Scrappy, Out of Home Marketing Strategies for CMOs
Learn how Shafqat Islam and his team at Optimizely are getting scrappy and spending less when it comes to their marketing strategies.
At Optimizely, we're on a mission to help people unlock their digital potential. With our leading digital experience platform (DXP), we equip teams with the tools and insights they need to create and optimize in new and novel ways. Through Boundless Digital Invention, we’re reinventing marketing and allowing marketers to innovate without limits through confident content creation, inclusive collaboration and customer foresight. Now, companies can operate with data-driven confidence to create hyper-personalized experiences. Building sophisticated solutions has never been simpler. Optimizely’s 900+ partners and nearly 1500 employees in offices around the globe are proud to help more than 9,000 brands, including Toyota, Santander, eBay, KLM and Mazda, enrich their customer lifetime value, increase revenue and grow their brands.
Guest Bio
Shafqat Islam is the Chief Marketing Officer at Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, where he plays a central role as the company continues to reinvent how marketing and marketers work, from web experimentation to orchestrating the entire content lifecycle.
Islam’s dedication to optimizing the marketing experience dates back to his time as co-founder and CEO of Welcome (formerly known as NewsCred), the global leader in Enterprise Content Marketing from 2007 to 2021. Welcome created and led the content marketing platform (CMP) category (now known as the Optimizely Content Marketing Platform). He joined the Optimizely team as General Manager when Optimizely acquired Welcome in 2021.
Guest Bio
Shafqat Islam is the Chief Marketing Officer at Optimizely, the leading digital experience platform (DXP) provider, where he plays a central role as the company continues to reinvent how marketing and marketers work, from web experimentation to orchestrating the entire content lifecycle.
Islam’s dedication to optimizing the marketing experience dates back to his time as co-founder and CEO of Welcome (formerly known as NewsCred), the global leader in Enterprise Content Marketing from 2007 to 2021. Welcome created and led the content marketing platform (CMP) category (now known as the Optimizely Content Marketing Platform). He joined the Optimizely team as General Manager when Optimizely acquired Welcome in 2021.
Episode Summary
This episode features an interview with Shafqat Islam, CMO at Optimizely, a leading digital experience platform (DXP) that equips teams with the tools and insights they need to create and optimize in new ways.
In this episode, Shafqat shares his core company beliefs around marketing, the journey of cutting Optimizely’s budget to zero and starting over, and how he and his team are getting scrappy and going back to the drawing board to start afresh with their marketing strategies. Shafqat also gets transparent about what it’s been like to be a first-time CMO and the advantages that present to him in his new role.
Key Takeaways
- For long term business success, you have to have a solid digital presence, create awesome content that keep your customers coming back for me, and utilize creativity and science to provide unparalleled customer experiences.
- Sometimes, you have to scratch it all and start over. By cutting their company budget to zero and starting afresh, Shafqat and his team now run a leaner and more scrappy marketing organization.
- Anything measurable is uncuttable, anything unmeasurable is cuttable. Be ruthless about what your output is and how it affects your input.
Quotes
“We wanted to get a lot scrappier, a lot more entrepreneurial, a lot cheaper, like spend a lot less money, even though we have big budgets and it just requires a different type of person, right? And so, as I mentioned, sometimes some people opt out. Some were encouraged to find a better fit somewhere else. And the entire leadership team in our marketing org turned over very quickly… So they all left and all the people who were doing the job one level below got promoted into the new marketing leadership team, and they've absolutely crushed it. I'm so proud of them because they were just waiting in the wings to take on more responsibility. Get shit done, prove that we can run a very different type of scrappy marketing organization.” –Shafqat Islam, CMO, Optimizely
Episode Highlights
*(03:43) - The Trust Tree: Cutting the budget to zero and starting over
*(23:37) - The Playbook: Getting scrappy and redefining the marketing game
*(33:39) - Quick Hits: Shafqat’s Quick Hits
Episodes Transcript
- For long term business success, you have to have a solid digital presence, create awesome content that keep your customers coming back for me, and utilize creativity and science to provide unparalleled customer experiences.
- Sometimes, you have to scratch it all and start over. By cutting their company budget to zero and starting afresh, Shafqat and his team now run a leaner and more scrappy marketing organization.
- Anything measurable is uncuttable, anything unmeasurable is cuttable. Be ruthless about what your output is and how it affects your input.
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