Sean's career journey to TaxSlayer CMO

Key Points

• Sean started his career at a boutique marketing agency in Charlottesville, Virginia, spending five years there.
• He transitioned to a startup seeking in-house marketing experience.
• The startup was acquired by LendingTree, where Sean spent four years in various marketing roles.
• Joined TaxSlayer in 2021, leading digital marketing before becoming CMO.

"The most rewarding part is just being able to serve our customers and offer them the tools to complete their tasks successfully."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

TaxSlayer's mission and market challenges

Key Points

• TaxSlayer's mission: Empower consumers and professionals to complete complex tax-oriented tasks through powerful software solutions.
• They serve as an intermediary between consumers/preparers and the government/IRS.
• Key challenges: Adapting to changing tax policies and competing with larger brands with bigger budgets.
• TaxSlayer is a challenger brand navigating market dynamics and seeking growth.

Pain points and why Optimizely

Key Points

• Pain point: Slow development processes and prioritization issues hindered marketing agility.
• Optimizely's CMS and Web Experimentation platforms offered a solution.
• Reasons for choosing Optimizely: Robust framework, powerful integrations, security, privacy, and scalability.
• Optimizely enabled data-driven decisions and reduced development costs.

"Optimizely... were what we believed to be the right tools to support the next stage of growth."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

Experimentation learnings and metrics

Key Points

• Key learning: The importance of understanding customer interactions with software.
• Experimentation helped identify areas for improvement in customer experience.
• Optimizely fostered a culture of learning and testing.
• Key metric: Conversion growth, using proximate business metrics like customer experience scores and retention.

"It opened our eyes on whether or not we had the adequate tooling to understand that customer experience."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

Optimizely CMS impact on workflow

Key Points

• Optimizely CMS empowered the marketing team to control content creation and publishing.
• Streamlined workflows and increased velocity.
• Marketers gained more control and could make changes immediately.
• New teams and processes were implemented to maximize the investment in Optimizely.

"They [marketers] don't have to manage the project because they're just getting work done."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

Data-driven culture and future initiatives

Key Points

• Importance of clear goals tied to company strategy.
• Trusted and accessible data is crucial for data-driven decision-making.
• Future initiatives: Personalization and leveraging NetSpring acquisition.

"Setting clear and digestible goals that tie up to the company's strategy is paramount."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

The excitement around NetSpring

Key Points

• NetSpring addresses the challenge of trusting and utilizing data effectively.
• It brings data from the warehouse to the application, enabling faster analysis with confidence.
• Reduces reliance on internal data science teams for model building.

"If you can bring that trusted data... to the experimentation tool, we can conduct the analysis there and... move that much more quickly."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

Advice to other Marketing Leaders

Key Points

• Develop persistence as a core operating principle.
• Progress is not always linear and requires consistent effort.
• Enable teams to support the broader mission.

"Develop persistence as a core operating principle... progress is predicated on just consistent applications and strategic vision."

Sean McGinty

CMO, TaxSlayer

Conclusion

TaxSlayer's success with Optimizely demonstrates the power of an integrated platform approach to content management and experimentation. By embracing data-driven decision-making and streamlining workflows, TaxSlayer achieved significant improvements in agility and efficiency. Their ongoing commitment to Optimizely, including plans for personalization and leveraging NetSpring for enhanced data analysis, positions them for continued growth and market leadership.