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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#665: Developing strategies that cut through the omnichannel noise, with Arianna Vogel, Foursquare
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- [00:00]
Author of the Agile Brand
Your brand may be staying on top of current trends, but are you agile enough to stay relevant, resilient and successful as customers, competition and the world continues to change at a breakneck pace? I'm thrilled to share the newly revised version of my first book, the Agile Brand. I'm calling it the Agile Brand Revisited. It's been updated to reflect our continually changing world and it provides seven principles that form the backbone of an agile brand, offering detailed insights and actionable steps for incorporating them into your business strategy. This is the book that started it all and I'm excited to share it with you. It's now available in print and digital formats and available everywhere. Learn more by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com. the Agile Brand.
- [00:55]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trend, trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. With the increasingly complex Omnichannel customer journey, it seems like attribution is getting harder than ever. Do you know which of your marketing tactics are really driving sales? Or are you flying blind when it comes to measurement? Joining us today is Ariana Vogel, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Foursquare, a leader in location intelligence and measurement, helping marketers navigate the increasingly complex world of attribution, enabling them to develop strategies that cut through the noise and drive real results. Welcome to the show, Arianna.
- [02:23]
Ariana Vogel
Thanks so much, Greg. So happy to be here.
- [02:25]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely a timely topic here. And attribution. And I know a lot of companies that I work with. Definitely. You know this is something that keeps people up at night. So, you know, before we dive in here, why don't you start by telling us a little bit more about your background, your role at Foursquare and you know what excites you most about the work you're doing?
- [02:49]
Ariana Vogel
Sure. So I lead product marketing at Foursquare. For those that may be less familiar. Foursquare has been around for over 15 years. You might be familiar with our beginnings as the first check in app. But more recently over the last decade, we've really been focused on how to service marketers and businesses with our understanding of where places are in the real world through a robust platform that helps those marketers run better campaigns and businesses solve location based challenges. So my team specifically assists with building and bringing these messages and products to market as well as in the reverse direction, bringing learnings back to our team to help us build better solutions. What really excites me about this role is the challenges that we're solving. Our space is continuously changing, so even six plus years in here at Foursquare every day really continues to be exciting and completely different.
- [03:48]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, love it, love it. Well, yeah, and I was definitely an early adopter of Foursquare, so I've been following the company for a while here. So looking forward to diving in here. And I want to start with what I talked about at the top of the show is just some of the challenges that brands are facing with measurement and attribution and with this omnichannel journey, people, platform switching, channel switching and you know, whether that's solely online or online plus in person, you know, what do you see as the biggest challenges that marketers face in measuring campaign success accurately?
- [04:31]
Ariana Vogel
The two that immediately come to mind just to take it back to basics, are really understanding true marketing roi. It all comes back to that. These simple questions of do you really understand how your channels are working together? Do you truly understand how your results ladder up to the core business objectives for your brand? It all kind of comes back to that. The second that still continues to be a big challenge is really understanding where and how to optimize mid campaign. So where should I reinvest? Where should I de invest all in service of trying to drive efficiency without having to wait until the next campaign. If you're really just thinking about your measurement or attribution reporting as a report card after your campaign, you're missing out on so many opportunities to optimize and drive efficiencies have cost savings even while your campaign is in flight.
- [05:34]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah. And so we started talking about the customer journey. We've also got a crowded and highly competitive retail market. How has that made measurement even more critical?
- [05:49]
Ariana Vogel
Yeah, the past few years and current economic climate have definitely led to a more fluid brand loyalty environment. So, so consumers, even myself, are continuously reconsidering where to place their purchasing power. More than ever, they might be considering the virality of an offer, the affordability of an offer, the wisdom of the crowds and their networks. So all of that from a consumer perspective, combined with the fact that 83% of retail sales will come from in store shopping in 2025, really underscores the ever growing importance of campaign measurement. So now more than ever, you really need to understand your customers, understand their journey, be keeping tabs on your market share, and what actions you really need to take to improve performance.
- [06:46]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, and that leads to, you know, cutting through the noise, so to speak, as far as competition goes, and paying attention to what customers want and how they're behaving means, you know, we've got to develop more personalized strategies to deliver the right message to potential buyers. What advice would you have there to teams that need to do just that?
- [07:12]
Ariana Vogel
Cutting through the noise is not easy and can sometimes be even quite expensive. But my advice would be to really go back to considering the segmentation that you're using to reach your buyers and be reevaluating that segmentation constantly. Broad, unspecific segmentation is not necessarily going to service you in our current environment. A more effective strategy will sort of delicately balance between granularity and scale. You want to make sure that you're targeting with the most specificity that you can to focus your efforts on your exact ideal customer profile. But you also need to simultaneously keep enough scale in mind for your campaign to reach the full potential audience. So constantly having conversations internally about how to balance those two factors of granularity and scale. There's really a disconnect between a consumer's digital footprint and their real world purchases. We see this with advertisers that we work with every day. Your digital footprint might be one that's more aspirational, but the other, your real world purchasing power tells you so much more about true intent. Where are you actually going in the real world? Where are you actually spending? So consider focusing your targeting strategies towards this true intent by segmenting based on actual real world behavior and not just what someone might be interested in engaging with socially or digitally.
- [08:41]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, So, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, there's the strategy and the approach, of course, there's the analysis of the data, but there's also the, you know, putting, putting the things in place to enable that. Right. So, you know, what's the role of technology here? To simplify if it can be simplified, you know, how can technology simplify the process of understanding all of this?
- [09:08]
Ariana Vogel
Yeah, it's not easy. But when assessing campaigns, many marketers that we work with get caught up in the cycle of comparing apples to oranges. What I mean by that is this dynamic is a byproduct of needing to advertise across so many different channels. And those different channels have different metrics, different ways and time periods of delivering you results, and most foundationally, even different methodologies used to calculate them. So that makes performance comparison across your whole campaign understandably extremely challenging. And gaining that true understanding of what's working and what's not working is a really difficult task. So technology, like what we offer at Foursquare with our Foursquare Attribution product can help with this because not only are we offering kind of a single unified view of your marketing across numerous different channels, whether that be connected tv, social, your digital advertising, programmatic podcast, even like the one we're on today with all of those different channels, we offer a common methodology and set of KPIs to be able to measure across them so that you're able to get that more apples to apples type of reporting experience. But new marketers and advertisers that we work with are really caught up in that cycle of not being able to compare. So what we offer really sort of brings. Brings that together in a way that's really valuable for them.
- [10:45]
Author of the Agile Brand
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- [11:37]
Host/Interviewer
And so I want to talk more specifically about where Foursquare comes into the equation. I mean, as you mentioned, a history of being one of the first check in apps. And so that location intelligence has been a big focus of Foursquare for years now. How does location intelligence help marketers to, you know, do some of the things we've talked about so far, but, you know, really maximize campaign success?
- [12:09]
Ariana Vogel
Location intelligence is crucial for marketers for numerous different reasons, but one specific example is really that it enhances and fills the gaps in first party data. So your digital performance, your customer emails won't necessarily tell you as a brand who actually engaged with your marketing and went to visit your store. Similarly, your first party customer data won't always easily help you conquest, say the loyalists of your competitors in a specific region, for example, if you might have a different competitive set in one market versus another. So location intelligence is really an ideal tool in any brand or marketer's tech stack to help solve those sorts of business challenges and will only become even more important in the years to come. Also, in store measurement, like visitation metrics, in store purchase metrics also help bring marketing teams and their agencies closer to the core business objectives of the overall brand. If we go back to the challenges that we talked about at the the start of our conversation of really understanding that true ROI marketers really want to continue pushing their teams and the ways that they report out on performance to be as close to the overall ways that ROI is being proved for the business overall. So having those metrics, not just clicks, not just even conversions, but having a real in store visit, having an in store transaction, having an in store purchase allows marketers to kind of share that common language and be reporting out on the same things that will be important to the brand overall as well as help them prove out and increase their own marketing budgets. So rather than dealing in digital KPIs, they're able to prove out their performance in tangible real world conversions that ultimately tell that more powerful story of roi.
- [14:11]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, because I mean, that's really what it comes down to, right, Is bridging that gap between, you know, customer browses on their, you know, whether it's their smartphone or they're at home on their laptop or whatever and actually make making those purchases. Otherwise, you know, I'd imagine a lot of that is, is guesswork, you know, making assumptions about someone might have walked into a store. You're, you know, you're actually pulling this, this data together. So I mean, back to the point about attribution, I mean that's, that's a pretty powerful closed loop there, right?
- [14:47]
Ariana Vogel
Yeah, exactly. And even once someone gets to the store, there are lots of different circumstances where someone may have converted on the ad, made a subsequent visit, but they may be intent on browsing or showrooming as a concept is really popular in our space now for a lot of different retailers. So that's really why we've enhanced our solutions over the last couple of years and invested a lot of effort in making sure that we offer a suite of in store measurement metrics to have at your disposal. So whether that's visits, transactions, sales coming to life through things like sales lift, basket size. Together these metrics paint a much more holistic and insightful picture for a marketer. And they really offer you learnings on your customer journey that are not only just related to marketing effectiveness, but they can be really insightful learnings for the rest of your team too. You know, if people are converting and visiting your store but not necessarily making a purchase, are there learnings and insights you can take away about your store experience, about merchandising, about inventory you might have in stock in certain regions or locations? So there's really a variety of different learnings that can come out of having an even broader swath of in store measurement metrics that are really helpful beyond just the check the box. Yes or no. Was this campaign successful?
- [16:24]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, love it. And you know, Foursquare works with a lot of different brands, but you know, customers like Nextdoor, Ashley Furniture, Roku and many others. Can you share maybe a real world example or even hypothetical example, but an example of how are brands using some of these attribution tools to drive foot traffic and increase sales?
- [16:51]
Ariana Vogel
Absolutely. Well, foursquare attribution users range across numerous industries, but most notably advertisers in food and dining. QSR retail see really crucial value in in store measurement because of the importance that they place on proving marketing's impact on their brick and mortar businesses. So those businesses that have a storefront really see the immediate value with with location based measurement. But some specific examples. So I mentioned qsr, a great success story has been our work with Jack in the Box, who and a specific campaign was really interested in drumming up buzz and sales for a new menu item as well as increasing their market share in specific regions. So for this specific campaign, they weren't just only using our attribution solutions, they also were using our targeting solutions. So really embracing location intelligence throughout all of the different phases of the campaign. And specifically they wanted us to measure the success of their digital out of home ads. So the campaign was really successful. It increased foot traffic to their stores, over a million store visits as a result of that exposure. But even more interestingly and a point of pride for our team, was it driving really strong behavioral lift, meaning influencing visits that would not have occurred otherwise without consumers seeing the out of home ads. So what I love about this example is not only was it a really successful campaign for Jack in the Box, but it really Again, shows kind of the power of location intelligence influencing at different stages of the marketing life cycle for a particularly thorny and difficult to measure channel like out of home. And the proof is in the results. You also brought up Ashley Furniture, which is another fantastic example of using foursquare attribution. With Ashley. You know, Ashley Furniture, they have their leadership position in the furniture space, but they had historically had a hard time driving sales and being able to connect those sales to traditional TV advertising. So for the specific campaign, in an effort to drive reach and upper funnel performance, Ashley turned to Roku to run those connected TV ads and test out that kind of transition from linear TV and traditional TV to digital, and then tapped foursquare and foursquare attribution to measure the results. In turn, not only were they able to prove out that they could increase store visits, but they also were able to decrease their cost per store visit with this more effective connected TV channel. Roku users, they found, were more than 37% more likely to visit the Ashley Furniture store after exposure. But more importantly than any of those specific results, it was really a success story in someone taking the leap and exploring a new emerging channel and sort of pivoting from that traditional to digital. And foursquare attribution is a really effective way to help advertisers dip a toe into a new channel where they might not have advertised previously and be able to prove out the effectiveness of that and help the team assess whether or not to reinvest.
- [20:28]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, those are great examples. I wonder, for those marketers out there listening to this, what lessons or advice would you have for others that maybe haven't taken that leap yet, but want to explore potentially similar results. What lessons could they take from this?
- [20:50]
Ariana Vogel
The first, I'd say is to consider a holistic marketing strategy using location intelligence, especially when you're trying out a new channel or even trying to reinvigorate a channel where you've been present for quite some time, working with a common vendor, understanding their methodology, having trust in that methodology, and really applying that across the board, just sort of offers a constant in an experiment where there are multiple variables. Secondly, you want to make sure that you have a strong measurement partner in place when you are testing and investing in new channels like connected tv, like podcast. You want to make sure that, like I said, you're keeping constants in, in place where you can so that you can really focus in on those, those variables in, in your marketing experiment. And lastly, I would just say, since we touched on out of Home, is to hold your out of home tactics to the same standards of measurability as you would your digital tactics. The technology is there, the tools are there. We offer the ability to measure out of home at Foursquare. So this channel can be so much more than awareness. So hold it to the same standards as you do your other stuff.
- [22:20]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, I love that. That's great. Yeah. Because it's unfortunate if marketers are essentially writing off an entire channel of okay, well, we can only get but so much visibility or clarity on what's happening. I wonder, along those lines, thinking future trends and thinking a little bit out there, what trends are innovations? I mean, if we have this capability now to really tie location based attribution, what other trends or innovations are you seeing on the horizon that may change how marketers approach things like attribution and measurement in the next few years?
- [23:02]
Ariana Vogel
Yeah, there's so many, obviously in our space, AI is a massively emerging, rapidly emerging trend. Whether that's being used for segmentation, being used for customer journey analysis and measurement, campaign optimization, forecasting. I would also talk to your vendors and partners as a marketer to see not necessarily just what AI tools you should be putting in your tech stack, but how are your partners and vendors working with AI as well to improve the solutions that you might use from them. The second trend is, and building on AI is really ensuring the usability of your first party data to train models to have them work effectively for you. You really need to have those inputs into those models be structured, captured in a way where your customer data is usable. It's crucial for the effectiveness and use of AI in a way that will actually benefit your business and make your job easier. Also, another trend we're going to continue seeing those shifts in consumer behavior that we've been seeing over the past few years, where and how customers will buy will rapidly evolve probably in ways in a few years that we can't even conceptualize yet. So what marketers really need is a flexible strategy that can be continuously reevaluated so that teams can adapt really nimbly. Those that will succeed are those that have that flexibility, that adaptability, and are able to test and learn really quickly. And so marketers can really prepare for all of these shifts by partnering with platforms like Foursquare, with vendors who are rapidly innovating, but also balancing that with the preparation that's needed for the long term. Yeah, yeah.
- [25:08]
Host/Interviewer
Love it. Well, thanks so much for joining today, Arianna, one last question for you. I like to ask everybody here, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [25:20]
Ariana Vogel
Yeah, we've talked a lot about how our industry is constantly evolving. The best way me and my team stay agile is really by just continuously staying on top of what's happening in our space, continuously investing in learning, and more deeply understanding the challenges that our customers are facing. What's really worked for us is setting up processes to turn the exercise of industry intelligence into a regular practice. And that's really what's been a game changer for our team.
- [25:51]
Host/Interviewer
Yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Ariana Vogel, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Foursquare for joining the show. You can learn more about Ariana and Foursquare by following the links in the show notes.
- [26:04]
Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's the agile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [26:57]
Author of the Agile Brand
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- [27:57]
Greg Kilstrom
Before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. TechSystems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more@techsystems.com that's T E K systems.com now let's get back to the show.