Embracing Change in Digital Marketing with Colin Day

Colin is Oktopost’s EMEA Managing Director and VP of Business Development. He has over 35 years of expertise in MarTech and Fintech, including founding his own consultancy. Colin joined Oktopost four years ago where he continues to drive strategic leadership and operational excellence. Colin is passionate about mentoring emerging leaders and sharing his knowledge of the evolving digital landscape.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• The significance of embracing change in business.
• Why sales is a team sport, with various departments playing crucial roles.
• The essential role of a trustworthy social media presence from brand representatives in driving sales and enhancing customer service.
• Where we can expect AI to make a significant impact in digital marketing.
• The three pillars of transformation.

In this episode…

Just as every player on a soccer team touches the ball before it reaches the goalie, getting a sale across the finish line at the dealership is a shared responsibility among all team members.

Beyond sales, marketing and customer experience are key players in driving revenue. In marketing, tasks like audience segmentation, audience suppression, and content curation are just a few of the ways to set the sales team up for success. Meanwhile, the customer experience team is essential in fostering strong relationships from a shopper’s first website visit to long after a purchase, maximizing customer lifetime value.

In this episode of InsideAuto, Colin Day, EMEA Managing Director and VP of Business Development at Oktopost, chats with host, Ilana Shabtay, about leveraging AI for more efficient marketing and sales, the value of a strong social media brand presence, and the importance of having different digital marketing strategies depending on the company or product.  

Resources Mentioned: 

• Ilana Shabtay on LinkedIn 
• Fullpath
• Colin Day on LinkedIn
• Oktopost 
• FIS

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Fullpath.

Fullpath is the automotive industry’s leading customer data and experience platform (CDXP).

Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first-party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create exceptional, hyper-personalized customer experiences.

To learn more, visit www.fullpath.com. 

Episode Transcript:

Ilana Shabtay 

Ilana Shabtay here, host of Inside Auto podcast where we interview top dealers, GMs, marketers, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in and out of the automotive industry. And before we introduce today’s guest, this episode is sponsored by Fullpath.com. Fullpath is automotive’s leading customer data and experience platform, CDXP. Fullpath enables dealers to turn their first party data into lifelong customers by unifying siloed data sources and leveraging that data to create hyper-personalized exceptional

customer experiences. To learn more, visit fullpath.com. Today we’re welcoming Colin Day to the show. Colin, thanks for joining. Where are you in the world today?

Colin Day 

Thanks for having me. Exciting. Where am I in the world? I often ask myself that same question, but today you find me in Oktopost European headquarters, which is in London, England.

Ilana Shabtay 

Awesome, well, your accent gives it away. Thank you for joining. Colin is Oktopost’s EMEA Managing Director and VP of Business Development. He brings over 35 years of expertise in MarTech and FinTech, also opening up his own consultancy, which he’s done and founded, which is really, really cool, so we’ll talk a little bit about that. And four years ago, Colin joined Oktopost where he continues to drive strategic leadership, operational excellence,

sometimes MCs on the side, which I got to experience firsthand, which was really fun. Colin’s also passionate about mentoring emerging leaders and sharing his knowledge of the evolving digital landscape. So we’ll talk about that. Hopefully you can give us some advice. Thanks again for joining. Let’s do it.

Colin Day 

little bit.

Let’s do it. Thank you for having me. And it makes me sound very old when you say 35 years worth of experience, right? And I guess these aren’t laughter lines, are they?

Ilana Shabtay 

Well, you know what? No one would ever guess. Okay, so let’s dive right into, I wanna talk a little bit about how you got to Oktopost and what that journey was like and what challenge you guys are solving for businesses. But before we get to that,

What speaks to me specifically is the mentoring aspect of your experience, right? So what are you telling emerging leaders today specifically about digital landscape, generative AI? How should leaders today be preparing for what’s coming in digital? Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve been focusing on lately?

Colin Day 

Yeah, mean, sure, mean, look.

The one thing that’s constant is change, Ilana. Change is the one thing that’s not going away. Everything else, who knows? But from a business perspective, one thing that we’re always gonna be challenged with is change. It’s how do we become change agents with inside our roles and with inside our businesses? How do we embrace change rather than fear change? Because it’s human nature. It’s human nature for us to fear the unknown.

Ilana Shabtay 

Bye.

Colin Day 

It’s the fight or flight mentality of our forefathers when they were out hunting or forebears, whatever the correct term is. But when they were out hunting and living in the caves, was, do I fight or do I run? And that’s, as business leaders, that’s one of the scary things for us is change. So a lot of my focus over certainly the last 15

20 years of my career has been how do I coach the teams that work for me, work with me to embrace change and become that change agent and that change ambassador.

Ilana Shabtay 

I love that approach. was just talking to someone who just joined our team, our new CISO Shahar Maor, and he was talking about interviewing in the age of ChatGPT and he talked about the evolution of hating ChatGPT to loving ChatGPT. And within a month, he goes, okay, forget it. I’m going to embrace ChatGPT, and I’m now going to decide that if I interview someone, the expectation is they actually know how to effectively and efficiently

use ChatGPT. So that’s a good example of kind of like embracing change, right?

Colin Day 

Yeah, and Ilana, you probably use ChatGPT, right, to create some of your scripts, right, or some of the stuff that we’ve done from an Oktopost perspective, right? It’s like, you know, if I think about some of my, you know, STRAP plans for 2025 or even back in 2024, because, you know, that’s when it started to come out, It’s like, you know…

Ilana Shabtay

Yeah.

Colin Day 

using those technologies to help you or assist you with your work, in guardrails, putting rails down to help guide the team or the individual, but using those technologies to help you become more efficient and do some of the heavy lifting for you. I mean, how often do you get stuck writing formula for Excel spreadsheets or Google Sheets?

Hey, just put what it is you you want. It’s like tell tell it in human language, right? Tell tell the model what what you want and it will go and create it for you I was doing only that last night as I was building a new price book for the business

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah, it’s actually incredible because it really can make you just so much more efficient. So, embracing it. Yeah. Yeah.

Colin Day 

It’s not gonna replace your job, right? Cause you still need to give it the prompts and the guidance and yeah, when the thing that will replace us, right? Is when it becomes general AI, but not generative AI. Generative AI still needs the human to give it the prompts and the direction.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah.

prompt. Yeah, and by the way, I don’t use ChatGPT for my scripts, but I should start using ChatGPT. So thank you. Okay, shifting gears a bit to…

Colin Day 

you should do, there you go, there you go. Hint number one or tip number one right, so there we go.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yes, exactly. Thank you so much. What a great mentorship to the emerging leaders. I very much appreciate it. Hands on example. Let’s talk a little bit about Oktopost. It’s been four years. I know that your journey has been really great there. It’s a great team. I know the team over here in Tel Aviv. Talk a little bit about…

Oktopost what challenge Oktopost is solving and and what company should be thinking about when it comes to employee engagement social media and then we’ll we’ll try to shift it a little bit to dealerships because I do know you guys also work with you know a few dealerships as well and we want to think about everything in the lens of automotive here but also outside automotive because oftentimes automotive gets influenced from outside

Colin Day 

Sure, and I’ve got a disclaimer. My eldest son works for Ford, so I don’t know if that actually precludes me from being on your podcast, because friends and family of, there you go, there you go. He works in IT as well, but, so a story for another day, Elana, but look, if you.

Ilana Shabtay

Power!

No, he should have come on. We should have had him.

Amazing. Yeah, I have to bring mine.

Colin Day 

You said that my journey with Oktopost started four years ago. That’s true. That’s when I joined the team to become the managing director for EMEA and VP of business development. But my journey with Oktopost actually started back in 2015. The company was founded in 2013 by two amazing founders out in Tel Aviv, Daniel and Liad I was their first enterprise customer back in 2015. So I’ve sat

Ilana Shabtay 

Cool.

Colin Day 

on the client side. I used to be the Chief Technology Officer for global marketing for a large financial technology company called FIS. I was actually at FIS for 18 years, but I came across Oktopost as I was taking that organization or part of team that was taking that organization through a sales transformation. Historically, we’d been a house of brands rather than a branded house.

We were getting ourselves really aligned to selling centrally, to bringing stuff back into a central team and having one go-to-market rather than 50 different go-to-markets or 500 different go-to-markets. So what started off as a sales transformation project quickly morphed into bringing marketing into that conversation as well, because selling’s a team sport and an important part of that

team is marketing, right? So I was tasked with trying to find a platform that we could use with inside ourselves organization to empower them to take branded content out to their own social networks, right? It’s like, this is going back to 2015, right? So, know, social was a pretty new thing and very, very new for B2B organizations. So our sellers, although they may

Ilana Shabtay 

Right.

Colin Day 

have had a presence on X or Twitter back then, it’s like on Facebook, on Instagram, on LinkedIn, from a business perspective they didn’t really know what to say.

Right. And that’s part of the problem the Oktopost solves from a social selling perspective is as a central marketing team or maybe the HR team from an employer branding perspective can create content on the platform and then easily share it with the wider organization such as the sales team or anyone that’s really like customer focused but put it in the hands of those individuals and then empower them to quickly schedule

and share it out over those personal networks. And then what we do is we capture the insights about who’s engaging with that content, yeah, bring that back and put it into the right hands or the right person in the organization. That may be sales, it may be marketing, it may be customer success, but empower them to understand who’s engaging with that content that’s gone out either over the corporate pages or employees’ page personal profiles. Bring it back into the…

organization to do something with it and then ultimately tie it to revenue. So from a marketing perspective, I understand how organic social is impacting the sales activity of the organization.

Ilana Shabtay 

That’s really cool. actually didn’t necessarily, I wasn’t familiar with the data back to the company and bringing it back into the, you know, the marketing organization or whoever is responsible for figuring out that target market and who’s actually, you know, engaging with the content. So that’s a really cool piece. And when I think about this within the automotive structure, and again, I’d love to hear from you how your clients are using it, and I’m assuming it’s pretty similar, but I think about the…

the automotive sales guys that are on TikTok and on Instagram and on LinkedIn and creating really funny, engaging content so that they can be personable and specifically for automotive also break down some of the stigmas about car salespeople, right? So I think it does like a little bit of two for automotive specifically, which is so interesting and I’d love to hear your take on this. It’s like, yes, of course, let’s help the business, let’s promote the business, let’s put in there.

Let’s give them tools that they can, you know, be brand ambassadors for the dealership. But also along the way, something that’s really important specifically with dealerships is making them personable, like making sure that they really are breaking down those stigmas so people enjoy and trust the people that are going to sell them a car, at least in the US. I don’t know if the stigma is the same in the UK.

Colin Day 

Trust, you bring an important thing into the equation there, right? The word trust, yeah? And people buy from people, right? Whether it be a car or whether it be olives from Carmel Market in Tel Aviv, right? People are still buying from people, right? Whether it be B2B, B2C, B2G, whatever, right? So people are still buying from people. And people are buying from people they like.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yes.

Mm -hmm.

Yep.

Colin Day

Right, yeah. It’s called social. When was the last time you were social with a brand?

Ilana Shabtay 

Right, it’s an interesting concept. Right.

Colin Day 

How do you have a conversation with a brand? Maybe it was the airline company that you used for your summer vacation. The flight was late taking off or they lost your luggage. Or maybe it was the car dealership and you had your car serviced and there was a problem with some follow-up. Maybe, I don’t know, the sensors went out, the valves on the tire.

And you took to social to berate or have a conversation, but it’s more like a monologue rather than a dialogue when it becomes a customer service issue, So people are more likely to engage with social content that’s gone out through an individual’s channel. In actual fact, if you looked at statistics from the likes of LinkedIn, LinkedIn will tell you they’re 10 times more likely to engage with

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah.

Colin Day

a LinkedIn post that’s come from your eye versus from Oktapost or Fullpath. And off the back of that, people are seven times more likely to convert, whatever that may be. So it may be go to the dealership’s website, if we’re talking about the automobile industry. Go to the websites, download a white paper on the most recent Ford. Other brands do exist.

Ilana Shabtay 

Right.

He

Colin Day 

on the latest model of a particular car that you’re interested in, right? All the way to maybe booking an appointment with a sales rep to go in and actually do a test drive or whatever it may be. So seven to 10 times more likely to engage and seven times more likely to convert. So that’s why social is such an important channel for anyone in sales, whether it’s

Ilana Shabtay 

So it’s…

Colin Day 

be the sale of a car, the sale of an RV, the sale of a piece of software.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah, can you talk, or I don’t know if you have any data on this, but can you talk a little bit about the difference between B2C and B2B when it comes to this type of strategy?

Colin Day 

Yes, like, look, great, great question. It’s like when when you think of B2C sales, yeah, typically it’s transactional, right? And typically it’s it’s more likely to be impulsive, right? You’re either going to buy it or you’re not. Yeah. And the sales cycle is is typically a lot shorter than than what you would have in in B2B. Right. And from a B2B perspective, it’s how do I keep someone engaged? How do I nurture

Ilana Shabtay 

Thank

Colin Day 

of them until such times that they’re in a buying cycle. You could actually say that’s also true in B2C because, hey, maybe I’m purchasing, I’m an individual purchasing a car. Let’s bring it back to automobiles. Maybe I’m an individual purchasing a car. Maybe I’m the purchaser at an organization buying a fleet. If we think about those two different purchases,

Ilana Shabtay 

Right.

Colin Day 

If I’m buying a car, I’m in the market to buy a car probably once every 12, 24, 36, maybe 48 months. And new versions of the cars are going to come out in that time, whether it be electric or hybrid or whatever. There’s going to be new versions. If we think about the B2B side of that, the fleet

purchase, right? That’s going to be, you know, maybe on a three to five year turnaround. So it’s a lot longer, right? In that cycle. So therefore the way, the tactics I’m going to bring to bear in the sales and marketing and information exchange, right? Or the value exchange between the buyer and the brand are going to be different because I need to, you know, I need to obviously

Ilana Shabtay 

Yes.

Colin Day 

that second one on the fleet side of things I need to keep someone engaged for a lot longer than I do on the B2C side.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah, and it’s actually an interesting point that you’re bringing, which is that there’s a difference between engaging them for the sale and engaging them for retaining. And we have to think of our employees as ambassadors for both, right? Like you want to keep your clients engaged for loyalty and you want to keep your clients engaged for new business. So it’s just an interesting way to think about social content. It’s so powerful.

Colin Day 

And in the automobile space, right, it depends on the dealership, right? The dealership may just be new cars, right? Maybe new cars, used cars. It may be new cars, used cars and repairs and servicing, right? So, depending upon what products you’ve got, depends upon whether my strategies are just gonna be new business sales or whether I need to retain, right? Because if there’s a retention perspective,

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah, very different.

Good.

Colin Day 

could be how do I get more of the servicing dollars, right? Or it could be how do I then think about how the individual is going to be chopping that car. Actually chopping a car is probably a bad analogy. So I’ve got a daughter that’s a police officer and she would tell me off if I was talking about chopping cars.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah. Yes, it’s

you

Colin Day

Maybe it’s changing the car for my next purchase. Do I stick with a brand? Do I stick with a dealership? Or do I go to a different brand and I can only get that through a different dealership? So you’ve got to think about the products and services you’ve got and the lifetime of the customer, not just one and done.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah.

Yep.

Yes, lifetime value of a customer is extremely important and I love how this plays a role in that too. So before we sign off here, I want to ask a really quick question on your predictions for digital marketing in 2025. You know, it can be within the realm of social media and employee branding or outside of it. What do think we’re going to see from like a digital marketing perspective, video marketing perspective, anything you feel comfortable talking about? Like what do you think? Where do think we’re going?

Colin Day 

Yeah, so that’s a great question, right? And I think more AI, right? And I think, you know, at the moment, it’s still generative, right? I think there’s a lot to run from a generative AI perspective. I think we’re only scratching the surface. I think you’ll see more incorporation of AI capabilities into core platforms, such as your marketing automation.

Ilana Shabtay

Yeah.

Colin Day 

platforms such as your CRM system, but also standalone. I think more of us are getting familiar with the use of the likes of ChatGPT. Others do exist now, but it was the first one to the market and it’s the one that everyone’s familiar with the brand. I think you’ll see more use of that. think that a lot of the marketers that I’ve spoken to

Ilana Shabtay

Yeah, one viral. Yeah.

Colin Day 

whether it be leaders or whether it be practitioners, have been scared to use ChatGPT or similar technologies because they don’t know what they can do with it. And it goes back to the fight or flights, like conversation that we had right at the top of the session. So if I don’t know what to do with it, sometimes we live so busy lives, I don’t have the time to…

Ilana Shabtay 

Yeah.

Colin Day 

invest in my own knowledge or upskilling. But when I talk about any transformation, there are really three pillars to a transformation, Ilana. It’s the mindset, it’s the skill set, and it’s the tool set that you’ve got. So as I think about change, and I think about transformation, and I think about what’s coming, yet do I have the right mindset to be able to embrace that change? And that goes back to that mentorship conversation that we had.

Do I have the right skill set? The answer is probably no. So it’s then a case of, do I have the right mindset to go and be able to get up skilled? And then it’s, do I have the right tool set to be able to empower me yet to make that change? So predictions for 2025, I think more AI built into platforms, whether it’s platforms such as Oktopost from a social engagement perspective, whether it’s the most

Ilana Shabtay 

Bye.

Yeah.

Colin Day 

marketing automation or CRM system or whether it be the social networks themselves as an example. The other thing I think you’ll see change is the media that is used. We’re using the power of video or the power of a podcast today to get our message across.

I think that you’ll see more use in 2025 of video because we live busy lives and we love to consume. It’s like in bite-sized snippets. I mean, if you look at my children, eldest one is 28, the one that works for Ford, another plug. If we look at the way that he watches TV, it’s very different to the way that myself and my wife watch TV. We’ll sit down and we’ll watch the BBC or ITV, the terrestrial.

Ilana Shabtay 

Yes.

Yeah.

Colin Day 

TVs in the UK and we’ll watch it as they put it out. But as a society we’re more used to consuming content through streaming services and we’re more used to consuming content when we want it rather than when it’s given to us. So I think you’ll see more use of video, more use of bite-sized video because it’s just so much more engaging to the individual.

Ilana Shabtay 

yet.

Yeah, everyone wants everything right now and actually AI will very much help with that. So we’re all tied together.

Colin Day

And you can tell this face wasn’t AI generated, Ilana because as I say, this is far too old. You could have got a better model otherwise.

Ilana Shabtay 

Hahaha

I think you’re doing great, Colin Well, thank you so much for joining Inside Auto Podcast and thank you for bringing some insight outside of automotive from inside of automotive best practices. That’s what we like to talk about here. For our listeners, if you like this episode, please tune in insideautopodcast.com. You can find us in all your favorite streaming channels. Thank you again, Colin.

Colin Day

Thanks for having me. Thanks, Ilana.

Ilana Shabtay 

Bye bye.