Let\u2019s take a look at some of those obstacles we see today, including how they are addressed and solved by WordPress.<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s Digital White Waters<\/h2>\n
![\"jason-cohen-7\"](\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/jason-cohen-7.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a technical term in whitewater rafting called a \u201cboof\u201d. When rafting, whitewater indicates an obstacle that can be a challenge to pass through. According to Cohen, \u201cthe human tendency when you see water rolling around is to go around it. But when you do that in a kayak, you turn over, meaning leaning away from the problem actually is<\/em> the problem.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo the correct technique is to go right at the white water to fly over the obstacle and use it as an advantage to go fast,\u201d Cohen explained.<\/p>\n This is a great metaphor for what it means to take on these challenges in digital marketing. Rather than work around the problem, turn the problem into a differentiating advantage.<\/strong><\/p>\n According to Cohen, here are some of the \u201cboofs\u201d (or obstacles) digital marketing faces today that can be overcome…<\/p>\n Source: Chiefmartec.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cOne thing that\u2019s obvious to me is there\u2019s an explosion in types of marketing tools from chat to geo-targeting to lead generation forms and so on. It\u2019s clear that in the future there will be more of these types of things, not fewer,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n Within each marketing category, it\u2019s getting more specialized and complicated. So this implies that if there\u2019s only going to be more types of ‘things’, and it\u2019s very hard to do those things. The general conclusion is platforms are going to start offering to do everything for you… ‘we\u2019ll do all in one’ so to say.<\/p>\n However, according to Cohen, being able to do everything on one platform isn\u2019t<\/em> the future of digital marketing. Ask yourself \u201chow do I take it to the next step from basic integration to doing something custom with that integration?” For instance, taking these marketing IT tools and turning them into something unique.<\/p>\n From the film “Minority Report”<\/em><\/p>\n Personalization is a trend that\u2019s gaining rapid momentum. But how do you persuade your clients of its importance? According to Cohen, sometimes your clients aren\u2019t convinced to invest in something that\u2019s highly personalized. It\u2019s important to convey to them that conversions will go up when you\u2019re specific and personalize content based on information you can gather about your customers (say from AdTech).<\/p>\n Therefore, in terms of technology, this means your website has to collect and manage data. To be personalized, there has to be a lot of data. You must be able to access the data in real-time too.<\/p>\n In the 90s brands were told to get on the internet. \u201cIt\u2019s the future,\u201d they were told without really any other explanation. You weren\u2019t able to say, \u201cyou need to get online because Amazon is going to happen…or Google\u2019s going to happen..or social media is going to happen.\u201d We didn\u2019t know any of these things, but we knew this was the future, Cohen explained.<\/p>\n Today, the equivalent to getting online is giving your brand publishing agility<\/strong>. \u201cContent should be the centerpiece of marketing,\u201d said Cohen. He added, \u201cpeople on Facebook share content, not home pages.\u201d<\/p>\n The obstacle here is being good at publishing…many brands don\u2019t specialize in this area, so it\u2019s a challenge to go above and beyond to make your brand stand out from a publishing perspective.<\/p>\n \u201cThose who don\u2019t publish will not only stand still, but they\u2019ll fall behind,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n When you think like an entrepreneur in the context of a bigger company, that\u2019s called intrapreneurship. There is so much unknown and it\u2019s hard to plan for the unknown or how things will unfold. \u201cOne of the ways you deal with this uncertainty is to act or think more like a startup that also doesn\u2019t know anything about their customers, their products, or their market,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n He further explained that what you do is you run experiments. You acknowledge that you aren\u2019t sure how to use certain technology and that you need a technology platform that is flexible and lets people move quickly when they want to.<\/p>\n Secondly, you need an agency that\u2019s flexible and creative because it doesn\u2019t matter what the technology is doing, it\u2019s the campaigns and creative inside there that actually counts.<\/p>\n Thirdly, you need to be able to run tests quickly and cheaply so you can try things and learn and figure out what\u2019s working.<\/p>\n \u201cThis notion of intrapreneurship is more than just nice, it\u2019s mandatory when you\u2019re navigating a world where it\u2019s not exactly clear what the right answer is,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n What are the answers to some of these obstacles? Let\u2019s take a look\u2026<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what the technology is if the creative isn\u2019t there,\u201d Cohen explained. He added, \u201cat the same time, if you have the best ideas in the world, but it costs 50 thousand dollars and two months for a test campaign, that also won\u2019t work.\u201d<\/p>\n The relationship between technology and creativity is a marriage — you have to have both the technology platform to support these activities, along with non-A.I. humans to drive the creative strategies.<\/p>\n To attack these sorts of challenges, here\u2019s what you need from technology:<\/p>\n A solution that already runs at scale, meaning globally. Your content should be able to be reached from all over the world and cater to different languages, etc. But also, in a technology sense, say something goes viral and you get tens of millions of hits in a day; your site should be able to handle this volume of traffic without crashing.<\/p>\n Agile = fast. You have to be fast to be entrepreneurial at all of these things.<\/p>\n Not everything is cheap, obviously. Yet, simple things ought to be easy and they should be cheap. Complex things are not cheap, yet they are possible.<\/p>\n As data sources continue to expand, being able to easily and quickly connect and access all that data is essential.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how WordPress addresses these challenges:<\/p>\n WordPress powers more than a quarter of the web and 60 percent of the CMS market share. It also powers 27 percent of the top 10K websites.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s an example: When Google Glass came out, by the next day there were three free WordPress plugins that you could use that would take your content and make it available in Glass. This means that you and your clients are in control of the when and how to go and apply this new technology.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the control and power to go at the rate that\u2019s appropriate for you and your clients…that\u2019s agility,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n On the other hand, a closed platform, like Adobe, took four months to declare when they\u2019d have support for Google Glass..the answer…nine more months and then they didn\u2019t even\u00a0end up supporting it.<\/p>\n The WordPress software is free and so are many plugins and themes. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s not about making the budget smaller, but rather making the value bigger,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n Ask yourself \u2018what are you spending the money on?\u2019 Are you spending it on software licensing fees? This doesn\u2019t make a project more successful. Or are you spending it on making a better project or a more effective campaign which generates more value?<\/p>\n WordPress is open source and has 30,000-plus people working as freelancers whose primary income comes from WordPress. The fact that all this exists makes it easy to make integration points. Since it\u2019s open, you can take whatever somebody else did and customize it to the integration you want, making it that much easier.<\/p>\n \u201cWordPress is free like a puppy dog is free,\u201d explained Cohen. But of course, it\u2019s not actually free. Just like you have to give a puppy shots and keep it fed, WordPress comes with maintenance tasks too.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the part where WP Engine comes in. We take an open source project and we make it an enterprise-grade platform. All of the challenges of open source goes to all of the things we want to solve,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n He then explained the inspiration behind WP Engine. \u201cI wrote a blog post on a dedicated WordPress server. When it got popular, the server would crash,\u201d said Cohen. This led to the need for a managed hosting solution for WordPress,<\/a>\u00a0and so WP Engine was founded.<\/p>\n \u201cJust because you have a pile of zipped up PHP code doesn\u2019t mean it scales, doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s secure, doesn\u2019t mean it has high uptime or doesn\u2019t mean it will perform well under a lot of traffic. There are all of these pieces required to actually make a website work,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\n According to Cohen, there are three vital pieces to taking an open source project\u00a0and making it an enterprise-grade platform. This includes high performance<\/strong>, security<\/strong>, and service<\/strong>.<\/p>\n With WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress hosting<\/a> solution, high-performance is just one result noted. The infrastructure was built to address scalability among other performance factors.<\/p>\n WordPress security<\/a> is also another important piece to an enterprise-grade website. \u201cYTD we\u2019ve blocked 1.6 billion attacks on our platform,\u201d said Cohen. As technology evolves, security attacks will not be something that\u2019ll lessen in the future, they\u2019ll only get worse. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to invest in an enterprise-grade solution that hardens your WordPress site<\/a> against potential threats.<\/p>\n In addition, another component to being enterprise-grade is having access to great service. \u201cWe have 400 people in our organization and about half of them work in customer experience,\u201d said Cohen. He added, \u201cBecause investment in humans beings the right way is how you have great service.\u201d<\/p>\n Check out more from Agency Summit<\/a> #wpeagency<\/strong><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To be successful in digital marketing you must face the challenges of today and the future. These problems are not only worth solving now, but worth investing in solving because they will still be problems in the future. In his speech at Agency Summit, WP Engine\u2019s CTO and founder Jason Cohen discussed how to take…<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":20388,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[683,7,79],"tags":[824,179],"class_list":["post-20298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agency","category-company","category-event","tag-agency-summit","tag-jason-cohen"],"yoast_head":"\nthe marketing it explosion<\/h3>\n
![\"marketing-technology-landscape\"](\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/marketing-technology-landscape.jpg\")
<\/p>\nPersonalization<\/h3>\n
![\"minority-report-personalized-digital-signage\"](\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/Minority-Report-Personalized-digital-signage.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBrands As Publishers<\/h3>\n
Intrapreneurship<\/h3>\n
To Boof or Not to Boof?<\/h2>\n
Technology Can\u2019t Replace Human Creativity<\/h3>\n
![\"jason-cohen-12\"](\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/jason-cohen-12-1.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhat\u2019s Needed from Technology to Exploit the Rapids to Your Benefit?<\/h3>\n
Scale<\/h4>\n
Agility<\/h4>\n
Right Cost<\/h4>\n
Integration<\/h4>\n
Why WordPress?<\/h3>\n
![\"why-wordpress\"](\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/why-wordpress.png\")
\n\u201cWordPress is actually perfectly suited to take on these particular obstacles,\u201d said Cohen.<\/p>\nSize<\/h4>\n
Agility<\/h4>\n
Right Cost<\/h4>\n
Integration<\/h4>\n
The Catch…<\/h3>\n
![\"free-puppies-wordpress\"](\"https:\/\/wpengine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/free-puppies-wordpress.jpg\")
<\/p>\n