Season 2 Episode 16
Invoca’s Gregg Johnson on Bridging Digital and Human Touchpoints

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RESOURCES   ❯   The Marketing Rapport Podcast

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Marketing Rapport, host Tim Finnigan interviews Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca, about the evolving complexities of the customer journey. They discuss the challenges that arise when companies attempt to unify both digital and offline buyer interactions, particularly in industries like insurance and healthcare, where decision-making can be intricate. Gregg emphasizes how aligning sales and marketing teams is crucial for creating seamless experiences for consumers.

The conversation delves into how technology, such as Invoca’s, bridges the gap between digital data and human interactions. By integrating these touchpoints, companies can offer a more personalized experience while optimizing their marketing strategies. Gregg highlights the importance of understanding consumer behavior across both platforms to enhance efficiency and engagement.

Finally, they reflect on the collaboration between Verisk and Invoca, which allows them to serve joint customers more effectively. Together, these companies provide insights that enable marketers to better orchestrate buyer journeys, ultimately driving profitable growth.

Guest-at-a-Glance

Key Insights

• Unifying Online and Offline Customer Journeys
  In industries like insurance and healthcare, customer journeys are often complex, involving both digital and offline touchpoints. Gregg Johnson highlights that companies need to integrate these two elements to understand consumer behavior fully. While digital marketing provides structured data on customer activities, offline interactions through contact centers or retail stores often lack the same level of measurable insights. By bridging these gaps using technology like Invoca’s, businesses can offer a more unified and personalized experience, ultimately improving conversions. The integration of both online and offline data enables companies to tailor their marketing strategies more effectively and enhance the overall customer experience.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment: The Key to Success
  Gregg Johnson emphasizes that many companies struggle with misalignment between their sales and marketing teams, especially in industries where marketing drives consumer interest, but sales handle final conversions. This disconnect can lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and inconsistent customer experiences. He points out that aligning these two teams with shared goals and consistent KPIs can create a more seamless experience for customers. By doing so, businesses can ensure smoother transitions throughout the buyer journey, optimize resource allocation, and ultimately achieve better revenue outcomes. Gregg also notes that companies often need to play the role of a “therapist” to foster this collaboration, ensuring both teams are working towards common objectives.
• The Role of Human Touch in the Digital Age
  Despite the increasing dominance of digital marketing and automation, human interactions remain a crucial component of the customer journey, especially for complex purchases like insurance or healthcare services. Gregg Johnson explains that companies often struggle to measure and optimize these human touch points compared to digital activities. However, advances in technology now allow businesses to track and improve these interactions just as they would with digital data. By leveraging insights from both human and digital channels, companies can deliver more personalized and valuable experiences to consumers. This ability to optimize across both channels allows for greater flexibility in how customers engage with a brand, ensuring they receive the right balance of digital convenience and human support.

Episode Highlights

Gregg’s Journey to Becoming CEO of Invoca
Timestamp: [00:04:00]

At the beginning of the conversation, Gregg Johnson discusses his career path and how he became the CEO of Invoca. He shares that his professional experience before joining Invoca included working at Salesforce and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), where he gained significant experience in CRM, customer engagement software, and digital marketing. Under his leadership, Invoca grew significantly, both in terms of revenue and team size.

“I’ve been in Invoka as CEO, and I actually hit my eight-year anniversary yesterday. And so I joined in late 2016. Um, the company was about a hundred, about a hundred people, about 15 million in revenue, we’re over a hundred million in revenue, about 350 people today.”

The Importance of Data in Decision-Making
Timestamp: [00:05:00]

Gregg highlights how data-driven decision-making plays an essential role in modern marketing. He emphasizes that while many people view data as static, it is actually a constantly evolving component of marketing strategies. Businesses must continually update their data practices to keep up with market changes and consumer behaviors. Companies like Invoca help businesses better use data, particularly in blending digital and human touchpoints, to optimize both customer experiences and marketing effectiveness.

“People think, uh, sort of if you just do a blanket term, data, that it’s this old thing. It’s constantly moving and changing…what’s been nice is companies that value human touch, they had to fly blind from a data perspective.”

Challenges with Offline Media and Digital Integration
Timestamp: [00:06:00]

One of the recurring themes Gregg discusses is the challenge of integrating offline media with digital marketing channels. Companies that invest in both offline and online media, like TV ads and digital advertising, often face difficulties in orchestrating and measuring the buyer journey across these channels. Gregg explains how Invoca helps by connecting offline customer engagement, such as contact center interactions, with digital insights. This integration allows for better understanding of customer behavior and more efficient marketing strategies.

“They spend money on digital advertising. They spend money in offline media. They make money through digital conversion. They make money through offline conversions, uh, through contact center retail stores…Orchestrating, measuring, and optimizing that buying journey…is just a higher level of difficulty.”

AI and Its Role in Marketing
Timestamp: [00:19:00]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral tool in modern marketing, and Gregg discusses its impact on driving revenue growth. He mentions how companies are increasingly using AI to analyze customer journeys, improve marketing efficiency, and personalize consumer experiences. AI allows brands to better understand buyer behavior, predict trends, and optimize their marketing strategies in real-time. Gregg also touches on how AI has opened up new possibilities in both measuring digital interactions and automating key aspects of marketing.

“Talking about artificial intelligence and how, you know, companies are the different ways they’re applying AI to better understand the buyer journey, to better, uh, drive marketing efficiency.”

Top Quotes

[00:01:00] Gregg Johnson: “Piecing together all the elements that you need to buy to drive and orchestrate that buyer journey is very, very complicated. And so that’s where we’re very fortunate to share a number of joint customers with Verisk…to best understand the journey to understand what people are interested in buying.”

[00:04:00] Gregg Johnson: “I’ve been in Invoka as CEO, which actually hit my eight-year anniversary yesterday. And so I joined in late 2016. The company was about a hundred people, about 15 million in revenue, we’re over a hundred million in revenue, about 350 people today.”

[00:06:00] Gregg Johnson: “For Verisk and Invoca, we work with customers that…drive interest and demand through digital advertising and digital marketing. So platforms like Google and Meta…and then they drive some of their conversions, some online through e-commerce checkout or online scheduling.”

[00:10:00] Gregg Johnson: “One of the areas that technology has opened up over the past five, six, seven years that we’ve learned really heavily into is, can we help a brand deliver that same level of human touch that makes for a great experience while also measuring that journey and those interactions?”

[00:16:00] Gregg Johnson: “One of the things that we end up doing a lot in Invoca is not only providing the technology and the data that helps those teams talk about buyer journeys in a consistent way with more consistent KPIs or metrics, but…playing sort of an organizational therapist role.”