Episode 52: Noz Urbina, Urbina Consulting - Content and the customer journey

Kristina Halvorson:
This is the content strategy podcast and I’m your host, Kristina Halvorson. On each and every episode I interview someone I admire who’s doing meaningful work in content strategy and all its adjacent disciplines. If you care about making content more useful, usable and inclusive for all, welcome in, you have found your people.

Hello, hello. I am back again. Look at how I am releasing episodes so consistently. It's just extraordinary what a little pause in the chaos will do for one's life because one can return to one's passion project, which as you well know, this podcast is for me. I am so delighted and thrilled and excited to reconnect with this genius human being that I'm getting ready to speak with. I would like you, listener to please help me welcome Noz Urbina.

Noz Urbina is a globally recognized pioneer in customer journey mapping and adaptive content modeling for delivering personalized, contextually relevant content experiences in an omnichannel environment. Basically, he's a content strategy guru. He's also co-author of the book, Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and benefits, and lectures in the Master's Program in content strategy at the University of Applied Scientist, Graz. Sciences, not scientist. A content scientist is a thing that we all want to be when we grow up.

A little bit more. In 2013, he founded his own consultancy, Urbina Consulting, and in 2018 co-founded the omnichannel events organization, OmnichannelX. Clients include Microsoft, Johnson and Johnson Pharmaceuticals... Noz you're throwing all these words at me that I can't pronounce. I had Are Halland on last episode. It almost put me in the ground. Sanofi vaccines. Is that right? Did I say that right? MasterCard, Barclay's Bank, Abbott Laboratories, and many more. Phew! Noz. Welcome to the Content Strategy Podcast.

Noz Urbina:
Well, thank you very much for having me, Kristina.

Kristina Halvorson:
Noz, you and I have known each other for low, at these very, very many years, and I am super excited to see you in person for the first time in a long time at Confab this May.

Noz Urbina:
Yeah. Yes. Yes. The last ever Confab, I couldn't be more pumped about it.

Kristina Halvorson:
I know. I know. We all are. And you're going to be traveling to join us from where?

Noz Urbina:
Well, I am based in Valencia, Spain. I've been out here for about 15, 16 years now.

Kristina Halvorson:
You lucky, lucky Dog.

Noz Urbina:
I got to say. Yeah.

Kristina Halvorson:
Have you been to the United States since COVID?

Noz Urbina:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Kristina Halvorson:
So what you're saying is that you just haven't come by to visit

Noz Urbina:
Yeah. Well, I say that this is so obvious. When I say, "Oh yeah," I had one big, massive road trip. I didn't go anywhere for three years, and then I traveled for five consecutive weeks and nearly died and got COVID again.

Kristina Halvorson:
No, I know. That's kind of how we're all... It's like all this pent-up must travel. I literally was feeling during the pandemic, I was like, "Oh, I don't know. It's kind of nice to be at home and I think I'm going to really cut back on travel." And by the end of it I was like, "Okay, I have 48 hours. I'm pretty sure I can make it to Belize and back by then."

Noz Urbina:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I took 13 flights in five weeks.

Kristina Halvorson:
Well, that just makes me want to cry. Don't do that again. It's too much. Hey, Noz, a thing that I do at the top of every episode is I ask my esteemed guests to share with me a little bit about their journey in content strategy and how they landed where they are now, and I wonder if you could share that with our listening audience.

Noz Urbina:
Yeah. Okay. I literally don't answer, because it often comes up on forums and stuff like, "Hey, introduce yourself. Tell us how you got into this." And I'm like, "Oof. You don't want to know." So I'm going to give a little bit more of the fun side. So I would say that I'm sitting in this chair talking to you today because when I was a teenager, I wanted to be in a band. And we wanted to use samples in our music and why was broke. And so in order to be able to get a computer to be able to sample and play electronic music, I got into a gig building them and learning how to install Windows and put in graphics cards and stuff, and I worked in a tech support in a little shop. And through a weird series of events that became working for a software company.

By coincidence, that software company was a company that was making an authoring tool in the late '90s where their vision was to be able to create structured machine-readable content that you could press a button and it could go out and be filtered for multiple audiences, multiple channels, be transformed into multiple formats like display screens on device print and of course, web. We didn't have phones at that time. There were no smartphones. So I just landed ass backwards by luck in this visionary environment where there's 150 people who were the world leaders in thinking about where content was going to go. And just because it was a little company, when I had just joined and I was learning the ropes, learning a product, et cetera, I got to learn from all these people, the people who actually worked on the technical committees, who set the standards that made the web what it is today.

I worked with a person who led the team, you know how today you can just have Google Docs and you can click something and edit it on the web. Back in my day, webpages, you had to reload the whole thing if anything was going to change. And I worked with the people who made it possible to have a read and write web. So that was really cool, and that led me into some amazing projects and all these learning opportunities, which set me up. So I would have to be a total idiot not to succeed. 

Kristina Halvorson:
That is the fun version. Although you did jump over a 20-year period there.

Noz Urbina:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. And I think your listeners are probably be happier than I did.

Kristina Halvorson:
I don't know. People care about this stuff. Because I met you pretty early during that period of time that people started to find each other, those of us who were talking about and calling ourselves content strategists, were you talking about this work as content strategy during that time? Were you familiar with the work of Ann Rockley and the Rockley group? How did you come to the community?

Noz Urbina:
Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. So content strategy specifically, so I was working with this product, and so I was working in supporting the product, became a sales engineer, then became a consultant, then became a trainer, and then a professional services manager. And so we were working for this company, and I moved over from the company itself to one of the partners who was all consultancy. And we started doing an event, actually. So in 2006, so this is 2006, we gathered Ann Rockley, Rahel Bailie, Scott Abel, John Hamer, I can't even remember the original lineup, JoAnn Hackos. So yeah, I was collaborating with Ann Rockley back in the day, 2006, before the term really hit the mainstream. So yeah, absolutely. When I talk about all these incredible opportunities, it was because Ann and the rest of us were in such a small community that I, as somebody who'd been in the world for five years at that point, was able to go to meetings and talk and learn from Ann directly.

Kristina Halvorson:
So you were really in the thick of it with all those OGs. You're just throwing those names around, like JoAnn Hackos like it's just nothing.

Noz Urbina:
Exactly, like O, O, OGs. The people who are already being forgotten about. They're so OG

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, exactly. Oh, no, Don't say that at all, not if I can help it. These are the folks though, when we started, the people that I was really connecting with and who started talking about content strategy in the early 2010s, we were talking about it really from more of a website user experience perspective, and connecting those dots, the title of your book, between what needed to happen on the front end with user experience and what needed to happen on the backend in order to make that content go and be available to users. Being able to continue to merge those two conversations is just something that really gets me out of bed in the morning because it matters. You can't do one without the other.

Noz Urbina:
And it's still not done. It's not standard practice.

Kristina Halvorson:
No, it's not, especially because it's required for effective personalization, not only on one channel, but across many channels. And you have been ranting about poor personalization literally for as long as I have known you. So when you started talking about the omnichannel experience, I understand what omnichannel is, I wish that it was a more widely used term. Tell me about why you started talking about omnichannel as where organizations need to go when we're talking about delivering effective customer experiences/personalized experiences?

Noz Urbina:
Yeah, absolutely. So for me, I started in a world where the projects were very much about efficiency. We needed to make sure that the content was available in all the channels, that the right person got the right thing, and that it was accurate. And when I say, "Had to," I mean, because hands could get cut off or entire businesses could go under overnight. So it was very, very critical. Accuracy, efficiency, speed, multi-format was very important. As my career developed and as I would go in and do these projects, they were all about, "Let's make the thing and make sure that the thing goes quickly and then make sure the thing is translated in 52 languages accurately and that it shows up in all the formats and everything's correct." That was the metric of success. 

Eventually, I started going, "But is it the right thing though? Are we making the thing that we should be making?" And that led me to a customer led, experience led, audience led way of thinking about what are we trying to accomplish here, which led me into customer journey mapping and thinking about content, not just as how does the business want to structure its messages so that the business can do what the business wants to do, but actual the content strategy bit to make good on that promise is to say, what is the business trying to accomplish and how does that overlap with what the user is trying to accomplish, the audience is trying to accomplish? Because if we force ourselves and we try to just get better at ramming messages down their throat, we're not really thinking strategically. So I became interested in omnichannel because omnichannel is saying not how do I make sure that I can pump this out on all these channels, but how does the whole, how does the sum of the parts work together to support that user's journey? And that's a perspective shift, which is I'm still evangelizing because it hasn't become standard practice, but that for me is the real difference.

Actually, climbing mount-audience-centric is the omnichannel promise.

Kristina Halvorson:
Did You say mount-audience-centric?

Noz Urbina:
Yes I did.

Kristina Halvorson:
I will climb that mountain with you, Noz. I'm going to set you up here. To understand is that the magic ingredient to making sure this works is a customer journey map. Is that right, Noz?

Noz Urbina:
Hey, swish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So customer journey mapping for me was a turning point in my career because it was really... I started going to these clients and going... I would tend to push back. Good consultancy. Why? Why are we doing this? Who's going to benefit? Why are we publishing this? What's the point of this piece of information? But until I actually could come in with a methodology that would help the customer visualize that, they wouldn't be able to tell me. Customer journey mapping is one of the most frustrating things because like content strategy, everything, all the terms in our industry, it kind of becomes famous for its worst examples. So if you Google customer journey map, you get this diagram that's got a dot where somebody's going, "I clicked an email, then I downloaded the brochure, then I went to an event, then I bought the thing, now I'm an advocate."

And literally, I'm seeing clients pay $10,000 an inch for this little line with dots on it, with maybe some thought bubbles at the bottom. And they're calling that a customer journey map.

Kristina Halvorson:
I've seen them pay a lot more than $10,000 an inch, just for the record.

Noz Urbina:
Exactly. Well, it depends how big you print it.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's right. Yeah, exactly. Let's put it on the wall.

Noz Urbina:
It has to be mapped to calls to action, metrics, content requirements. Do you have the thing that's going to answer the questions that are coming in of this phase? Do you have the content which is appropriate for this channel? Do you have a way to get this stuff onto this channel? Because that's where the user really wants it. So the organization thinks it's buying a picture. They think they're buying this static asset, whereas really a customer journey map should be a living integrated body of your customer understanding. This is supposed to be your understanding of what your customer's life is like when they're achieving their top tasks. So that's not something you just pay a consultancy to do once and then look at it, pat yourselves on the back, and then go back to doing things the way you used to. It has to be tied into editorial requirements, content tagging strategies, technical requirements like how are we going to get the thing that is over here, over here so that the people can go to the next step of their journey? How does this interact with other journeys? How does it interact with the human beings who might have to answer questions along the way?

So having an omnichannel journey map that's properly integrated with all of the things we do suddenly makes all the things we do visualizable. You can bring it into a room and go, "Look, we need to put some effort into our content because you see here, when people get to stage three, it all goes to hell." And that has been such a useful tool to be able to talk to all the different stakeholders you need to talk to make good content experiences happen.

Kristina Halvorson:
First of all, yes, to all of that. Secondly, what I run into all the time is that there are two things that need to be in place, or at least in flight, to be able to start to get to this meaningful, useful, applicable journey map that you're talking about, omnichannel journey map. The first of which is useful, meaningful customer research and ways to set up ongoing conversations with those customers. And the other is meaningful success metrics, so that when you say, "Hey, look here in stage three, everything goes to hell," we understand what that means. How do you navigate when you walk into a client and they're like, "We want you to do the thing that you have spoken so eloquently about that is going to change our organization," and they don't have those two things in place?

Noz Urbina:
Okay. So I missed it when I was listing all the examples of things that the customer journey map needs to have. One of them was call to action and metrics. So I'm at stage three. How do I know that I'm at stage four? How are you tracking the transition from stage three to stage four? What do they click? Where do they go? What analytics are going to trip that they're going to tell us that they've made this transition? That has to be baked into your journey map as well. And frankly, what we've started doing is we've taken the content design doctrine or that philosophy, that methodology and realized that that's what we were doing. Because to do it effectively, we've had to come in and go all the way to the beginning and say, "All right. You don't know what your customers want. You don't know where they're getting their stuff. You don't know what the pain points are. Step one of doing content is finding out." And we just say, "You want to have your delightful customer experience dessert, you're going to have to eat your customer research dinner." So we've had to take on the skills to do the research bit because frankly, I walk in, most of our clients are household name multinationals, even if they're hard to pronounce sometimes. And they don't have it. They've done it as a one-off. They have customer understanding for a certain section of one web property. And I'm like, that's not a customer centric view. So silos are still a problem. I'm not saying that we solve that. It's not like we leave, and our customers are all singing, all dancing, omnichannel masterpieces, but we do go in and we usually uplevel what they've got to something that we can work with to define when are you going to personalize? Why are you going to personalize? How will you know if personalization was successful? We just have to have those things in order to be able to do anything that's going to be relevant or meaningful for the customers.

Kristina Halvorson:
So when you walk in and are working with these customers to get forward movement on any of these, even to be able to establish a shared understanding of what meaningful means along the customer journey, you need alignment and where does that start for you? Does it start with a higher up sponsor within the organization? Does it start with getting everybody in the same room? At the very beginning, how do you say, "Here's what success is going to look like for us,"?

Noz Urbina:
That's the consultative bit. That's very different from project to project. Exactly. Because some people come in and they say, "We want to understand our customers better and deliver them a better experience, and we want to know how we go about that." Other customers say, "We want to launch this thing. Can you help us launch this thing?" And so it depends on the attitude of the customer when we start, where we have to go. I do a whole sub thing, I've presented at several times at different conferences. We actually have a bit of a methodology around what we call castle storming. So how do you navigate the various chambers and tunnels of the business to unlock support? And that process is the methodology of thinking about it.

Thinking about, "Okay. Who do we know who do we have to talk to? What is the content strategy for our content strategy? How are we going to message this? How are we going to deliver the right messages to the IT people that need to support us? How are we going to message the right people to the creation community? How are we going to message it to partners? Whatever, whomever your stakeholders are. We have a methodology for doing that, but the actual strategy is situational. For any kind of strategy, you can't like cookie cutter from one environment to another. So I guess the answer is you have to methodically take the lay of the land internally and then have this meta strategy for... Okay. These are internal audiences that we have to message, and this is their perspective, this is the things that motivate them. And you have to do it once internally if you're not getting the support you already need. Does that paint a picture?

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that last bit that you said in particular is oftentimes you'll walk into a project and the client who hired you says, "Oh, yeah, we know what's going on. Everybody knows what's going on. We have support for this project." But then you start talking to people and there isn't a shared understanding of why you're there and what you're looking to do and how this work is going to level up everybody's game. And so being able to talk about meaningful customer journey design and how it serves strategy, I think is a skill unto itself that sometimes people just need to bring in from a third-party.

Noz Urbina:
I'm finding that's most of what I do now. Within my business, I've stopped down on the weeds content strategy bit, and mainly I'm doing the meta content strategy bit. I'm mainly getting everybody else on the same page and aligned and getting the budget so that everybody else can do their jobs. I found it's that much a thing would completely takes up my day to day.

Kristina Halvorson:
That just is bananas to me that so often people are like, "We want to do the thing," and no matter what your job as a consultant is, whether it's content strategy, or even if it's HR and internal communications that run the gamut, that so much of it is getting everybody on the same page, just in terms of what we're talking about in the first place. That Meghan Casey talks all the time about getting alignment on terminology and language. When we're talking about content, this is what we mean. When we're talking about customer journey, these are the customers that we're talking about and prioritizing, and why. I think that people really underestimate how important it is to get a shared understanding of that prior to being able to move forward. A lot of spinning of the wheels occurs when that shared understanding isn't in place.

Noz Urbina:
And maintain it because it'll evaporate.

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. To continually remind people in conversation, "No, no. Remember, that's not what we understand. That's not what we share as understanding." You had mentioned that a lot of your clients that you're working with are in pharma and that it is a perfect storm of content challenges and opportunities within pharma organization. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Noz Urbina:
Absolutely. So I'm loving working in pharma. It's been about five years. This is about half of our reading consulting's existence. We started a lot in high tech and medical devices and that kind of thing. And pharma's been really great because a lot of... The really interesting conversations going on. So you have the equivalent of a support desk, and you have the equivalent of sales engineers, but they're different. And because it's pharma and because it's the medical company speaking to the medical field as well as the client, as well as the patients, they're all medically trained. Half the content team used to be pharmacists. They had a white coats, worked in a pharmacy, or were medical doctors. And now they're running omnichannel content operations for this multinational brand. So it's like this, as you said, this overlap between super complex requirements, localization, translation, huge regulatory, multi-format, omnichannel, and with people who that's not their background. They didn't come up from journalism, or literature, or semiotics, or any of the specific content things.

So that's been really cool for me to get in and be able to connect the dots for people who this is so new for and always come back to, we are helping a human conversation. We're helping this person who works for the company and was a doctor, go out and speak to this person who is a doctor and help them facilitate conversations with their patients that the human side and coming back to we're trying to exchange knowledge, we're trying to advance people along their journeys is a really nice place where that's... Not saying there's not tons of money in pharma, but I don't have quite so much pressure on the sell, sell, sell marketing aspect of it. You're marketing, but it's a bit softer.

I like the fact that they value knowledge and understanding the overlap between managing your knowledge and having a good content strategy is a very comfortable place for me to be in. And it's a place where I feel like I can do a lot of good in the world. I can help. Every little thing I do on a project could really touch the lives of thousands and thousands of people in a very intimate way.

Kristina Halvorson:
That's a great reason to get out of bed in the morning. 

Noz Urbina:
It's cool. 

Kristina Halvorson:
Yeah.

Noz Urbina:
I've had customer research meetings where you have the patient there, the audience representative, and you have two people from brand and me. Everybody in the room is crying. It's motivational to be able to go we're changing people's lives with content.

Kristina Halvorson:
We just have a few minutes left, and I wonder if you could speak a little bit to Confab in May. The title of your talk is How to Track and Evolve with Content Experience Trends. You like to sit around and think about the future of content and where we're going. You've been thinking about this for years. You've done such an amazing job identifying, I think, what matters, what's required, what is essential to be able to build these meaningful experiences and support customers and the people we serve with content. What's coming? And if you say generative AI, I'm going to hang up on you. No, I'm just kidding. Because I know you've got to talk about that.

Noz Urbina:
So when we started talking about omnichannel about 10 years ago to now, there's been a thousand percent increase on Google in terms of interest. When I talk about omnichannel, it is a barometer for organizations actually understanding that they need to put customer experience at the center of what they do. So I think we're going to see more and more of that. It's going up the chain where experience and relationships across a journey as opposed to short term one-off quick hit metrics are the focus. So I think that's going to happen. If you want to talk bigger picture, I could go on a lot about AI.

I think people have a very unsophisticated view of AI, and we've only got a couple minutes left so I can't get into mine in depth. But the shortest thing I would say is to consider to stop with a binary of AI replacing. This idea of it's a zero sum game. Me or the AI, this role or the AI. Anytime we have better automation, it is a tool to help people do what they do faster and more effectively. I don't think that we're talking about replacement. We should see these things as companions or tools or apps that aid us, just like the apps that we have today, just a lot better and more creatively. We get lost in very stupid discussions in AI about replacement theory. And I think those would be the two things that pop into my head as the big topics of the day.

Kristina Halvorson:
I am in complete agreement with you, and I think that whoever can really start to lead a conversation around, "And this is how we use it. Here's how we do it. Content designers, user experience designers, editors, writers, marketing people, here are the ways in which AI is going to support and collaborate with you versus replace you." I think that there are a lot of AI content companies and products that are trying to convince folks of this, but it'll be nice when we have more neutral third-parties being able to step up and say, "Here's how this is going to make our jobs better," versus all of these scare thought pieces that you're talking about. 

Noz Urbina:
I just realized that I forgot the metaverse. So that little thing.

Kristina Halvorson:
Oh, no. No, not the metaverse. We're really out of time. 

Noz Urbina:
Oh no. Can you give me 10 seconds on the metaverse?

Kristina Halvorson:
Go, go, go, go. I'm just teasing. 

Noz Urbina:
Okay. So the metaverse is like this big foreign thing. You're either doing it or you're not. Again, these binary dichotomies, they're not real. So if you look at what the New York Times is doing with data visualization in 3D, in the browser, or Google's recommendations on using 3D in search results or on product descriptions, we've seen augmented reality apps like Pokémon GO or the retro camera, the reversing camera in your car. We've had augmented reality and these kind of apps and these things, it's a spectrum from 3D in the browser or 3D on your phone to apps that can do a bit of mixed reality, augmented reality to virtual reality, to networked collaborative metaverse, all the things.

And I think that we need to get on that train. Stop thinking about whether we're going to do metaverse or not but think about how are we going to bring the 3D pipeline and the spatially aware of location and environments. How do we can start to leverage that more in what we do today? And those skills will make us metaverse ready because the metaverse is coming, and people think it's going to be a big flip that get switched. That's not how the internet worked. That's not how this is going to work either. It's going to come on and there's going to be a few killer apps and na, na, na. And 10, 15 years from now, we'll be talking about how these companies still don't have the metaverse presence, whereas others have shifted their whole business model. So we just have to start pivoting to understand how we get the right skillsets in our teams, and that will really get you ready for the next 15 years.

Kristina Halvorson:
How do you hold all of these thoughts in your brain all at the same time? We just covered from the basic meeting your basic customer needs with journey mapping to incorporating the metaverse into your core business model. How do you fall asleep at night?

Noz Urbina:
Excited to get up the next day.

Kristina Halvorson:
Okay. That's a great answer. Noz, thank you so much for joining me today. It is a delight to catch up with you, and I just can't wait to see you at Confab in May.

Noz Urbina:
Likewise. Thank you for having me.

Kristina Halvorson:Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.