21st Century Public Relations

MarTech is the New Black. Get fashionable. 

Digest...

Here are five themes for the future which resonated across multiple surveys and form the basis for these predictions. Remember, they are made specifically for large and extra-large companies.

1. Customer Experience Will Be the Battleground Marketers Are Fighting Over

In 2016 customer experience will garner the highest level of marketing investment; it is one of three areas in which CEO’s expectations of CMOs will increase the most; and bleeding-edge technologies to improve it will be the top innovation project marketers undertake.

2.  How Marketers Use Customer Data Will Determine their Level of Success

Managing, collecting and making use of internal and external data was the second highest area of CEO’s increased expectations for CMOs. Marketers will analyze data less and synthesize it more, leading to better and more actionable conclusions. Distribution of the data to decentralized groups such as brands or business units will occur to allow for informed recommendations/decisions about what action to take.

3.  Digital Commerce Will be Inextricably Linked with Marketing

We found that in 25% of organizations, marketing has total responsibility for digital commerce, and in 46% of companies, marketing owns a digital commerce P&L now.  Whether you lead or support your company’s digital commerce efforts, plan for higher investment and a greater role in crafting compelling commerce experiences. 

4.  Marketing Will Set the Strategy for Not Just Marketing Technology, But for All Customer-facing Technology

Marketing will be intensely involved in all technology that touches the customer as it works on improving the customer experience with customer service, sales and operations. It already sets the strategy and develops the roadmap for marketing technology in over 90% of companies. In a growing number of companies it is moving into different elements of revenue management, including former sales systems. By the end of 2016, customer-facing technology strategy and roadmaps will be led by marketing in at least one quarter of companies.

5.  Marketing Innovation Will Come Out of the Closet

For the second year in a row we found that marketers are setting aside more than 9% of their budget for innovation. Leading a culture of change and company-wide innovation was the third highest ranked increased CEO expectation of CMOs. More marketing executives have innovation in their title.  An increasing number of CMOs manage product development as well as product management. Digital business transformation is causing many industries to shift their business model and offerings to digital vs. physical; putting marketing squarely in the middle of such innovation. 

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Intermediate/ Excerpt...

One of the most powerful management levers is organizational structure. And while many companies are altering their org charts in marketing, to better adapt to a digital world, there isn’t much statistical data out there on what these new org charts look like.

Well, the folks at VentureBeat and I would like to change that. So we’re collaborating on a study of the “top layer” of the modern marketing org chart. Here’s your chance to be one of the first people to see the data from that study — by participating in a survey to help us gather it:

http://intel.venturebeat.com/surveys/new-marketing-org.html

The most important question we ask is:

What’s the list of titles of the people who directly report to the most senior marketing executive? So, for a large company, you might answer: VP Product Marketing, VP Marketing Operations, VP Customer Intelligence, VP Content Marketing, etc. No names — just titles.

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Digital has shaken up the marketing trade. Today’s marketers find themselves performing their work outside their comfort zone. While the marketing world has changed, the schools that teach marketers have not always kept up with the changes.

Intermediate/ Digest...

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing has caused mar­keters to think in terms of the entire cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and mov­ing them on the road from acqui­si­tion and usage to con­ver­sion and even­tu­ally reten­tion and loy­alty. How do mar­keters do this?

1. Test­ing is key. You will never get every­thing right. Know­ing how and what to test becomes para­mount. You need to be agile, and in a world of dig­i­tal, the mar­ket­ing depart­ment needs to become a test­ing machine.

2. You need to know what tools are avail­able that can assist in doing your job. It is not nec­es­sary to have a full under­stand­ing of the tech­nol­ogy. Instead, you need to know what’s avail­able. You need to have some knowl­edge of social sen­ti­ment and influ­ence, tar­get­ing, per­son­al­iza­tion, media opti­miza­tion, Web man­age­ment, and more.

3. You need to know how to cap­ture data, trans­late it into insight, and inter­pret it. You need to fig­ure out ways to go from data to insight to action.

4. You need to be skilled in break­ing down silos and work­ing effec­tively with cross chan­nels, cross media, and pri­vacy and secu­rity concerns.

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Suffering from MarTech FOMO? We’ve got the cure. Contact us.

Advanced/ Digest...

But my earlier perceptions play out the challenge that marketers face–everyone  thinks they can market.  As a result, we are constantly on the defensive, trying to convince people of the value we provide. Sometimes, this goes too far—where we define marketing as being the hub of the business, trying to get over our own inferiority complex by making everything else inferior to us.   As I hear more and more talk of marketing having “revenue responsibility,” I worry that this is going to far.   Sales has revenue responsibility.  Marketing’s job is to make it easier for sales to sell and customers to buy.  But if we broaden the scope of marketing too far, we are doing what was done to us—devaluing key roles and functions in the business.

When you think of marketing this way, the role is pretty broad.  Its about contributing to what is being created.  Its defining who the target customers are and the value they can expect to receive.  It’s sharing the story broadly so that the job of your sales channels (whether ecommerce, direct, or indirect) get easier.  You want to be that favorite author–the one who fans wait impatiently for their next book or story and tell all their friends about.

Whether you like my definition or hate it, the big thing is to get over marketing’s inferiority complex.  Refute definitions that define marketing based on a single tactical activity.  Participate in strategic discussions and fight hard for the good of the brand and brand promise.  I recently advised one client that has an incredible track record of successful implementations that that was a claim to stand behind.  And, if any of their product lines did not match that standard, they should either be  divested or work must be done to the product or services to get to the level of the other products.   That is marketing driving strategy and it makes sense.

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► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).