Welcome to the Voices of Acoustic blog series! With this series, we invite you to meet different members of the Acoustic team, learn about their backgrounds, and find out what they’re excited about when looking to the future of marketing. You’ll meet members of Acoustic from all different backgrounds, geographies, and parts of the organization with the goal of giving marketers and customer experience leaders a closer look at who we are and what we believe in.

Let’s dive in with our first installation. Meet Scott Opiela, Chief Marketing Officer at Acoustic.

Acoustic: Thank you for joining us today, Scott! To kick us off, we’d love to learn more about your background. What inspired you to pursue a career in MarTech?

Scott: Like many, I was uncertain about my career path in high school and even in early college. My father was a nuclear engineer who pushed me to pursue a career in engineering. When it came time to select a school for my undergraduate degree, I chose Clarkson University and understood that it was a strong engineering school but offered other paths as well.

After the first semester, it was pretty clear that engineering wasn’t a path for me. However, I loved the business classes, especially those focused on marketing. I’m thankful to have had some great professors at Clarkson that I attribute to pushing me towards marketing – Jeanne Munger, Brenda (Dunn) Kozsan, and Bill Karis – I still remember all of them well. They were my inspiration.

How have you seen the industry change?

There’s been A LOT of change in marketing – primarily to the technology we use. I graduated college before the Internet was mainstream but was captivated by computers and technology as a kid. I even tinkered on Apple and Commodore computers long before tech was “cool.” Clearly, much has changed since then. 

I’m fortunate to have been part of the broadband movement, the migration to SaaS/cloud, and the explosion of ecommerce. There’s been immense change in the technology that marketers use due to the adoption of new tech like smartphones, streaming, and ecommerce, among other innovations. These technologies have fundamentally shifted how brands and marketers connect with their customers and how we track and measure success. 

We’re seeing massive tech transformation again driven by consumer privacy concerns, big tech providers that are putting walled gardens between marketers and their customers, AI adoption, and even the metaverse. It feels only natural to now be at Acoustic where we have some incredibly transformational technology that can better help marketers navigate change and future-proof operations. 

What should marketers’ top priorities be today?

That’s a difficult question to answer because it depends on the maturity of the business. Speaking broadly, for a new company, it’s important to generate some awareness and differentiation in the market. For a more mature business, you want to ensure that you’re helping facilitate growth and that you have a scalable and repeatable process that you are able to properly measure and report. 

As a B2B tech CMO, my top priorities are to deliver efficient, effective, and measurable growth, and to surround myself with talent to accomplish this. The scope of marketing continues to expand and it’s imperative that marketers have talent in place to ensure effective brand, data, communication, CX, growth/demand gen, and MarTech infrastructure strategies.

Driving ROI for a brand is a critical part of marketing. What metrics are most important for brands to track in order to determine the ROI of their campaigns?

There are a range of metrics that marketers track today, including open, click-through, click-to-open, bounce, and conversion rates as well as time spent on site. While these metrics do tell marketers important information about engagement, they don’t give marketers the full story – there’s a huge gap in understanding what happens between the click and conversion. 

 For example:

• A bank may send an email about locking in low interest rates for loans. 
• You can typically see that the consumer opened the email and clicked a link within, but you may not know what she did after.
• At some point, she may submit a credit card application – but why? What made her jump from considering loans to applying for a credit card? That’s where behavioral experience insights come into play. 

Behavioral experience insights help marketers gain full visibility into the customer journey by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting behavior-based signals such as intent, frustration, and content and channel preferences. With traditional marketing metrics, you know what actions are taken (i.e., a click and then sometime later, a submitted credit card application), but you don’t know what pushed the user to take these actions. 

Behavioral insights will show you the user had clicked the low interest rate link, reviewed information about student loans, read user reviews for different credit cards for students, and then decided to move forward with applying for a credit card using her mobile device. This gives you a more complete view of the customer, enabling you to personalize her experience in a much more specific way moving forward. The big difference is you can understand not just that the user clicked, but what her intentions are, what device she prefers, and what her journey was to submit the application.

That leads us to our final question. Acoustic recently launched Acoustic Connect, an all-in-one platform for behavioral experience insights, multichannel marketing, and personalized journey orchestration. Can you explain why Acoustic launched the platform and how it’s expected to benefit marketers?

Traditionally, marketers have relied on disparate technology to accomplish their goals. Data is siloed across different tech stacks, making it difficult to create a complete view of the customer and understand the individual customer experience. You may have one tool for ingesting customer data, another that acts as your send engine, and yet another for creating more complex, personalized journeys. Because these tools are disconnected, gaining real-time visibility into campaign activity – and acting on these insights – is nearly impossible. 

Acoustic Connect is transformational to marketers because it’s the first solution to combine marketing automation, journey orchestration, and actionable insights around customer behavior and intent in an all-in-one platform. Marketers can use behavioral insights to understand the customer on a whole new level, empowering them to act quickly, orchestrate a multichannel journey that’s tailored to the individual, and report marketing ROI in a clear, precise manner. We’re connecting the dots between the campaign and conversion to enable marketers to better serve their customers and ultimately drive increased performance and improved CX. 

It’s an exciting time to be part of the team and although I’ve been with Acoustic for 18 months now, I know this is only the beginning of the industry disruption and MarTech innovation we’ll be leading.

 

Thank you for joining us and providing your insights, Scott! 

If you’d like to connect with Scott, you can find him smoking the perfect brisket at his cabin, playing with the latest AI tools online, or directly on LinkedIn.

This is the first installation in a multi-part series focused on the people at Acoustic. Please keep an eye on the Acoustic Digital Experience Blog for future editions.