WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

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.

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

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.

This year is about drama: comedy, tragedy and satire. A connection with the human experience.

20 years ago Apple seized music, and turned it into a lever for its broader business. It failed to do the same to TV, and lost control of music, but won massively in games, where it now makes more money than the entire global digital music industry. Now, perhaps, it’s looking at advertising.

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?

We looked into how traffic trends and user behavior on mobile stack up against desktop, and also analyzed mobile vs. desktop SERP discrepancies.

In one of the most popular trends reports in the industry, we take a journey through the important email marketing and automation trends for 2021. 8 leading email marketing experts join forces to bring you the latest trends essential for business success this year.

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.

Welcome to the 2020 edition of the marketing technology landscape. Yes, it grew once again, by 13.6%, up to a total of 8,000 martech solutions. That's after 615 from the 2019 landscape went away, either consolidated with another martech company or simply gone defunct. If you were predicting consolidation, an 8.7% churn rate from one year to the next is pretty significant attrition to support that narrative.

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,

Well. It is certainly safe to say that 2020 has been tumultuous.

Marketers have been thrown challenges from every angle. This report takes a reflection through the past year and looks at what marketers should do to improve their ability to compete in 2021.

In this guide you will learn:-

• The importance of embracing digital transformation
• How to be a helpful and genuine marketer
• What it means to be data driven in decision making
• And so much more.

An analysis of more than 400 use cases across 19 industries and nine business functions highlights the broad use and significant economic potential of advanced AI techniques.

The industry’s largest-ever survey of CMS users reveals which technology drives greater business results.

The Marketing organizational survey 2020 provides marketing leaders with the latest insights to optimize their organizational structure and build a more scalable, flexible, and resilient marketing organization

The Marketing Operations Survey uncovers best practices for the marketing operations leaders' role’s current scope, future mandate, and provides insight into the most critical key performance indicators, development priorities and operational marketing technologies.

Martech investments in digital tools and techniques are aimed at driving marketing efficiency and innovation, characteristics that might blind some digital marketing leaders to short- and midterm risks from COVID-19 and slowing economies.

Digital marketing leaders have an optimistic outlook but need to have a realistic perspective that places a premium on the resiliency of the martech stack, or many marketers may find themselves in trouble should economic or pandemic conditions worsen. Marketing technologies with a longer-term plateau will likely remain protected in marketing budgets given their long-term importance as well as the incremental value they deliver over the midterm.

Here are my top six trends:

1-Niche Rich: Continued Customer Segmentation Refinement

2-Digital Meets Physical: Balancing Convenience and Connection

3-Sustainability: Casting a Very Long Shadow

4-New Formats: The Next Marketplaces, More DTC Brands

5-The Linchpin: Data and Technology

6-Mall Fall: Department Store Degradation and Mall Seizure

Business leaders who measure how their consumers map to Forrester’s Empowered Customer Segmentation and evolve along these critical dimensions will understand and anticipate customer demands for new services and experiences. Armed with that information, business leaders can prioritize their investments in digital innovation, pinpoint the customers most likely to reward innovation with new revenue, and identify which consumers threaten to churn.

Complimentary copy of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) and find out why Freshworks is the only company recognized as a Visionary.

Insights and trends from 1050+ CX, analytics and marketing leaders worldwide

Join IAB, IAB Tech Lab, government and other industry/consumer organizations in Project Rearc to harmonize privacy, personalization, and community.

The cookie-less future is barreling down upon our industry. Project Rearc seeks to rearchitect digital marketing to drive our industry forward while aligning the interests of consumers, businesses, and governments.

This collaboration needs industry leaders from the brand, agency, publisher, platform and technology industries to join together and address consumer demands for personalization and privacy through behavioral standards, codes of conduct, legal agreements, and enabling technologies.