20 / December 2015/January 2016 / dmnews.com

MARKETING TECH CHANGES

EVERYTHING2016 will be a seminal year for marketers who are adjusting budgets and processes, staffing and strategy, and more as they aim to exploit technology

20 / December 2015/January 2016 / dmnews.com

Part 1 > The Marketer and Her Sous Chef

Cuisinart’s director of marketing communications may drive

strategy, but it’s her collaboration with the CIO that allows the

brand to cook up true innovation.

Part 2 > What the Dickens to Do About Marketing Tech

It’s the best of times and the worst of times for marketers with unlimited possibilities

and limited resources.

Part 3 > Technology-Driven, Must-Have Marketing Skills

The proliferation of marketing technology is changing how

marketers work and the skills they need to succeed.

Part 4 > Buyer Beware Marketers may not be asking

the right questions to select the optimal marketing technology

and then maximize it.

Part 5 > The Marketing Cloud Wars – Revisited

In the battle for industry dominance, five marketing cloud platform behemoths

lead the field.

Customer Journey Mapping and Buyer Personas

IBM Marketing Cloud

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Today’s buyers have more ways to interact with businesses, but this doesn’t always translate to a positive customer experience. Learn how customer journey maps and persona marketing can facilitate your contacts’ purchase decisions and improve their experience.

dmnews.com / December 2015/January 2016 / 21

The Marketer and Her Sous ChefCuisinart’s director of marketing communications may drive strategy, but it’s her collaboration with the CIO that allows the brand to cook up true innovation.

BY ELYSE DUPRÉ

Julia Child once said, “Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” For kitchen appliances manu-facturer Cuisinart—a brand used by the legendary American chef—

that passion is innovation. Innovation has been a key ingredient in Cuisinart’s recipe for success ever

since it debuted the food processor in the United States in 1973. The Conair Corporation brand’s ingenuity has evolved over the past 40 years—particular-ly in marketing—and technology has brought this change from a low simmer to a full boil. Instead of solely broadcasting its messages through channels such as direct mail, TV, and radio as it did in the past, Cuisinart now uses marketing technology to get closer to the customer and derive insights quickly.

“The difference with people who are running marketing now is you have to be not only a traditionalist, but a technologist, too,” says Mary Rodgers, Cuisinart’s director of marketing communications for the past two decades.

Marketing technology, for all its assets, can be both a blessing and a curse. Marketers can be guilty of chasing the “shiny new object” and letting tech-nology dictate their strategies instead of facilitate them. Not in Rodgers’ kitchen. She sets her problem-solving objectives first and then finds solu-tions to help her achieve them. You could say that her relationship with technology is similar to a chef’s relationship with a knife: The knife helps the chef execute the meal, but it’s still the chef who controls the knife.

As Rodgers puts it, “I don’t let technology get in my way.” Still, knowing which tools to invest in and how to leverage them can

be cumbersome. To ensure that technology is a benefit to Cuisinart’s marketing, instead of a burden, Rodgers adds another crucial compo-nent to her menu: people—specifically her sous chef, Conair Corpora-tion’s Global CIO Jon Harding.

“It’s all great to have all these software solutions,” she says, “but you need someone sitting behind a desk to use them. It’s not like you press a button and it takes care of itself.”

Together with their agency partners, Rodgers and Harding combine their expertise to provide a better experience for Cuisinart and its cus-tomers. Here are three examples of how the two executives collaborate and reinforce the notion that both marketing and IT need to have seats at the strategy table.

Preheating a partnershipRodgers and Harding didn’t always have a cooperative relationship. In fact, Harding says that it wasn’t until three years ago that marketing and IT decided to combine synergies—specifically, for a social analytics initiative.

The idea to implement a social analytics tool was based on Rodgers’ need to uncover the sentiments and conversations generated by her three core customer segments: brides and grooms, mothers with children under the age of two, and women 25 to 54 years old. She already knew these customers’ demographic makeup and purchasing habits through product warranty registration forms and marketing studies; however, she wanted to have a deeper understanding of how customers felt about Cuisinart and its competitors. She also wanted to know what customers were talking about on social media for future content and campaign inspiration.

So, Harding worked with a consulting firm to find a solution that would uncover these insights. After the firm suggested implementing a social listening tool, Harding and Rodgers discussed the options and jointly decided to implement NetBase’s social media analytics platform and use it to evaluate conversations happening on Facebook and Twit-ter. But the platform wasn’t an overnight success. On the contrary, hir-ing holds put the project on the back burner and both Harding and Rodgers agree that training Cuisinart’s marketers on how to use the technology to derive meaningful insights was a struggle.

“Even though it’s new technology, it still requires effort on the mar-keting side,” Harding says. “My challenge in other [departments] is finding the right people to work with.”

After collaborating with NetBase, members of Cuisinart’s IT team, and its agency partners to pick up the additional work and iron out the kinks, Rodgers and her marketing team started running pilot cam-paigns to test the technology and collect insights. In one test the team noticed that parents were talking about the types of kitchen appliances their kids needed before heading off to college. As a result, Cuisinart started promoting products on social media that students could fit in their dorm rooms, such as coffee pots or Griddlers.

These insights didn’t just benefit marketing; they also better-informed IT. Harding says he was surprised to learn, for example, that most cus-tomers were having conversations outside of the brand’s official social channels. “By using one of these tools, we could make sure we got that feedback, whereas previously there was a risk that we were only really hearing the response to our social media channels,” he says.

Cooking up serviceIn addition to working together to launch the social listening initiative, Rodgers and Harding are combining forces to introduce a product reg-istration system, which will fully launch in January. Powered by SaaS

WHO SAID THIS?Marketing and IT at Cuisinart work to speak the same language. Can you decipher who said the follow-ing statements? (Answers below.)

“A” = Mary Rodgers, director of mar-keting communications, Cuisinart“B” = Jon Harding, global CIO, Conair Corporation

1. “To me, now it’s more important that we have the right people on the marketing side of the table than on the IT side of the table because they’re the ones who are going to re-alize the value of those investments.”

2. “IT is like a curator for the experience.”

3. “I don’t use technology as a bar-rier to what I want to get done…it’s our job, together, to provide a bet-ter experience for our consumers.”

4. “Technology spending hasn’t drastically increased. What’s happened is that we’ve taken advantage of the lower cost of day-to-day processing power and tried to move those savings.”

5. “The challenge…is getting the yield off those [technology in-vestments]. You’ve bet the mon-ey on it. Can you execute the project effectively and even get the technology to work?”

6. “We’re deciding what we want to accomplish first and then how do we get the technology in place to do that.”

7. “There’s so much data out there. So, it’s how do we analyze that data and get those insights that would differentiate us as Cui-sinart or allow us to offer better services [or] better products?”

8. “You need to put the effort in to get the effort out.”

1. B; 2. B; 3. A; 4. B; 5. B; 6. A; 7. B; 8. A

platform Registria, the system enables custom-ers to scan product codes via their smartphones and automatically register their products via email, online, or mobile, instead of having to go online and manually enter in all of the informa-tion. Rodgers says that this initiative not only creates a more convenient and seamless experi-ence for consumers, but it also makes it easier for Cuisinart to update and access its customers’ demographic data and purchasing behaviors.

As with the social listening project, this initia-tive was a team effort. Although Harding says Rodgers took the lead in terms of researching and choosing the solution, he and his IT de-partment have been working on the solution’s contract details and ensuring that consumers’ data is protected. He adds that Cuisinart plans to integrate its product registration system with Conair’s corporate CRM solution to better edu-cate call center agents on Cuisinart’s customers.

So, if a customer calls about a problem that he’s having with his food processor, for instance, the company’s call center agents can know exactly who that customer is and which food processor he purchased.

“We want to make [the customer] experience as seamless as possible,” Harding says, “because we all hate it when we call a call center and, even though we spent $200 on that item, we have to spell our name three times and all of that stuff. By integrating what Mary’s [selected] as a neat way to get that registration, we’re going to improve our source of lifetime value to the consumer.”

Repurposing the leftoversThe product registration system isn’t the only recent development Cuisinart has made to streamline its customer experience. The company also integrated a new online retail intelligence solution called Channel IQ for its website in December. Before this implemen-tation, online shoppers looking to buy a Cuisinart product would have to visit the brand’s site, review a list of retail partners selling Cuisinart products, and click a link to go visit that retailer, which would bring them to a Cuisinart-branded landing page where they start the search process over again. Now, once customers have chosen which Cuisinart product they want to buy, they can choose from a short list of re-tailers selling that exact item and click to go to that specific product page on the retailer’s website.

Collaborating on this project—as well as the for-mer two—has benefitted Rodgers and Harding in several ways. Not only were they able to tap into each other’s area of expertise, but they also were

able to repurpose each other’s ideas and solutions.In one case Harding originally purchased Channel

IQ to monitor retailers’ online pricing of Cuisinart products. But after speaking with Rodgers, he knew that it could also work for her. Similarly, Harding knew that he’d be able to integrate the product reg-istration technology with Conair’s CRM system be-cause he had already done a similar integration for a Conair Corporation brand in France. Recycling these ideas and products, he adds, helps Conair as a whole cut down on technology costs.

“By collaborating, there’s more chance of find-ing a solution and sharing ideas,” he says, “and perhaps something that we bought for another purpose, we can reuse.”

Avoiding too many cooks in the kitchenThis collaborative approach makes Harding and Rodgers a dynamic duo. But another ingredient in their recipe for success is that both executives don’t let too many cooks into their kitchens.

Rodgers, for example, prefers to work with small-er agencies and niche vendors instead of industry behemoths. Doing so, she says, simplifies the ex-ecution process and often results in these smaller companies prioritizing Cuisinart’s business.

“I prefer to be more like the medium-size fish in a small pond than a little fish in a big pond where I’m not going to get anything done,” she says.

The company’s overall structure supports this independent culture. Although Cuisinart Cor-poration is home to multiple brands, the compa-ny treats them like “autonomous business units,” Harding says. As a result, Conair Corporation doesn’t have an overarching CMO. Harding considers this a benefit in that there are no “stan-dardized marketing practices” to follow, which allows Cuisinart to be entrepreneurial.

As collaborative and entrepreneurial as they are, Rodgers and Harding don’t see eye-to-eye all of the time. “Sometimes we just agree to differ,” Harding says. But even Rodgers admits that she’s more ac-cepting of IT’s ideas now than she was in the past. “Over the years I’ve become more open to other people bringing things to the table,” she says.

So, what will the duo cook up next? More collab-oration is on the menu to ensure that Cuisinart gets the most from the marketing tech tools it adopts.

“It’s all great to have the tools, but you need to put in the time and effort and really use the tools as they’re meant to be used,” Rodgers says. “Do-ing all of this work with Jon leads me nowhere if we don’t together put in the appropriate effort.” n

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BY AL URBANSKI

There’s no astute modern marketer who doesn’t know the name Scott Brinker. In 2011 the CTO of ion interactive and author of the Chiefmartec.com blog produced his first Lumascape-esque logora-

ma of marketing tech solutions. Digitally overwhelmed marketing execu-tives glommed onto it like Web shoppers to free shipping offers. Brinker had boiled down the tech solution universe for them into 100 companies that could be printed out on a single sheet of 8x10 paper. Just four years later, 100 has blossomed into 1,876 and Brinker’s neat, little guide sheet has metamorphosed into a graphic horror novel of sorts for marketers.

“Almost 2,000 logos,” marvels Mike Ballard, senior manager of digi-tal marketing for Lenovo’s commercial marketing division. “You look

at that chart and you think this is a great time in our lives. But it’s a double-edged sword. Every time you add something to the stack, you’re adding complexity and budget and dedicated resources—and, if we’re not careful, we can almost overwork ourselves and not use technology to its fullest capabilities.”

As rampant as the spread of technology are the demands from cor-porate chieftains for the 360-degree customer views and cross-channel marketing schemes these new tools promise to deliver. Yet study and after study depicts a marketing community lagging in its fulfillment of the promise. A survey of 268 senior marketing executives conducted by The CMO Council found a mere 21% rating themselves above average

It’s the best of times and the worst of times for marketers with unlimited possibilities and limited resources.

What the Dickens to Do About Marketing Tech

in engaging customers via digital channels. Another survey, of 120 se-nior marketers by The CMO Club, had 55% admitting they had yet to launch cross-channel marketing strategies. More than half of CMO Club members polled said they were stymied by a lack of resources and an inability to make sense of data with existing technology.

“The world we look at right now is so complex, there are no blue-prints for dealing with it,” says Monique Bonner, VP of global digital technology and innovation at Dell. “Go to anybody—vendors, service providers, strategic consulting companies—no one can tell you, ‘This is what we think you should do.’ No one’s done it. The problem has not been solved. We live in a world where the standard is not defined.”

It’s hard to pin down a world spinning as fast as a top—one that has jumped off the table and scooted into the next room thanks to mobile. Not only are shoppers researching purchases on smartphones, they’re increasingly using their devices to consummate them. Research compa-ny eMarketer forecasts mobile payments in-store will nearly triple next year to $27 billion. “The mobile thing terrifies me. You have to figure out how it cuts across social and other channels, not to mention known and unknown visitors. It adds more questions than it provides solutions,” says Liz Miller, SVP of marketing for The CMO Council. “So we’re automating, and we end up going from a pistol to an automatic weapon. Often, all we end up with is automated random acts of marketing.”

And then there’s the data. Integrating databases and arriving at the long-sought-after single view of the cus-tomer must be mastered before channel integration can be. “This is a huge point of frustration in the cur-rent tech landscape,” says George Corugedo, CTO of RedPoint Global, a data management company. “I have a friend in retail who’s facing attribution issues and source issues but her company has a centralized data warehouse that’s owned by IT and it’s a battle to get to the data. The new siren call is from solutions providers who tell marketers, ‘Give us your customer data and we’ll do it for you.’ Then you go and do it and find that your data’s trapped with them.”

Data is a word that conjures up visions of computer models and statisticians, yet for marketers faced with reinventing their businesses for a digital world, data is the clay from which they must build customer profiles. “Five years ago marketers were so excited to buy marketing automation and not go to IT for help. Now it’s all about the data, and the data lives in a thousand differ-ent places,” says Debbie Qaqish, chief strategy officer of Pedowitz Group. “I was [visiting] one company and an executive handed me a piece of paper with, like, 35 different ideas about how to use data and asked me what I thought. I said I have no idea what to tell you, but if you redo this sheet of paper, draw a picture of the customer right in the middle of it.”

Thousands of marketing tech solutions to choose from, mobile cus-tomers expecting brands to be at the ready 24/7, data overload, soaring expectations from business leaders and customers alike: It’s enough to make a marketer consider a career change. Fortunately, there are ways to manage through the madness and seize the opportunities that all this technology presents.

Strategy firstIn a recent report from The CMO Club, “Building a Modern Market-ing Association,” Plantronics CMO Marilyn Mersereau comments that “we shouldn’t even call it marketing and sales anymore. We should just call it Go To Market and realize that there’s a fluid transition be-tween one to the other.” Indeed, there was consensus among those in-terviewed for this article that the sine qua non for conquering the 21st century tech challenge was establishing a go-to-market strategy that all stakeholders in a company could agree on.

“Any organization that doesn’t have an innate conception of this is going to make tech investments that aren’t going to provide ROI,” says Jonathon Burg, senior director of marketing and customer acquisition at Apperian, a company that designs security programs for internal business apps. “You may have an amazing tool for customer advocacy, for instance, but if your goals aren’t aligned, the solution won’t be ap-propriate. Discern what your goals are from your product teams and map your systems by that.”

The poster child for customer-centricity is Ama-zon. When thinking about the right way to fash-ion digital marketing and technology around cus-tomers, this rarely profitable but long ballyhooed purveyor of personalization and customer engage-ment is still the go-to case study, as far as Qaqish is concerned. “The CMO should not be talking about tech spend; he or she should be thinking about a new way to go to market that creates a competitive advantage, and these new technolo-gies allow that new strategy to take root. If you don’t have this approach, the tech is going to be sub-optimized,” she asserts.

Lenovo had this happen with a new video plat-form it had tested, only to find its resources limited it to using only about a fourth of its potential. “You have to have a go-to-market strategy, but one of the problems you face is a tendency to design your strategy around the technology,” Ballard says. Still, testing possible home-run solutions among the Terrifying Two Thousand is a game that Bal-lard, and most other marketers seeking digital transformation, are willing to play. Many vendors

provide free, limited-time tests or short-run, low-cost contracts that al-low companies to see if the solutions fit with their strategies. One test that did work out well for Ballard’s commercial unit was with Eloqua.

Both the commercial and consumer businesses of the global seller of computers and electronics use Adobe Marketing Cloud as their primary marketing stack. Ballard and his digital marketing counterparts across the organization are free to add new technologies independently and then report results back through the network. “Purchasing Eloqua came en-tirely out of my organization’s budget to start. It worked really well for us and we started to get a lot of inquiries from other geographies. As more people jumped on it became a shared budget item and our cost lowered.”

Mitchell Diamond, director of sales and marketing operations at McKesson, a distributor of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, is an-other tech experimenter who takes advantage of free trials to test what

Any organiza-tion that doesn’t have an innate conception of this is going to make tech in-vestments that aren’t going to provide ROI.

fits with his go-to-market strategy. Like most global enterprises, budgets at McKesson are locked down a year ahead of time, making agile reaction to new solutions a challenge—but one that’s not insurmountable. “[We may] do a trial and that tech…works nicely into our system and makes a business case to be implemented. If we find something like that midyear, we can reprioritize something else and rebudget,” Diamond says.

One advantage Diamond has in the age-old struggle between the sales and marketing departments is that his department manages market-ing automation and Salesforce.com for both, making it easier to blend in new solutions. General database management also falls under his team’s purview, as well as data analysis and exposition of metrics for the McKesson unit that sells business services to hospitals and physi-cians—often a six-month selling process. “The business segment owners are partners with us in obtaining new solutions,” he says. “If my depart-ment finds some tech we think might be interesting for them—whether its midyear or the beginning of the budget process—we work together to assess whether we want to spend that money.”

Test and learnOf course, it’s not just huge multinationals facing imperatives for digital transformation. Smaller com-panies and nonprofits do, too. At WGBH, the Bos-ton PBS TV affiliate and producer of shows such as Downton Abbey, Masterpiece, and Nova, the martech blueprint was torn up and redrawn a few years ago when its fundraising operation switched platforms from Oracle to Salesforce. Several staffers depart-ed for failure to adapt to the new technology, and Cate Twohill, managing partner for CRM services, went off in a new direction with a seven-person team mostly recruited right out of college.

“One of the benefits we have is that everybody here has so much exposure to what the organization is trying to accomplish,” Twohill says, adding that her young team is an added asset. “Being just out of school, tech is second nature to them. The combina-tion of those two things makes them adapt quickly.”

Not saddled with an entrenched corporate bureau-cracy, the team is free to investigate new solutions without interference from IT and make liberal use of free trials. Twohill led a six-person contingent to Salesforce.com’s Dream-force conference this year to shop the solutions providers. “It’s like drink-ing from a firehose. It’s the best experience for a technologist ever,” she says. But team members are encouraged to be independent in their tech ex-plorations. One of their most successful finds, in fact, was Redpoint Global.

Because WGBH supports membership recruitment efforts for several PBS stations across the country running their programming, the non-profit’s database is extensive and requires constant cleansing. Having single records for contributors—Redpoint’s specialty—is crucial in not offending them with multiple appeals. “Knowing who people are is ab-solutely the most important thing for us,” Twohill says. “We had one donor who was getting six pieces of mail a month from us. He sent us $60 with a note saying that he’d send us $60 more if we started sending him just one [piece] a month.”

Champion the causeIt would be hard to imagine that a company battling back from the brink might have any advantage in the marketplace, but if it did, one might be a senior management commitment to technology as the fastest route to higher ground. In 2007 sandwich chain Quiznos had 5,000 outlets, but a suit by franchisees claiming that the chain overcharged for supplies and over-stored their market areas led to a Chapter 11 filing and the ousting of top management. The chain emerged from bankruptcy protection last year with a new CEO and just 1,500 stores still operating. Surviving CMO Susan Lintonsmith faces a tough road ahead, but she does so with the mandate to set the strategy for customer experience and digital transformation.

“Being in a turnaround situation, it’s a necessity to be agile,” Linton-smith says. “The senior executive team meets weekly on hardware and software issues and all of the technology decisions come down from the C-level.” One of the most recent of these was a move to a new POS system that will return data on the frequency of customer visits and

what customers are ordering.Also in Lintonsmith’s corner is one of the most

sought-after prizes in the marketing world: a code-writing innovation director with his own budget and agenda. He’s the primary liaison between marketing and IT, sits in on high-level meetings, and has a free hand in investigating new solutions. “We tell him, ‘Go try, go play,’” she says. “He’s done stuff with social monitoring, programmatic, beacons, geo-targeting. He’s the point man on finding the things we need to do to reach millennials.”

One tech vendor who thinks such an innovation champion is crucial for marketing organizations taking on the tech monster is Scott Vaughan, CEO of Integrate, a demand marketing platform. “You have to put aside 10 percent of your budget for in-novation and testing,” he says. “We’ve been told you can buy everything you need from the cloud, but that’s not the reality. Maybe in five or six years it will be, but the fact is that you have to be your own systems integrator.”

The largest, most advanced companies appear to be doing their martech homework to turn innovative ideas into reality, according to Forrester analyst Todd Berkowitz. “They keep asking us, ‘What are my competitors doing with tech? What are the best practic-es? What channels should we be looking at?” he says.

Those probing questions promise to keep coming Berkowitz’s way for some years to come, as there seems to be every indication that the march of point solutions companies into the martech arena will contin-ue unabated. Choosing the right ones won’t get any easier. As Brinker’s logo-crammed Marketing Technology Landscape patterns illustrate, the overabundance of martech has stitched its way into the fabric of the marketing life. Marketers who put customers first, choose marketing tech that supports their go-to-market strategy, and have a tech cham-pion driving innovation will find it easier to weave the right tech tools into their marketing architecture. n

We’ve been told you can buy everything you need from the cloud, but that’s not the reality.

20 / December 2015/January 2016 / dmnews.com

Technology-Driven, Must-Have Marketing SkillsBY NATASHA D. SMITH

A s marketing technology advances, marketing leaders must ensure that they have the right people and processes to get the most from their tech investments. Today, “right” often

translates to adaptable. For marketers this means continual ad-vancement in the skills they need to excel at their job. For processes, adaptable may mean flexible or even transformative.

Here’s a deeper dive into how tech drives the people and inner workings of many modern, evolving companies.

Technology and peopleMarketing technology today requires marketers to be data-driven and tech-savvy, as well as content creators. “The way the industry is right now, people are looking for specialists,” says Lauren Ferrara, lead recruiter at Creative Circle. “So, even when [we’re trying to fill] a marketing role, we dive in and find out if it’s more analytics, if it’s more content creation, or if it’s more strategic.”

Ferrara says that a marketer who’s looking for the next opportuni-ty—or perhaps who’s looking to advance within his company—needs to have a firm grasp on technology just to be considered. “Overall, what clients are looking for are candidates who demonstrate strong ideation skills around creative uses of technology,” she says. “[They want] someone who can speak eloquently about digital technology to clients [and] stakeholders, and who can guide the [marketing] strategy in that direction.”

That’s the overarching view of how technology is driving recruiting, hiring, training, and skill-sets today. But Ferrara says that technolo-gy is prompting companies to get more granular and stringent with their requirements. “Where we see the biggest change is tech skills in social media,” she says. “Every brand that we’re working with—and almost every agency that we’re working with—obviously has a social media presence, and they’re looking to grow that. They’re looking for their marketers to understand that space, not only from a content perspective, but [also] from an analytics perspective and a strategic perspective. So, as far as anything from technology that’s changed

the marketing game the most, it’s social media.”“Technology has been a double-edged sword for marketers,”

says Don Schuerman, ‎chief technology officer and VP of prod-uct marketing at CRM platform Pegasystems. “It’s given market-ers far greater access to data, far more ways to reach their custom-ers—whether it’s technology like social, mobile devices, or even the emergence of the Web 10 years ago. So, marketers have a greater set of tools at their disposal. However, that means that to be a marketer you have to know a little bit about a lot of technology.”

Understanding marketing technology is only part of the equation for marketers. That technology provides reams of data for market-ers to analyze and enables them to do more with the data—and, ul-timately, impact the bottom line. “Data is huge,” Ferrara says. “The reason companies are able to digitally engage is because the data is all trackable, especially social media.”

She says that data—extracted from actions such as how many people are clicking, engaging, and reacting to company messages—requires marketers to use the right tech tools to make meaningful changes to internal operations and strategy. “Tech requires marketers to not just pull reports, but [also] be able to take that data and pull meaningful insights from it and understand what it means,” Ferrara says. “Then take that and be able to change the strategy or change how a brand is talking to a consumer. It’s all because of technology.”

Technology and processesThe changes created by marketing technology are in many cases pushing marketers beyond their comfort zones when it comes to skill. But that’s not where the changes end. The ongoing digital transformation is leading the push to reinvent marketing practices and processes, as well. Many marketing organizations, however, remain slow to catch on. In fact, a recent study released by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Pegasystems reveals that just 10% of surveyed executives say their businesses are fully digital. There is a silver lining: While a majority of the nearly 450

The proliferation of marketing technology is changing how marketers work and the skills they need to succeed.

Analytic: Analytics are imperative to driving audience and revenue growth. The insight marketers derive from analytics can help them create the right messages and content—communications that will be more likely to drive actions that lead to the business outcomes their companies want. That means marketers need to understand how to collect, organize, and interpret the data that technology provides. But there’s a shortage of those who do. In fact, two stud-ies highlight the gap between the demand for analytic skills and the number of people who have the skills needed. A study from Online Marketing Institute says that 37% of surveyed companies need a data-savvy staff. But just 26% of companies, according to Ameri-can Management Association, reported that they feel their analytic needs are met.

Content creation: Content is a tool that enables marketers to rise above the competition by engaging and educating prospects and customers. Through content, companies can develop a loyal follow-ing and position themselves as thought leaders. With a constant demand for content from buyers, marketers today need to have a command of publishing tools, the ability to use technology that measures the effectiveness of published content, and the insight to determine the most effective content for specific audiences. Of course, automation tools are essential in content management, helping create a cadence, and allowing marketers to be always-on. Marketers should also have the savvy to engage consumers to co-produce content.

Social media: Nearly three quarters of Americans (73%) current-ly have a social profile, according to Statista. With adoption like that, social media skills are table stakes today for the success of market-ers and their campaigns. Through social tools, marketers can follow trends, curate content that consumers demand, and then personal-ize those messages for niche audiences and individual shoppers. The tools are seemingly endless: Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other tools including Flickr, Instagram, Medium, Periscope, Pin-terest, Quora, Snapchat, and Vine. Of course, marketers don’t need to understand or be on every platform—what marketers do need is the ability to determine which platforms work best for their audiences.

Mobile: Nearly all 18- to 24-year-olds (97%) in the United States use mobile phones. Eight percent of smartphone users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up, according to IDC Research, and 79% of adult smartphone users have their phones with them for 22 hours a day. Some 91% use mobile phones to surf the Internet at least once per month. Consumers of the future are on their mobile de-vices constantly. And where consumers are is where marketers need to be. Mobile tech skills are critical for revenue growth and the suc-cess of marketing campaigns today and in the future. Marketers need to be capable of drafting strategies for mobile apps, messaging apps, SMS, and emoji messaging. Technology allows marketing teams to im-plement mobile strategies and determine which messages resonate most with users. Mobile skills are essential for a marketer who aims to interact with and provide immediate benefits to each person.

FOUR TECH-BASED SKILLS OF SUCCESSFUL MODERN MARKETERS

executives surveyed have yet to implement digital transformation plans, they say that they expect their operations to be 80% digital within the next five years or more.

Technology can transform the internal operations, i.e. processes, of a marketing organization, so marketers can set goals, work toward those goals, and achieve their desired outcomes more effectively and efficiently than ever before. “I don’t like the term processes because different people think of processes differently,” Pegasystems’ Schuer-man says. “I like to think of it as work and outcomes because most of the time that people think about process, they’re thinking about work that needs to get done that’s going to deliver some meaningful busi-ness outcome to the company or to the customer. Process is just one of the ways in which that work gets done.”

Schuerman says that when it comes to internal operations, mar-keting technology has one main role: “Technology should be help-ing companies make their processes simpler, both for the employees and customers,” he says. “But when you look inside these organiza-tions, particularly large organizations, processes became complex.”

Some experts say, however, that there’s one major caveat when it comes to marketing technology. “The tools aren’t enough to make a marketing process successful,” says Don Nelson, head of content and e-commerce at eClerx, a digital marketing operation and process

company. “You’ve got to bring in customer data; it must be smart [data]. It has to answer marketers’ questions, and be structured, accu-rate, and up-to-date.”

Nelson adds that the proper use of tech tools is what promotes the most effective processes inside an organization—particularly among the marketing team. “To effectively change processes and manage-ment, it requires proper governance of the collection and the hygiene of the data,” he says. “Technology can help document that change, figure out where there are inefficiencies, and meet business goals.”

As technology continues to fuel the inner workings of most every marketing operation, marketers are now required to become master technologists. Those behind the curve will spend more time and resources trying to catch up with competitors. Those ahead of the curve, however, will become market leaders and disruptors.

“Technology has made this a very different world,” Schuerman says. “It’s made marketers who can learn the technology more ef-fective, but it’s also made the jobs and the skill-set that you need to be a good marketer significantly harder. We simply have moved to an expectation in which you have to be a businessperson who understands technology. And now we have an emergence of people who know and love technology, which is simply today’s tool to get things done.” n

Retail Marketing TechRoss Kramer, Cofounder and CEO, ListrakBefore purchaseWhat’s the integration level required? Too many tech vendors disguise this, and implementations fail when it’s not asked.Who’s responsible for customer success? It’s easy to buy software, but difficult to implement, train on,

and operationalize inside your company to achieve your goals.Are our mutual long-term goals in alignment? Often a tech ven-dor’s goal is to be sold, and when it is, so goes the account manage-ment, engineers, etc. that you were depending on to help move your company forward.

After implementationIs 24-hour support available? It’s a 24/7, global business world. Will some-one be there to answer the phone if something goes bump in the night?What are your training options? They should include in-person and recorded, as well as platform certifications.Who will be our account manager? Account management is generally the X factor to customer success. Meet your account manager before signing; know whether she’s in your time zone and her level of expertise.

Marketers may not be asking the right questions to select the optimal marketing technology and then maximize it.

Buyer Beware

B2B Marketing Tech Tom Belle, CEO and President, GageBefore purchaseIs your solution a point solution or a platform suite? Point solu-tions are meant to stand alone, often don’t integrate with other functionality, and require the marketer to be the “general contrac-tor”; whereas a platform suite leverages multiple layers of func-tionality and is typically designed with robust API capabilities. Does your staff understand marketing? Most B2B marketing tech vendors focus on getting the technology right, but for the marketer the key is having a marketing partner with strong tech chops who can understand and share the marketer’s vision and deliver the appropriate technology to achieve it.How long have you been providing this solution and for whom? It’s relatively easy to build a great-looking technical solu-tion, but the real proof of a vendor’s capability is evidenced in the client portfolio they’ve serviced over a significant period of time.

After implementationDo I have the right functionality? It’s easy to under-buy func-tionality and save money, or over-buy and waste money. It’s important to understand current requirements and the func-tionality needed to address those, as well as to handicap what will be required tomorrow.Can my team fully utilize the power of the technology or should I access outside support? Marketers tend to avoid post-purchase support funding, but an inexperienced internal team can leave a valuable technical tool underutilized.How can we further leverage this technology? Marketers can turn applications like learning management systems into chan-nel portals, content management systems into marketing-on-de-mand platforms, and simple sweepstakes into long-term incen-tive programs with relatively minor additional effort.

BY GINGER CONLON

With nearly 2,000 options to choose from, marketing technol-ogy is an increasingly complex purchase. After selecting the type of marketing tech they need, marketers must not only

ensure that the product they opt for is right for them, but also that they can get the most from it. Asking the right questions is integral to achieving these ends. Often, however, marketers miss essential ques-tions during the discovery and implementation processes.

Marketing-tech vendors—who spend their time talking to prospects and customers about their tools, and who often use their own technol-ogy—know what prospects and customers should be asking, but don’t.

We’ve invited vendors that represent a selection of tech tools to provide us with the most-often overlooked questions that marketers should be asking—and why they should ask those questions—to 1) select the right marketing tech vendors and 2) get the most from the tech tools they’ve invested in. Here, their recommendations, listed by technology type.

Email MarketingTony D’Anna, CEO, PostUPBefore purchaseWho is will my contact be? Don’t settle for phone queues or knowledge bases; the correct answer is someone’s name.How will you help me grow my business? If they don’t care about your bottom line, why should you care about theirs?Are you willing to change for me? A good relationship with your email service provider (ESP) involves ongoing evolution on both sides. Make sure your requests are heard.

After implementationCan I get more training? A quick training session once a quarter will help email marketers ensure they’re taking advantage of all the new features their ESP is releasing.Is there anything I should be doing? Your ESP should regularly advise you to ensure that your email program’s progress is on track.What’s the best feature that nobody uses? There may be a cool feature hidden a couple of layers deep. Make sure lack of knowledge isn’t the reason you’re not using it.

Digital PrintTim Ohnmacht, President, Marketing Solutions, Quad/GraphicsBefore purchaseCan you help me translate my data into customized and actionable con-tent? More and more marketers are shifting to data-driven marketing to influence consumer connections, shorten sales cycles, and maximize their return on marketing spend. Your vendor should be able to help you use data insights to build an integrated marketing strategy that goes beyond basic segmentation into a strategic application of analytics that predicts behavior and leverages deep insights to encourage transaction.How vast is your platform and are you nimble? Digital print vendors

with the ability to adjust to changing demands, support a variety of run sizes, and execute multi-ple layers of variable print complexity on a wider range of image areas offer greater advantages of scale than those with limited equipment and capabilities.Do you support omnichannel campaign management and execution? Engaging consumers through communications designed and tailored for a new era in consumer marketing allows you to evolve broad markets into prospects, prospects into customers, and customers into long-term relationships. Using arresting creative through varied media gives your audience an immersive brand experience that drives engagement, momentum, and transaction.

After implementationWhat’s your ability to provide cost, operational, and campaign efficiencies? Analyzing cur-rent project workflow and tailoring optimal solutions reduces the amount of schedule time and streamlines processes to provide a more automated way of print ordering, proofing, and campaign execution. Given that postal-related costs make up a significant percentage of every direct market-er’s campaign budget, obtaining the most advantageous sortation scheme is vital, and digital print service providers that can also offer best-in-class delivery solutions maximize those costs savings. How comprehensive is your campaign reporting, measurement, and attribution solutions? Measurement and results reporting allow marketers to fine-tune marketing efforts and extend their brand in new directions. Getting the metrics you need should be a priority to increase market penetration, as well as tailor and evolve campaigns with precise relevance.Are you keeping pace with updates to digital print technologies and data-driven market-ing? Combining intuitive persona analysis with foremost digital print technologies creates an ideal setting to develop game-changing data-driving decisions. The application of these deci-sions allows marketers to launch campaigns that drive more consumers to purchase.

Email Marketing Justin Foster, Cofounder and VP of Market Development, Liveclicker Before purchaseWhat are the top 3 significant advan-tages you offer versus competitors? Ven-dors should be able to explain why they’re different/better in a concise and accurate way. If they can’t, you should pass.How will you help our business meet its objectives? A real partner will work with you to ensure that you look good in front of your boss and help you move the needle in the areas that matter.If I were to randomly call three of your clients, what would I expect to hear? Screenshot the client logo slide of your prospective vendor, pick the three companies you feel would be the most relevant, and reach out to the likely de-cision-maker via LinkedIn. You might be shocked by what you hear when you take reference-checking into your own hands.

After implementationWhat should I be using that I’m not? Ninety-nine percent of clients only use a fraction of a tool’s capabilities. The vendor has the perspective of working with hundreds—perhaps thousands—of clients. Its vantage point can be your competitive advantage.Who is my primary support contact? Centralize knowledge of your account with your partner to ensure faster and more accurate response. When is your next webinar? Webinars are free to attend, can be attended while multi-tasking, and usually will present at least one good idea you can execute on in the short- to mid-term.

Marketing Cloud Eric Stahl, SVP of Product Marketing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Before purchaseDoes this technology help me achieve a comprehensive view of my customer beyond digital marketing? We live in the era of the connected customer. The physical and digital worlds have converged, and marketers need to be able to serve customers at every step of their journey.Is the technology scalable? Marketers should be investing in tech-nology that’s right for their business today, and will also be able to

support it through every stage of its growth—or, they’ll need to replace it down the line. What is the track record for innovation? Consumer tastes and expectations of brands change rapidly, and marketing technology must mature accordingly. Without innovation, the technolo-gy will likely become obsolete—making the time and resource investment of adopting it fruitless.

After implementationAm I putting the customer at the center of everything I do? Too often marketers focus on technology, when putting the customer first is what matters. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think about the optimal experience. How can I integrate data-informed actions and decisions into every step of the marketing process? Marketers today have unprecedented access to data about their customers’ tastes and preferences—but they’re often still at a loss when it comes to putting that data into action to improve the customer journey. How can I work to ensure that agile marketing practices are part of my company’s DNA? Marketing today requires a different cadence than it did in the past, and marketers need to be able to make data-informed decisions a part of their day-to-day processes.

Marketing CloudLaurie Hood, Vice President, Product Marketing, Silverpop, an IBM Company Before purchaseDo you provide a scalable, flexible marketing database that my team can control? It’s im-portant that this database can collect data from a variety of sources and create a single customer identity that can be leveraged across channels.Do you provide an automation or orchestra-tion engine to drive behavior-based individ-ual interactions? Marketers must be able to use behavioral and demographic information to deliver personalized multichannel campaigns based on their marketing and business rules.

How strong are your multichannel mar-keting capabilities? Marketers today should be able to deliver a personalized experience across virtually any channel through a single, unified platform and deliver highly personal-ized experiences in channels where each cus-tomer prefers to interact.

After implementationWhat are you going to do to ensure that I’m successful with your platform? Be sure there’s a path to smoothly transition to new technologies without an interruption in pro-grams and, more important, without a degra-dation of results.What programs do you have to get me started? Marketers need to be prepared to migrate to a new technology and maximize usage of product features and capabilities.What ongoing programs do you have to keep me current on new product capabilities and industry trends? It is important to under-stand products updates, how to best use new features and capabilities, and how to use the products to support evolving marketing efforts.

Marketing CloudBrandon Hartness, Evangelist, Adobe Marketing CloudBefore purchaseWhat are our core marketing objectives and KPIs? Don’t jump straight into what you’d like to do with a new marketing cloud; make sure the ca-pabilities you’re acquiring map back to business objectives and strategy.Will your marketing cloud give us a clear view of our customer? As marketing is central to identifying visitors, the technology should

enable a single view of a consumer across most, if not all, interactions, and then enable you to take action on that data.How flexible and agile is the marketing cloud? This is a long-term investment and a partnership, and digital marketing is rapidly changing. Make sure the marketing cloud you choose can grow with your company and keep pace with the industry.

After implementationAre we measuring success across the entire consumer journey, both online and of-fline? Digital is now an important part of any marketing campaign, and while physical campaigns don’t always bridge to digital, it should be treated as an extension of existing marketing activities.Is our marketing department accepting of a data-driven culture? A key advantage of today’s marketing technology is the ability to drive data-driven decision-making. But it takes organizational buy-in to put those insights into action.Are we archiving test results and extending insights to other teams? The future of market-ing is about bringing more customer intelligence to the entire organization. Extending those insights to other processes and teams will greatly improve the overall customer experience.

OmnichannelPam McAtee, Senior Vice President, Digital Solutions, EpsilonBefore purchaseWhat percentage of clients uses your technology or services for more than two channels? Because many omnichannel vendors have roots in a single channel, the majority of customers may still only use them for one channel. It’s important to understand the breakdown of what clients are using them for.Can you help me augment my data to create a deeper customer profile? Providers play an important role in bringing together data elements—e.g., email address, online cookies, IP address, phone numbers. Data must come

together for brands to gain one view of the customer and achieve omnichannel success.How can your offering take what we’re doing today to the next level? A vendor’s answer to this question will help demonstrate a) how well they understand your business and vertical, and b) how innovative they are in their approach.

After implementationCan I store data from multiple channels in a single source? Since many omnichannel plat-forms are built from integrating multiple technologies over time, the result is often disparate data. Data stored separately restricts the ability to have one view of the customer and execute omnichannel campaigns.How does your technology integrate with other tools that inform omnichannel strategies? Many omnichannel tools integrate seamlessly with their own tool set, but not so well with other third-party tools. It’s critical that these tools can work together comprehensively to not only execute, but also inform the omnichannel approach.Do you offer strategic consulting, support, and services to help make the most out of my investment in your technology? Finding a vendor that will ensure success after the technology purchase is critical to avoid struggling with integration.

OmnichannelAshely Johnson, SVP of Global Mar-keting, Experian Marketing ServicesBefore purchaseDo you understand my business? The best providers are strategic business partners that understand your unique business challenges and have a proven track record of supporting clients with varying needs. Can I rely on you for data expertise? Data and privacy expertise will play a more important role in the vendor-client relationship as marketers need technol-ogy to help them scale their first-party data asset for the future. Is your system flexible? Look for a partner that can address your current needs but is flexible enough to evolve with your customer and the needs of your business.

After implementationAre we putting the customer first? Identify the areas where your technolo-gy encourages and inhibits your ability to be customer-first. Are we able to deliver relevance at the right time? Increase your ability to easily query, synthesize, and extract the most purposeful data where and when it matters most. Are we failing enough? Use tech-nology to test and fail fast to quickly learn from those failures and inform positive action.

Site SearchMatt Riley, CEO, SwiftypeBefore purchaseHow much control will I have over changing search results? There are many instances when a marketer will want to override or customize a specific result for a specific campaign (e.g., mov-ing a product to the top of a high-trafficked search query).What kinds of analytics and actionable insights does your site search platform deliver? Data that comes from the search box shows customer intent, so it’s important for marketers to see which searches they can optimize for conversions to drive the most reve-nue out of their search box.What types of content can I include in a search experience? Not only is it important to make sure that video, PDFs, and blog

posts are included with products in search results, but it’s also beneficial to have a search box that can pull in content from a company’s other websites, including its customer support site.

After implementationHow much revenue am I getting out of my search box? For marketers, search boxes are on your website to drive engagement, conversions, and revenue. Knowing what these metrics are and building goals around these numbers are important to getting the most out of a search box.What are my colleagues’ best practices? Taking advice from marketers who have more experi-ence optimizing their site search experience is an easy way to add quick wins to your own approach.Is my algorithm effective? If the answer is no, fine tune the relevance model so the content being curated in search results delivers what the user is looking for.

AnalyticsJosh Reynolds, Head of Market-ing, QuantifindBefore purchaseHow clearly does your solution cor-relate to revenue or other KPIs? Buzz, sen-

timent, and other metrics aren’t inherently connected to actual movements in revenue or other meaningful business KPIs. Make sure that the analytics correlate directly to movements in KPIs that matter. Are your analytics predictive, pre-scriptive, or explanatory? Predictive analytics tell you what’s likely to happen if nothing changes. Prescriptive analyt-ics tell you what to do without providing context. Explanatory analytics include elements of predictive and prescriptive but help you understand why things are happening and how to change outcomes. Where does your methodology tap into human curiosity and intuition? How well does the vendor enable human ex-ploration of data? Where in the method-ology do human curiosity and intuition play a role? And how do you avoid the disintermediation of human wisdom?

After implementationWhere are my blind spots, and how does data illuminate them? Perhaps you have social listening in place, but it’s not tied to revenue. Or perhaps you have predictive analytics, but need help digging into causes. Where are your unknown unknowns, and how will you explore them?How will I make sure I’m focused on the right questions? The only thing worse than the wrong answer is the right answer to the wrong question. What’s your pro-cess for letting data whisper to you and suggest smarter questions to explore?What barriers to action do I face inter-nally? If data leads you to a game-chang-ing finding, how much resistance will you face to act on it? What kind of culture, politics, and resource constraints are you facing? And what kind of evidence will you need to overcome them?

Visual CommerceMatt Langie, CMO, CuralateBefore purchaseWhat should a marketer consider in a visual commerce platform? The way marketers manage and measure the value of visual content is fundamentally different than the way they approach text. A visual commerce platform should aggregate, identify, productize, and distribute visu-al content to effectively connect it to commerce. How will your platform help me prove ROI? As market-ers are pressured to demonstrate business results, it’ll become increasingly important to invest in technology that measures how both brand-owned and user-generated content improves digital engagement, drives traffic, and generates revenue.

What’s your product roadmap? Find a partner that understands the needs of digital marketers and who innovates and implements ahead of the needs of marketers.

After implementationWhat do my customers care about? Most brands don’t have great insight into their organic engagement. A visual commerce platform should enable marketers to analyze and gain insights on organic trends, which can influence ad buys, merchandizing decisions, and branded content. Do we offer easy distribution points to non-social channels? On social, engagement with even the best images diminishes within 24 hours. Ask how your team can share images across every digital consumer touchpoint to reach consumers more often and in more places.How can we pull in all of the images that depict our products, as opposed to just consumer images? UGC is an important source of creative, but it’s just a piece of the pie. Ask yourself how you can leverage the entire breadth of images shared about your brand’s products—not just from consumers, but also from influencers, employees, partners, and vendors.

AnalyticsJerry Jao, CEO, Retention ScienceBefore purchaseCan you scale and adapt to my business needs? Mar-keters need a vendor that can help now and when their business has grown and evolved.Are your services answering the right questions and solving the right problems? Make sure the analytics the vendor provides relate directly to improving your business.What are the actual outputs from the analytics, and are they clearly actionable? Analytics are always better to have, but results don’t come from insights alone. Ven-dors should demonstrate how their predictive tech will make their clients’ marketing smarter.

After implementationHow do you continually improve analytics results? The ideal tech partner should keep it-erating on both input and output to make sure their clients get the best, most accurate results. Are we prioritizing data-driven insights when executing marketing campaigns? The best analytics only matter if marketers use them. Do a pulse check to make sure your campaigns actually use the insights you get.Are we using the analytics in every way we can? Too many companies still focus on acqui-sition only; not only can predictive analytics help improve retention strategies, they’re usually cheaper to execute.

Sanity on the Horizon?BY AL URBANSKI

The cascade of new marketing tech solutions promises to slow in the near future, according to Kathleen Schaub, VP of the CMO Advisory Service at International Data Corp. Her group forecasts

that 20% of large enterprises will consolidate their marketing infrastruc-tures by 2017 and that a third of top marketers will outsource digital marketing duties via marketing as a service by 2020. In a conversation with Direct Marketing News, Schaub discusses the impact that the chang-ing martech landscape will have on marketers.

IDC recently announced the onset of the digital transformation—or DX—economy. What will its arrival do to marketing departments?For the past few decades businesses have been concentrating on creat-ing efficiencies to increase bottom-line profitability. The most efficient way to do that is to create silos. Within marketing, every time a new channel is added, a mini-silo is added. DX rips the roof off the house and, instead of having these differentiated silos, companies will have to realign and reintegrate pieces of the business.

And that’s where marketing tech comes in?Yes. The connective tissue takes the form of technology. Tech not only improves the quality of workflow, but also provides a way to manage the complexity of connecting things.

Are any companies making headway with internal integration?We work with mostly technology companies that tend to be early adopt-ers and, yes, some of them are moving from pilot programs and projects to some stage of maturity where they’ve gone out and developed their own marketing technology. Some of the companies we work with may

have 50-plus systems, so this is the way we think the process is going.

How will this affect the CMO’s role?There’s clearly a new role for a marketing technologist who has one foot in marketing and one foot in IT. The world overall is facing the crisis of not having enough people who understand math. Many career marketers have let whatever they learned in school go stale or hat-ed math to begin with. But what we’re seeing is that [the majority of] marketing jobs will require some degree of quantitative ability, even if you’re high up in the management ranks. I recently sat in on a manage-ment meeting where predictive analytics was discussed as a way to de-velop new customer targets. One executive piped up and asked, “What am I going to do with this information?” He was met with blank stares.

Will there be more reliance on cloud-based marketing stacks?I think the relationship between platforms and innovative point solu-tions is going to shift over time. Marketing isn’t like finance, which is just more of the same at different companies. Marketing can be a strong differentiator for companies, so they’re not going to want plain vanil-la systems. Companies will establish central operations platforms and consistent data links and innovate at the margins.

One of your predictions is about blowing up the funnel. Why?One of the dirty little secrets of the [marketing] business is that the funnel never really worked. Sales managers like it because they have to forecast. Salespeople never liked it. But as we move to a customer-cen-tric model, it’s like taking a very messy, complex thing and forcing it into a structured format. n

Call AttributionSteve Griffiths, SVP Marketing, Strategy & Analytics, DialogTechBefore purchaseDo you offer solutions that provide full call attribution, as well as ways to proactively convert callers into reve-nue? Marketers need end-to-end call attribution to fully un-derstand how different channels perform, and the real-time conversion technology to turn callers into customers.

Do you integrate with other marketing and sales tools? Nobody wants data in a silo; make sure the vendor can share data with your other important tools to give you the full attribution picture.Do you offer a full platform to control all aspects of the call? What hap-pens during the call is as important as tracking it, so make sure your vendor provides contextual call routing and a robust IVR. Additionally, spam calls can be an issue by delivering unwanted calls, so choose a vendor who can block these calls before they reach you.

After implementationAre we tracking call extensions? In today’s mobile world, tracking calls made directly from Google Search ads at the keyword level is essential to full call attribution.Are we optimizing multi-location technology? If you list multiple busi-ness locations and phone numbers on your site, make sure you dynamical-ly track calls to all of them, as well as get keyword and session-level data.

OptimizationJustin Bougher, VP of Product, SiteSpectBefore purchaseCan I test site functionality like new releases and search algorithms? Testing new releases and how a site actually works [such as checkout flow or search] often delivers the greatest impact on conversion.Do you provide strategic advice for optimizing

our digital business? A vendor should be a strategic partner, not just a slice of your technology stack.How much of my testing program can I automate? Ultimate-ly, if you want to test the most changes to your customer expe-rience, you’ll need to automate aspects of test creation, manage-ment, and analysis.

After implementationHow many metrics am I keeping track of per test? Often, the knowledge to be discovered from a test is in the side effects of a change. Keeping track of more metrics in every test allows you to know all the effects of a change on the customer experience.How much site latency is my test adding to the customer ex-perience? If your test is adding a lot of latency, slowing down your site, it can dramatically skew the results. Avoid making the wrong decisions due to the effect of a slow-loading test.What parts of the customer experience am I not testing? Why? Many times your next big win will come from areas that you have not tested. Don’t let a testing platform prevent you from seeing large conversion improvements.

The Marketing Cloud Wars – RevisitedBY JASON COMPTON

Marketers have put the pressure on marketing cloud vendors. They’re demanding centralization, simplification, and access to powerful data and campaign execution solutions—all with-

out significant involvement from corporate IT. The result? Marketing cloud vendors are enhancing the size, scale, and shape of their platforms.

The bigger cloud vendors are also responding to market pressure of a very different kind: demands from early-stage investors who want to cash in and move on from the countless recent experiments in social mar-keting, programmatic campaigns, and mobile outreach in recent years.

“The market of hundreds of point solutions is dividing into the win-ners, who get acquired at a reasonable price, and the ones that aren’t able to scale their offerings,” says Andrew C. Frank, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner.

As the number of addressable devices explodes, and customer data sources become ever-richer, marketing clouds will offer the ideal mis-sion control for a host of marketing campaigns and customer interaction strategies that can barely be imagined today. “It’s not just marketing au-tomation anymore. Marketers want solutions that are more integrated, that leverage both external and internal data with sophisticated tools and data science,” says Rebecca Wettemann, VP, research, at Nucleus Research. “And the big vendors realize there’s money to be made there.”

Last year The Hub examined the fates, fortunes, and growing pains of five major marketing cloud solutions. This year we return to the big

five and see what has changed. Adobe finished 2014 in pole position, but the other four—IBM, HP, Oracle, and Salesforce—have all devoted tremendous amounts of money and time to finding a way to catch up and stay caught up.

In 2014 we said there were at least four components that every digital marketing cloud should be offering:

1) Multichannel marketing automation for publishing and promoting content that helps marketers engage customers across several different channels, particularly mobile and social. It also needs automation for the intelligent algorithms that sequence how that engagement happens.

2) Content management tools to create and manage the content and engagement tools that can be deployed across different channels.

3) Social media tools for listening to and engaging with social media networks, tapping into consumer conversations, and responding with custom content, or social media advertising.

4) Analytics to create profiles of consumers based on their online behav-ior, and evaluate which marketing campaigns are working and which aren’t.

Each of the five major vendors now offers all the above tools, well-tested and integrated, and they’re each seeking to build out more ambitious capabilities—notably, predictive analytics and sophisticated customer journey mapping. Visit thehubcomms.com/cloudrevisited/ to read detailed profiles of the top marketing cloud vendors, in-cluding the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. n

In the battle for industry dominance, five marketing cloud platform behemoths lead the field.