revenue our sales teams are not paid on commission based on what's in our systems so that makes it difficult to get to the ROI to get to the revenue behind our efforts so we really have to rely for on more of those metrics that go up the funnel from there so we're looking at things like how are we engaging our target list or our customer segments how are we converting them what percentage are engaged how many of those convert and then from there what are the marketing qualified leads and accounts and what does sales accept and start to progress for more opportunities so I can say by looking at what we've improved from a personalization standpoint we're engaging the more and from there that that trickled down the funnel those percentage that moved from one step to the next is not decreasing it's actually improving so I know we're driving more but I don't have the revenue behind it yet so it's kind of a work in progress and it's sometimes it's kind of hard to to get the buy-in but you know we work with what we can do so we are we can share successes beyond that so how are you looking at your analytics so and what I know we I think we helped you guys set up some data dashboards yeah studio dashboards but that's helping you understand the increased engagement like time on your side or bounce rates or what what are the key metrics yeah so it's elevated there is definitely a help to set up more event based tracking around our personalization efforts so we can look at both the channels and the experiences together and actually it's driven it's a lot of us to do a lot of optimization so originally when you're looking at the personalized experience in analytics we could see like hey this isn't you know we're seeing a high bounce right here but then when we started to combine the channels with what we're seeing in the experiences it was one channel that we realized okay this programmatic channel isn't reaching the right people this isn't driving impactful traffic so once we took that out you could actually see a lift there and with that too I think we've with our brand campaign that was a big a big success for us that was our first one and we saw a 30% lift on time on site so people are engaging more we also saw lift on pages per session so they were actually clicking around and exploring like we wanted them to do they're following that journey which was a huge win so you're able to fine-tune what it was on your channels and see what's working yeah yeah it's great any other metrics or any other results that you can share with us not at all specific conversion rates available but I know we reestablished an increase in conversion rates for a couple of growth business lines which was awesome to see it went up I don't want to guess and that I want to say 40% from what we saw before yeah it was a big enough lift that we were we were very happy about it now we can just tie all those numbers to revenue then we'd have like a clear picture yes that's the long-term goal we are working through this whole personalization effort as well as I mean other things that were happening in our business lines as far as the sales teams being siloed has kind of spurred a master data management strategy so now we're we're digging into it with representatives across their organization all of our business lines to bring all of our product systems into one view together and I know it'll be a very very slow process we're starting with a pilot this year but I'm really excited for that because I think that will open up a lot more that we can do from a personalization standpoint yeah because these types of strategies really do involve everyone from all the different departments and business lines to get involved and yeah rally behind it and so evangelizing it early is really important keeping the momentum sharing out what you're doing keep going so we're really glad you were here today to share with this your direct insight and experience with rolling it out how you did that seeing just under the hood on how that experience has been for you working with smart content working with Drupal and the community we're glad you were here thank you yeah thanks for inviting me and it's great to see everyone involved with it and kind of peek behind the curtains excited like I said I've never been here before I've never gone to a Drupal conference so it's it's awesome to be a part of it yeah does anyone have any questions or anything you want to ask yes for using demand base yep we so there are some functionalities behind it within demand base that we tap into from a lookalike audience standpoint from building out what you know intent triggered type of pieces of it does that answer the question a little bit oh yeah so okay choosing demand base over the adobe solution I got ya you know it's I don't know if I haven't necessarily a straightforward answer at that it's kind of hard within Comcast they have we have so many different divisions we don't always talk to each other collaborate demand base is one though that we did we worked with the Comcast business side of the house so they were also doing a trial at the same time we were back in 2017 we we both saw success from it from a B2B perspective where I think Xfinity it's more the it is the B2C side of the house so we didn't necessarily collaborate with them but that's a good insight that you kind of checked out the site and had I mean that's a great question to ask well I know we're constantly comparing the new technologies that are out there and there's a lot of competitors you know in the landscape and sometimes we have to choose what it is that the clients or the organizations we're working with have in place or have available but we try to just select what is available at that time what they're familiar with what makes the most sense and also through using smart content we already have existing API that works with that platform and so it really made a lot of sense for this particular initiative yeah and to add to that too we have used different ABM platforms as well domain base is the one we're using now but there were others that we have tried out I do think the flexibility in the tightest mark content is a huge plus and that team at domain base was willing to work with us on that as far as making sure everything was connecting well so that was definitely something that drove a plus the other part of it too that to me was a big selling point was the breadth of what you could do from an intense standpoint so you can have as many topics many groups of keywords that you want to track and when you're doing something for four business lines five markets and there's you know eight to ten products under each of those it gets really big really fast so it's proven to be easy for us to organize which is a huge plus and it's baked right into Salesforce which is our CRM system so that made a lot easier as far as that sales connection and that's one thing we had talked about earlier was how did you select that that tech stack there was a kind of process of elimination there are limitations and other tools that we were disqualified because like she mentioned so many business lines so many keywords just the magnitude of their program just pushed them into some particular tools and then made that selection from that excuse me what do we use for the data storage or where's the content being stored I think we're using the Drupal interface smart content module is right there within the CMS for you to be able to load in your content yeah not in this case there's not but potentially if it needed to have a dam I think that could be something on a not in this project we're not doing that yeah that can be very useful when you're able to do that yeah Jeff we have yeah we have like 1200 1300 targets yeah I mean we're we're probably 18 months to two years right yeah so personalization was the next step in their account based marketing program the ABM of their targets of their specific you know company accounts so that was just that that scenario lended itself to that platform yeah yeah any other questions anyone else awesome well we're glad you joined us this morning a little chat with Catherine so thanks for coming enjoy the rest of your Drupal con it's the last like day here I guess then tomorrow's contribution day so enjoy your time yeah thank you guys