Why a Consolidated Martech Stack makes sense?

One of the more jarring tasks of many businesses I’ve worked with is selecting from the vast pool of tools to use. This is where having a marketing technology stack becomes fundamental to your business’ marketing strategies.   

But what is a marketing technology (aka ‘martech’) stack and why does your online business need one? Let’s discuss and break it down: 

What is a Marketing Tech Stack? 

This is marketing jargon that you will definitely hear more of if you haven’t already. Essentially, a marketing technology stack is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a group of tech-based tools that marketers and businesses use to improve their marketing activities. But it’s more dynamic than merely using several tools individually for their own siloed purposes. Instead, marketing technologies are ‘stacked’ to create an integrated series of tools that allows you to build seamless customer relationships across several different channels. 

Not only will the right martech stack iron out your processes, but it should focus on the impact of your marketing activities and drive more efficient marketing spend.

Why should I invest in a Marketing Technology Stack? 

Like I said earlier, the martech space is made up of thousands of online tools and technologies. The sheer amount of vendors offering the latest and greatest in marketing innovations is overwhelming. Just take a look at ChiefMartech’s latest edition of the marketing landscape for 2020, with over 8,000 solutions to choose from. (For some perspective, ChiefMartech reported only 150 solutions just 10 years ago!) 

Put simply, the martech space is colossal. And marketers are pressured to keep up with the growth. According to Korn Ferry, “27% of CMOs were concerned with staying ahead and taking advantage of digital technology trends.” 

With thousands of solutions to choose from, it’s vital for marketers and business owners to understand how the right tech stack will impact their businesses and which technologies will be fundamental to reaching their goals. 

First of all – as with other areas of your marketing strategy – one size does not fit all when it comes to building the right martech stack for your company. Your chosen technologies will be impacted by factors like your budget and the type of business you have. One key factor to consider is your target market; for instance, B2C companies will likely require slightly different technologies than a B2B company since they each typically use different channels and techniques to acquire and engage with their customers. 

What Elements Make A Great Marketing Tech Stack? 

So let’s take a look at the technologies I consider foundational to a tech stack, regardless of your target customer.

  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM): this is often a focus for you B2B-ers. CRMs track all customer relationships and marketing attribution for you and your sales force. Ultimately, CRMs are essential to gaining in-depth insights of how your marketing efforts impact your sales pipeline.
    [Tools to explore: Salesforce; HubspotCRM; SugarCRM].
  • Content Management System (CMS): by now, for most of you, this is a basic element of your tech stack that you’re familiar with. A CMS is the technology that powers your website, blog, landing pages etc. These web properties are often where you want to engage your customers.

  • Advertising and SEO: this element is pretty vast, but search engine optimization and advertising is key to your customer acquisition strategies regardless of the type of business you run. Many marketers use a combination of software for keyword research, display ads, ad tracking, and attribution. 
    [Tools to explore: SEMrush, Google Ads; HasOffers].
  • Email: Email marketing is still a very cost effective way to support sales, build brand awareness and gain trust with your customer base. Email marketing capabilities might even be readily available in other platforms in your tech stack; like in your marketing automation or inbound marketing platform, for instance.
    [Tools to explore: MailChimp; Constant Contact; SendGrid].
  • Social Media: technologies for this space help monitor your social conversations, schedule posts or curate content. Specific networks like Facebook and LinkedIn also offer social media marketing opportunities that may be a valuable addition to your own tech stack.
    [Tools to explore: BuzzSumo; Hootsuite; SproutSocial].  
  • Collaboration: these are some of my favorite tools to add to a tech stack. Collaboration software focuses on working efficiently and transparently with your team. There are a number of project management tools to choose from, or even tools that focus more on the customer journey.
    [Tools to explore: Trello; Asana; Slack].  
  • Analysis and Reporting: regardless of the technologies you choose to integrate with in your tech stack, you must always be able to access your data to measure your marketing efforts. For the most part, businesses will at least have basic website analytics tracking in place, which is a great way to start. But depending on your situation, you could explore building a full data warehouse to pull together data from various systems to make your reporting more accessible and rounded.
    [Tools to explore: Google Analytics; KissMetrics; HotJar].

Your marketing technology stack is critical to your organization’s success. It enables you to manage your brand efficiently, coordinate and execute campaigns, leverage existing content, and attract and convert customers in an increasingly complex marketing environment. However, putting together the right set of tools and technology may be extremely challenging. With so many competing options, features, and interoperability concerns to consider, piecing together your martech may feel like navigating a minefield. However, the right marketing technology can make all the difference when it comes to the behind-the-scenes task of managing your brand and marketing operations.

2021: How Your Marketing Tech Stack Needs to Change

S. ERNEST PAUL

Instead of a shiny penny approach where marketing leaders are trying out every new tool that emerges from the market, businesses focus on creating tech stacks that are smarter, more streamlined, increasingly connected, and dramatically more powerful. Here is what you need to know about marketing technology to lay the foundation for smooth brand management and marketing operations.

Top Marketing Tech for Your Business

Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, there is no doubt that you have struggled with lead generation. Both landscapes are increasingly competitive, and lead generation can pose one of your biggest challenges. However, lead generation starts with traffic, and there is an entire collection of tools you can use to help you take care of just that.

#1. From siloed tools to all-in-one solutions

As more marketing channels emerge, marketing teams will continue to specialize rapidly. However, more channels mean more to coordinate and manage. As individual disciplines branch off, marketing teams risk building unintentional silos that may ultimately undercut efficiency and brand consistency. All-in-one solutions consolidate and may eliminate the need for disparate point solutions. They are also powerful for aligning cross-functional teams—like marketing and sales—to work together in harmony with greater speed and efficiency.

#2. Tools that connect and interact well with one another

As the need arises, API-first tools empower businesses to add, remove, or swap out solutions with greater ease. Of course, APIs fuel the free-flowing exchange of data between tools, systems, and channels—another area that is top of mind for marketing leaders for the year ahead. This step-level for your marketing tech stack is all about connection. You need to merge it, find patterns, and learn. As marketing becomes more omnichannel driven, channels and software islands need to be connected through API integrations and data warehouses.

#3. Leveraging data to create personalized customer experiences

Businesses focus on creating increasingly personalized experiences for their website visitors and customers. They invest in improving data pipelines to trigger powerful, real-time experiences and communications between prospects and use existing users with sales teams based on visitor, user, and company information or activity. By planning to leverage data-rich tools to better understand the customer and their journey, businesses can deliver more tailored content and experiences to the right customers at the right time.

Strategy First, Technology Second

Keep in mind that a tool is not a strategy. It may allow you to compare different software packages by their features; however, the real value marketing software offers lies in the strategy and approach it enables and how it affects customer experience (the desired end-result). Before you build or update your marketing stack, it is crucial to devise your marketing strategy. This approach should be shaped around your product, desired audience, and how to reach them. Analyze your current marketing practices carefully and identify where they match the strategy and where they block it. Do the work, map your plan, and only when you have a defined need should you consider purchasing something new. Find out where you lack processes and where you need to do things differently and then choose technology based on that. Mapping out this process will give you a better understanding of the required tools needed for your business. Martech is all about devising the right strategy for your business and only then identifying the technology that will help you execute on that strategy.

The type of business you have will determine which technologies you might find important and how they should be organized. That said, there are certain technologies you should consider as foundational to your marketing technology stack as you build it. Your marketing stack can be broken down into three key stages:

Stage 1: Attract
Stage 2: Engage
Stage 3: Analyze and optimize

Although there are multiple sub-phases within the above, these three are the most common phases almost every business can relate to.

Google Ads – ad tech

When it comes to driving qualified traffic to your website, Google’s search, video, and display ads are the quickest way to get the results you need. Not only can you target people who show a specific interest in what you are selling, Google Ads acts as your first point of contact for lead nurturing tactics like remarketing, email marketing, and conversion optimization.

Demandbase – ad tech

Demandbase enables businesses to deliver personalized online ads to specific people at specific companies across the web while refining the message to convert them into customers.

Unbounce – landing page builder

There is no point in spending hours creating targeted ads only to send prospects to a generic, soulless landing page, as this is one of the quickest ways to lose potential leads and sales opportunities. Unbounce lets you quickly and easily create custom landing pages that will help convert more website visitors into customers. You can create and publish landing pages in minutes—with no code required. The powerful A/B testing functionality allows you to experiment with your messaging, design, and forms to understand the best ways to convert visitors.

Sprout Social – social media management

Sprout Social allows you to manage your entire social media marketing strategy from one place. It can help you attract and engage with hundreds of thousands of customers and prospects. With Sprout Social, you can streamline your publishing workflows, schedule posts at optimal times, and turn social data into meaningful insights. All of this is geared towards optimizing your social media strategy and better connecting with your audience.

Marketo – marketing automation

Marketo allows users to automate their marketing processes like identifying top prospects, creating personalized campaigns that scale, and finding and connecting with the right customers. It is probably overkill for a smaller business. However, if you are moving from a startup to scale-up, Marketo is ideal for those looking to grow and market to a larger audience with a high degree of segmentation.

HubSpot – marketing automation

The breadth of the HubSpot platform is incredible. Its products run the gamut from advertising, blogging, SEO, email, social media, call-to-action, and beyond. This low-cost, or free in some cases, platform is particularly popular with small businesses who cannot afford the wealth of software options that other more mature companies can.

Outreach – sales engagement

Marketing teams have always been good at generating and nurturing leads. However, they might not always be that great with handing those leads over to sales and making sure they are acted on. They often have little insight into whether reps have, in fact, advanced inbound leads or not. Outreach is a type of tool for teams who are serious about sales and marketing alignment. It tracks your reps’ interactions with prospects and customers and recommends prescribed sequences of communications based on that. Instead of logging marketing into one system and sales into another, both teams can use Outreach’s dashboards and tools, making sure no leads fall through the cracks.

Aircall – cloud calling

Every marketer knows that if given only five minutes to show the product to all new users and answer their questions, they would nail their monthly recurring revenue targets. The problem is that setting up so many screen-shares each day is a tooth grinding process. Aircall allows you to start a phone call instantly from pretty much every major software system out there. Getting visitors from chat into a face-to-face demo can all be arranged automatically in a matter of minutes to speed up the sales cycle drastically.

Tableau – business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) software is an increasingly powerful tool in a marketing team’s arsenal, as it allows teams to track every dollar and every movement throughout the marketing funnel. However, the real power comes in connecting multiple data sources to gain invaluable insights, otherwise lost. Tableau is recognized as the cream of the crop for its visual-based data analysis. Their data visualization is head and shoulders above what traditional BI vendors offer. You can perform reasonably complex data visualization in a very intuitive, drag-and-drop manner, so your team does not need to be fiddling around with SQL and so forth.

LeanData – lead management

Conversions are not a nice, neat, and organized path from point A to B. The conversion process is often more like a winding road of intersections, tangents, and loops that involve an entire host of marketing touchpoints. To understand your marketing program’s real ROI, you need to know which individual components got measurable results. Without these, it is all too easy for marketers to invest in under-performing marketing channels that yield inadequate pipelines and revenue. LeanData connects with your Customer Relationships Management (CRM) to provide the most accurate, channel-by-channel view of your campaign performance so your team can decide how to spend money in the most effective ways. Different marketing attribution models may suit different business needs depending on the buyer’s journey length and complexity. LeanData features fully customizable attribution models that can be finely tuned to your business.

Optimizely – conversion rate optimization

Optimization and experimentation need to be a crucial part of any marketing strategy in 2021. Optimizely allows you to create variations of your existing website with multivariate, multi-page, or A/B tests and then tracks how customers respond to the different versions. The best part is that it is absurdly easy to use. You do not have to code anything to adjust your website with this tool. Optimizely has a visual editor that allows you to make changes by clicking instead of coding, which is perfect if you do not have a full-time development team at your disposal.

Ahrefs – SEO

Ahrefs is a suite of SEO tools that help websites, blogs, and companies do in-depth research on their competitors, grow their search traffic, and monitor their niche. What keywords or topics should you be trying to rank for? How many links do you need to build to rank for your chosen keywords? Ahrefs allows you to do all that and much more.

Zoom – webinars

Conference calls and one-on-one meetings are Zoom’s bread and butter, but it is also a fantastic tool for hosting webinars that will drive people to your website. Zoom provides a useful, easy, and effective way to hold webinars as it hooks into your CRM very nicely, and the video quality is unparalleled. The user experience for the business and participants is next level.

Madkudu – lead scoring

Marketing teams are not just responsible for filling the sales pipeline with quantity, but quality as well. There is no point in attracting hundreds of leads who would never be a good fit in the first place. Lead scoring is one of the best ways to guarantee that the leads they hand over to sales are of high quality. Madkudu is one of the most powerful lead scoring tools available and helps you calculate tons of valuable information, most of which is not visible to your sales team. Beyond only job titles and employee count, Madkudu can evaluate the predicted: revenue of each company; the size of specific teams; tech stack and tools a company uses; whether their solution is B2B or B2C; has a free trial; raised venture capital; and more, meaning your sales team can hone in on leads showing the best determinations of success.

Intercom – customer engagement and lead generation

Intercom’s conversational relationship platform can serve as the backbone of your entire marketing technology stack. You can use it to send targeted messages to visitors on your website, build chatbots to engage qualified leads 24/7 on your website automatically, and CRM. Intercom’s power comes through tracking and monitoring customer data so you can better understand your audience and properly serve them with the right content and messages. Intercom solves one of your biggest headaches when constructing your tech stack integrations. Even if a platform promises great results, it may do more harm than good if it does not integrate with the rest of your tools. Intercom has over 100 integrations with Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, and many more, so you can rest assured that everything will play nicely together.

Clearbit – data enrichment

Clearbit Reveal can be used to help de-anonymize website traffic. When a prospect visits the website, Clearbit uses its IP address to detect its company, industry, location, and the technology the company already uses. You can thus customize your communication with each individual and avoid those spray-and-pray tactics from years gone by.

Five Considerations for Your Marketing Tech Stack

As technology evolves, marketing tools become increasingly more granular. In the past, one tool could solve three different issues. But today’s marketers need an advanced solution for each channel, task, and function. You will soon find that, with more tools, simple processes become complicated and inefficient. Now, rather than selecting tools based on price or feature set, marketers need to consider various factors before making their decisions. As this is much easier said than done, here are five important questions to ask before purchasing a new software:

1. Do you just want something new or will it deliver results?

At one point or another, shiny object syndrome has gotten the best of us all. Make sure you are not buying a tool just because it is new and exciting. Instead, consider the current tools you already have. Is there a way to reach your goals without using this technology? Do not buy a product just because you can. Adding another tool to your tech stack will only waste resources and add unnecessary stress to your team. Remember, more tools do not always mean better results.

2. Does this integrate with the tools I’m using?

The most important consideration to make when constructing your tech stack is integration. Even if a platform promises impressive results, it can do more harm than good if it does not integrate with the rest of your tools. A new website management tool may promise to double the number of leads you generate. However, if it does not integrate with your CRM, it may require four different people to move leads from one system to another. Not only will this cut into productivity, but the manual data entry will dirty your marketing database and require an additional tool for database maintenance.

3. Have I researched all my options?

Even if a tool checks all the boxes, it is still important to consider other options as well. You should do some more digging and check out some online reviews. There are many high-quality tools on the market, but even though one might seem like a good fit, it does not necessarily mean that another will not be better.

4. Do I have the skills and resources to operate this system?

It is important to buy tools that are easy to run using the resources you already have access to. Some of the best, most advanced technologies may turn into a full-time job. If you are a small team, going with a less sophisticated option will make more sense. Choose a solution that will help you reach your goals without too much effort.

5. Should other departments have input on this buying decision?

It is always considered best practice to share resources and information across departments, especially when purchasing a new tool. Without input from all stakeholders, you will not be able to make an educated purchase. Be sure to consult with all parties involved before handing over your credit card.

Data integrity is a prerequisite for the subsequent technologies – M, AI and Predictive analytics to perform well. The A/B texting has to continually be performed to constantly optimizing campaigns.

Every organization is different from scale to audience to product and geography. The Martech stack has to keep all these factors in consideration

S. Ernest Paul

In Conclusion

Building the right marketing tech stack for any company is no picnic. It can be quite a gargantuan task. But it’s all about integrating the right technologies together so they’re working cooperatively instead of independently. Not only will you get a full, comprehensive view of your customer journey and marketing efforts, but you’ll uncover how to optimize your hard earned marketing dollars.

The ROI Of Adobe Experience Cloud

Executive Summary

Growing digital expectations and competition for empowered consumers and business buyers is forcing organizations to invest in new capabilities that enable them to optimize the value of their customer interactions. Businesses across every industry are looking to digital experience technologies in order to deliver contextually relevant and personalized digital content, with 51% of global software decision makers revealing that they are increasing spend on digital experience solutions over the next 12 months.1 These investments in experience are well-founded:

This study examined the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by adopting Adobe Experience Cloud and transforming into an experience-driven business. Adobe Experience Cloud — consisting of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Target, and Magento Commerce Cloud — is an integrated cloud platform that serves as the foundation for delivering experiences across marketing, analytics, advertising, and commerce.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, thee were nine customers interviewed across seven industries with an average of nearly five Adobe Experience Cloud products implemented, above average product adoption scores, and years of experience using these solutions within their marketing, customer experience, and analytics functions.

Prior to using Adobe Experience Cloud, interviewed organizations struggled to get a 360-degree view of their customers using disparate, homegrown and third-party marketing and digital experience technologies that were poorly integrated. Furthermore, organizations had no way to empirically test what impacted the customer experience, thereby leading to organizational gaps in what stakeholders knew would help to engage, convert, and retain customers across the customer life cycle.

Key Findings

The following risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed customers, as realized by the composite organization built for this study. Similar to Adobe customers interviewed for this study, the composite organization has an above average Adobe product adoption score using multiple Adobe Experience Cloud solutions including Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Advertising Cloud, and Adobe Target.

Financial growth: Interviewed organizations leveraged Adobe Experience Cloud to drive CX transformation that resulted in the following superior business results across the customer life cycle:

A 14% year-over-year (YOY) growth in new unique visitor site traffic by Year 3 of the analysis. Organizations drove significant improvements in customer acquisition and brand engagement metrics by leveraging behavioral analytics to optimize sites for organic search and using lookalike modeling and advertising retargeting to identify, activate, and engage new high value customer segments. Furthermore, improved content velocity and effectiveness using Adobe Experience Manager helped drive earned media traffic growth. Over three years, the uplift in profit from increased traffic for the composite organization totaled a PV of just under $5 million.

A 25% increase in web and mobile conversion rates. Interviewees built a testing culture, enabling them to deliver personalized and optimized messaging, promotions, and content to targeted audiences at scale. Collectively, these capabilities improved customer engagement and lead quality, ultimately resulting in incremental closed business. For the composite organization, Adobe Experience Cloud drove a 25% increase in conversion rate by Year 3 of the analysis, generating a PV of over $11 million in incremental profit over the three-year analysis.

A 10% uplift in average order values over three years through improved targeting and messaging to high value segments. Using Adobe Audience Manager to identify and activate high value audiences and a combination of Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager to provide consistent, highly personalized omnichannel engagement, the composite organization was able to grow average order values by 10%, generating a PV of $3.7 million in additional profit over three years.

A 10% YOY growth in loyalty program membership and a 60% three-year increase in upselling loyalty program members. Adobe Experience Cloud helped organizations exceed expectations for customer experience metrics, improving customer engagement and helping drive loyalty and rewards program membership growth. Improved loyalty program membership in turn enabled organizations to personalize each loyal members’ experience on the website using Adobe Target, helping drive upselling and repeat purchase metrics. Loyalty program membership growth and improved upselling conversion rates generated a PV of over $2.8 million in additional profit for the composite organization over three years.

Operational productivity gains: Interviewees boosted customer digital engagement and streamlined marketing, customer insights, digital analytics, and experience team business processes using Adobe Experience Cloud. The following risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed organizations:

› Repurposed 2.5 FTE analyst and digital marketing resources to testing and personalization activities. By streamlining several formerly manual, labor-intensive data analysis, reporting, segmentation, and multivariate testing activities, the composite organization was able to save time and refocus the equivalent of 2.5 FTE analyst and digital marketing resources to personalization and cross-channel optimization.

Web, mobile, and product page content changes that would take nearly a week could be implemented in hours using Adobe Experience Manager. By consolidating redundant content management systems (CMS) and leveraging Experience Fragments in Adobe Experience Manager to propagate content changes across channels, organizations increased content velocity. In addition, Adobe Experience Manager helped marketing to implement content changes in a fraction of the time of their legacy systems without the involvement of IT. Over three years, the efficiencies from content management totaled a PV of over $370,000.

Marketing used Adobe Campaign to build campaigns in half the time it took with their legacy tools. Using Adobe Campaign, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Target, organizations reduced campaign execution time from at least five weeks to two-and-a-half weeks. Over three years, the efficiencies from faster campaign execution totaled a PV of $3.9 million.

A 40% reduction in contact center call volumes from self-service customer care. Organizations were able to empower customers with contextually relevant self-service digital content that helped resolve customer service requests faster, improving the customer experience and reducing contact center call volumes. Over three years, customer care center calls were reduced by 40%, saving the composite organization a PV of $1.7 million.

Customer acquisition and technology cost savings: Organizations were able to retire and consolidate legacy content management and analytics tools, saving both technology and IT administration time and labor. Furthermore, organizations accrued a variety of media, agency, and customer acquisition cost savings by bringing audience management in- house and optimizing their campaign and media spend. The following risk- adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are representative of those experienced by the interviewed organizations:

›  Customer retention improved by 2% saving nearly $1.5 million in customer replacement costs. Organizations were able to avoid unnecessary customer acquisitions costs by improving customer retention and improving brand loyalty. Over three years, total savings from improved customer retention totaled a PV of $1.5 million.

›  A 2.5% reduction in customer acquisition and agency costs freed up capital of CX transformation. In-house advertising suppression, retargeting, audience management, and personalization capabilities using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Target, and Adobe Audience Manager reduced customer acquisition costs while concurrently limiting reliance on outside agencies, saving the composite organization a PV of just under $2.7 million over three years.

›  Over $2 million in cost savings from the retirement of legacy technologies. Organizations eliminated poorly integrated and redundant content management systems and analytics tools. For the composite organization, this saved a PV of just over $2 million in technology and people costs over three years.

Costs. The interviewed organizations experienced the following risk- and present-value adjusted costs, which have been included in the financial analysis for the composite organization:

› Adobe software licensing costs. Software licensing and other fees paid to Adobe for use of Adobe Analytics, Adobe Audience Manager, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Target, Adobe Campaign, and Adobe Advertising Cloud, which totaled a PV of $2.6 million over the three-year analysis.

› Professional and managed services fees. These are engagement fees paid to professional services firms to assist with the initial proof-of- concept, full implementation, and ongoing management and maintenance of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions, which totaled a PV of $3.6 million over the three-year analysis.

› Internal resource costs. These are internal resource costs to support and manage the initial proof-of-concept and full implementation of Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. In addition, this cost category includes the ongoing analytics, digital marketing, testing, personalization, IT administration, and development resources required to manage and harness the full capabilities of Adobe Experience Cloud. These costs totaled a PV of just under $3.6 million over the three-year analysis.

› Training costs. These are the training costs for new and existing Adobe power and self-service users. Training costs totaled a PV of over $460,000 over the three-year analysis.

Forrester’s interviews with nine existing customers and subsequent financial analysis found that an organization based on these interviewed organizations experienced benefits of $35.1 million over three years versus costs of $10.3 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $24.8 million and an ROI of 242%.

TEI Framework And Methodology

From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester has constructed a Total Economic ImpactTM (TEI) framework for those organizations considering adopting Adobe Experience Cloud.

The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. The study took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that Adobe Experience Cloud can have on an organization:

DUE DILIGENCE

Interviewed Adobe stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to Adobe Experience Cloud.

CUSTOMER INTERVIEWS

Interviewed nine organizations using Adobe Experience Cloud to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.

COMPOSITE ORGANIZATION

Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewed organizations.

FINANCIAL MODEL FRAMEWORK

Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organizations.

CASE STUDY

Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling Adobe Experience Cloud’s impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication that enterprises have regarding ROI analyses related to IT investments,

The Psychology of Color in Brand Marketing

Color psychology is the study of how colors determine human emotions and behaviors. We react to colors based on a complex series of interactions between our personal tastes, our family upbringing, and our cultural backgroundColor can affect perceptions in subtle ways; for example, it can enhance or detract from the way that food tastes. The right colors can even enhance how effective pills and placebos are; blue is used for calming or sleep-inducing pills whereas red or yellow are usually used for stimulantsEvery brand and business uses colors deliberately in their product designs, packaging, advertisements, and websites. High-level graphic design relies in part on the ability to select colors that work with the brand and the company’s mission. The psychology of color can and must be used to trigger the right responses from consumers, and this is part of the graphic designer’s goal.Great graphic design also anticipates cultural differences in the way colors are perceived. The same color can mean very different things to different audiences; for example, in most cultures yellow has a bright, cheerful connotation, but in China it may have vulgar or adult connotations. In the US white symbolize purity and is often used for bridal branding, but white is a mourning color in Japan, India, China, Korea, and the Middle East. The bottom line here is to know your audience and choose wisely.

A lot has been studied about how color influences the brain to react. Different color have different outcomes.

How people respond to different color stimuli varies from person to person. In a U.S. study, blue is the top choice at 35%, followed by green (16%), purple (10%) and red (9%). Blue and green may be due to a preference for certain habitats that were beneficial in the ancestral environment as explained in evolutionary aesthetics .Orange, yellow, and brown are the least popular colors, respectively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHa922t7DmQ

Color preference may also depend on ambient temperature. People who are cold often select warm colors such as red or yellow, while people who are hot favor cool colors like blue and green.[6 Introverted individuals are also found to be more attracted to cool colors, while extroverts prefer warmer colors.

Gender has also shown to influence how colors are received, with some research suggesting women and men respectively prefer “warm” and “cool” colors. Black, white, and gray, as tones or shades, were shown to be received more positively by males than females.

Humans are visual beings. The brain processes pictorial information 60,000 times faster than it processes text. In addition, 90 percent of the information sent to our brains is visual. And an important component of that visual information is color.

Color psychology, the study of how color affects human behavior, is a hugely debated topic. The debate about the specific ways color affects humans is as old as color itself. Some groups even dismiss color psychology completely because the individual perception of any color is dictated largely by personal experiences and interactions with the color.

But color does have an impact on our lives. For example, in marketing and branding, color plays a prominent role in memorability: Think of Coca-Cola’s characteristic red, or the yellow golden arches of McDonald’s.

For brands, paying attention to color psychology and applying what holds true for a majority of the populace can help in getting an edge in a highly competitive marketing scene.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways brands can use the psychology of color to their advantage.

Creating a visual identity

As mentioned earlier, one of the important ways brands use color is to create a visual identity for themselves. This helps to differentiate the brand from that of the competition. It also helps with memorability.

How do brands go about doing this? The first step is to identify the core components of your brand personality.

In her publication, Dimensions of Brand Personality, Stanford University professor and psychologist Jennifer Aaker identified five core dimensions that play a role in a brand’s personality: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness.

After identifying elements that represent your brand, you can then go about creating a color scheme that communicates those elements. Studies such as Interactive Effects of Colors have proven that it is important for a brand color to “fit” what is being sold.

Appealing to specific audiences

One of the most important lessons from color psychology is that people respond differently to color based on their gender, age and cultural background.

Research has established that blue is the most popular color for both men and women. Then women are particularly inclined toward pink as men are toward blue. Big brands have wielded this information to create powerful brands.

A good example is Victoria’s Secret. Its characteristic shade of pink was not just chosen at random—it is a favorite of the company’s target audience: women. The color also reinforces the image of the brand personality; pink is an “elusive” color, and its lighter shades are barely visible. Using pink not only plays on the “secret” in the brand name; it also shades the product, underwear.

Age is also known to influence color preferences. Whereas younger audiences might be drawn to bright, youthful colors, older audiences might prefer cooler shades.

Understanding how culture affects color perception is also important for brands targeting international markets. A color considered acceptable in one culture may be a complete turn-off in another.

By choosing colors that the audience is most receptive to, brands can get an edge over their competitors.

Associating your brand to a specific mood

Another important tip from color psychology is that certain colors put people in a specific mood.

Brand strategist Thomson Dawson explains it this way: “All colors create a specific frame of mind for people—it’s called a mood. Having people be in the most receptive mood is essential for their engagement with your brand. Color sets the mood of brand expression and, more important, creates mental associations to the meaning of your brand within the context of the world it lives in.”

Research has shown that the color red causes people to react with greater speed and force, which might prove useful during athletic activities. Little wonder car companies like Ferrari and Lamborghini combine red and black to create a balance between the powerful and the luxurious.

Coca-Cola also takes advantage of the effect of the color red. For some people, a mere sign of the characteristic red color is enough to get them thirsty.

Psychologist Andrew J. Elliot tested to see if the color of a person’s clothing could make them appear more sexually appealing. He found heterosexual men and women dressed in red were significantly more likely to attract romantic attention than women dressed in any other color. The color did not affect heterosexual women’s assessment of other women’s attractiveness. Other studies have shown men dressed in red appeal to heterosexual women.

Contrary to the adult fondness for blue, in children yellow is the most favored color, perhaps owing to its associations with happiness. However, children like colors they find to be pleasant and comforting are changeable, while adult color preference is usually easily influenced.

Cultural background has been shown to have a strong influence on color associations. Studies have shown people from the same region, regardless of ethnicity, will have the same color preferences. Common associations connecting colors to a particular emotion may also differ cross-culturally.

For instance, one study examined color relationships with emotion with participants in Germany, Mexico, Poland, Russia, and the United States; finding that red was associated with anger and viewed as strong and active

However, only Poles related purple with both anger and jealousy while Germans linked jealousy with yellow. This highlights how the influence of different cultures can potentially change perceptions of color and its relationship to emotion.

Increase conversions and click-through rates

One area where the psychology of color is particularly relevant in marketing is in the use of call-to-action buttons. Several studies have been conducted on the importance of choosing the right color for call-to-action buttons. The reason for the attention is simple: The aim of marketing is to get the consumer to take the desired action. On the web, a call-to-action button is a gate to the desired action.

An example is a study by Hubspot, which A/B tested a green button vs a red button. Again, red won. The red button outperformed the green button by 21 percent.

This in no way means that every brand should use red for their CTAs, but it does mean that paying attention to CTAs and making sure that they are prominent can determine whether they get the click or not.

This also applies to social media campaigns. Whether it’s a photo or video shared, the text or area showing the required action should stand out and convey a sense of urgency.

Conclusion

Color is a powerful visual component. Brands can not only apply the color psychology in differentiation, it can be used to appeal to specific audiences and elicit certain responses from their prospects. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that the right combination of colors for any brand can only become evident through consistent testing.

A CDP is even more critical for the Martech Stack in 2021

The rapid shift to digital channels during COVID-19 grabbed headlines through out 2020. But for marketers, it was only one change among many in an eventful year.

Google Chrome joined Safari and Mozilla in announcing it would end support for third-party cookies, eliminating a tool marketers had long relied on to accurately attribute ad spend and market. The passage of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) in November left them with more data privacy rules to address. And marketers were expected to handle all of these changes with budgets that had been reduced due to a sudden economic recession.

To understand how marketers have responded to these changes and what that means for the future of CDPs in 2021, through surveys of 300 U.S. marketers in the travel, hospitality, finance, retail and healthcare industries in November 2020

Research found that CDPs have been vital to marketers’ efforts to address the many challenges of 2020. These experiences have solidified the CDP’s position in the center of organizations’ marketing stacks and increased marketers’ confidence that the technology is here to stay. In our 2021 report, 68% of respondents said CDPs will remain a must-have technology in 2025, compared to only 57% in 2020.

The pandemic shifted marketers’ priorities

All of the organizations in our survey (100%) saw at least some
marketing budget cuts due to COVID-19, and 41% saw cuts over 20%. Though the pandemic made organizations more reliant on digital channels for reaching their customers, most marketers couldn’t afford to invest in new tech solutions. More than three-quarters (77%) of organizations cut tech initiatives in 2020 due to COVID-19.

At the same time as budget cuts were forcing them to do more with less, marketers shifted their priorities to address new challenges caused by the pandemic. For marketers without a developed first-party data strategy, the demise of third-party cookies made it harder to manage ad spend across digital channels. Tighter budgets made customer acquisition and retention more difficult. And finally, the restriction or elimination of in- person experiences put incredible pressure on marketers to offer a unified customer experience across channels — particularly digital ones.

Results suggest that marketers are using their CDPs to address
these challenges head-on. For example, in 2020 report, respondents focused on various forms of real-time functionality as the most useful capabilities of a CDP. Now, the emphasis has shifted to managing data across multiple channels and resolving customer identity — which are important for delivering seamless digital experiences in a post-cookie world.

2021 may see a rise in CDP investment

Despite the drop in tech investment overall, there wasn’t a drop-off
in CDP investment during COVID-19 — likely because CDPs are so important for addressing marketers’ pandemic-related concerns. Eighty-nine percent of marketers we surveyed had a CDP, and nearly a tenth (9%) had adopted a CDP since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020.

Key takeaway

Marketers understand that CDPs are key to unlocking the full potential of first-party data. The right CDP will anchor a robust customer data supply chain that frees your organization from excessive reliance on third-party data. It will also enable accurate attribution of ad spend and market, enabling more effective ad spend management. Finally, a CDP will support a unified customer experience across channels, built on first-party data acquired with customers’ consent.

Recommendation

With third-party cookie loss, a first-party data strategy is no longer optional. As tech spending rebounds in 2021, look to invest in a CDP that is equipped to meet the challenge of third-party cookie loss, while also supporting better customer experiences.

State of the CDP 2021

In 2021, marketers will make up for lost time by increasing their tech investments. Eighty-nine percent of organizations will spend more on tech in 2021 than they did in 2020, and almost one-third (32%) will spend significantly more. Perhaps because they were hit harder by the pandemic, travel and hospitality marketers were most likely to say they’ll spend significantly more. The big question: Where will marketers allocate these funds in 2021?

The importance of integrations

As first-party data becomes more central to marketing strategy, CDPs are becoming more central to martech stacks, too. That means they need to integrate with more solutions across the organization — and they need to do so easily and quickly.

As a result, marketers are demanding more from their CDPs. Integration with more third-party solutions shot up from the No. 4 improvement marketers want in their CDPs in 2020 to No. 1 in the 2021.

Unfortunately, many marketers feel their existing solutions aren’t delivering. Almost two-thirds (62%) of respondents said it’s difficult to integrate new third-party solutions into their martech stacks. And 63% said they have struggled to achieve marketing goals due to the difficulty of integration since March 2020.

A barrier to cross-compatibility

When it comes to more and faster third-party integrations, one major barrier stands in marketers’ way. A majority (53%) of marketers strongly agreed that their martech stacks are walled gardens — meaning they consist mostly of solutions from one vendor that are designed to work together. Products that are part of a walled garden will almost always have limited cross-compatibility with third-party solutions.

It’s no surprise that many marketers are actively seeking new solutions that won’t limit their options: Seventy percent said they’ve discussed adapting their martech stack to incorporate third-party solutions more easily

Key takeaway

With marketers under pressure to do more with less, speed and efficiency are at a premium. Marketers need to be able to integrate new solutions into their martech stacks fast. Unfortunately, tools that are part of walled gardens — including some CDPs — can’t deliver the fast, seamless integrations marketers need.

Recommendation

It’s time for marketers to break out of their walled gardens. Look for a vendor-neutral CDP that will integrate quickly and easily into your existing martech stack, and also work with any new solutions you add to the stack later. By building the stack you want based on your organization’s particular needs — not the options available from one particular vendor — you’ll take the first step toward unlocking the full power of your customer data.

The changing privacy landscape

Data privacy regulations continued to evolve rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some organizations are still getting up to speed with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which went into effect on January 1, 2020, just months before the pandemic hit and derailed marketing budgets. Now they must also address CPRA, which passed

in November 2020 and amends and expands CCPA.

Marketers realize that managing these new regulations — on top of existing data privacy rules like HIPAA — requires the use of sophisticated tech solutions. Data privacy protection was the top outcome marketers are looking to drive with technology in 2021.

A powerful tool for ensuring privacy

CDPs are uniquely suited to meet marketers’ need for greater control over customer data. For example, by enabling the management of data flows based on geography, CDPs support compliance with data privacy rules
for different states and countries. Powerful encryption and data recovery capabilities secure sensitive information against breaches and cyberattacks. And these are only some of the ways CDPs help keep customer data safe.

It’s likely that marketers will rely even more heavily on CDPs for data privacy controls in the future. Marketers who have CDPs agree that data privacy is the most important area for the technology to address, narrowly edging out predictive insights and customer acquisition.

It’s likely that marketers will rely even more heavily on CDPs for data privacy controls in the future. Marketers who have CDPs agree that data privacy is the most important area for the technology to address, narrowly edging out predictive insights and customer acquisition.

AI is key to 2021 marketing strategies

The pandemic has made delivering great digital customer experiences
— and doing so efficiently, at low cost — more important than ever. To
keep up with the competition, marketers must predict customer behavior and take proactive action to drive the outcomes they want. And that means effectively deploying AI and machine learning to generate predictive insights. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say AI capabilities are extremely important for achieving their marketing priorities for 2021, and 99% say they’re at least somewhat important.

Closing the AI expertise gap

CDPs are the foundation of AI and machine learning capabilities because they help ensure the data that is collected is complete and accurate, which is critical for AI and machine learning to be effective. Marketers already understand this: Customer analytics and predictive insights is the second most important solution area they want CDPs to address. Many marketers are already seeing AI success.

A majority (62%) say their organizations are very effective at deploying AI for predictive marketing insights.

However, gathering the right data to feed AI and machine learning algorithms isn’t trivial. And while marketers are mostly confident about their ability to build the data foundations necessary to deploy AI, not all feel like they have the right expertise. Among respondents who say their organizations aren’t very effective at deploying AI for predictive marketing insights, the top reasons are lack of expertise among marketers (30%) and IT (29%). It’s likely building the data skills and capabilities necessary to support machine learning and AI will be a major focus for marketers in 2021.

Key takeaway

AI will be an important growth area in 2021, as many marketers are still learning the ropes. The right CDP will help you close the expertise gap both by ensuring you collect the right set of complete, unified customer data and by offering built-in predictive capabilities that are easy for non-data-scientists to use.

Recommendation

Without the right customer data, no algorithm can deliver results. Look for a CDP that will help you build a strong data foundation for AI and machine learning by collecting and orchestrating the right datasets for your business. Adopting a CDP with easy-to- use, marketer-friendly data and machine learning capabilities will help you make smarter marketing choices and drive overall success in 2021.

However, gathering the right data to feed AI and machine learning algorithms isn’t trivial. And while marketers are mostly confident about their ability to build the data foundations necessary to deploy AI, not all
feel like they have the right expertise. Among respondents who say their organizations aren’t very effective at deploying AI for predictive marketing insights, the top reasons are lack of expertise among marketers (30%) and IT (29%). It’s likely building the data skills and capabilities necessary to support machine learning and AI will be a major focus for marketers in 2021.

“Customer analytics and predictive insights is the second most important solution area [marketers] want CDPs to address.”

The elusive revenue connection

In 2020, CDPs became more integral to marketing operations and data teams, addressing more use cases, incorporating more data and linking
to more third-party tools across organizations. This has made it even more difficult to quantify CDP ROI, since impact is diffused across so many solution areas. It’s no surprise, for example, that organizations still struggle to quantify CDPs’ impact on revenue: Just 7% of organizations measure CDP ROI based on revenue, the same percentage as in the 2020 report.

In the 2020 report, respondents cited data quality as their top way to measure CDP ROI, which isn’t ideal. Data quality is important, but hard numbers about monetary impact are key for securing leadership buy-in. The 2021 data shows that marketers have made some progress tying CDPs to operational savings, which is now the No. 1 way to measure CDP ROI, up from No. 2 in 2020.

Time to value is a major differentiator

Perhaps due to the increasing sophistication of ROI measurement, or the difficulty of integrating CDPs with the martech stack, average time to value for CDPs has increased. In the 2020 report, more than half (53%) of companies saw ROI from their CDP in six months or less. But in the 2021 report, less than one-third (30%) of companies did so.

A majority (57%) of marketers expect to see ROI from martech solutions within six months or less. That means only some CDPs are meeting marketers’ expectations for time-to-value — the rest are lagging behind, possibly due to slow integrations.

The CDP of the future

CDPs are a relatively new technology, and marketers are still working out which use cases make the most sense for them. But in 2020, marketers made significant progress toward more effectively integrating CDPs into their marketing operations.

CDPs were central to solving the biggest challenges of 2020, including budget cuts, new data privacy legislation and a sudden shift to digital channels due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The prospect of third-party cookie loss in particular brought CDPs to the fore: A first-party data strategy anchored by a CDP used to be “nice to have” — in 2020, it became absolutely vital for marketing success.

In 2021 and beyond, CDPs will be increasingly foundational to the martech stack. They’ll adapt flexibly to new regulations, continue to underpin customer acquisition and retention strategies and enable powerful AI and machine learning capabilities. To set themselves up for success, marketers should look for CDPs that:

  • Are vendor-neutral: Faster, easier integration will speed time to value and increase overall ROI.
  • Offer predictive insights: User-friendly AI capabilities will empower marketers to deliver standout customer experiences.
  • Protect data privacy: Capabilities like data encryption and consent management keep organizations compliant with regulations like CPRA. After the challenges of 2020, now is the time for marketers to plan strategically for the future by investing in tech. Equipped with the right CDP, marketers can make 2021 a record-breaking year for their businesses.
  • Marketers struggle to fully leverage integrated customer data, which has driven hype around the opportunity of customer data platforms. Tempered expectations of the effective scope of customer data platform (CDP) use cases are pushing this market toward the Trough of Disillusionment on Gartner’s Hype Cycle for digital marketing and advertising.
  • ■Effective use cases for customer data platforms often depend on or overlap with capabilities in IT systems such as master data management, which contain customer data but are typically managed outside of marketing.
  • ■Although the diverse vendor ecosystem is composed of vendors with rapidly evolving capabilities, pure-play CDP vendors compete against those with legacies in either technical data management or marketing, such as multichannel marketing hubs. Vendors frequently add new features and capabilities, but buyers struggle with a single CDP label used by vendors to cover the entire spectrum of use cases when most only excel at a subset of these.
  • ■Most CDP vendors originated as solutions for B2C use cases, and only a handful of solutions support the account-level aggregations and ABM tactics required for facilitating B2B marketing orchestration

How to Make a CDP Work for Your Organization

Whether you’re choosing a CDP for the first time or switching to a new CDP, don’t rush the process. Take the “crawl, walk, run” approach when considering the right Customer Data Platform and plan for the long-term. You’ll want to ensure that you choose a CDP that your organization can grow into: a scalable CDP that supports a wide range of third-party integrations, real-time capabilities and strong data governance.

Take the “crawl, walk, run” approach when considering the right CDP and plan for the long-term. Click & Tweet!

Navigating the CDP landscape alone is an overwhelming process for an organization. We help you evaluate which CDP technology best aligns with your organization’s roadmap for improving the customer experience. Our Customer Data Platform (CDP) consultants work with clients to help break down data silos, ensure data quality and activate use-cases, all the while respecting increased concerns for customer privacy.

Recommendations

To best evaluate the CDP marketplace using data and analytics technology:

  • ■Identify whether the majority of your use cases are operational by solving for inefficiencies in data management or data delivery, or analytical, such as growing customer spend or reducing churn.
  • ■Consult with key stakeholders in your organization before deciding whether to deploy a CDP. Determine your brand’s willingness to source technology externally versus building and maintaining in-house and clearly document your needs for marketing orchestration and native execution.
  • ■Conduct an inventory of existing skills in order to evaluate the marketing team’s ability to collaborate with IT and other stakeholders for data science, customer modeling, data management and execution. Select marketing solutions that complement and integrate with other enterprise systems such as data warehouses, CRM tools, or personalization engines.
  • ■Evaluate the level of risk tolerance in your organization for emerging technologies by determining whether a CDP — or related technology system — is an ideal fit.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2023, 70% of independent CDP vendors will be acquired by larger marketing technology vendors or will diversify through M&A of their own to enter adjacent categories such as personalization, multichannel marketing, consent management, and/or MDM for customer data.

HTML Template recommendations for SEO, by S. Ernest Paul

Update: Google has begun ranking websites higher which have AMP pages (Accelerated Mobile Pages). Please be sure to include an AMP plugin in the HTML page templates. They are to be found within the Web Content Management platforms, Template section. Please reach out to your WCM partner or your internal IT resource. If you have a WordPress site, a plugin from the WP Plugin directory should do the trick. The AMP pages provide greater visibility (higher ranking) of your web and mobile pages on mobile and tablet devices

 

Html Optimization for SEO from S. Ernest Paul ✪

Nudge theory | Incorporate Nudging in Marketing with behavioural economics

Nudge theory economist from the Boothe School of Business recently won the much deserved Nobel prize for economics, in this case behavioral economics. I was so fired up this Oct 9th, when the award was announced; I believe must have woken up half of Boothe at 5.30 AM EST.

At the core of behavioral economics is the idea that we are not always rational beings. Our decisions are driven by a range of factors beneath our subconscious (desires, habits, social norms) and these factors are consistent, predictable and can be understood. This principal can be used to influence consumer decision making. It’s often called “nudging” which involves an effective little help to adopt a desired behavior either consciously or subconsciously. This is achieved by leveraging subconscious drivers (such as framing, loss aversion and reciprocity) and making a certain behavior easier than an alternative path.Fintech and insurtech products which show a degree of distinction and nuance are terrific candidates for Nudging.

Here are two typical retail examples of nudge theory at work:

  • Shoppers who came across a tasting booth with a limited selection (6 jams) were
    substantially more likely to purchase a jar of jam versus those who had visited a booth with
    a wide selection (24 jams). When there are too many unfamiliar options, consumer confidence in their selection is diminished, and thus they avoid making a decision altogether.
  • The addition of a small sign that read “no more than 12 cans per customer” actually doubled the amount of soup shoppers bought, by effectively “anchoring” their decision process. Anchoring occurs when individuals use an initial piece of information to make subsequent judgments. Once an anchor is set, other judgments are made by adjusting away from that anchor.

Both of these examples did not involve strongly enticing or cajoling people into changing their behavior, they simply made a desired behavior “easier” than an alternative choice.

It’s important to keep in mind 3 principals when applying nudging to marketing:

  1. Nudging compliments rather than replaces traditional marketing. Marketing creates the desire while nudging facilitates the follow-through.
  2. Nudging involves creating new habits as many human behaviors are a function of our ingrained habits. Therefore, nudging is best suited to category-level behavior (adopting a new product) not brand preference (which brand of salad dressing should I buy?). Fintech and insurtech products which show a degree of distinction and nuance are terrific candidates for Nudging
  3. Nudging works most effectively when it is used for good, creating a “win-win” situation for both companies and individuals. (ex. nudging people to eat more fresh produce through a series of large green arrows on the floor, making a trail to the produce section.)

Where can nudging be used most effectively? First with regards to digital adoption as this area provides benefits of convenience and cost to both consumers and marketers. (ex. Use a digital app to buy insurance rather than going through a broker.) This is a change many people want to make but need help with. Another area is in the shopping aisle to drive incremental purchases and to nudge consumers to consider additional product categories. Lastly nudging can be used to educate marketers and hopefully make it part of the marketing toolbox.

In summary, nudging holds the potential to shift the marketing paradigm. In this increasingly competitive world, consumers can’t be influenced through claims, features and benefits alone. Nudging may make marketing more effective as it shifts the focus towards creating new habits rather than constantly fighting for brand share.

Inspired by: Anne Stephenson, Partner, Explorer Research

The Digital and Business Transformation decisions for the C-Suite, the Board and the Customer

How well is the C-Suite, the digital office, the business strategists, the futurists and the forecasters prepared, for where we are today, and for what we may witness well into the future?

The future is not the next shiny object or some fancy new jargon, but still remains the Long Term Value the (LTV) of the customer, we all desire – it is a digital transformation ‘outside looking in’ approach, rather than focusing on internal efficiencies first (my school of thought). Internal efficiency potential targets surface to the top organically, when employing and deploying this approach and execution.

A Digital Customer Centricity vision proposes to define the next generation of ‘a best in class organization’. With this proactive lens, a healthy NPS score is something we must stitch.

A product manager who thinks and acts like a CEO – the future is here

The role of the product manager is expanding due to the growing importance of data in decision making, an increased customer and design focus, and the evolution of software-development methodologies.

Product managers are the glue that bind the many functions that touch a product—engineering, design, customer success, sales, marketing, operations, finance, legal, and more. They not only own the decisions about what gets built but also influence every aspect of how it gets built and launched.

Unlike product managers of the past, who were primarily focused on execution and were measured by the on-time delivery of engineering projects, the product manager of today is increasingly the mini-CEO of the product. They wear many hats, using a broad knowledge base to make trade-off decisions, and bring together cross-functional teams, ensuring alignment between diverse functions. What’s more, product management is emerging as the new training ground for future tech CEOs.

As more companies outside of the technology sector set out to build software capabilities for success in the digital era, it’s critical that they get the product-management role right.1

Why you need a product manager who thinks and acts like a CEO

The emergence of the mini-CEO product manager is driven by a number of changes in technology, development methodologies, and the ways in which consumers make purchases. Together, they make a strong case for a well-rounded product manager who is more externally oriented and spends less time overseeing day-to-day engineering execution, while still commanding the respect of engineering.

Data dominates everything

Companies today have treasure troves of internal and external data and use these to make every product decision. It is natural for product managers—who are closest to the data—to take on a broader role. Product success can also be clearly measured across a broader set of metrics (engagement, retention, conversion, and so on) at a more granular level, and product managers can be given widespread influence to affect those metrics.

Products are built differently

Product managers now function on two speeds: they plan the daily or weekly feature releases, as well as the product road map for the next six to 24 months. Product managers spend much less time writing long requirements up front; instead, they must work closely with different teams to gather feedback and iterate frequently.

Products and their ecosystems are becoming more complex

While software-as-a-service products are becoming simpler for customers, with modular features rather than a single monolithic release, they are increasingly complex for product managers. Managers must now oversee multiple bundles, pricing tiers, dynamic pricing, up-sell paths, and pricing strategy. Life cycles are also becoming more complex, with expectations of new features, frequent improvements, and upgrades after purchase. At the same time, the value of the surrounding ecosystem is growing: modern products are increasingly just one element in an ecosystem of related services and businesses. This has led to a shift in responsibilities from business development and marketing to product managers. New responsibilities for product managers include overseeing the application programming interface (API) as a product, identifying and owning key partnerships, managing the developer ecosystem, and more.

Changes in the ‘execution pod’

In addition to developers and testers, product-development teams include operations, analytics, design, and product marketers that work closely together in “execution pods” to increase the speed and quality of software development. In many software organizations, the DevOps model is removing organizational silos and enabling product managers to gain broader cross-functional insights and arrive at robust product solutions more effectively.

Consumerization of IT and the elevated role of design

As seamless, user-friendly consumer software permeates our lives, business users increasingly expect a better experience for enterprise software. The modern product manager needs to know the customer intimately. This means being obsessed with usage metrics and building customer empathy through online channels, one-on-one interviews, and shadowing exercises to observe, listen, and learn how people actually use and experience products.

Three archetypes of the mini-CEO product manager

There are three common profiles of the mini-CEO archetype: technologists, generalists, and business-oriented. These three profiles represent the primary, but not the only, focus of the mini-CEO product manager; like any CEO, they work across multiple areas (for instance, a technologist product manager will be expected to be on top of key business metrics). Most technology companies today have a mix of technologists and generalists (Exhibit 1).

Exhibit 1

As these three archetypes emerge, the project manager is a fading archetype and seen mainly at legacy product companies. The day-to-day engineering execution role is now typically owned by an engineering manager, program manager, or scrum master. This enables greater leverage, with one product manager to eight to 12 engineers, versus the ratio of one product manager to four or five engineers that has been common in the past.

Common themes across the three archetypes

An intense focus on the customer is prominent among all product managers. For example, product managers at Amazon are tasked with writing press releases from the customer’s perspective to crystalize what they believe customers will think about a product, even before the product is developed. This press release then serves as the approval mechanism for the product itself.

There are, however, differences in how product managers connect with the users. While a technologist may spend time at industry conferences talking to other developers or reading Hacker News, the generalist will typically spend that time interviewing customers, talking to the sales team, or reviewing usage metrics.

A new training ground for CEOs

Modern product managers are increasingly filling the new CEO pipeline for tech companies. Before becoming the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Marissa Mayer were product managers, and they learned how to influence and lead teams by shepherding products from planning to development to launch and beyond. Such experience is also valuable beyond tech: PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi started her career in product management–like roles at Johnson & Johnson and Mettur Beardsell, a textile firm.

While today such a background remains rare among CEOs, product-management rotational programs are the new leadership-development programs for many technology companies (for example, see the Facebook Rotational Product Manager Program, the Google Associate Product Manager Program, and the Dropbox Rotation Program). Any critic of the analogy between product managers and CEOs will point out that product managers lack direct profit-and-loss responsibilities and armies of direct reports, so it is critical for product managers with ambitions for the C-suite to move into general management to broaden their experience.

The product manager of the future

Over the next three to five years, we see the product-management role continuing to evolve toward a deeper focus on data (without losing empathy for users) and a greater influence on non-product decisions.

Product managers of the future will be analytics gurus and less reliant on analysts for basic questions. They will be able to quickly spin up a Hadoop cluster on Amazon Web Services, pull usage data, analyze them, and draw insights. They will be adept at applying machine-learning concepts and tools that are specifically designed to augment the product manager’s decision making.

We anticipate that most modern product managers will spend at least 30 percent of their time on external activities like engaging with customers and the partner ecosystem. Such engagement will not be limited to consumer products—as the consumerization of IT continues, B2B product managers will directly connect with end users rather than extracting feedback through multiple layers of sales and intermediaries.

Courtesy – McKinsey

Propagating Agile habits and a state of mind

Agile is a state of mind. Developing agile habits is crucial. The agile lines between the business and IT are blurry. Business and IT conduit talent knows this well. I know I have to speak with multiple audiences and and agile thinking starts from the business and eventually ends there. Here are some thoughts on the agile state of mind

1. Put some skin in the game.

In an agile environment, some business-unit leaders will be tapped as product owners—that is, the business-unit stakeholders most accountable for shaping the products. These leaders must make the development and success of a product their highest priority—and they must be given the leeway to do so. That might mean shifting schedules and commitments so product owners can attend key agile meetings: scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint planning sessions (see the sidebar “Speaking agile”). Additionally, senior management may need to redeploy resources so that business units can assign product owners to individual agile-development initiatives.

Product owners not only set the aspirations and vision for the product but also colead decision making about features and development goals with colleagues in IT. They should be able to live in two worlds. They must have some understanding of technology and the ways it is transforming their industries. They must also have a strong sense of market needs and the product features that would be most valuable to end users. (Typically, that’s not an issue for most product owners who come from the business, because they interact more frequently with end users than IT managers do.) Product owners can pair this market knowledge with the engineers’ feedback on the technical feasibility of specific product features to create a clear development plan.

2. Shape the product together.

Under traditional approaches to product development, IT leaders interview business-unit leaders once to collect business requirements—for instance, what novel features are required in the new software or applications being created, and on which platforms will the new applications need to run? IT managers capture these requirements in jargon-filled documents, and the next time they reach out to the business unit, it’s with a mostly completed prototype in tow.

By contrast, agile product development is less about taking orders and more about sharing information. The business and the IT organization must codevelop products every day, side by side, in an ongoing process. Senior business leaders can establish this level of collaboration by investing in tools to improve interactions—for example, visual aids instead of lists of requirements.

At one company, a product owner from a business unit and a technology leader used sketches to trade feedback on software under development. IT professionals sketched a prototype that the product owner could page through. The product owner could circle what he liked or draw alternative versions of the elements he didn’t. The team refined the design together in a way that everyone could understand and contribute to.

 

3. Cheer for your own team.

Leaders in the C-suite and the heads of business units have a critical role to play as evangelists for the software products they codevelop: they must hold product owners from the business units accountable for the successful rollout of any new release and its effect on the business. They should encourage product owners and IT engineers to educate their business colleagues about the benefits of new software and reasons to adopt it. Agile teams can share introductory videos at the launch of a product, demonstrate it at town-hall meetings for employees, and listen to their colleagues’ frustrations with and ideas about it. All the while, they should explain that this input is valued—and demonstrate that it is by incorporating feedback into product revisions. Such transparency, encouraged and modeled from the top down, can produce a culture in which joint efforts at problem solving, rather than complaints about IT, are the norm.

4. Think like a user.

Sometimes, senior business leaders may very well be the users of the product they are shaping—if it’s an executive dashboard, for instance. But usually they are not. To help build software and products that transform the way a company operates or appeal to customers, product owners from the business must be unwaveringly committed to users’ needs. Senior executives can encourage this kind of outlook by asking targeted questions during product reviews. Who are the users? How are they using the product? Do they primarily work in an office or remotely? What are their biggest frustrations? Software-development teams should also think through these questions as they design tools and experiences to ensure that they are addressing the idiosyncrasies of end users.

5. Learn to live with ‘good enough.’ Senior executives are typically a risk-averse group. Traditional product-development models emphasize multiple check-ins at various stages of development—a time-intensive but comprehensive way to ensure that products include all the desired features and don’t contain bugs and other flaws. By contrast, agile development emphasizes a test-and-learn approach—for instance, releasing a minimally viable product that delivers value to end users in the short term but is expected to change on the fly.

In this case, chief information officers may need to help senior business executives come to terms with the release of a good-enough product by redefining their expectations and thresholds for risk. A CIO could, for example, highlight agile success stories—instances where a company released a good-enough product, shifted strategy midstream in response to feedback, and ultimately delivered a winning solution. In addition, the CIO can be open about accepting minimally viable releases refined by IT line managers—prompting similar behavior across the company. And at least initially, technology leaders could press for time-to-market schedules that give the business units no option but to pursue good-enough products.

The CIO should also help senior business leaders understand that even under a good-enough approach, agile teams will not deliver everything immediately. The process is actually more rigorous than most executives can see. Agile teams must work exhaustively to collect feedback to determine what’s working, what’s not, and how to make incremental improvements that will enhance the product or the customer’s experiences with it. And they must repeat this process over and over again.

Making the case for agile

6. Broaden the mandate.

As scrum teams ramp up their performance and experience, they will inevitably bump up against slower teams and processes elsewhere in the organization. These slower teams, such as high-volume sales organizations, use more traditional, rigid work processes. To maximize the impact of agile methods, senior leadership must consider ways to transfer lessons from agile teams to different areas of the company. Working with the CIO and other technology professionals, senior business executives can identify the processes and products that are most critical for delivering business value to customers and consider which agile principles would help to speed things up (see the sidebar “Making the case for agile”).

Source: McKinsey; Shutterstock

What Exactly Is a Martech Stack?

The TL is a part laundromat, part high-end coffee bar, and it’s just around the corner from this year’s Martech conference at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco. It’s the type of place that can dry your undergarments while also serving you a delicious cup of java.

James Thomas, CMO of ultra-hot marketing technology startup Allocadia, is there, sipping his cappuccino out of a paper cup. The seven-year-old company, with clients including Microsoft, GE and Phillips, provides insights into things like the return on investment for sponsored events. It also aims to show what type of return brands get when they advertise on Facebook, among other things.

Thomas, a curly-haired man with a slim build from Vancouver, is giddy because in a few hours Scott Brinker, editor at ChiefMartec.com, host of the Martech conference and godfather of all things marketing technology, will crown Allocadia for having one of the best “martech stacks.”

I don’t know exactly what a so-called martech stack is, so Thomas explains.

“Think about a car,” he says. “It has a collection of parts and technology, but ultimately, its job is to get you from point A to point B.”

“A martech stack, in this case, is a number of different technologies from a number of different companies that’s meant to attract and retain customers in the most efficient way possible.” To combine into a machine, that is, that gets marketers all the way from point A to point B.

Allocadia is just one of 5,381 different companies that operate in the marketing technology space, up from 150 in 2011 by Brinker’s count. And nearly all of them are laser-focused on providing brands data in areas like workflow management, content, social media or analytics.

Over at the Martech conference expo hall, 4-year-old email marketing company Iterable claims they’re snagging clients like AT&T and Yelp away from behemoths like Salesforce because it’s easier to use and take less time to integrate data than competitors.

“Say someone starts creating a profile on CareerBuilder, but exits out before uploading their resume,” an Iterable salesman says. “That’s a hole in the funnel. We specialize in plugging that hole by messaging the person on whatever device they’re on. We get them to come back to CareerBuilder and finish building their profile.”

Wrike, which specializes in workflow management, says its customers include Tesla, Sony Playstation and Hulu.

“It just blows my mind when I go on LinkedIn Jobs and see how many of them require applicants to know how to use Wrike,” says a sales associate. “Slack is one thing when you’re managing one or five people, but how do you manage hundreds for a big project? That’s where Wrike comes in.”

Companies like Allocadia, Wrike and Iterable are among the 30 or 40 — sometimes more — different parts that make up a marketing technology stack. Outfits like these are aggressively pursuing a new breed of marketer called “chief marketing technology officers,” whose primary duties include selecting different vendors to assemble the stack. Microsoft, for one, has added such roles to build out its stack.

“It’s chaos,” Thomas says of choosing vendors to make an optimal martech stack. “We’re making it really hard for marketers.”

To hear Thomas explain it, picking which vendors to work with is difficult because there are so many, and most can’t easily integrate with one another.

The whole idea of having a martech stack is to create a one-to-one relationship with the consumer. And imagine knowing when the best time to reach that person is, on which device and with what creative.

That’s martech’s sales pitch, and legacy brands like Nestlé, for example, are buying into it. Microsoft recently described the companies that it has pulled together into the marketing stack that it uses for its own marketing, which consists of several dozen different companies. An operation of such scale, Thomas says, would cost at least $15 million per year.

And that’s not including the cost of maintaining a team with the chops to integrate and make sense of all the “Big Data” that’s going to come through.

“The idea of the stack is to bring order to the chaos,” Thomas said. “There’s so much data and things like AI are helping make sense of all of it, but we’re still one or two years away.”

Each stack is built around a “core” — think Marketo, for example. But it then branches off into different areas like data acquisition and management, content creation, SEO and social. None of this is integrated into one giant, easy to use platform, either. Instead, teams are put in place for each of the branches, experts at using and understanding each of the different companies’ offerings. Data from the different branches eventually gets plugged into the “core” of the stack.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it and it’s still too early for many brand marketers to start worrying about what their martech stack will look like. Ultimately, though, they’ll get there, according to Thomas.

“The people who say, ‘Half my money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’ are going to get fired,” he said. “Why? Because the technology to measure it is already out there.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said Allocadia was two years old. The company is seven years old.

Source: http: //adage.com/article/digital/martech-stack/308976/
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