 Your new post is loading...
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
At the peak of inflated expectations, you want to avoid overspending on technology and overpromising results. You don’t want to ignore the movement entirely, since there is fire smoldering below the smoke. But you want to evaluate claims carefully, run things with an experimental mindset, and focus on real learning.
In the trough of disillusionment, that’s when you want to pour gas on the fire. Leverage what you learned from your experimental phase to scale up the things you know work, because you’ve proven them in your business.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
A new study released today by Wunderman, the leading global digital agency, in partnership with Penn Schoen Berland, finds that despite having access to more innovative marketing tools and systems than ever, 68% of global senior business decision makers (BDMs), are still struggling to bring their data, creative and technology together. Wunderman has introduced Future Ready as a call to action for business and marketing leaders to act now in order to prepare their businesses for the future.
Other key findings from global BDMs include:
--While 99% of global BDMs believe data is critical to achieve success, 62% are unable to turn data into insights or action.
--68% of companies can't change their creative based on insights from their data.
--73% say their companies are siloed and 89% of those believe these silos impact their ability to deliver cohesive messaging.
--59% of executives surveyed remain dissatisfied with their current marketing investments.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
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.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
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.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
eMarketer: How big of a problem is having excess marketing technology across the industry?
Tharp: Every day it feels like there are new applications for sales and marketing. Yet despite having untold amounts of technology at their disposal, every organization has complaints about the customer journey. It’s this seemingly unharnessable thing.
eMarketer: If an organization is in this position—they’ve impletmented a ton of applications but can’t seem to master the customer journey—is there a solution?
Tharp: All of this app proliferation is creating an opportunity and demand for a more complete core CRM experience, which will help not only potentially reduce the number of applications an organization needs to delight customers, but also reduce costs.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
Brands that plan to survive in the digital age need to utilise their existing technology stack or risk alienating customers, a new report finds.
Customer preferences have changed drastically in the past few years and chief marketing officers (CMOs) are under increasing pressure to adapt their marketing functions to the new digital age. According to research by Deloitte, 75% of CMOs see their roles as increasingly influential to business success.
Marketers have also become increasingly dependent on technology. According to Gartner, marketing leaders allocate 27% of their expense budget to technology which is equal to 3.24% of overall revenue.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
"We live in an era of constant disruption. In the realm of marketing, thousands of companies have emerged, promising great results to their clients, with very little to show for their claims. As a business or brand owner, this is beyond frustrating. I’m constantly getting pitched on new tools that my clients and I must have to compete in the marketplace. But here’s the rub: with all of this disruption, you would expect there to be growth. Instead, the major brands investing millions in this technology are losing market share, year by year like a slow leak.
Nowhere is marketing disruption more evident than in the Marketing Technology (MarTech) sector. The size of the MarTech industry has ballooned, growing by more than 40 percent in the last year. Now that digital marketing is at the core of most businesses, MarTech companies are selling their services as the solution to nearly every problem. Need support? To name a few, there is content marketing, attribution, data collection, sales automation, and management software for that. The result is that major companies are dividing their budgets and still struggling for growth.
So take a step back. Before shopping for a MarTech solution, ask yourself these three questions: - Is the solution linked to your actual business objectives?
- Do you get access to the consumer and customer data?
- Is it holistic?"
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
What does a successful platform company look like?
You want to create a lovable platform, said Brinker. One that developers and customers alike love working with. Your business vision might be to build a platform that helps you grow your customer base, or grow revenues, but if the right foundation isn’t put in place, then Brinker said all those things are difficult to achieve.
There are a few ingredients that go into a lovable platform according to Brinker. The first is that it’s the platform’s responsibility to create an attractive market for third-party developers. It must be a large market, and it must have unmet needs. Here he noted that HubSpot is in this position. It has 34,000+ installs and a large expanding base. It also has unmet needs, one of which is video.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
Unilever, one of the world’s largest marketers, is briefing startups on the tasks previously handled by the agencies it has axed in recent months as part of its ongoing efforts to limit agency and production fees.
The advertiser slashed its spend on agencies by 17 percent in the first half of 2017, while simultaneously making more moves to get closer to entrepreneurs. Over the last six months, it has launched co-working spaces in Singapore and Ireland where its marketers can sit beside up to 50 startups, with plans to erect more throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. In these hubs, both Unilever’s marketers and startups work on live briefs, while the latter also have access to networking opportunities such as fireside chats and mentoring programs.
By cozying up to startups in these spaces, Unilever plans to give startups like user-generated-content platform Vidsy and influencer marketing technology Mavrck more of its marketing budget. Startups are already taking on more of tasks such as customer research, content production and social listening, which Unilever’s defunct agencies once handled, according to Aline Santos, evp of global marketing. It’s left some of Unilever’s traditional agencies in a precarious position at a time when Santos and her team are cutting half of the 3,000 agencies they use around the world and are making 30 percent fewer ads.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
Here are the 2 ways data has transformed marketing into Art X Science and brought it closer to tangible and measurable growth:
DATA AS AN INPUT has made marketing RELEVANT & CONTEXTUAL – Advanced research and behavioral science capabilities, predictive models, qual and quant analysis has enabled a holistic understanding of the user (probably 360 degree X 2). The advancement in data management platforms; data matching capabilities across known and anonymous data, across online and offline data, across devices and cookie IDs has shifted a segmented view of a user to an individual view of the user.
DATA AS AN OUTPUT has made marketing MEASURABLE & ATTRIUTABLE – Despite an extremely fragmented media and channel landscape; marketing has evolved into a measurable and attributable function. It is no longer an ROI black box. The advancement in measurement and analytics platforms has allowed for not only cross channel measurement, JIT if not Real Time Analysis but also multi-touch attribution (granted with certain caveats). Attribution is no longer limited to the last-click model; injecting new measurement and predictive algorithms in a typical multi-touch conversion funnel.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
New research indicates where to focus digital investments so that they will reap rewards in online and face-to-face channels.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
For large companies with large marketing budgets, top consulting firms such as Accenture and Deloitte now provide marketing technology services that range from strategy to implementation and management. These firms are smartly leveraging their IT expertise and experience to deliver a suite of complementary marketing services.
With a stack framework in place, category/functional specialists and agencies can deliver exceptional value once you know what type of technology you need. You can find experts in virtually every technology category. Agencies that are category/functional experts (e.g. SEO, Digital Advertising) will in many instances source and then deploy and manage technology on their client’s behalf. This is particularly helpful in resource- or expertise-constrained environments and virtually mandatory in a startup environment.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
The right approach for SAS was a ground up renovation to better integrate channels and create a new customer-centric view of the market. We needed a way to monitor all of the campaigns in a centralized fashion. This meant creating unified experiences across all channels to deliver to customers the personalized attention they are asking for. And we started by establishing an Analytical Marketing Functional Framework that would serve as the foundational structure.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
The boundaries blur, and that’s a good thing. It brings the customer into focus.
Managers embrace distributed leadership, giving teams the power to sense and respond to a rapidly changing world. Strategy becomes more bi-directional, a shared vision that adapts to emergent opportunities through continuous experimentation. The brand ideal is made real, and relevant, every day.
Because martech isn’t just technology. It’s the people and processes that leverage technology in the pursuit of that brand ideal.
Tuning the people-process-technology triangle is the art of management for our digital age, and it’s more malleable than ever before. Imagination is its greatest resource.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
1. Custom APIs
2. PR Tech
3. Programmatic Advertising
4. Marketing Automation Platforms
5. Offline Tracking
6. Data Analysis
7. Celebrity Endorsement Model Going Micro
8. Conversational Interfaces
9. The Science Of Automation
10. Social Media Artificial Intelligence
11. Peer-To-Peer Marketing Outlets
12. Voice Agents
13. Creative Optimization Tech
14. Account-Based Marketing
15. The Human Side Of Martech
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
“In 2017, a mar-tech strategy means having some kind of road map and having some kind of vision for what the end state is that you’re looking for, because you can’t accomplish everything overnight,” he said. “So you have to have some kind of a plan, and you have to have some solutions that you can implement in a fairly short time frame so that you can prove your credibility and the value of these investments.”
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
According to Dell EMC, almost 70 percent of buyers' research is done online and the same proportion of that "buyer's journey" happens before the sales process ever starts, much of it conducted with the help of social media.
Dell EMC's new marketing platform is designed to jump that circuit by putting online resources for content syndication, social media and other marketing campaign tactics in partners' hands for free as part of the company's partner portal.
The platform is an integral part of Dell EMC's Partner Marketing Institute launched in May by partner marketing chief Cheryl Cook. The effort aims to make marketing a simple, self-service affair while also making solution providers more social media savvy.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
Successful MarTech companies are the ones that have taken measures to safeguard their future and while many companies are struggling, some are thriving that focused on three key areas of business performance;
· Business operations
· Non-optional technology
· Investing in customer success
In an over-crowded Marketing Technology landscape the clear winners are companies that can build sustainable businesses for the long term. Whilst complexity can be a challenge, opportunity is ripe.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
While marketing automation tools can help simplify the marketing process, artificial intelligence (AI) has proven to be incredibly helpful in improving the overall customer experience. Perhaps, this is the reason why major companies are “remaking themselves around the technology.” AI platforms help marketers create a structured messaging system that can actually “speak” to the consumer by parsing and sifting through heaps of consumer information. Driving creative efficiencies through AI-powered automation augments content marketing, production, delivery and overall presentation of campaigns.
With predictive analytics being one of the key AI capabilities, marketers can now prioritize the use of their marketing resources. For startups and small business marketers, creating a lean and productive strategy is crucial to success, in these cases predictive analytics keeps the business growing without bloating the marketing budget. AI driven predictive analytics can help marketers become more agile with real-time feedback on campaigns.
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
The obvious shift in the digital landscape reveals that marketing technology is more than a trend, and clarifies the need for a leader who can unify departments.
- Big data integration
- Customer engagement software
- Digital marketing and e-commerce
- Efficient management of technology
Key Technology Spending In Marketing:
- Marketing and analytics software (SaaS): 24.4 per cent
- Infrastructure (hosted/cloud servers, network storage): 28 per cent
- IT Cross-charges: 21.3 per cent
- External services for development, implementation, and integration of marketing applications: 25.2 per cent
- Other: 1 per cent
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
Too often, we find, marketers treat features and functionality as the end goal, rather than focusing on the goals they want to achieve and using martech functionality as the means to that end. “Your ability to identify and deploy martech solutions that fit your organization and meet your business needs,” observes Adam Sarner (Gartner client subscription again required), “depends on accurately assessing your capabilities and goals. Forging ahead otherwise risks wasting martech resources on solutions that fall short of expectations.”
Start with your goals and work your way back to the functionality you need to realize them. Inventory your existing martech portfolio, identify areas where you can consolidate (including reducing unused seats or licenses) and squeeze more out of what you have by emphasizing ongoing training and education. These are three steps Bryan Yeager identifies (you know the drill) for marketers to follow to get the most value from their existing martech investments before adding new applications. A side benefit is that you also get to avoid the ignominious fate of becoming a “Martech Fred” (an organization that overspends on and subsequently underutilizes its marketing technology).
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
1. Determine the 'Why'
2. Advance what's working
3. Beware of 'walled gardens'
4. Keep it simple
5. Know the trends
6. Stay in your lane
7. Prioritize adoption
8. Understand the importance of ROI
9. Go for it: Avoid paralysis by analysis
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
"AI usage "light to medium." Yes, Salesforce's report notes that 51 percent of marketers surveyed are already using AI. There is a bit of a trust issue when it comes to creating models and algorithms behind AI and humans want to oversee things.
Yet AI will be needed to manage media fragmentation and channel sprawl.
Email still matters as marketing channels proliferate.
The CMO is becoming the chief growth officer and that reality changes structures."
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
Learn how customer experience is reshaping marketers’ mindsets in our latest survey of 3,500 marketing leaders worldwide.
Our new Salesforce Research study explores:
Shifting priorities that are sparking organizational change
Marketing technology that’s making waves across the broader business
How artificial intelligence is raising the bar for personalization and efficiency
|
|
Scooped by
Marteq
|
The US$67 billion takeover in 2016 by Austin-based technology maker, Dell, of its Boston-based rival, EMC¸ represented the largest merger in the technology industry.
For Dell EMC’s senior vice-president of marketing, Gaurav Chand, the biggest challenge is not in getting the two parts of the company to work together, but in getting the marketing technology stack – particularly from Adobe and Salesforce – to work together.
“That is where I would love to see a lot more coming from vendor integration, to be able to provide that forward and background integration, to create a stack that the entire team can use,” Chand says. “Building the APIs to connect that stuff is major IT work. IT never has the time, because it is not a priority for them.”
|
|
At the peak of inflated expectations, you want to avoid overspending on technology and over-promising results. You don’t want to ignore the movement entirely, since there is fire smoldering below the smoke. But you want to evaluate claims carefully, run things with an experimental mindset, and focus on real learning. In the trough of disillusionment, that’s when you want to pour gas on the fire. Leverage what you learned from your experimental phase to scale up the things you know work, because you’ve proven them in your business.