WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

This is the 8th year we're running The Stackies. It's an awards program that invites marketers to share a single slide illustrating their martech stack — the different apps and platforms they use and how they conceptualize them working together. I'd encourage you to participate (deadline for entries April 29). It's a fantastic way to contribute to our community's understanding of how martech fits into the function and flow of modern marketing. However, even if

Today, HubSpot announced a milestone of more than 1,000 integrated apps featured in the app marketplace for its CRM platform. The call to better integrate martech is being heard. As you may know, I joined HubSpot a little over four years ago to help grow its platform ecosystem. So I'm delighted to see this momentum build. And I feel like it's still in the early stages of what it will become. A huge 'thank you'

Congratulations on making it to the end of 2021. It's been a long year for everyone as we navigated the ongoing pandemic saga. From the perspective of advancing digital business, these past 21 months have seen leaps and bounds forward. But the circumstances that catalyzed this punctuated equilibrium of marketing's evolution have been hard for so many in so many ways. I'm not going to subject you to the phrase 'the new normal' again —

Hello, 2022! Following my wrap-up of martech from 2021 — tl;dr a year in digital marketing that was experienced like a Twitch stream at 1.5X speed — let's jump in to the martech topics I expect will shape 2022.

Marketing attribution frequently arises as a hot topic among RSG’s MarTech Leadership Council members.  So in our last private meeting, we decided to address it head on, including a couple of case studies, one B2C and the other B2B.

While CDP vendors may claim to do everything, the fact is they can’t.

There's been some interesting debate lately about CDPs vs. CDWs — customer data platforms vs. cloud data warehouses. If CDWs such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Redshift, etc., are becoming a universal data layer in companies, is there still a role for domain-specific data platforms, such as marketing-controlled CDPs? The short answer, in my opinion, is 'Yes, but it depends…' There is still a significant distinction between live business operations systems that run in real-time serving

Download the 2021 digital marketing survey eBook to discover emerging digital marketing trends, goals, and priorities that help CMOs drive the digital future.

Gartner have released their Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing, 2021 edition and here we will break down the key takeaways

With new tech-enabled features, the store of the future will be able to provide a more frictionless and personalized experience that meaningfully engages shoppers. The following infographic visualizes the expected 2030 in-store journey for a customer named Rachel. Here are some of the technologies and innovations that will impact each step of her shopping experience.

From shopper emotion detection to in-store robotic warehouses, we highlight the technologies and trends bringing retail stores into the future.

This reference architecture, a key piece of Credera’s end-to-end MarTech assessment and enablement framework, provides a logical view of the data, processes, and technology needed to enable one-to-one marketing use cases. Put more simply, we use the reference architecture as a tool to explain the building blocks that are required to enable modern, data-driven marketing.

The martech reference model defines a taxonomy based on a common understanding of customer-centric business needs, requisite capabilities, and the recommended technology components.

See side-by-side comparisons of the top 6 marketing automation vendors in one convenient guide. Compare costs, both upfront and ongoing, and get insight into contract terms. See a roll-up of ratings from the most popular review sites to hear what real users like you think of the various platforms out there.

In our in-depth playbook, we cover everything you need to know about:
The benefits of a Customer Data Platform;
Getting started with tried-and-true use cases;
Building a team with the right skillsets for any size organization;
Securing buy-in from executives across the company;
Measuring the ROI of CDPs to prove value to different stakeholders

Discover the trends and tech, from “waterless” beauty products to virtual try-on, that will continue to transform the beauty sector in 2021 and beyond.

To evaluate which edition is best for your business, we highlighted the key differences between Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce on various parameters such as business size, cost, features and support.

Amazon has been able to scale indefinitely because it treats every product as an interchangeable packet, and doesn’t need to know what they are, only what they weigh. But if it doesn’t know what it sells, that’s only half a retailer. And what would happen if it could change that?

In this e-book, we'll answer all of the questions you have about customer data platforms and help you to understand the value that a CDP can bring to your business. You will also learn specifically how a CDP can increase customer lifetime value and other key metrics.

Key Takeaways: Forrester's research uncovered a market in which Adobe, Salesforce, and commercetools are Leaders; SAP, BigCommerce, Kibo Commerce, and Oracle are Strong Performers; Episerver and Elastic Path Software are Contenders; and Sitecore is a Challenger.

Business User Experience Drives Key Differentiators

As monolithic technology becomes outdated and less appealing to merchants, the providers that lead the pack will demonstrate deep integrations with both owned and competitive solutions, as well as business user tooling that unifies controls across those solutions and streamlines workflows. Vendors that deliver this value position themselves to successfully help their clients grow revenue, deepen customer loyalty, and expand into new markets.

Check out this showcase of some of the best, open source headless CMSes. This is community-drive so be sure to submit your favorite CMS today!

side-by-side comparisons of the top 6 marketing automation vendors in one convenient guide. Compare costs, both upfront and ongoing, and get insight into contract terms. See a roll-up of ratings from the most popular review sites to hear what real users like you think of the various platforms out there.

Email marketing automation saves time, improves results, and allows you to reach your customers at the right time with the right message. In this playbook we break down email marketing automation into clear and actionable advice for 2021 and beyond.

A recent meeting of Real Story Group’s MarTech Stack Leadership Council focused on personalization lessons learned. These sessions with large-enterprise stack owners are confidential, so I can’t share specific details and recommendations, but some high-level themes might interest you.

This is the 6th year that we have run The Stackies as an awards contest that invites marketers to send in a single slide illustrating their marketing stack — the collection of martech tools they use and the way they conceptualize them together as a whole. Although we award trophies for a few winning entries for the ideas they shared, any stack that works for the team who uses it is a winner where it really matters. But through this contest, the martech community at large wins, by learning from the many examples their peers so generously share. A big,