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.

 “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself” Peter Drucker.  For 99% of businesses, achieving this goal (a requirement for surviving in today’s hyper-competitive environment) requires the right investment in Marketing Technology. If you want to optimize the performance of your Marketing organization and become more efficient and successful, you must know how to identify which technologies are need, in which order, and how to effectively implement and use the tools.

There are over 300 companies in 45 categories in the marketing technology space. So, it’s hard to keep up! As the number of tools and solutions for marketing has grown, the marketing technology landscape has evolved.  Today, we need to know both the types of technologies available, as well as how to implement and leverage them as a holistic system.

Marketing Technology and the Work of Marketing

The marketing landscape can be confusing, and the acronym alphabet soup used to describe these technologies only adds to the conundrum: DAM/MAM (digital asset or marketing asset management), MOM (marketing operations management), MAP (marketing automation platforms), and MRM (marketing resource management). In their study, “Realizing the Promise of Marketing Technology,” ITSMA defined marketing technology as “the software for improving marketing and sales processes to achieve business objectives.” This definition provides a way to frame the marketing technology landscape, which currently consists of a very large and growing list of players.

Read More

Harvard Business Review blog , Jerry Wind, Stan Sthanunathan, and Rob Malcolm argued that great advertising is both local and global. The authors contend that global enterprises have traditionally faced an unattractive trade-off when it comes to advertising. As they put it, “Global brand advertising can rarely reflect the idiosyncratic characteristics of every market, but the alternative – locally designed advertising – often sacrifices a consistent global message and misses out on economies of scale.”

To avoid this trade-off, the blog authors say that enterprises should pursue a glocal advertising strategy, which they define as, “locally adapting a universally embraced core idea that will resonate in any market anywhere in the world.” As an example of effective glocal advertising, the authors described a 13-year advertising campaign used by Johnnie Walker to reinvigorate its Scotch whiskey brand.

The Johnnie Walker campaign was based on the recognition that men around the world, regardless of culture or nationality, want to advance their lives. The creative expression of this theme was “Keep Walking.” This universal theme was localized through the use of inspirational quotes from multiple cultures. For example, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” by Lao Tsu was used in Asia. Over the life of the campaign, more than 100 “local” quotes were used.

The blog authors contend that an effective glocal advertising strategy has three core components:

• A global concept that embraces a universal human emotion
• A global brand vision combined with localized creative delivery
• An organizational architecture (including corporate culture, technology platform, and necessary resources) that facilitates effective collaboration between global and local marketers

In my view, the points made by Wind, Sthanunathan, and Malcolm about advertising apply equally to virtually all aspects of global marketing. Today, multinational enterprises must pursue both global brand consistency and effective localization simultaneously across all marketing tactics and channels.

Coordinating global and local marketing activities is especially important because the Internet largely erases geographical boundaries, making many consumers both global and local. For example, consumers in Japan or India increasingly expect marketing messages and materials that are culturally relevant and appropriate, but those same consumers can also easily access marketing content that is primarily intended for consumers in the US.

I also agree with the blog authors that both organizational culture and technology play critical roles in effective glocal marketing. Enterprises must nurture a close collaboration between marketers in the central marketing department and those in regional or national marketing offices around the world. Enterprises must also deploy the technology systems and tools that will enable geographically dispersed marketers to collaborate easily and efficiently. Without the right technology tools, timely and effective collaboration is all but impossible to achieve.

Marketing software applications have become mission-critical technologies for most global enterprises. The proliferation of marketing communication channels, the growing need to customize marketing messages and materials, and the emerging need to provide prospective customers detailed, interactive product/service information on a real-time basis have made it all but impossible for large organizations to manage marketing effectively without technology.

Choosing the right marketing software tools is, therefore, a major strategic decision, and one important aspect of the decision is whether to opt for software that is installed on in-house servers or software that is hosted by the software provider and accessed via the Internet. While the use of “cloud-based” applications is clearly growing, both delivery models have advantages and disadvantages. The choice ultimately depends on which model is the best fit for your business.

A new white paper by Ralph Windsor and Nick Brookes is a valuable resource for making this important decision. Ralph Windsor is a senior partner at Daydream, a UK-based digital asset management consulting firm, and Nick Brookes is an independent DAM technology and media delivery infrastructure consultant based in London. Both Windsor and Brookes are also members of the editorial staff at Digital Asset Management News.

Read More

‘Marketing is different’. “What’s more, we believe there is a better approach to building sustainable marketing operations, and it is not rocket science.”

The two start their paper with a bold statement. “From a marketing operations point of view marketers are no better of than they were a decade ago and their conventional thinking persists”, they state in the first paragraph of the first chapter.

There are three common views on marketing which dont work:

Not traditional

Traditional approaches to marketing do not work the way marketing works. The approaches do not account for marketers’ natural iterative human relationships and their fundamental task to enrich and deploy their ideas as late in the process as possible. Managing global decision-making, reporting relationships, incentives, processes and technologies are wildly complex and making sweeping improvements is nearly impossible.

Technology

The technology available today is mature, does what it must do: supporting customer interactions and providing data to inform the next interaction. However, according tot Rotkow and Manders, a view on the full ecosystem of technologies that help marketers get the work done think back office and those that interact with customers- think front office – reveals there is a significant incongruence. Front-office tools are increasingly utilized to manage customer interactions across channels. While back-office solutions haven’t been fully executed by the softwarevendors who have instead responded with incomplete solutions which are serviceable but further isolate marketing, rather than connecting it to the enterprise.

Advisors

Advisor don’t know it all. The gaps left across agencies, consultants, and technology vendors, results in a disconnection between a marketer’s operational capabilities and the customers it is trying to influence. Who is designated to build marketing people, process, and technology to drive the capabilities needed to deliver the world-class programming? “No one, in our view”, Rotkow and Manders say.

Marketing is unique

That is because marketing is a different kind of cookie. Marketing is unique because:

• Marketers must navigate unprecedented technological advances and a new regulatory standard (think of, for example, all the new channels coming up)
• Marketers must navigate increasingly complex internal relationships
• Marketing process is critical to success, though linear approaches don’t meet the challenge
• Marketers depend on a network of resources to successfully collaborate

The depth and complexity of the issues discussed by Rotkow and Manders cannot be addressed in a simple checklist of action items to be owned by the CMO’s direct reports. The best path forward is not a new buzz, but rather that marketers may realize operational improvements by applying the marketing-specific design principles to tried-and-true business design frameworks. Sustainable improvements require a mix of methodical top-down study and design, and practical bottom-up initiatives.

In conclusion they state: “Marketers who wish to enjoy an advantage in the coming decade will adopt a view of their organization – an uncomfortable view perhaps – that is less about a hierarchical organizational design and more about collaborative human interactions set within a specific process context. They will use a smart mix of technologies to enable these collaborations made possible by even smarter information standards that allow open communication. To start, marketing and technology leaders should initiate a top down design of an optimum marketing function, while identifying high impact improvement opportunities from the bottom up. In time, the top down will meet the bottom up for an organization that has the capacity for dynamic operations.”

Asia has always been a big driver in innovation and this can lead to challenges in marketing operations and keeping pace. Here Wilson Raj, Global Director Customer Intelligence at SAS talks about what companies are doing to reduce time to market.

Irv Shapiro. “I am fascinated by many of the results that reflect the innovation that is occurring in marketing measurement.”

So, what are the results?

A primary trend from the 2013 research is the level of support, and scrutiny, that marketers are receiving from their CEO’s around marketing measurement as a growth engine. Two thirds of CEO’s surveyed have significant influence in marketing decisions and half receive regular marketing measurements. In fact, one in ten CEO’s seek marketing measurements daily (9.2 percent) while one in five (19.7 percent) are receiving updates weekly.

How often marketing metrics are reported

 (graph by Ifbyphone 2013: State of Marketing Measurement Survey Report)

What is being measured?

Marketing teams are being asked to measure a wider range of marketing metrics with a greater focus on revenue and tracking of customer interactions from both offline and online sources. Tracking new customer sources is the highest rated marketing metric utilized (by 49 percent of all respondents), with measuring increases in sales/revenue across marketing channels a very close second (48 percent).

Given the dominance of the sales-related metrics already being measured by the marketing team, it is not unreasonable to conclude that marketing measurement innovation, which enables marketers to better track and monetize engagements with customers and sales prospects, will be a high priority in coming years.

Use of marketing metrics

 (graph by Ifbyphone 2013: State of Marketing Measurement Survey Report)

Marketing enjoys budget growth

Investment in an emerging generation of marketing measurement tools is needed to satisfy the CEO’s increasing demand for tracking data. In order to facilitate this, budget growth and additional marketing resources are being provided.

Possibly as a result of the increased focus from the CEO and the growing role marketing has as a growth engine, almost half of respondents (45 percent) reported an increase in their marketing budgets in the past year while only 12 percent are working with a tighter marketing budget.

Respondents were asked what their marketing personnel priorities would be for 2013/14 and a significant majority were focused on proactive and growth related strategies. Almost a third (32 percent) plan to add more full-time marketing resources, one in five respondents (19 percent) plan to invest in more contingent marketing workers, while one in 10 (10 percent) will hire a new marketing agency.

One in 10 respondents (10 percent) will also share resources with other departments, such as IT, reflecting the highly technical nature of twenty-first century marketing analytics. A much smaller percentage of respondents are planning to downsize their investment in marketing personnel in 2013/14.

The emergence of the Growth Hacker

In line with increasing marketing budgets, more marketing people are being hired. Growth hackers, marketers who combine marketing knowledge with a strong technical background to drive growth, are having an impact on improvements in marketing measurement. One quarter of respondents (25 percent) now have a Growth Hacker on their marketing team, the same percentage that have Product Managers.

Marketing teams with Growth Hackers are prioritizing investments in emerging marketing measurement technology, across both online and offline channels. Almost three quarters of marketing teams with a Growth Hacker engaged (72 percent) are experimenting with Voice-Based Marketing Automation (VBMA), 19 percent more than marketing teams generally. Meanwhile, 44 percent of marketing teams with Growth Hackers are using marketing automation software compared to only 26 percent of marketing teams generally.

Over a third of Growth Hacker-backed marketing teams (34 percent) are utilizing heat map tools compared with only 20 percent of the average marketing teams. Almost twice as many marketing teams with Growth Hackers (28 percent) are experimenting with emerging workflow automation tools, compared to 15 percent generally.

Across every category of marketing measurement technology, it is the Growth Hackers who are leading the charge in experimenting and innovating with emerging tools that will give them, their CEO, and their marketing colleagues the edge in tracking where the best results are being achieved for marketing investments.

See the complete survey at Ifbyphone.com

Unlike many C-level executives, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are without commonly accepted strategies and routine performance measures. This may be in part why CMOs so often dont get a seat at the executive table and incur such high churn. So whats a CMO to do? In this