News@VShift

Most B2B businesses are familiar with account-based marketing (ABM) and its promise of revenue growth through better targeted, more efficient marketing to key accounts... but what about ABX? Account-based experience, which harnesses the power of unified data and combines rich account intelligence with compelling narratives and authentic emotion, applies the principles of ABM to the entire customer journey.

Strategist, innovator, growth enabler and more: A CMO’s unique combination of skills is invaluable for driving business growth. But no one can wear all the hats at once (no matter how large his or her head). So how do you prioritize? CEO Al Collins shares his insights with Forbes.

Why do some organizations achieve growth at scale through CX while others stall? In his latest CMSWire article, VShift’s Eric Feige shares insights about the revenue-culture connection, composing employee experience around the needs of the customer instead of the tech vendor, and how intrinsic motivators drive engagement and transformative growth.

It’s not just artificial intelligence: According to VShift CEO Al Collins in Forbes, one of the top tech trends to be excited about is martech orchestration. Others on Forbes’ list: AI-assisted data interpretation, conversational user interfaces and AI voice agents.

MarTech Edge spoke with Dan Anderson about his insights and strategies for building a world-class technology organization, along with the advantages of VShift’s innovative AEM Digital Experience Accelerator.

How are you helping your organization expand its understanding of brand experience? Superior brand experience delivers value to the business and the customer. Matt Dunn and Riham El-Lakany discuss.

Without internal alignment, ideas can’t muster the momentum to achieve liftoff. That's why we are proponents of the "theory of growth," which, fundamentally, is a hypothesis: what does a company believe will drive growth? Functionally, it is the superpower leaders can deploy to promote top-to-bottom organizational alignment.

Digital marketing fatigue is real – and it’s a growing problem for marketers seeking to engage customers and prospects. Forbes asked experts in digital, including VShift CEO Al Collins, what strategies they recommend for cutting through the noise and delivering real value to a jaded audience.

Businesses are investing heavily in artificial intelligence to enhance their ability to anticipate and support critical moments in customer journeys. With “AI fever” driving technology and data investments, will these latest AI innovations finally deliver the high-value AI-powered personalization customer – and the industry – are waiting for? VShift’s Managing Director of Strategy Eric Feige shares his thoughts in CMSWire.

Digital transformation and experience design executive Scott Santos joins VShift’s leadership team as chief client officer and managing director of business development. In this new role, Scott will spearhead revenue and client growth, strategy and engagement with an emphasis on experience design, product creation and digital solutions.

How do successful marketing campaigns balance emotional resonance and rational appeal? Nineteen industry leaders, including VShift Founder & CEO Al Collins, shared their insights with Forbes: "We use consumer behavior insights to craft targeted, emotionally resonant messaging and select optimal channels to reach the right consumers and drive engagement and action. You can’t base campaigns on historical trends, sales plans or even what clients think their customers want, just as you can’t predict economic trends based on supply and demand theories without accounting for consumer behavior."

CMS Critic’s Matthew Garrepy writes: “VShift is reinforcing the value of Adobe for its customers and the market at large. Its new AEM Digital Experience Accelerator is bridging the best of all worlds by providing a pathway to greater composability and flexibility ... VShift’s Accelerator ... focus[es] on the most challenging layers of a digital stack, where legacy systems are still mandated or represent a significant investment.”

VShift POV in CMSWire: Why Is MACH Architecture Hitting a Critical Inflection Point? MACH architecture – Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless – has reached an “inflection point” because many verticals want to build off an industry-oriented model that decouples the user interface from diverse “as-a-service” digital experience modules. VShift’s Managing Director of Strategy Eric Feige shared his insights with CMSWire.

AEM users will be able to leverage Netlify headless CMS to accelerate business goals, streamline workflows, and reduce the number of touchpoints needed across multi-channel projects, thanks to a new AEM integration built by VShift as part of its AEM Digital Experience Accelerator.

Data-driven marketing is effective and efficient – the proverbial no-brainer. Yet in B2B, it’s also highly underused.

As an increasing number of companies struggle to match their digital experiences to real-time opportunities, VShift announced the launch of the VShift AEM Digital Experience Accelerator at the MACH THREE Conference today in New York City. Developed for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) users, this proprietary program helps deliver more engaging digital experiences with Adobe faster, easier and more cost effectively.

AI will inevitably be a significant part of the CMO’s job. So, CMOs need to understand it—not just read about it—to remain competitive.

VShift is honored to join the MACH Alliance – the leading industry organization promoting the headless/composable approach to web development. As passionate believers in the MACH philosophy, we look forward to continuing to bring our clients cost-effective, flexible MACH-powered solutions for building next-generation web applications and digital products.

Imagine splitting something apart so that, paradoxically, the individual pieces work together better than before. That’s the idea behind a decoupled web architecture: a flexible ecosystem that enables your user interfaces and your “as-a-service” technology tools to interact while actually remaining separate entities. The decoupled approach allows marketers to update content and digital experiences while technologists deal with API-based services – all while avoiding unnecessary entanglements.

Businesses that follow the composable approach to web development have more flexibility in how they respond to fast-changing market conditions. But “going composable” doesn’t happen overnight. Organizations need to adopt new ways of working to realize the benefits, including new collaboration models and a new approach to customer experience. VShift’s Eric Feige shares his insights in CMSWire.

Getting in front of increasingly discerning buyers will be a major priority among B2B marketers this year, according to a recent study. Their work is cut out for them, including helping B2B buyers understand product specifications/configurations when researching purchases and providing consistent product or service information. In this article, CEO Al Collins is quoted on  the importance of including a human element throughout B2B interactions.

VShift has led successful digital transformations in healthcare, financial services and other complex regulated industries, helping to generate revenue growth and competitive market share. The common factor? A change-agent CMO who understands that successful transformations have marketing deeply involved in adopting technology solutions that benefit the customer.

One of the best B2B strategies for generating leads and winning new business is to ensure your current customers share their positive experiences with your brand (or services) in the marketplace. At VShift, we help our clients implement “peer-to-peer” marketing efforts—because nothing is more powerful than a word-of-mouth endorsement. As a follow-up to Forbes’ roundup of best peer-to-peer marketing advice, CEO Al Collins shares his insights with Forbes.

The more ambitious a project, the greater the risk that misalignment among
stakeholders will derail the effort. This is especially true with large, complex
organizations. The VShift solution? Stakeholder advisory groups or SAGs. CEO Al
Collins shares his tips on creating and leveraging SAGs to keep stakeholders
aligned, operations running smoothly and projects on a path to success in his latest
Forbes article.

Forbes' roundup of best peer-to-peer marketing advice from 18 industry leaders quoted VShift Founder & CEO Al Collins: "Recommendations from trusted sources are critical in B2B marketing, and social media platforms have vaporized barriers to sharing success stories. But not every client is a great natural storyteller. That’s why it’s important to arm clients with both the language and supporting tools—charts, quotations and a video, for example—to share their success story in a succinct, powerful and memorable way."

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) included VShift Founder & CEO Al Collins' article on the key role marketing plays throughout the B2B sales process as part of its Knowledge Partners blog. "Ensuring that sales, IT and finance understand the role—and power—of B2B marketing enhances marketing's effectiveness by opening opportunities for collaboration and sharing of information and insights."

Composable architecture and legacy investments are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. VShift’s Eric Feige explains how companies can benefit from composable technology and make a seamless transition.

Composable technology enables an organization to impose order on IT chaos while helping the organization overcome interdepartmental gridlock and achieve better business outcomes. VShift’s Dan Anderson and Eric Feige share their insights.

The purpose of marketing—and the value of the marketing organization—is less well understood in B2B than in B2C. VShift Founder & CEO Al Collins talks about how to leverage your marketing efforts at every stage in the B2B sales process in Forbes.

Organizations stuck in monolithic architectures and stubborn governance procedures need to consider composability. VShift’s Eric Feige shares his insights with CMSWire.

VShift joined the vanguard of composable technology to kick off Contentful’s Storylines Tour in New York City.

In this webinar, VShift’s Eric Feige discusses how the right composable stack can serve innovation-minded leaders in regulated industries looking to bring new initiatives to market quickly with Netlify’s Min Kim and Sam Bhagwat.

VShift and client FTSE Russell, An LSEG Business were overjoyed to receive the Silver FCS Portfolio Award for Digital Media & Integrated Communication in person at New York’s Ziegfeld Ballroom. VShift’s Al Collins and Mark Silber celebrated alongside FTSE’s Mike DeMilio, Pat Cunningham, Iordanka Katardjieva and Richard George as well as a host of industry luminaries dedicated to raising the standard of excellence in financial communications.

Move too fast, and you’ll break things. Move too slow, and people lose interest. How do you sustain enthusiasm over the many months and years a typical digital transformation will span?

If CMOs are the stewards of consumer trust, what will artificial intelligence dispensing advice to customers mean for their jobs?

VShift client BJC HealthCare developed its first-ever Super Bowl Ad to launch an integrated brand awareness marketing campaign for 2023. VShift’s Matt Dunn, Su Strawderman, Greg Bradley, Claire Nelson, Al Collins, Dan Onufrishy and Sami Kaba collaborated with BJC Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Riham El-Lakany, Michael Laurie, Shana Ruffus and Sheenu Chako-Thomas to produce this impactful campaign.

VShift Managing Director, Strategy Eric Feige shares his hard-earned wisdom on avoiding common pitfalls to deliver smart composable implementation with CMSWire.

VShift Managing Director, Strategy Eric Feige sat down with CMSWire editor Dom Nicastro to discuss why composable digital architecture matters to businesses, and what Legos can teach us about good governance.

Al Collins addresses the hurdles Marketing-IT misalignment creates in business and how to fix it in Forbes.

Presenting to a gathering of CMOs leading the charge in client-side marketing technology, VShift’s Eric Feige spoke on MarTech’s influence on CMO/CIO collaboration, operating models, and content team structures. (requires ANA login)

The transition to the composable model goes beyond mere use of more licensed MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) technologies to include evolving management, development and governance.

Going composable? DCPL is a new composability accelerator designed to help enterprises of any size and digital maturity level achieve the business benefits of decoupled technology.

VShift hosted partners Netlify and Contentful for an informative panel and engaging happy hour at VShift's midtown offices on September 27. VShift Managing Director, Strategy Eric Feige, Contentful Evangelist Nicole France and Netlify Co-Founder Christian Bach discussed how decoupled, composable, MACH technology enables businesses to meet their potential. Guests kept the conversation going over cocktails on VShift’s lovely terrace patio. 

Eric Feige, Managing Director, Strategy at VShift, spoke to Michael Berberich on the ANA Marketing Futures Podcast about building a “composable enterprise” by decoupling the marketing tech stack and leveraging the exploding marketplace of APIs to create a leaner, more agile marketing machine. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

In this fast-paced webinar, VShift Managing Director Eric Feige and Contentful Evangelist Nicole France help business executives and marketing technologists understand why decoupling using MACH technologies (microservices, APIs, cloud-native and headless) is rapidly being adopted by innovation-focused organizations.

Al Collins, CEO of VShift, is the newest member of the Forbes Agency Council, an invitation-only community for senior-level agency executives.

Every year, Chief MarTec invites marketers to share a single slide illustrating their martech stack.