Monte Wilson, Adobe’s former Vice President & Head of Digital Media Global Strategy and Business Development, knows a little bit about marketing technology (martech). My recent conversation with him as part of my UC Santa Barbara Distinguished Speaker Series covered a variety of subjects, including the future of marketing.
Martech Investments Are Accelerating
We’re at a turning point for the marketing technology industry. Marketing budgets are at an all-time high, but half of marketers still feel that their companies don’t spend enough on martech. IDC predicts that 2014 to 2018, martech spending will total $130 billion, indicating that most Chief Marketing Officers’ (CMOs) budgets will continue to increase.
Image: John Greathouse, All Rights Reserved
Meanwhile, the market is relatively mature — it’s been 10 years since Marketo first came onto the scene and placed predictive data at the forefront of marketing. Marketers today must combine analytics and automation to efficiently reach customers across a myriad of touch points.
Within this backdrop, I believe that the next wave of martech will be driven by continued investment and innovation in the following three categories.
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Data-Driven Creativity
Monte expressed a fairly controversial point of view regarding the future roles of the sales and marketing organizations, stating, “I can actually see a scenario where sales is rolled into marketing. The capabilities of the CMO today to understand the customer… (means) the real opportunity is in predictive analytics. Think about what the customer will do, before they do it. That is all happening with the CMO.”
The balance of left-and right-brained thinking is a key element of the modern CMO. Rather than complicating this balance, technology can facilitate creative thinking and agile processes. I see potential in collaboration and workflow tools built specifically for marketers to help teams work more closely together, automate their processes and unite their workflows in a single place. I see potential for the marketing “system of record” to evolve, combining the real-time social listening/publishing features of tools like Percolate with project management and tracking tools like JIRA.
Continuous Customer Delight
Monte also stressed the importance of delighting customers, with both ease of use and the manner of in which they interact with them. “Two things I was really focused on (at Adobe). The user experience of the product… (and) a great interaction with the customer. Delight the customer, always. It’s even more important today. If you look a few years ago at Photoshop… you pay your $700 and you might not buy it again for several years. If you’re in a subscription business, you have to be delighting that customer every day. Not just with the product, but how you interact (with the customer).”
Airbnb,
The most successful marketing teams will use qualitative and quantitative data to inform their decisions, and the leading martech solutions in the broad category of “customer experience” will act as the central brain that connects to every possible customer channel. This kind of system once required massive development and IT resources. A number of customer data platforms are changing this by working toward the vision of a single data repository. In particular, developer-friendly APIs, like Segment, can connect different data sources from customer touch points in one place.
True Omnichannel Marketing
IBM found that omnichannel marketers outperform their peers by 20 percent in measures that really count: revenue, profit and market share. Martech solutions promise to help marketers reach their customers across the entire “omnichannel experience,” but the billions of dollars in current martech investment are mostly focused on measuring and automating this experience on the web. However, in addition to
I see promise in companies that are using martech to take a true omnichannel view, creating a seamless customer experience online and offline.
Just as the future of marketing involves both the left and right sides of the marketing brain, the evolution of martech requires striking balance — between data and intuition, digital and analog, structured systems and experimentation, automation and human interaction. Technology is moving closer to this balancing point, but we’re just scratching the surface of what software can do to make marketers more successful.
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