DXPs, Data, and the Death of Guesswork in Marketing Strategy (ft. Steve Herz)

Speaker A: Welcome to Making Martech where we spotlight innovative Martech companies and leaders who are driving growth. Um, highlighting valuable insights and actionable strategies to stay ahead in this industry. Today we're here with Steve Hurst, CEO of Moonstone Interactive. Would you mind introducing yourself?

Speaker B: Don't mind at all. I'm Steve Herz, I'm the CEO of uh, Moonstone Interactive. And Moonstone Interactive is a, uh, website design, development and optimization company. And we combine those all together to help our clients be able to have a high performing website to deliver the conversion rates and whether they're generating leads or product sales, whatever it is to improve that business impact for the clients by giving them the right tools to do that.

Speaker A: And can you tell us a bit about your background?

Speaker B: Actually I purchased the company Moonstone. It had started originally as a creative agency and I've been kind of migrating much more toward the business impact of what we do rather than only the creative impact. In other words, you can have a great website that doesn't produce any sales or you can have a great website that produce a lot of sales. Which one's better? Well, I think the one producing sales is the best. So we integrated the conversion rate optimization, the increase in sales return on investment calculations into everything we do from a design development standpoint.

Speaker A: And how would you describe your approach to digital growth? I know that you said that you unify this. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Speaker B: Yeah. Our approach is first off from the strategic side. We start every project making sure we fully understand our clients business goals. Why do they have a website? How is it going to help their business? And then we use data to help us refine or as we develop, if they need it, the strategy to improve those business results. Now what we're trying to build here for all of our clients is a platform, an online platform that enables their marketing department to execute their uh, business strategy and marketing strategy because they have the right tools to win in the competitive marketplace. And to us it's the same as any industry. Any function where you're trying to create something, are you trying to build a house or you're trying to create an effective website? You need to have the right tools in order to be able to fulfill that job. And so we're providing our clients with a platform that has the right tools for them to improve their marketing impact, uh, their visibility, user experience and conversion rate into their business.

Speaker A: What sets Moonstone apart? Because I know there's tons of other agencies out there that are creative agencies, web design agencies. So what exactly sets Moonstone apart here?

Speaker B: Well, I mean there are many agencies that have the same perspective we do and there's lots of agencies that don't. So what sets us apart from a lot of my peers that I know is that all of us that work in the company are from the enterprise side. So we bring the enterprise perspective and into the middle market so that the middle market companies can get the same expertise and tool set that the larger enterprises have. And as I mentioned before, we do everything from a marketing data standpoint. Not everyone does that. Some people do what we call opinion based design. What that basically means is whoever has the highest title, the most powerful, the highest salary, whatever it is, their opinions most important. And companies build around those opinions of what must be right because that's the chief person. We gear our recommendations and our tools toward following the data. Data about the competition, data about uh, visitor behavior, data about the actual execution and tracking. So we track everything and give proof at the end for our clients so that they can measure their actual impact on the bott. So we have that totally integrated. So if you take enterprise level solutions and that covers security, scalability, reliability along with a data driven marketing strategy, you have a much more efficient, effective solution.

Speaker A: And you talk about bringing this enterprise level perspective down to the mid market. Can you go a bit deeper on that? What does that exactly mean?

Speaker B: Well what that means is that uh, the product solutions we offer the platform or which we offer typical website content management systems and that. But when we get into really enabling our uh, clients to win in the marketplace, we're generally implementing what's called the digital experience platform. And what that is is a combination of many of the individual services that are out there that include a uh, CMS to manage your content, marketing automation to automate your emails and lead nurturing content personalization which relies on Personas and developing different images, messaging offers based on the Persona of a particular visitor and personalizing that to the experience as well as experimentation to be able to do some a B test or multivariate tests to find out which one has the best results in the marketplace and taking all those and putting them under one vertically integrated designed platform that gives our clients the efficiency of having one technology to learn of um, having everything integrated without building separate interfaces and interpretations, one set of reporting that consolidates the reporting across all those functions. So by vertically integrating all that into one Martech solution, reduces the total cost of ownership of the website, improves the time efficiency and enables the marketing department to manage that strategy and execute more efficiently without needing to be dependent on the IT organization because they don't need to know development, they just need to know how to use this user friendly platform to build new pages, build new campaigns, build new Personas, whatever they need, that's their strategy.

Speaker A: So what does that mean for, for the businesses that are using it? Because there's a lot of stuff in here that's nice to have. But then when a lot of companies come looking for an agency, they're also looking for an agency that's helping them grow their revenue.

Speaker B: Absolutely. For example, someone on one of these digital experience platforms, typically in the marketplace, they double their conversion rates because it gives them better tools. They usually uh, can produce content strategy 35% faster than with multiple tools. And the overall cost of platform is usually 25 to 40% less than when they do it with individual services and tools. It's about unifying so you can do that. But also if you have content personalization for different visitor groups or Personas, it's pretty well proven that um, you're going to get probably a jump, uh, of around 40% increase in your revenue. So you have both the efficiency side, which is a cost, as well as the revenue side because you increased or elevated really your user experience that increased conversions. So you're lowering cost and increasing revenue. That's a pretty sweet combination.

Speaker A: Yes, it is. And do you think that there's misconceptions that people have about this?

Speaker B: You know, I think there are two things. One is some companies are so focused on cost, I want the cheapest platform. So I'm going to um, build my website on Wix or in WordPress with a few plugins. And they're not looking at the long term sustainable business model to deliver results and be future proofed against the competition continuing to grow. So that's one aspect. And the other aspect is they may not understand all these tools yet because they haven't dealt with them. And so they're a little reluctant to change or to learn new things. But if you look at a Gartner, Forrester, who really are, uh, industry analysts as far as where the market's going, you know, don't take my word for it, go check out Gartner and Forrester. And they religiously will say the winners in the market are the ones that use a digital experience platform and integrate everything around the customer journey, that user experience and that brand reputation and trust that you get by satisfying that online user. So they find what they want quickly, they get the information quickly and they basically execute quickly. So the industry analysts say those are the winners, the people who don't adopt the new technologies and that of uh, a digital experience platform, they're going to have a hard time competing. And these digital experience platforms also include the latest bug AI because a lot of the content personalization is driven by AI modules. So one way to think about is almost every middle market company I've met that uh, is E commerce based will say, oh my God, we have such a hard time competing with Amazon because everyone uses Amazon. This gives them the ability to have features similar to Amazon without doing the same investment Amazon because it gets those tools down so the middle market can

Speaker A: actually afford and going off that. Um, my question is, you talk about future proofing for your clients, you talk about your clients having to think about the long term. So what does that end up looking like?

Speaker B: Well, there's a couple things that will come into this whole concept of future proofing because the future is going to be different than the present. Has been that way since the beginning of time. Right. We keep evolving, using new tools, new techniques, et cetera. So couple things come out there. The digital experience platform has so many tools and uh, capabilities. It allows a company to grow significantly within the platform because they can refine their techniques. The concept of having experimentation integrated into that allows them to constantly test the marketplace so that they can evolve with the marketplace as the consumer needs change. So they have those tools. But what is also a factor of anyone who manages a web platform within a company is kind of the cost of keeping up with a new version of WordPress or a new version of this or a new version of that. And if you have six or seven components all tied together from different manufacturers, keeping up with it becomes very expensive and complex. Because if one thing, one part upgrades, is it still compatible with all the other parts and you have to go in and fix all the interfaces or is one out of sync? You have it all in one place. Plus we work with a, uh, platform called Experience by Kentico. And one of the architectural aspects of it is, is you don't have a major version upgrade. So anyone who has a large platform, you know, you'll hear them talk about we have to upgrade our version to be current. So then they have to do a platform upgrade, large platform upgrade with a lot of migration tools. And then as all the qa, then user acceptance, testing and everything in that takes time, money and people to do well with Experience by Kentico, they updated all along, there's no more versions. They update every month. They update, update, update, update, and they have these automate programs. So now the cost of version upgrades goes down immediately because it's done continuously. So there are ways like that that are embedded in these new tools that lowers the cost of ownership and the resource drain so that you can focus on the strategies. So you have continuous upgrading, easier to manage to the future. You have experimentation, easier to follow the consumer changes, you have internal measurement, easier to recognize when you need to change. And you can do it in the marketing department and not need to worry about. The IT schedule is filled with a bunch of other things and they don't have time for it. So it gives the marketing department the tools they need to win today and continue winning into the future and going off that.

Speaker A: What are your thoughts on the AI shift? How are you adapting to it? How are you evolving?

Speaker B: Well, we as a company are evolving in a couple ways. One is, as I mentioned, our tools have AI, uh, components that relate to the tools that we have. So the easiest one to understand is content personalization, because our AI modules within the Digital Experience platform, in essence are predicting, based on industry data as well as your own website data, what is the most likely need or want or requirement of the visitor at the point of their visit so that you can present them with better information so they find what they want faster, they can execute faster, and they can have more efficient fulfillment. So that's how AI is helping in that it's helping us take some of the things that maybe the marketing department would have to think about and evaluate, say, let's change this, let's say, and does it more dynamically in the real time experience. So by embedding AI into the platform, we are in essence using AI based on the behavior of the visitor. In addition to that, we, uh, use AI internally to basically do market research. Market research about solutions, market research about consumer trends, market research about industry trends. So we're using IT because AI is incredibly efficient and doing research and going through data and dissecting it in a, in a way that it can answer our questions, provide considerations, and even help us go in the right direction. So that's where we're using it. Um, AI is very powerful today, but I think it's going to be a whole lot more powerful five years from now. And we want to, um, not be on the bleeding edge, meaning trusting it too much and having to cause a problem. We want to be on, uh, what we call the fast follow. So in other words, as it demonstrates its value, we want to be right there. Uh, so again, we believe it creates incredible efficiency. It doesn't replace what we all do, it basically gives us the tools to do it more efficiently.

Speaker A: You mentioned going in the right direction. So can you tell us about one or two recent client success stories that you've had?

Speaker B: We recently, uh, started working on optimizing a company that does very sophisticated equipment for spaceships, airplanes, military devices, et cetera. Very high precision. We've only been working with them for five months and they have already more than paid for whatever they paid us by multiple factors. With the increase in sales that they paid.

Speaker A: And uh, what do you think made this successful? If you had to go and pinpoint one factor that led to that success, what would it be?

Speaker B: Data driven marketing recommendations.

Speaker A: That's what it's all about.

Speaker B: Well, again, at the end of the day, the data that I refer to is data about behavior, visitor behavior, market behavior. And that behavior from a business standpoint is what you need to understand to satisfy those visitors. Whether those visitors are, uh, business or whether those visitors are consumers, their behavior indicates what they're responding to and what they need and want. If you follow that data, you're following the customer. You've got to know your customer, give them what they want. And um, by being able to know whether or not you are delivering to that requires you to set up all the monitoring so that you can monitor behavior to see how they're responding. Whether it's in an uh, experiment or whether it's just in day to day volume. You want to see if it's working and quite frankly it becomes very simple. If it's working, do more of it. If it's not working, do less of it. And you just became optimized.

Speaker A: Couldn't have said it better.

Speaker B: Now to get the data and execute on that's a lot harder than what I just said, but it is fundamentally recognize what your market wants and deliver.

Speaker A: And one of the things I like to say is success is like a two sided coin where on one hand we have our successes and if we flip that coin over, it's also going to be paired with some challenges. So my question to you is, what are some of the biggest challenges that Moonstone faces right now? Scaling.

Speaker B: That's a good question. I would say one of the biggest challenges is really educating the market on what opportunities they have and educating them in a way that they can see the reality of it.

Speaker A: So how are you addressing that?

Speaker B: Uh, by having podcasts with people like you. And you just need to get the word out and you need to, I mean, we do a lot of blog articles, we do Some podcasts like this, we, uh, just try to get the message out and reinforce it and get more information out there. Because companies that want to win, they're looking for what they need to do. And we're in this all day long. Most middle market business executives are running a business and hopefully they, they decide to find an agency that's going to work with them and adopts their goals as their own, provides the best solutions based on what they individually need, rather than just some cookie cutter formula. Um, you know, look the data, and then based on that and the company strategy, et cetera, put together a very bespoke solution that addresses what the company needs.

Speaker A: Given that, have you been going and exploring content as a strategy?

Speaker B: Content is a strategy, without a doubt.

Speaker A: And how have you guys been using that to go and address this problem?

Speaker B: Well, uh, it's interesting because the client I just mentioned that we just started with recently and have had early success, which is wonderful. The whole concept about content. We just went through this thing. It's okay. What content do we need to add to build more authoritative information on their website? We went through the whole dialogue of, well, we should look at these search terms and these queries, and there's a lot of volume here. Let's, let's do that because we'll get a lot of interest. And I basically provided from my experience. No, that's only one piece of it. Let's talk about who we want to come to the website. Not many. So in their case, they're targeting experts. You got to figure if they're doing equipment for aerospace, you're not talking to dummies like me. You're talking about really, really smart engineers. So we need content that attracts smart engineers, not dummies like me. You can get 10,000 people like me that will never buy aerospace equipment. So let's structure all our content around that target audience. And if we don't get 10,000 visitors, but we get 500 and all 500 of them are interested in our product, that's worth a whole lot more than 10,000 people who are not. So with your content, you really need to focus on your target audience. Who are the buyers and what information are they interested in? Uh, what information will represent your expertise for what they need? Back to knowing your visitor. So you've got to do content around knowing your visitor. Also, I'm probably get myself in trouble sometimes because the social media gurus will say, well, you need to have your information on Facebook and Snapchat or whatever, all this stuff. And a lot of Times. My advice is not, uh, necessarily, if you're B2B, I would say Facebook is not necessarily the best place for you. LinkedIn is a much better place. Why now are your target clients on Facebook? Probably. Are they on LinkedIn? Probably. But when they're on Facebook, Facebook is more around personal things. LinkedIn is more around business things. So if you want to talk about business things and attract their attention, do it on LinkedIn. Um, if you want to talk about family events, do it on Facebook, don't do it on LinkedIn. No one cares when they're on LinkedIn. So you have to also look at not just the, uh, person, but what their intent is when they're on different sites and play into the intent that relates to your product and services. So you just really need to be thinking about content from a targeted segment perspective.

Speaker A: And I think that comes back right down to your point. It's all about selecting the right tools, right?

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: It's the same thing for social media, it's the same thing for content marketing. In doing this, how do you keep innovating? So given that, are there any new services, technologies, capabilities, anything you're working on or rolling out soon?

Speaker B: You know, I would say the thing that we're working on most is how to leverage AI, because from an industry evolution, it's probably the biggest McGilla right now. And it's a matter of not just I have AI, it's really how do you use it to deliver your products and services or to provide your clients with tools to that use AI to accomplish their business goals. And so I think from an innovation standpoint, it's going to be hard to find something that's going to be more impactful than AI.

Speaker A: Uh, so how's that been going? Deep.

Speaker B: Um, hug. I, I think it's going at the right pace for our company, uh, and our services because we have it embedded in our products. We're using it internally for efficiency. We're helping our clients use efficiency, efficiency. And I think they'll just continue to evolve. But I'm, I'm actually pleased with the results we've seen so far. Uh, we definitely not, have not jumped in and, you know, jumped off the cliff with it, but we are definitely using it and getting very distinct productivity

Speaker A: and shifting focus a bit from AI. AI is a big trend. But apart from that, what trends are you currently seeing when it comes to this industry?

Speaker B: Well, I think it's probably tied in with AI in a large degree, and that is people wanting to get out of the minutia. So basically a lot of the work effort sometimes we need to do and a lot of people need to do is really tedious. And I think there is definitely a trend to get beyond the tedious and get into the higher level intellectual type things. And AI helps with that tremendously. But I think there's actually um, maybe a social or psychological desire for that and that'll help accelerate AI. But I think the, the more tedious kind of efforts in our world will start to get automated and simplified and that type of thing. So the easier you can make things. I'll go back to my user experience. Comments people. The easier you can make for the visitor on your website, the better.

Speaker A: And with that, how do you see client expectations evolving?

Speaker B: Well, they're going to expect to see more of that. Remember what I said before about these integrated platforms, reduced total cost of ownership, not as many moving parts to integrate it all. I think all that is in there and I think more and more customers are going to need and to math

Speaker A: and we talked about client expectations evolving, but what about agency expectations? What's something that you wish that more companies understood before they go and start

Speaker B: working with an agency that's going to sound funny? I think the more they understand their own requirements, and I use, uh, that word rather than others that could come to mind, but they need to understand what they know and what they don't know and where they can use help. So in some of this stuff, let's say, uh, since you were focusing in on AI, the majority of companies, not all companies, the majority of companies will probably need to hire an AI specialized company to help them. And the reason why that's important is because it can help them learn faster, help them avoid a lot of the initial pitfalls and help them apply more different tools that they might not be aware of. And it's the same true in our tech. If you haven't already done it, consider hiring an agency to help you do it because overall it's going to cost you for the agency, without a doubt. But you'll probably make faster progress, less mistakes and um, overall probably cost you less.

Speaker A: And I like to end every single podcast episode with the same M question. And that's moving away from the business, the serious stuff that we're seeing in the industry, and bring it to a more personal level. Uh, so what's the most overrated piece of advice that you've heard recently?

Speaker B: Most overrated piece of advice? That's a really good question. I'm going to take the fifth on that, because all I can think of when I think of that is politics. So I'll throw them all under the bus and say probably if it, uh, came from a politician. That's overrated.

Speaker A: Sounds good.

Speaker B: You weren't expecting that one.

Speaker A: I was not. I was not. Alrighty. Well, thank you for coming on, Steven.

Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. It was a lot of fun. I appreciate the opportunity to talk.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing your insights, sharing your expertise. That was some great stuff.

Speaker B: Thanks so much.

Speaker A: Thank you, Stephen. As we end today's episode, Making Martech, I'd like to thank all our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to share this and subscribe to our show so you don't miss the next one. I'm your host, Hymnish Jindal, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.