Marketing X's & O's

Setting the stage

“We believe quality of life helps to keep people healthy, happy & motivated throughout life. We believe it helps organizations to be more efficient and productive.”

That’s the mission Sodexo employs across its portfolio of 100+ global services.

And true to company form, Marianne Goguillon, SVP of Global Digital Marketing at Sodexo, embraced that exact sentiment when evaluating the team’s martech stack.

“We wanted to reimagine how we planned, created, and activated all of our digital marketing assets,” said Goguillon. “And we needed to have a tool that made the life of the team easier.” 

With a large, matrixed organization of 90+ marketers covering 7 business units across five countries (US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and France), collaboration and communication were paramount. 

Unfortunately, the generic project management tools they were using were not conducive to planning, producing, and storing the digital assets they needed to fuel their campaigns. They did not integrate well, created a lot of inefficiencies, and often slowed time-to-market.

So, the team set out to find a new solution — one that would become a foundational piece of their martech stack, increase the capacity of their teams, and help drive efficiencies through the sharing of plans, resources, and assets. 

We were relying heavily on the Microsoft stack, which is fine for project management, but it required team members to go find the assets they needed, download them, publish them and so on... it was a manual, multi-step process and we had a vision for something that made collaboration easy.

Marianne Goguillon

SVP of Digital Marketing, Sodexo

Content Marketing Platform: A New Solution

In early 2020, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sodexo team selected Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform (CMP) to become a shared, centralized place for marketing planning and collaboration.

The three main criteria: unify planning and provide visibility on a global scale, accelerate how teams create content and execute campaigns, and maximize content sharing and reuse.

1. Planning & Visibility 

Dedicated campaign workspaces allowed the teams to outline the plan and collaboratively develop strategic briefs.

“Now we have a forcing function and place for everyone to say, ‘Okay, what type of campaign are we running, what’s the goal, what do we need, and who is going to be involved’”, said Goguillon. “We’re consistently making sure nothing has been overlooked, or misunderstood.” 

From there, the global calendar was automatically populated, providing visibility to the other business units, and enabling everyone to get to work on their part. 

2. Production & Publishing

With a high volume of content creators, the team utilized Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform’s powerful workflows and content editors to facilitate how the creation, review, and approval process — and complimented it with sophisticated integrations to push the content to downstream channels. 

Goguillon and team recognized the importance of having a well connected martech ecosystem — there were a lot of efficiencies to be gained by eliminating a lot of the manual work they were forced to do previously. 

“Collaboration was happening back-and-forth in email. And we were manually downloading and reuploading assets,” said Goguillon. “Now, we’re able to streamline the process, and automate how we push that content to our CMS, Social channels, and more.” 

3. Storing & Sharing

The CMP Library, a fully-integrated Digital Asset Management platform, helped the team store, track, and repurpose all of the content they produce.   

“Whenever you change process, the natural reaction for many can be “what’s in it for me?” — but this is where many of those folks had the light bulb moment,” said Marlow. “We made it so easy for them to see what pieces of content the other teams had produced, and in some cases, repurpose those assets for their own business unit.” 

The net result? The Sodexo team can power the full, end-to-end lifecycle of their content production — in one tool. 

Measurable Results

Quite simply, the Sodexo team is delivering more — and enjoying the process along the way. 

“Our capacity has shot up. We’re able to see more, produce more, and we have so much more content available to us stored in the shared Library,” said Marlow. “It has a compounding effect… Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform has turned us into a content and campaign machine.” 

"Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform is a platform that has, simply, made our lives easier. We’re producing more than before, delivering campaigns, and seamlessly collaborating with all of our stakeholders."

Liz Marlow, Global Project Manager at Sodexo

In addition to the visibility and production benefits, the team is also using the platform to uncover insights and drive better programs. While they have plans to integrate their Salesforce with the CMP for full, end-to-end content reporting, the global calendar helps them retroactively analyze the impact of their campaigns. 

“Whenever we see a spike in traffic, we’re able to refer back and pinpoint exactly what helped trigger that,” said Marlow. “Slowly but surely, we’re changing how we plan our campaigns, with the ultimate goal of driving business impact.”

And the full business impact may still yet to be realized.

“We’re seeing a lot more interest from other areas of the organization as well,” said Goguillon. “We have our colleagues in Communications, for example, eager to centralize their work in the CMP and recognize the visibility benefits our team has already seen.” 

“...keep people healthy, happy & motivated throughout life. We believe it helps organizations to be more efficient and productive.”

Safe to say that Goguillon, Marlow and team are truly embracing the company mission.