1. A head-space strategy. Beyond the initial gains of your marketing automation platform (MAP), broader automation including AI, robotics process automation (RPA), and other implementations should free up resources from the repetitive and mundane. 
2. Navigating the gray line. Consumers continue to participate in the value exchange of personal data for perks, yet 51% of surveyed consumers are actively pulling back from providing personal data due to skepticism or distrust. There is a gray line between useful and unwanted personalization. Get both quantitative and qualitative guidance from customers so that: 1) You can get a feel for what the gray line is and 2) you can operationalize accordingly.
3. Experience it before doing it. The most acute brand risk will be when you use AI to deliver new experiences — but you have not really tested the common-sense, human response.Take the time to experiment, experience it, and look at it objectively or even from detractors’ point of view.

1. Rationalize your martech stack.
I love the term “rationalize” because the root of the word means to be rational. To rationalize your martech stack is to get more out of your best marketing technology tools — and to get rid of tools that you’re either no longer using or duplicate functionality that you have elsewhere.



2. Grow and rejuvenate your martech stack.
I know, this sound contradictory to your first resolution to rationalize your stack. But it’s not. One of the advantages of rationalizing your stack is that it actually makes it easier for you to phase in new technologies as you need them. And you’re going to need new technologies. The digital world continues to advance at an incredible rate — this is Martec’s Law in action. If you don’t take advantage of innovations in the market, your competitors may.



3. Keep the customer at the center of your martech stack.
Marketing technology and operations has become a big part of what modern marketing organizations do. But it’s important not to lose sight of why we operate these technologies: to provide remarkable customer experiences. 

As B2B companies pour money into the systems and technologies needed to transform their marketing operations into truly global digital performance engines, we will continue to see a steady rise in marketing spend as chief marketing officers leverage their new capabilities and ability to drive (and measure) return on investment on an unprecedented scale. Because of the marketplace’s overall digital transformation, B2B CMOs are now in a better position to argue for more ad spend.

Last week, eMarketer announced its first B2B digital advertising forecast, predicting the space will total $4.6 billion in 2018, up 13 percent from this year’s projected total of $4.07 billion. What’s more, when comparing next year’s forecast versus 2013, B2B digital ad budgets will have grown by 111 percent in just five years.

The growth figures for B2B media spend actually understate the share of corporate budgets going into B2B marketing activities if you consider the material technology investments that companies are making to drive performance and efficiency from their ad spends. This investment in digital transformation of the end-to-end B2B marketing stack is allowing deeper insights, better targeting and overall efficiency in driving engagement, leads and actions.

1. Asked to identify the top organisational goals for the business, companies expect their marketers to grow revenues (20.75 per cent), acquire new customers (20.6 per cent), and improve the customer experience (17.9 per cent), as their top priorities.

2. Marketers are investing in programs to better demonstrate the value of their work. However, these are often unsophisticated. 

3. As such, marketing is still poorly perceived by its management peers. Barely 15 per cent of respondents said their peers saw marketing as a primary business driver and revenue generator. 

4. Marketing technology has made huge strides improving the lot of CMOs over the past decade, and most companies have made investments across a range of disciplines. The top five functions identified by marketers in the survey were CRM, Social Media Engagement, Email Marketing Platforms, Marketing Automation, and Data Management.

5. As to their own goals, marketers want to build a bigger personal profile (interestingly, in the deep dive this was partly motivated by wanting to demonstrate the value of thought leadership to their peers). They also aspire to taking a larger role in business strategy and see gaining additional skills and capabilities as key to this.

The 15% drop in martech spend sounds more surprising, at first, until you consider three things:

Enterprise CMOs are still allocating 22% of their budget to marketing technology, and that is a large investment. 
Some of the cash pulled from martech was reallocated to paid media — but within advertising, it’s notable that 67% of CMOs are increasing their digital spend while 63% are decreasing offline spend. 
The other place where martech cash moved was services, which rose from 22% to 25% as well. Combined with the 27% of the marketing budget allocated towards internal staff, CMOs are spending over half of their budget (52%) on people. This is where budget should be going! 

Martech capability is essential, what can you do as a marketing leader to assure you and your team have adequate martech chops?

Look in the mirror – It’s difficult to lead a martech-centric team without being proficient yourself. 

Know what your team can do – Helping your team begins with an accurate assessment of where they are now relative to martech expertise. Good leaders know the strengths, gaps, and opportunities for their teams.

Be proactive about development – Building on the knowledge of where your team’s martech skills are today; a good marketing leader is proactive about developing martech skills. 

Practice continuous calibration –  All the previous points are in constant motion. New vendors and team members entering the mix, skills within the team are evolving, and the needs of the business continue to shift. Effective marketing leaders are highly-tuned to all these changes and commit to creating a culture where everyone is continuing to enhance skills, educate others and see where new martech-related opportunities exist.

1. Severely outdated technology 
2. Marketing measurements that are simply not actionable – Our study found that only 6% of marketers feel that their measurements help determine the next best marketing action. That leaves 94% of those in our study without prescriptive guidance on where to spend their limited budget and resources.
3. Misalignment between Marketing and the business 
4. CFO and CMO relationship troubles – The best organizations in our study were 3X more likely to align the functions of Marketing and Finance. However, only 14% of marketing organizations overall saw Finance as a trusted strategic partner, and 28% either have no relationship with finance or speak only when forced to. 
5. Poor investment, budgeting, and planning data quality 
6. Lack of visibility into baseline metrics 
7. Inconsistent use of MarTech

Once again, offered the opportunity to lead, marketing has shrunk to the occasion. Not all marketers, and not all companies, of course — some CMOs have genuinely grasped the mantle. But for too many, the technology challenge proved a bridge too far. As with digital leadership, many marketers overreached with the promises they made to the C-Suite, leaving them exposed when the expected ROI failed to materialise.

And that is reflected in spending this year. Last year’s survey showed 27 per cent of marketing budget was allocated to martech, that dropped to 22 per cent this year. And overall spending on marketing as a percentage of total expense also declined.

In fact, it’s possible that the CMOs’ moment in the technology sunshine may be passing. The sheer complexity of the marketing technology ecosystem — and the huge wins to be derived by more fully integrating marketing into the wider corporate tech stack — suggest to us that IT will take an increasingly prominent role in martech decision making. How CMOs respond over the next 12 months will answer the question. 

Whether a chief marketing officer (CMO) has $100,000 or $100 million in his or her budget, the question comes down to how the cash is spent. And according to a new report, spend is slowing with more pressure for marketers to prove returns.

Budgets have decreased from 12.1 percent of company revenue in 2016 to 11.3 percent in 2017, according to Gartner's 2017-2018 CMO Spend Survey. Marketing technology saw the steepest decline in investment between 2016 and 2017, with a reduction of 15 percent.

The technology, sometimes known as "martech,"is used by companies in various ways, including tracking customers' browsing habits on different devices and matching that behavior to buying. It can also be used to automatically place advertising on websites, a complex process that has been subject to fraud, and has also resulted in ads appearing next to undesirable content.

“Doing marketing” refers to the execution of marketing. This includes all those tactics related to attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers, areas like email, social, content, events, advertising, and much more.

But the other job marketers have is strategy, otherwise known as “running marketing,” which covers everything going on behind the scenes to make marketing tick. It’s managing budgets and having visibility into where the team is investing, understanding what results those investments have delivered, and most importantly, earning confidence to know what to do next.

To Run Marketing means to optimize its impact on the business, a core tenet of Marketing Performance Management.

Develop an adaptable marketing technology roadmap that defines the phases and resources required to close gaps and move up the maturity curve. Determine how to maximize existing marketing technologies before seeking out new tech. Solicit feedback from internal business users to help identify bottlenecks and immediate areas for improvement. Collect and analyze customer feedback to surface quick wins that will improve their experience and add value.

• "The most cited objective for marketing technology was increasing marketing ROI at 69%, followed by improving marketing efficiency (48%), improving decision making (40%) and gaining competitive advantage (36%), per Ascend2 research made available to Marketing Dive.
• The martech functions that respondents said would most likely increase ROI include analytics or predictive modeling (50%), data management (45%), marketing management (38%), content or user experience (37%), social or relationships and advertising or promotion (both at 35%), and e-commerce or direct sales (28%).
• The four challenges to acquiring marketing technology that were cited by at least more than one-third of respondents are: budget availability (59%), forecasting ROI (44%), integration requirements (43%) and prioritizing needs (36%)."

This survey, Marketing Organizations in the Age of Martech, asks you for three pieces of your organizational structure:

What roles report to your CMO (or highest-level marketing executive)?
Who is in charge of marketing technology management and what roles report to them?
Who is in charge of marketing operations — if that’s a separate role from marketing technology — and what roles report to them?

Digital marketing budgets are growing at a breakneck pace, but according to a new report, investments in the essential digital marketing skills needed to handle these larger budgets is lagging far behind. This is particularly true in high-engagement channels and capabilities, such as mobile, video and testing. Translation: although spending on digital technology may be up, the performance of marketers continues to remain stagnant.

BCG, in their recently published report, “A Disconnect and a Divide in Digital-Marketing Talent,” cites that worldwide spending on digital advertising topped $180 billion dollars in 2016, and double-digit growth is expected for 2020.

More troubling, is that these marketers’ scores didn’t budge within an 18-month period. This signals a growing divide between mega digital advertising budgets and the strength of the capabilities that actually generate strong return on investment (ROI).

New research from the ANA reveals how marketers are dealing with industry disruptions using technology.

Seven percent use more than 20 marketing technologies