Category: Marketing Technology

Marketers and agencies alike are drowning in a waterfall of data. Learn 5 ways to stop drowning and obtain more from the richness of information available.

The technology transformation era has caused businesses to sit up and take note that in order to sustain your brand for future growth and profit you need to invest in the latest technology to keep up with….what exactly? This question, and often panic, has led to businesses investing in multiple technology solutions and internal marketing departments facing restructure to manage the investment, which ultimately leads to more (poor) investment. Sometimes businesses get it right investing in technology and sometimes it can lead to dormant software and marketing divisions not really achieving results. Which leads to the big question that often cannot be answered, or in most cases is not even being asked ‘What has the ROI been on that investment?’

In a recent TrinityP3 post, Darren wrote about the growing problem marketers appear to be having with data, posing the hypothesis that the problem with data (and its effective use in marketing) is due to the fact many marketers misuse it in its application. At the end of the post Darren asks what is stopping marketers from coexisting with and embracing data and analytics in their roles and questions whether this lack of data trust stems from a lack of understanding.

A recent interview with Professor Gary Lilien in Marketing Magazine on marketing analytics and the skepticism that still hinders its universal adoption got my attention. Not because of the issue, but because I have been longing to get to the bottom of why marketers are so sceptical. (I have my own hypothesis, which I will share below). He believes it is due to insecurity due to a lack of understanding of how marketing analytics works. I have joked a couple of times here that “72% of people are fooled by statistics” yet data and therefore statistics is an important foundation for marketing and understanding the market place. Time and again I hear about marketers struggling with or even rejecting data because it is often too confusing and therefore offers them no value or that the insights derived from the data conflict with their beliefs and so they reject its validity.

There’s never been a better time to be a marketer. Sorry to borrow and modify a phrase from our esteemed Prime Minister. Whilst it is an exciting time for marketers with technology, it’s also an extremely confusing time. It has never been more complex to identify the right path for your activity. Clients are increasingly looking for independent advice when it comes to approaching data-driven marketing. Advice to help identify dead ends, wrong ways and cautions.

And the winner of Chiefmartec’s 2nd ‘Stackies’ Award, for the best in class Marketing Tech Stack is…….Datapipe – for organizing its marketing tech stack around the buyer’s journey. Datapipe’s tech stack also clusters components around different marketing functions (eg Search Engine Optimisation, paid search, conversion, remarketing, email marketing, CRM etc), plus highlights the data flows between each technology. They applied a simple question: “how does a particular software technology solution move buyers forward?”

Have you heard this lately? Or have you found yourself saying this lately? It’s a phrase that seems to keep popping up in marketing management circles. And one that I also use from time to time to help keep up with the never-ending stream of new technologies, data services, digital platforms and media opportunities. It’s a great way of fleshing out information from a supplier, but also a way of determining someone’s actual capability and level of knowledge. I met with a global media manager, head of procurement and digital leader last week. It was a great meeting, and the conversation went in a variety of directions, however two key questions stood out for me at different stages of the meeting:

Most marketers have too many dashboards, and not enough distilling of data into a few key metrics that will offer potential insight by identifying shifts. I have worked with a variety of companies over the past 12 months to help them refine their dashboards, so I thought I’d share 7 best practice approaches with you in this post.

What’s the right path to focus on for your business? Who are the right agencies and suppliers to have on your side? There are plenty of great providers in the Australian market and offshore, however it is proving more and more difficult to get beyond the hype and promises to discover the real value that they can add to a business.

Technology is changing everything – how we communicate, how we shop, how we travel, how we are entertained, how we network etc. It is therefore natural that it is having a huge impact on a business function as essential as marketing and sales. Yet time and again we hear of businesses and marketers being caught unaware by technology. But how can the CEO tell if their CMO, General Manager Marketing, Marketing Director or Marketing Lead need to be thrown under the technology steamroller to save the company?