The New Imperative
Customer-centric marketing is on the rise. And to do it well, you need to understand how experience design principles fit into your overall business strategy.
Join us for the free AMA Experience Design Virtual Conference on April 13-15, 2021. We’ll look beyond the basics of experience design and give you the knowledge to better research your customers, improve your customer-employee interactions and test the overall usability of your online presence. Plus, we’ll look at ways to strengthen the collaboration between marketing and development teams to increase productivity and effectiveness.
You’ll also have the chance to network with fellow marketers and talk with solutions providers.
This AMA Virtual Conference is your opportunity to explore new methods to best serve your customers. Register now to attend live or to gain access to the sessions for future on-demand viewing.
This event is closed.
By attending this event, you can earn continuing education units (CEUs) toward maintaining any AMA Professional Certified Marketer ® credential. To learn more about pursuing certification or to claim your credits, click here.
April 13, 2021
Opening Keynote: Brand = Experience^STORY
Marketing has operated on a simple construct for branding for almost 75 years.: Brand = Promise + Experience. That construct is now obsolete. The advent of social media has shattered one-way interruptions of promise making in favor of co-created storytelling. But now marketers are addicted to storytelling; and they are at risk of losing yet more of their portfolio as they have with pricing, business analytics, supply chain, and distribution.
Russ Klein’s new and patented construct, Brand = Experience STORY makes the case that the most durable brand-building is through experience design, and re-frames the role of authentic storytelling.
Klein’s presentation will address how intentional experience design can be a brand’s strongest tool for engaging the Post-COVID consumer. You’ll be able to return to your brand the same day and see your challenges through the new lens of experience design.
Russ Klein
CEO, American Marketing Association
Now or Never: Why AI-Enabled Collaborative Work Management is the Future
As marketers, our digital IQ is years ahead of what anyone thought it would be. We’re more prepared than ever to be agile and pivot to meet the needs of our audience — and with more of our lives spent online, that audience is more available to us than ever. But with the increase in online content, how can we break through the noise and stand out from other brands? Automation and real-time insights will be the engine that enables brands to differentiate themselves. At Wrike, we’re finding that by using artificial intelligence capabilities, we’re able to get more insights with data than ever before with up to 99% accuracy. See how AI plus a collaborative work management solution allows marketing teams to work together in one platform to manage those insights and create impactful campaigns.
In this session, you’ll learn how to:
- Automate repetitive tasks so you can focus efforts on connecting with your audience
- Unify your marketing processes, streamline communication, and turbocharge your results
- Gain instant access to campaign performance across various channels so you can easily optimize results
Saranya Babu
SVP of Marketing, Wrike
The DNA of Customer Experience in 2030
Primed by evolving digital technologies that are smart, immersive and mobile, customers are expecting “relevance as a service” in ways that are more personalized, immediate and participatory. According to the Experience 2030 Pulse survey, 73% of brands agree that the future of customer experience (CX) is tied to real-time data collection and analysis. Analytics is the DNA of modern marketing in a tech-infused world. The new CX or “relevance-as-a-service” will be fueled by decision-driven analytics that is both tech-focused and human-driven.
Join this session to learn how to:
- Bridge gaps in customer experience design with AI and immersive technologies.
- Design customer journeys that mirror the needs, expectations and hopes of digital-first consumers.
- Evolve customer strategies from engagement to participation.
Wilson Raj
Global Director of Customer Intelligence, SAS
Agile For Content Creators
The imperative to be adaptive couldn’t be made stronger than it was last year, yet most content creation is still caught up in rigid and outdated workflows. Common creative processes are slowing content creators down, resulting in irrelevant material that is obsolete by the time it reaches its audience.
The Agile movement—borne from the world of software development—offers values and principles that can transform how we create. Whether you’re building training courses, internal communications, or something else altogether; your content development can be better and faster by adopting an agile mindset. Join Kevin Doherty, marketer and agilist, for this introductory crash course on creating content in an agile way.
You’ll learn:
• What “waterfall” is, and why it’s killing your content.
• The history, values, and principles of agile software development.
• Small mindset and process shifts that will take your content to the next level.
Kevin Doherty
Marketing Communications Manager, Vyond
April 14, 2021
Opening Keynote: Delta CX: Transforming Businesses By Focusing on Customer Value
Debbie Levitt
CXO, Delta CX
The Secret to Herding Cats — Internal Marketing for Brand Templates 101
Things certainly feel hair-on-fire-fraught right now, don’t they? “There are bigger fish to fry, beautiful designs to be made and dreams to be had!” you think.
But uh, speaking of those beautiful design dreams. Those can be tough to attain when you’re spending all your time herding cats, trying to get your team members to use brand templates you’ve made for them.
Here’s the thing — it doesn’t have to. Join Tyson Mickelsen, Senior Graphic Designer at Lucidpress, as he discusses tips and tricks to help you get folks to actually use the brand templates you’ve made.
In this little fireside chat, we’ll discuss how to:
- Strike a balance between hand-holding and an empowered template user through education
- Conserve your time, energy and design capabilities while giving the people what they want
- Delight and inspire your template users
You deserve to spend more time scheming and dreaming up grandiose design projects — and your design requesters deserve to get the content they need to do their job well! So, what are you waiting for?
Tyson Mickelsen
Sr. Graphic Designer, Lucidpress
How to Get Customers to Do Your Journey Maps for You
There are many roadblocks on the path to purchase, and it’s your job to remove them for your customers. The best way to make the journey easier for your customers? Have them design it. During this session, Nick Sargent, journey mapping expert for Standing Partnership, will show you how to lead your customers through experience design exercises that not only identify and prioritize the pain points of their journey but empower them to build the solutions.
During this session, you’ll learn:
1. Why customer-lead journey maps help you grow faster
2. How to find the right customers for the job
3. Exercises that get you those insights
Nick Sargent
Vice President, Standing Partnership
Customer-First: Embedding Experience Design in Your GTM Strategy
Customers are the lifeblood of every business, but how many companies can say that they truly have a customer-centric go-to-market strategy? With so many touchpoints in a customer’s lifecycle, there are innumerable ways to misstep and think about what makes sense for your company instead of who your company serves. Are you segmenting in ways that make sense for your audience? Are you creating marketing events and programs that bring the right types of customers together? When you speak to your audience, are you speaking in their language?
Join Marissa Lyman, Director of Americas Growth Marketing for her webinar, Customer-First: Embedding Experience Design in Your GTM Strategy.
You’ll learn:
- Dos and Don’ts of account segmentation
- Creative ways to think through programs and activities
- How to connect with your customers in meaningful ways
Marissa Lyman
Director of Americas Growth Marketing, Adobe
Driving Quality Growth at Scale - How To Develop Robust Customer Programs for Upsell and Cross-Sell Initiatives
Brands are capturing more data than ever before yet are challenged with how to fuel that to not only create better experiences, but how to create loyal fans for life. Join this lively session to see the exact steps for creating world-class customer growth programs and learn how to:
- Understand your customers through their data
- Create customer-centric campaigns that delight your audience at every stage of their journey
- Develop a powerhouse team that puts the customer first
- Implement a solid strategy that becomes a blueprint to ensure future growth
Heidi Bullock
CMO, Tealium
April 15, 2021
Future-Proofing Your Company: Integrating Brand, CX and EX
A new era of business is emerging. The future of work is changing, the complexity of challenges is growing, and the identity of companies is shifting. Increasingly, customers and employees want *humanized* businesses. And marketing has a more important role to play than ever before in this new era.
This session will discuss how stand-out companies will increasingly design the WHOLE brand experience, from new hire to new customer — integrating brand, customer experience, and employee experience. Join our discussion to think about your role and experience design strategy so that you can stand out and attract the best customers and best talent in the new era.
Charissa Shelton
Experience Strategy Consultant
The Digital Revolution: Static Webinars Reimagined for Maximum Engagement
Up until recently, webinar programs have remained relatively stagnant in terms of technology capabilities and audience expectations. But, with heightened focus on virtual events, and audience expectations demanding even more engaging content and interactivity, organizations must rethink how they remain relevant and keep audiences tuned in from start to finish.
In this session, we’ll discuss the new emerging ways to garner audience attention through enhanced production, content delivery, and captivating new strategies for packaging your entire webinar program.
Alyssa Peltier
Senior Manager, Industry Solutions, Event Marketing, Cvent
Myllisa Patterson
Senior Director, Demand Generation, Cvent
Lunchtime Keynote: The Golden Road Of Opportunity: Website Accessibility and Human Experience Design
This lunchtime keynote session explores real life examples of how and why companies overlook missed business growth opportunities in a digital world. What barriers are your customers experiencing? How are employees, students, and consumers using assistive technology and what steps can you take to embrace them? Through the art of storytelling and real life examples, we wrap up with a tour of possibilities that includes learning what experience as the new design methodology is, how to prepare for new global web accessibility laws, guidelines and best practices and why inclusive design supports and powers up digital marketing strategies.
Kim Krause Berg
CPACC Accessibility and Usability Specialist, Creative Vision Web Consulting, LLC
Rethink Retention and Growth with AI and Analytics
At a time when customer engagement and needs are rapidly changing, more than half of chief marketing officers (CMOs) plan to rely on existing customers to fuel growth in 2021. Knowing who your customers are, what they care about, and how they feel at different stages of their customer journey are key success factors for retention. In this session, you will learn about current marketing trends and how the combination of different AI and Analytics technologies provides key customer insights and enables marketing optimization. Sense customers’ sentiment and know who they are to build stronger relationships.
Andrea Yanez
Senior Product Marketing Manager, OpenText AI and Analytics
Virgil Dodson
Director of Developer Community and Product Marketing, OpenText AI and Analytics
The New Rules for Email Marketing: Combining Privacy & Personalization
With customers’ heightened focus on privacy and an increasing demand for personalization, marketers need a new approach to email marketing. Focusing on the customer experience and building trust is key to balancing privacy and personalization. In this session, we’ll discuss the emerging strategies to add transparency to email marketing in order to drive opt-ins, reduce opt-outs and unsubscribes, and retain your subscriber list.
Claire Feeney
Product Marketing Manager, OneTrust PreferenceChoice
Russ Klein
CEO, American Marketing AssociationAs CEO for the American Marketing Association, Russ Klein is charged with the transformation of the AMA to become an essential community for marketers. Klein is a five-time award-winning CMO who has quarterbacked teams for many of the world’s foremost brand names, serving as president of Burger King from 2003-2010 and holding top marketing and advertising posts at Dr Pepper/7UP Companies, Gatorade, 7-Eleven Corporation and Arby’s Restaurant Group.
Kim Krause Berg
CPACC Accessibility and Usability Specialist, Creative Vision Web Consulting, LLCKim Krause Berg, owner of Creative Vision Web Consulting, LLC, specializes in providing usability, conversions and accessibility website audits for digital businesses seeking new growth opportunities. A provider of consulting services with 25 years’ experience in website usability, user experience, accessibility, information architecture, software testing, SEO and online community management, Kim is known for her passion for holistic web design.
Debbie Levitt
CXO, Delta CXDebbie Levitt, CXO of Delta CX, has been a CX and UX strategist, designer, and trainer since the 1990s. As a “serial contractor” who lived in the Bay Area for most of the 2010s, Debbie has influenced interfaces at Sony, Wells Fargo, Constant Contact, Macys.com, Etsy, and a variety of Silicon Valley startups. Clients have given her the nickname, “Mary Poppins,” because she flies in, improves everything she can, sings a few songs, and flies away to her next adventure.
Her “DevOps ICU” book and training teach non-CX roles about CX, why it’s done by specialists, and how to integrate it into teams and processes. Her “Delta CX” book and training teach companies how to improve customer satisfaction, predict and mitigate business risk, and increase ROI by investing in great customer experiences.
Outside of CX work, and sometimes during CX work, Debbie enjoys singing symphonic prog goth metal, opera, and New Wave.
Kevin Doherty
Marketing Communications Manager, VyondKevin Doherty is the marketing communications manager at Vyond: an online platform for creating your own animated content. Kevin specializes in applying principles from the entertainment industry to how we communicate with an audience and is an ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Team Facilitation.
Saranya Babu
SVP of Marketing, WrikeSaranya Babu is the SVP of Marketing at Wrike. Babu oversees all aspects of marketing, including demand generation strategy, product marketing, and communications. Before joining Wrike, Babu was VP of Marketing and Business Development at Instapage where she grew revenue and valuation by 4X, customer base by 3X, and annual contract value by 30X. She previously held roles at ChargePoint, Inc., BDNA (acquired by Flexera), Dell, and NetApp. With more than 15 years of experience in the tech sector, Babu has honed a diverse skill set in enterprise go-to-market strategy development, demand generation, marketing operations, field marketing, and more.
Wilson Raj
Global Director of Customer Intelligence, SASWilson Raj is the Global Director of Customer Intelligence at SAS. Raj is responsible for global marketing to establish, evolve and evangelize SAS’ analytics-powered marketing solutions.
Data-inspired and creatively driven, Raj has built brand value, engagement and loyalty through expertise in strategy and analytical marketing. With more than 20 years of experience in multiple industries, he has engineered strategic programs that fuse advertising, branding, digital marketing, social media, relationship marketing and public relations for connected brand experiences. He has held global leadership positions in marketing at Fortune Global 500®️ companies such as Microsoft, Novell, Medtronic and Philips. He also advised C-level executives about digital strategy while at award-winning agencies that include Publicis Groupe and WPP-owned agencies such as VML/Young & Rubicam and Wunderman.
Raj is often featured in keynotes and in major media publications such as Adweek, CMSWire, CNBC.com, CRM Magazine, eMarketer, Forbes, InformationWeek, MarketingProfs, ZDNet and more. He’s also the co-host of the Reimagine Marketing podcast.
Raj holds a B.A. in English and an M.B.A. from Brigham Young University, and a Certificate-in-Education from the Institute of Education in Singapore.
Tyson Mickelsen
Sr. Graphic Designer, LucidpressHailing from Castle Rock, Colorado, Tyson is passionate about brand management and design — there’s nothing more satisfying to him than creating something that people actually value. With Tyson’s background in both marketing and customer success, he knows how to create content that is not just marketing-related, but informative. In his two years at Lucidpress, he single handedly built and marketed 75 templates internally for the org, which resulted in 100% company-wide user adoption after only six months.
In his spare time, Tyson loves to waterski, listen to the soundtrack from Stranger Things, and eat Oreos.
Nick Sargent
Vice President, Standing PartnershipAs Standing Partnership’s customer experience expert, Nick helps clients discover turbulence in their buyers’ journey and craft strategies that turn unhappy customers into advocates. In a business environment where buyers are both empowered by technology and bombarded by sales and marketing because of it, Nick shows businesses how improving Cx improves customer retention and increases share of wallet. Nick loves to learn and share that knowledge with others – whether that’s training client teams on how to better serve customers or leading companywide training for his Standing co-workers.
Marissa Lyman
Director of Americas Growth Marketing, AdobeMarissa is the Director of Americas Growth Marketing for Adobe’s Digital Experience business unit. Her team partners with sales to co-own pipeline creation, setting the strategy for how to drive demand and engagement across current and potential customers. She previously led business operations for Digital Experience Marketing, overseeing org-wide communication and engagement, spend management, and analytics special projects. Marissa joined Adobe through its acquisition of Marketo, where she served as the Chief of Staff for the company’s CMO and created and ran the Marketo Marketing Rotational Program. She started her career in journalism before transitioning to public relations and later corporate communications. Marissa lives in San Francisco and holds a BA in Print Journalism from the University of Southern California and an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Charissa Shelton
Experience Strategy ConsultantCharissa is an experience design consultant and facilitator passionate about helping leaders find their next “a-ha!” with confidence. Since 2014 she has advised 100+ executives on product or service initiatives and has facilitated 1,500+ hours of workshops. After studying psychology, she worked with boutique consultancies in Chicago before moving to the UK where she is presently finishing her MBA at Queen’s University Belfast. Charissa is on a mission to humanize business and empower purposeful, adaptive leaders of the future.
Alyssa Peltier
Senior Manager, Industry Solutions, Event Marketing, CventAlyssa is a highly skilled marketing professional with over 10 years of experience. Since 2016, Alyssa has worked to build the global event marketing function at Cvent ensuring its largest, marquee event programs were designed and executed in alignment with the customer and prospect engagement and business needs. Her major focus was on the creation of unique experiences and establishing quantifiable and integrated metrics to drive ROI of the live events channel. Transitioning to her newest role under the product marketing team, which builds on the experience of her previous role, Alyssa is now responsible for working cross-functionally to craft go-to-market messaging strategies across Cvent’s portfolio of solutions that target the marketing persona, with particular emphasis on the SaaS sector.
Myllisa Patterson
Senior Director, Demand Generation, CventMyllisa Patterson is Senior Director of Event Cloud Demand Generation at Cvent. Myllisa is passionate about building long-lasting relationships between people and brands. With 20 years of experience in communications and marketing she is a technical marketer at heart, and has a unique approach to combining new media channels with traditional marketing tactics that reach customers and prospects in a meaningful way. Quick to embrace new technology and digital tactics, she’s also committed to empowering marketers and event professionals with tools and best practices to make their lives easier.
Claire Feeney
Product Marketing Manager, OneTrust PreferenceChoiceClaire Feeney serves as Product Marketing Manager at OneTrust PreferenceChoice — part of the #1 most widely used privacy, security and marketing user experience technology platform. In her role, Feeney is responsible for driving the development and delivery of OneTrust’s consent and preference management product as well as driving the refinement of the toolset and offerings. She works with marketers to centralize their user consent and preference management; comply with 100s of global data privacy regulations, including the GDPR and CCPA; and to drive engaging user experiences while promoting transparency as a key part of branding. Prior to OneTrust PreferenceChoice, Feeney led many strategic projects as a product marketer at VMware and has been responsible for pricing and packaging strategy, key technology partnerships, and digital properties and content. Claire earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Georgia.
Heidi Bullock
CMO, TealiumHeidi Bullock is an experienced marketing executive who has built a 20+ year career working at both global enterprise technology companies and start-ups. Most recently, she was the CMO of Engagio, where she was responsible for the go-to-market strategy, product marketing, internal sales, corporate communications, and ABM initiatives. Before Engagio, Heidi was the Group Vice President of Global Marketing at Marketo. Heidi has contributed to key thought leadership guides, including the Clear and Complete Guide to ABM Analytics and the Definitive Guide to Account-Based Marketing, Lead Generation, Content, Mobile Marketing, and Engaging Email. Heidi is a frequent speaker and guest lecturer for B2B marketing.
Andrea Yanez
Senior Product Marketing Manager, OpenText AI and AnalyticsAndrea Yanez is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for OpenText AI and Analytics which include big data analytics, machine learning, business intelligence and text analytics. Her key focus is executing Go to Market strategies, content creation for global marketing initiatives and promoting the value of AI and Analytics solutions to an array of industries and functions.
Virgil Dodson
Director of Developer Community and Product Marketing, OpenText AI and AnalyticsVirgil Dodson is the Director of Developer Community and Product Marketing for the OpenText AI and Analytics products. Virgil has been with OpenText the last 18 years with a strong background in engineering, and most recently, has spent time working with machine learning algorithms and models integrated with OpenText Magellan.
