https://symposium.sitecore.com/en/agenda?tab.day=20241017#/

My notes from day two:

Power of Trust in a Digital & Physical

A conversation with Cracker Barrel, Aston Martin and Pet Supplies Plus. The commonality is that their goal is to invoke an emotional response from their client base through in-store experiences that may begin (or end) on their website. In my experience Cracker Barrel has an amazing staff that encourages future visits. Aston Martin spoke about differences in cultures which I love to hear about because I love catering web experiences to different cultures and learning from that experience.

ART

The Australian Retirement Fund spoke about combining two large fund companies into one and learning how their clients feel unready for retirement. It was great to hear their honest experience and how they selflessly took on the challenge to educate and help reassure a client-base that does not feel comfortable with where their retirement savings is at. They also have a great mascot ART.

Racing Victoria

Racing Victoria spoke about using branding across all channels to create an expertise engaging younger audiences to come to the race track (because their audience may be aging out and the economy may be shrinking disposable incomes). Another honest discussion about how to reinvigorate marketing throughout consistent branding.

Check them out: racing.com

I notice the front-end host is often left out from these discussions about moving to the cloud. This week me and the RDA team grew our bond with Netlify and we are very happy with them. Go Netlify!

Iron Mountain 

As an MBA I geeked out entirely on the two sessions I got to spend with the marketing manager from Iron Mountain (an MBA’s dream company). With no store-front and potential clients only familiar with a small part of their business, they took their Sitecore upgrade as an opportunity to address Information Architecture discrepancies. Again, no store front or local presence, they have to deliver pertinent content in over 35 languages and 70+ global websites.

Navigation and breadcrumbs on a page design are great but Iron Mountain takes navigation further with small sections of stories introducing visitors to other client journeys that they may be interested in. They consider it much softer than cross selling, more like presenting stories customers may be interested in about how Iron Mountain is used by others.

Erik Qualman

I am not interested in motivational speakers, but this guy is good. He got my attention. Here are a few takeaways from his presentation:

• Tech changes; human nature does not
• Simplify with technology 
• Be flawesome , not perfect

Listening to him made me think of something I had thought years ago. Sometimes a little trickery works well in the digital world. If you ask a user to set preferences, use them. Customers love that. Where if you ask me for my preferences and you don’t use them, I think you have a disconnect in your business. When I see my name on the page and the page is one I chose to show on initial display (a simple bit of trickery) I love it.

Future-proof XM Cloud

I avoid discussions on future roadmaps but I do love any discussion on future-proofing. A lot of this discussion focused around taking third-party tools done well and utilizing them. Steal your architecture and security from well architected solutions like Azure and AWS. Outsource things like security; don’t ever roll your own in a time when vendors are so good at it.

The discussion included utilizing API gateway technology. Something I am going to dig more into.

Marketing in the era of AI

My last session was by Michele Fisher from Microsoft. I point that out because if you ever have the chance to hear this person speak, take it! So many good points, let me try to capture some:

• There is a need to increase ROI without increasing marketing budgets (AI can help) 
• Treat AI as a co-creator 
• Don’t start from a blank slate, review what AI produces for you
• Your data strategy needs clean data — this point reminded me of issues migrating content in Sitecore from other disparate systems
• With AI utilize prompt libraries

On to day three …