by David Gorman
As head of Product at Opal, I have the amazing opportunity to work with some of the most innovative marketing teams in the world. This spring, myself and members of the Opal product, customer success, and sales teams have been traveling around the world to bring marketing leaders together to talk about their vision and perspective on how marketing is evolving to meet — and get ahead of — ever-shifting consumers’ expectations.
Throughout our Opal Brand Futures events, marketing executives continue to bring forward the importance of connecting directly with consumers. More and more, brands are leaning into Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) strategies with the goal of better understanding their customers so they can break through the noise and tell a more relevant, compelling story.
I have enjoyed hearing how these brands are evolving their strategies, teams, and processes to optimize their business in this new DTC era. The increasing complexity of personalization, the need to create a cohesive customer journey, and the speed that they must move at are all challenges that all marketers face today.
Given those challenges, the enthusiasm for Opal’s Direct-to-Consumer solution has been incredible to witness. As we talk to DTC marketers, they communicate the need for tighter collaboration across their marketing organizations. Marketers working across social media, email, and web channels are targeting the same goal of driving higher engagement and increased transactions. The challenge is that it’s difficult for everyone to coordinate their efforts and tell the same story, especially with the complexity of personalization and customer journeys layered on.
When talking with our customers on this tour, one thing that has repeatedly stood out to me is how empowered marketers feel with our new platform capabilities. The visual nature of the Opal Platform enables marketers to go beyond words in a brief to bring their ideas to life in ways that documents and spreadsheets are not able to.
In Opal, marketers wireframe their email campaign and visually plan how their homepage will represent their next product launch. This allows them to reduce the back-and-forth with creative teams and more easily communicate their ideas to execute campaigns more efficiently.
A director of marketing at a global cosmetics brand recently told me:
“I finally have a way to visualize my ideas and quickly get them out to my team. I don’t have to go to battle for resources just to bring a piece of content to life that stakeholders can react to.”
Feedback like this is validation that we are helping marketers become more efficient and effective than they ever could with general-purpose, legacy tools and solutions.
We are continuing our worldwide tour with several Brand Futures events, where we bring together senior-level marketers in a private setting to connect with each other while exploring the future of marketing.
