Who First

Understanding your customer is the most important thing you can do.

To serve a prospect or customer, you HAVE to understand them.
To improve your outcomes, you HAVE to measure the people behind the KPI.
To work effectively, your team MUST be able to communicate and collaborate on audience understanding.

The Who First toolset equips companies and organizations to:
* Develop a practical and measurable understanding of their audiences
* Serve their audiences better, doing more with less
* Measure their outcomes better, learning why things work
* Create audience focused teams, so everyone is rowing in the same direction

Principal and Creator

JoshOakes.com - Advisor on Customer Acquisition & Product Development

Understanding your customer is always the most important thing.

I help you understand, build for, and acquire customers. So you can serve your customers better.

Through fractional leadership, training, and advising I help organizations define and understand their audiences, build products and experiences for them, and acquire customers.

I've worked with app, SaaS, social network, education, media, agency, healthcare, and entertainment companies.

Advisor to Investors, Executives, and Entrepreneurs

duckscore / OwnIt

People should know exactly what it takes to realize the dream of homeownership.

OwnIt Holdings is bridging the gap between consumer fin-tech and prop-tech. We are building tools to enable consumers to view themselves more like a lender sees them.

Co-Founder, Chief Product Officer

Measurable Advantage: Eliminate bottlenecks in your customer acquisition

I help organizations improve marketing performance with a structured approach to developing more sophisticated and effective marketing operations. This brings focus to marketing activities, clarity to marketing priorities, and visibility to marketing performance.

I work typically with organizations that have: 
— Multiple digital touchpoints or channels
— A high touch or multitouch acquisition process
— Longer term relationships with customers
— Mission-orientation

Principal

[meta]marketer

Responsible for leading department staff, overseeing all client work and development of all processes, frameworks, and templates.
Client work consisted of researching and analyzing digital marketing efforts including web analytics data, paid search, organic search, social media, content marketing, CRM and marketing automation data to deliver strategic and tactical insight for the improvement of efficiency and efficacy of digital marketing efforts.
Served as the primary interface with client stakeholders across multiple teams–including Marketing, Product Development, Technology, and Management–and at various levels. This included auditing, troubleshooting, and implementation assistance at the tactical level up to strategy, reporting, and feedback to the C-Suite.
Developed propriety training offerings and all materials and content. Conducted in depth training workshops and seminars garnering universally positive feedback from clients in small to medium sized companies across numerous industries.

Director of Optimization (Director of Client Services)

NoiseTrade

Worked alongside founding partners, providing User Experience, Analytics, and Product Development  consulting. Also assisted with customer support issues to collect “voice of customer” data from customers (artists) and users (fans/visitors).

Product Development and Support

MacAuthority

Promoted from Technical Sales for local and regional corporate accounts to Service Manager. Responsible for ensuring that the service department provides an ideal customer experience through the consistent, timely, accurate completion of all service requests; also responsible for ensuring compliance with company and partner policies in addition to overseeing the training and certification of department staff, maintenance of department resources and conditions and ensuring that department utilization, profitability, and customer satisfaction metrics meet or exceed company goals.

Service Manager

The MacSuperstore

Responsible for ensuring that the service department provides an ideal customer experience through the consistent, timely, accurate completion of all service requests; also responsible for ensuring compliance with company and partner policies in addition to overseeing the training and certification of department staff, maintenance of department resources and conditions and ensuring that department utilization, profitability, and customer satisfaction metrics meet or exceed company goals.

Alpha Digital Solutions, LLC

Responsible as VP of Product Development for developing and documenting product requirements, prototyping user interfaces, and identifying product opportunities. Served as primary liaison and project manager to outsourced development team.

VP Product Development

Bay Leaning, Inc.

Front End and User Interface development and Engineering Management for a SaaS startup targeting higher-education institutional customers.

Engineering Manager, UI Engineer

Understanding your customer is always the most important thing. They're the ones with the money.

I won’t stop saying it: Understanding your customer is always the most important thing. They're the ones with the money.

Want to talk? https://whofirst.link/schedule

When you're using the Who First Framework you will:
• Create products & experiences that make your customers say "Oh sh!t!"
• Create Create content that hits your customer’s bullseye.  

What that means:
• How to capture real insights from your actual customers 👉 not rest on your collective biases and assumptions.
• How to DOCUMENT and VALIDATE Audience Profiles 👉 instead of made-up personas and bullsh!rt ICPs.
• How to make your customer understanding ACTIONABLE 👉 instead of just dumping it on your shared drive and never looking at it again.
• How to MEASURE your outcomes with the tools and systems you use  so you can actually 👉 move the needle.

How:
• Done With You and Done For You services
• Advising execs
• Self-service tools and templates

More about Who First: who-first.co
More about me: joshoakes.com

Joshua Oakes

Syndigo

Syndigo enables commerce by supporting the efficient transfer of information in the complex ecosystem of brands, retailers, and their customers. We provide descriptive product information, nutritional data, images, and other digital media, to empower engaging brand experiences online and in-store. Through Syndigo’s integrated platform, Content Experience Hub, clients can publish, manage, syndicate, and audit their product content across the largest trading network of brands and recipients in the world. Syndigo is a GS1 Certified Identification Partner and GDSN data pool.

Syndigo serves more than 12,000 brands and 1,750 retailers globally in many consumer industries including grocery, foodservice, hardlines, home improvement/DIY, pet, health and beauty, automotive, apparel, and healthcare products.

My team focuses on data structure and quality, operational efficiency, and understanding the needs of the consumer so that we can make it easy for brands and retailers to share the information consumers need to make a purchasing decision.

Vice President of Data Operations

My team captured all on-pack content for more than 150,000 grocery and CPG products every year. I focus on data quality, operational efficiency, data structure, and understanding the needs of the consumer so that we capture the information consumers need to make a purchasing decision.

Vice President of Content Operations

Director of Taxonomy and Content Strategy

Vanderbilt University - Owen Graduate School of Management

I taught a class on digital marketing to master's of marketing students.

Adjunct Professor

Creek Content

Creek Content is on a mission to end content chaos and help you communicate clearly. We match your business goals and your audience's needs with effective digital media strategies. We specialize in content strategy, information architecture, training and speaking.

We work with mid-sized to multinational organizations to create effective strategies. We design content models, build messaging strategies, and create and implement content operations and governance plans.

Recent projects include:
• Worked with a SaaS healthcare company to create content structure and taxonomy as it redesigned its website. The new system is expected to provide greater insight into the audience’s content needs, and allow for improved tracking across multiple channels. 
• Worked with a multinational company to create a full content strategy and rebuild its product content structure. The new structure will provide the audience with a reliable experience that makes it easy to find the information they need quickly. On the back end, the new structure will make content operations more efficient.
• Worked with a healthcare client to create multiple content structures for several digital products. My work included full content strategy, from product definition to metadata, taxonomy, and content management system design to support the organization’s goals. Then the Creek Content team worked with subject matter experts to create content for multiple digital products, according to the strategy and messaging we had laid out.

President, Content Strategist

Hammock Inc.

Hammock is a custom-publishing firm, and through magazines, newsletters and online media, we help corporations and nationwide associations build deeper relationships with their clients and members. On the digital side, we help our clients build strong web communities through all the tools available today, so they can participate in the conversations the marketplace is already having about their products and services.

Director of Digital Media

SmallBusiness.com

Product development, taxonomy, information architecture, community seeding and management.

Co-creator

Tennessee Society of CPAs

I wrote, edited and designed print and promotional materials for the statewide CPA association.

Communications Coordinator

Vice President of Data Operations at Syndigo

Experienced content strategist and information architect, transforming the way organizations create, structure, manage, and use information to engage with their customers and audiences. Skilled at leading business and technical teams, with a practical, goal-oriented focus. Highly rated speaker and trainer.

taplio

The Battle

Joshua Oakes

Laura Creekmore

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