b2b-marketing-signal-and-the-ideas-i-find-interesting

Expect roughly 80% marketing insights, ideas and perspectives — and 20% observations on life. Because good marketing doesn't exist in a vacuum.

I recently came across an interesting infographic showing different technology solutions assigned to specific areas of marketing. It was created by Scott Brinker, who runs one of the better-known blogs focused on marketing technology.

My first thought was how quickly the number of technology solutions available to marketing teams is growing every year. And the pace is quite impressive.

Having worked for a company developing business software, I have had the opportunity to work with products from the wider IT market. This immediately brought to mind a comparison between marketing technology and ERP solutions, where the market is also developing rapidly.

There is, however, one important difference.

With ERP systems, the software often influences the way internal processes are designed and organised within a company. Marketing tools work in the opposite direction. They need to be flexible enough to adapt to changing customer expectations and business requirements. At the same time, they must support the metrics and KPIs that marketing teams use in their daily work.

Following this comparison, we can look at marketing automation platforms in a similar way to a good ERP system.

In the past, marketing automation tools mainly supported basic purchasing and communication processes. Today, many of them cover much broader areas, including e-commerce and customer experience. They also need to keep up with changes in legislation.

GDPR is a good example. It has influenced many marketing technology solutions, including marketing automation platforms, as well as enterprise software such as ERP systems.

This brings me to another question: which technologies should a marketing department actually choose, and what criteria should be used to make that decision?

The answer is no longer based only on the functionalities required by the marketing team or the costs of maintaining and developing a particular system.

There are more and more external factors to consider — issues that may not be directly related to marketing, but can have a significant impact on the way the entire company operates. These include business performance, legal requirements and, increasingly, cybersecurity.

It is difficult to find one clear answer to this question, and I believe it is a challenge for many marketers.

Coming back to the infographic that inspired this post, my advice would be simple: before making any important business decision related to marketing technology, take the time to properly explore the market and understand the available options.

Marketing buzzword — for me, that's a term that's been gaining momentum for quite a while now. Taking up the challenge, over the past few days I've tried, on one hand, to catch up on what I'd missed, and on the other, to bring some order to my marketing knowledge, starting precisely with the definitions of various concepts.

Browsing through dozens of pieces, I came across a very interesting article by Samuel Scott titled “Everything the Tech World Says About Marketing Is Wrong” (published on TechCrunch). In the first part of the article, Scott aptly compares how marketing departments operated in the second half of the 1990s with how things looked just ten years later. He places the dividing line between these two drastically different worlds at the moment of broader digitalization, and with it, the arrival of a new channel and its growing share of the marketing mix. That, in turn, brought new methodology, a new strategic approach, and above all new knowledge and different needs on the part of the end audience. The author also tackles the concept of content marketing — aptly, in my view — pointing out that content marketing has always been an inseparable part of marketing activity, both in the digital era and before it. The only real difference now is that we have an additional set of channels available, namely the internet and mobile devices. Both of these areas open up far more ways to vary the format of content. Back in the 1950s, a marketer could already create content and place it in all sorts of print formats, which ultimately appeared either in the press or outdoors. Today the difference is that content can be freely varied in real time, and online has replaced print — this is where things like YouTube or any form of display advertising come in. Everything moves online, which does offer more room to play with format, but is by no means a guarantee of success. Scott gives what might be the best possible example here — Apple. How did Apple become the most valuable brand in the world? Through TV and print advertising. So the conclusion that ties it all together might be this: tools and channels change, but the underlying process stays the same.

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