Marketing Governance

Marketing departments will soon manage their technology stack like eco-systems of connected apps. This finally brings them agility, efficiency, resiliency and more revenue.

The marketing technology landscape is becoming ever more crowded. Last year the number of MarTech vendors grew by 18 different tools on average.

Working with a myriad of different tools is no recent development. Internal black markets for apps have always existed below the counter, but managers have tried to prevent individuals taking matters into their own hands.

But with the explosive growth in the number of apps and the need for agility, managers cannot ignore the cry for freedom any longer.

Marketing managers fear losing consolidated insights and reports… but they don’t need to be. There is a way to facilitate MarTech moonshiners, making them work for you instead of against you.

Integrate your marketing technology stack with… yet more apps. Apps like Zapier and IFTTT tie all other tools together, allowing for MarTech stacks to behave like ecosystems. Teams or business units will be free to select the tools they like and use them for any project, for any duration.

Management reports drawn from multiple data sources can be created using Boardview.io.

You can build your own castle from numerous ‘Lego bricks’ while remaining in control, as Google is doing running ‘microservices’. Matt Miller argues that, as an alternative for building big software platforms, software development teams now move to building ‘microservices’, i.e. “small, loosely coupled and composable autonomous pieces”. Sounds like an ecosystem to me.

4 Benefits of an integrated marketing technology stack

The result of managing your MarTech stack like an ecosystem? Increased agility, efficiency and resiliency.

Agility - Take away the need for expensive change management projects by effortlessly pulling reports from different data sources.

Efficiency - Teams will only select apps that serve their purpose best and leave other apps be, so you don’t waste money on what you don’t use.

Resiliency - The dispersion of apps across teams allow for seamless scaling. Meanwhile there is no single point of failure, limiting downtime

…which, in the end, results in more revenue.

Why not grab yourself one of those apps you always wanted? Go for it.

Two of the most valuable purposes of a marketing dashboard are to help the leadership team understand how Marketing is moving the needle in terms of top line revenue, market share, customer value, category ownership, etc., and to provide strategic guidance. However, one of more perplexing findings from the recently completed marketing performance research conducted jointly by Forrester, ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing is that while marketers have access to more data, leverage more analytics, and invest in more tools and systems than ever before, marketers continue to struggle to prove marketings contribution to the business.  While the majority of the marketers in the study indicated they regularly produce and share a dashboard. The same survey, with results from the 400+ marketing and business leaders shows that just 9% of CEOs and 6% of CFOs use marketing data to help make strategic decisions.

So where’s the disconnect? It appears that most marketers participating in the study use their marketing automation (MAP) or sales automation (CRM) systems to create their dashboards.  While helpful, dashboards typically generated by these systems report on marketing activity and associated costs  – email activity, website activity, social media activity, lead activity- rather than reporting on metrics executives can use to set direction.  It’s not that these reports and dashboards are bad; they are valuable when used to support tactical decisions, but if you want your CEO, CFO and other members of the C-Suite to use your dashboard, it must clearly connect marketing investments and initiatives to business outcomes and results.

Read More

A fast, steady and predictable growth, that is what companies these days want. The fastest growing companies of today use repeatable marketing and sales 2.0 techniques to grow revenue predictably and reliably. They are embracing the shift from the selling process to the buying process, moving marketing from a cost center to a revenue generator. By replacing the old linear sales model with a new holistic approach, companies are redefining the way marketing and sales teams work together.

The new buying landscape has changed marketing’s approach to lead generation and management. This tectonic shift has created a need to improve upon outdated systems that can no longer keep up with the demand to increase lead flow, ensure lead quality, and prove program effectiveness and ROI.

Companies that implement a marketing automation system to support their marketing and sales efforts are better equipped to manage lead flow and process leads more efficiently. A whitepaper by Marketo outlines how marketing automation optimizes marketing programs and can help companies:

• Create a faster and more predictable revenue cycle
• Increase profitability with tactics that result in higher conversion rates
• Align the efforts of marketing and sales teams to substantially increase topline revenue growth

Source: Marketo Benchmark on Revenue Performance as of Sept 15, 2012

Read More

For maximum impact and return, marketers must go beyond simple segment marketing or click reporting and create a personal dialogue with each visitor.

Behavioral digital analytics can fuel this personalization process by providing specific insights about each segment and individual. This can drive personalized product and content recommendations, as well as individually tailored retargeting for greater marketing ROI

Owlstone, talks about the two and how they can become succesfull partners in Marketing Automation. The two just need each other to bring marketing to another level, he states. One cant live without the other.

Though frequently at odds, marketing and IT executives agree that harnessing Big Data is imperative to building a customer-centric corporate culture, SAS.

They also agree that a lack of CMO/CIO alignment, rigid silos, unclear responsibilities, and a lack of leadership impede an organization from using Big Data to its full potential, the survey of CMOs and CIOs found.

Big Data is important to achieving a customer-centric culture, according to the study:

• 40% of marketers and 51% of IT executives said its critical for improved decision making.
• 36% of marketers and 23% of IT execs said data drives the ability to personalize customer experiences.

Below, additional findings from the CMO Council study, titled Big Data’s Biggest Role, Aligning the CMO & CIO.

Access to in-depth data, and the ability to translate it into insights, is a competitive advantage according to 70% of marketers: 30% say it is critical, and 40% say it is part of the overall picture.

However, most respondents view the flood of incoming data as part obstacle and part opportunity: 61% of CMOs and 60% of CIOs say so, admitting they have a long way to go still in using Big Data properly.

The main challenge, according to 52% of marketers (and 45% of IT professionals), is that functional silos block aggregation of data from across the organization, making it difficult to truly achieve customer-centricity:

Moreover, 39% of CMOs say the corporate culture is not aligned around the needs of customers.

A likely explanation for the lack of total customer focus is that no clear ownership of the customer exists. Among marketing executives, 18% say that ownership rests with the CEO, 17% say the CMO, and 19% say sales. IT professionals assign ownership to the CEO (20%), CMO (19%), and sales (17%).

Organizations that report they have achieved total partnership between CMO and CIO also have clearer ownership of the customer.

In such organizations, marketers (24%) and IT professionals (30%) say the CEO owns the customer. Furthermore, marketers and IT executives in total partnership organizations are highly satisfied with their companys ability to engage the customer (42% of marketers, 31% of IT execs).

Read more: 

Some long time IT observers and CIOs see the chief marketing officer as a threat to the CIO as nonsense.

But is he or she?

Weve seen this clash before, observes Enterprise CIO Forum community manager John Dodge.

In today’s market marketing teams are under more and more pressure to perform and get results. ROI is a magic word in marketing now-a-days, while budgets and resources are under pressure as well. In the meantime customers are holding back and getting less and less faithfull to just one brand. So, pressure is on for the marketing department, because you can only do so much to get better results.

There are several trends today which cause this higher pressure, says a paper by SAS.

• Consumers are more empowered then ever
• Data volumes are exploding
• New contact channels add complexity and dissonance
• You don’t control all the channels
• There’s more opportunity for confusion and noise
• Marketing organizations are drowning in data

How can marketers keep their head up in all this turmoil? How can they identify the best strategy that will deliver the best returns on from marketing investments?

Wilson Raj, Global Customer Intelligence Director at SAS shed his light on how to improve ROI on your marketing investments during a webinar sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association and SAS.  Optimization is the keyword, he says.

Read More

Marketing has come a long way. People have been selling things and services since early man. But how we market these things has changed a lot through the years and ages.

Modern marketing hasnt been around that long, it started  at the early 20th century, according to Marketo. As we entered the modern industrial age, the amount of goods became greater than the number of available customers, and so did the competition because suddenly had a choice. Modern marketing was born.

In time, with the emergence of new technology, marketing had to adapt. First, radio shook up how companies did their marketing. Then television made a huge impact. Then the Internet revolutionized not only how people did business but also how they live.

To illustrate technological advancements that have changed the course of marketing, The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation.

Read More