Cisco’s Jenny Hooks answers 10 questions on omnichannel marketing, content strategy and cross-channel experience
In this OmnichannelX speaker spotlight, we asked 10 questions of Cisco System‘s Senior Global eCommerce Marketing Manager, Jennifer Hooks. Cisco is a global leader in omnichannel content strategy for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business content marketing, so we take things Jennifer says very seriously!
Jennifer heads up a global team that seeks to keep up a consistent and aligned presence on a variety of channels that drives audience value during the sometimes long and complex sales cycle of their products.
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This post covers topics like
- the relationships between omnichannel and customer experience when crafting your business case, strategy, and processes
- the impact of omnichannel content strategy on collaboration and teams
- recommended learning resources from someone who has lived through a full-scale omnichannel content strategy implementation, and
- much more.
What is omnichannel? Your personal definition…
Do you feel it’s becoming urgent for brands to consider content strategy in the context of omnichannel experience?
The way our buyers engage, educate themselves, and purchase continues to evolve. Their expectations are changing as well – that brands anticipate their needs and make it as easy as possible for the customer to find what they’re looking for and do what they’re trying to do. And these expectations don’t apply to a single channel or a single part of the buying process. It’s expected at every engagement, every step of the way.
Where does an omnichannel content initiative usually start?
Ours started in Marketing, with our Chief Marketing Officer’s vision to build a customer-centric organisation that delivers value to the customer, and revenue to the business. Omnichannel experience is how we deliver on that vision – by creating compelling, personalized, data-driven experience that meets the customer exactly where they’re at with exactly what they need.
We’ve gained a tremendous amount of momentum, and are now seeing stronger partnerships with our sales and services organisations to help expand past just marketing-led initiatives.
We’ve gained a tremendous amount of momentum, and are now seeing stronger partnerships with our sales and services organisations to help expand past just marketing-led initiatives.
What tends to motivate an organisation to go omnichannel?
What do you feel is the biggest challenge holding back organisations from delivering excellent omnichannel experiences?
What skill-set or skill-sets do you recommend those trying to drive omnichannel strategies should develop?
The ability to understand what data is available, what data actually matters in the experience design, and how that data passes from one channel to the next to drive the overarching experience.
Also, the ability to be empathetic to the customer – digging in and looking at their experience as a whole, identifying ideal-state, then bringing in single-channel experts to help deliver against the end-to-end vision.
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How do you reconcile omnichannel’s cross-silo, cross-channel nature with the usual funding and resourcing model of an enterprise?
Top down or bottom up? How should you move forward?
How should you move towards omnichannel? Big bang or incremental change?
Start by prioritizing channels – based off of engagement, investment, etc. and connect the ones that make the most sense. Another simple step is to align on customer messaging and start to govern the customer experience. Customer’s don’t care whether what they’re seeing is orchestrated by sophisticated technology, they care about relevancy and consistency in message. You can make huge strides in this direction simply by implementing stronger governance around what the customer sees.
What books do you recommend to learn more?
- X: The Experience When Business Meets Design by Brian Solis
- Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Harley Manning, Kerry Bodine
About Jenny Hooks, Cisco
Jenny will be presenting a brand new session at the upcoming Omnichannel Conference. Keep an eye on the 2021 Programme for more.
Jenny is Senior Manager of Global eCommerce Marketing, whose mission is to engage Cisco’s diverse range of customers with data-driven, personalized, omnichannel experiences.
She is a business leader, passionate marketer, and problem solver, who relies on data to act with confidence and purpose. She tries to bring data into all marketing conversations because it will always point you in the right direction — you can’t argue with data.