Three key takeaways from Opticon 2022

Myself and members of the dotcentric team spent the day at Opticon London 2022 learning all about the latest happenings in the Optimizely world. Here are my three key takeaways from the event.

1. A new way of seeing the product suite

Optimizely have a bigger and better product suite than ever before, and it’s quite common these days for clients to get lost in the process of trying to understand how all these products fit together or which elements they need to complete their own bigger picture.

This is no longer the case as Optimizely have simplified how they position the offering with three foundational pillars:

• Orchestrate: one destination for content creation and management – eliminating the need for re-work.
• Monetize: deliver seamlessly personalised commerce experiences at scale, on any touchpoint.
• Experiment: grow and leverage a culture of data-driven experimentation to feed back into all processes ensuring the maximum return on investment.

This closed loop drives repeated growth as each iteration builds upon the work of the previous, leading to constant improvement and refinement.

2. Identify where processes need improvement

The world is ever changing, and our digital processes need to change to keep up. We can no longer do things the same way as we did last year and continue to expect great results. Your competitors are changing to keep up with the market and their users - this drive needs to reach all parts of your organisation.

Optimizely shared three key markers to look for:

• Complexity: More tools, more processes, more workflows, more approvals, and more clicks to get anything done. That’s the way processes naturally grow over time.
• Uncertainty: Decisions made as demands coming from upper management, or decisions made without data leads to uncertainty about results and uncertainty about why things work (or don’t!).
• Inertia: Siloed and non-actionable data makes everything more difficult even when you are trying to make data-driven decisions.

For all three, Optimizely is now uniquely positioned to provide a coherent platform that helps reduce your existing processes or eliminate needless back and forth entirely.

3. The Welcome addition

With the acquisition of Content Marketing Platform (CMP), Welcome, Optimizely added a four-time recognised Gartner leader in the CMP space into the mix. This addition helped close the loop on the orchestrate pillar mentioned above, as it gives marketers all the tools they need to create fantastic content all the way from ideation to release.

An announcement was made to confirm the renaming of Welcome to Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (OCMP) - and that’s not all: they are hard at work with a plugin for Optimizely CMS which will allow seamless integration between the two platforms.

Marketers will be able to natively create content in the exact same templates as they are available in the CMS, all from within the OCPM itself. No CMS editor expertise needed!

Not only that, but marketers will also be able to publish content from the OCMP directly to the web via the CMS without having to manually move content or copy across to the CMS, as the OCMP will be able to orchestrate the content creation in the CMS automatically. This of course is subject to the content approvals and workflows as set up in the OCMP.

The final surprise they shared with us is that soon the OCMP will be able to use open-source Stable Diffusion AI algorithms to generate content and imagery at no extra cost.

The purpose of this is not to reduce or replace marketers and content creators with AI, but rather to give them a starting point should they want something to spark their creativity.

It was a great day out, learning and being among peers discussing the latest trends in digital to ensure we are always ready to deliver the very best to our clients.