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Salesforce Marketing Cloud has released its “2015 State of Marketing” report [download page], a wide-ranging study that looks at the top digital priorities, obstacles and channels, drawn from a survey of more than 5,000 marketers from around the world. This article presents some of the top highlights from the report, which takes a special look at email, social and mobile.

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Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs

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What will 2015 bring marketers? Rather than look into a crystal ball, we have only to look at the present.

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Sales and Marketing Now Account for 48% of the Corporate IT Budget by Douglas Karr on Marketing Technology Blog

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Digest...

Aditya leads the marketing excellence practice at Bain, and works with some of the world’s leading brands and marketers. Here are my takeaways from this insightful conversation:

1. First and foremost, fellow CMOs, our role is going to expand. As Aditya says, our “visibility, [our] profile, the profile of the marketing organization — are all going to increase”. The importance of our ability to collaborate with other functions — IT, finance — and embrace the need to set up cross-functional decision-making processes cannot be understated.
2. Second, the marketing organization of the future is going to look different. In this new world, marketing organizations need different skills than they have today. Aditya comments, “what you essentially need is a modern-day DaVinci”. But those, as we know, are rare, so we as CMO’s need to create “DaVinci in the aggregate”. Aditya describes three key roles emerging as we move towards an engagement marketing model: marketing strategists, marketing technologists and marketing analysts. Each will play a critical part in creating, publishing and distributing content in a world where consumers are setting the terms for how they want to be engaged.
3. Third, marketing now needs to move at the speed of digital. That means fast. Really fast.  Aditya comments on how traditional marketing models rely on long creative cycles that ultimately provide insight/feedback for next year’s campaign. But, that model doesn’t work anymore — or, at the very least, it doesn’t capitalize on the opportunity of today’s digital world to “get real-time feedback” from customers.  At the most, marketers put themselves at real risk by not practicing “agile marketing” since, as Aditya observes, “A long cycle increases the risk that consumers have moved on to the next thing and your campaign won’t be effective”.

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How can you improve your marketing technology skills without sacrificing your day-to-day work? Columnist Erik Bratt has some tips.

Digest...

1. Understand That Creativity Without Conversions Is Equal To Zero

2. Get Experimental

3. Spend More Time With Your Technology Vendors

4. Understand What’s Possible: As organizations become more adept at integrating their previously siloed applications and data, “what’s possible” will only grow in size and scope. Marketers need to grasp the increasing interplay between technologies and how that can impact the customer experience.

5. Immerse Yourself In Digital Marketing Best Practices

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Digest...

A growing profession of marketing technologists have emerged from the intersection of marketing and IT. Marketing technologists combine technical skills — programming, systems design, algorithmic thinking, and technology management and strategy — with a passion for marketing and customer experience.

Similarly, re-imagined intersections with marketing are now blossoming across the organization. Indeed, one of the hottest categories for marketing technology today is sales enablement. Customer service is another fascinating intersection, catalyzed primarily by social media.

But this calls for new collaborations between the technologists configuring and operating these tools, the creative teams who know how to produce compelling programs in them, and the people who have responsibility for customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Finance and marketing are now working more closely together too, as marketing pursues an evolution from a traditional cost center to more of a dynamic revenue generation function.

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History is a guide to the future. And if the unprecedented change that has swept through marketing in the past five years is any indication, the next five years is going to require marketers at companies of all sizes and shapes to buckle-up for a wild ride. Gone are the days of mass marketing. Today and tomorrow, it is all about engagement.

To help marketers prepare, Marketo and the Economist Intelligence Unit have partnered to provide a roadmap for the future – a future in which marketing is first and marketers play a critical role as stewards of the customer journey. From organizational team design to the importance of engaging customers on a truly personal and 1:1 level – Marketo and the Economist Intelligence Unit have collected thoughts and ideas from some of the brightest minds in marketing to give marketers the license to lead.

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Abstract
This IDC study features results from IDC CMO Advisory Service's 12th annual Technology Marketing Benchmarks Survey and provides marketing executives with benchmarks for key performance indicators, program spend allocations, marketing head count, social media, and lead management.

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Digest...

The key pillars of a modern integrated digital provider these days, LiquidHub CEO Jonathan Brassington said, are social, mobile, analytics, and cloud — and the first three often involve some kind of digital marketing technology. And digital marketers, which create and manage customer expectations, become essential players in creating and managing the best customer interface.

“The customer is in control when deciding to engage with a vendor,” Stacey Bishop, a partner at investment firm Scale Venture Partners told us. This represents a “changing of the buying cycle, [in which] much more of buying is about marketing.” In that environment, she said, the key business need is “how do I get in front of the customer” to answer their questions, stimulate demand, and so on. And getting in front of the customer is what marketers do.

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