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.

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?

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,

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

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.

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

Gestion des stocks, de la caisse ou amélioration des services en magasin : face aux enjeux de digitalisation du point de vente, de quelles solutions technologiques disposent les détaillants ? L'édition 2020 de l'exposition NRF Big Show à New York nous a permis d'en identifier certaines.

The MarTech marketplaces that RSG covers continue to evolve rapidly and have become more complex (with more overlaps!) this year. The Customer Data Platform (CDP) market is no different - with new vendors, more investment, emerging niches, and evolving use cases.

Martech: 2020 and Beyond, a new report collaboratively produced by BDO, WARC, and the University of Bristol, estimates that the worldwide spend on marketing technology is $121.5 billion.

For the 5th year, we've run The Stackies Awards, where marketers send in a single slide that illustrates their 'stack' — the collection of marketing technology tools they use and how they conceptualize them together. We received 48 entries this year, and some truly incredible ones. Airstack graciously sponsored the awards this time. And, as promised, we've gladly made a donation of $4,800 to Girls Who Code on behalf of the 48 entrants ABinBev, Airstream, Alliant Credit Union, Artemis Health, BraunAbility, Esri, G Adventures, Juniper Networks, Lola, Nationwide Advisory Solutions, Paychex, Racing Post, Sargento Foods, The Telegraph, Tennant, and the

As Bill Murray would have said in Groundhog Day, 'Well, it's martech landscape day... again.' It has become an annual tradition at our spring MarTech conference to release an updated version of maybe the most infamous slide in marketing: the marketing technology landscape. We're keeping that custom alive this year again. What a crazy graphic! We nicknamed it the 'Martech 5000' a couple of years ago. While I like the ring of that — kinda rhymes with the Fortune 500 and the Inc. 5000 — it's a misnomer. Last year's landscape already exceeded 6,829 solutions. We're now up to 7,040 solutions

LUMA is the leading investment bank focused on digital media and marketing. We provide strategic advice, proven M&A expertise, and extensive industry knowledge to optimize outcomes for our clients.

In this recorded briefing RSG founder Tony Byrne takes you on a tour of a new reference model for the omnichannel era. Tony shows you how to guide your future stack investments towards supporting omnichannel needs, and what this means for content, data, decisions, and operations. If you manage one of these tech stacks, this is a must-see educational session.

We expect technology spend by CMOs to increase 10x in 10 Years from $12 billion to $120 billion, unlocking a huge opportunity for marketing technology companies and opening the door to the Decade of the CMO.

Beyond the world of email marketing in the wider world of business, the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity and employment has risen to prominence in the last two plus years as more affordable systems have become available from vendors. This has naturally prompted marketers to review the potential marketing applications of AI. To answer this question, in our guide to marketing applications of AI , Smart Insights has reviewed the opportunities and tools for AI across the customer lifecycle. This report highlights the critical trends and techniques that will help you transform your brand-customer relationships using the most powerful channel in your marketing mix: email!

Digital transformation is a long game. At the same time, it has to start somewhere. Over the years, the biggest digital transformation priority for companies has continued to be the customer experience. That work is aimed at fixing and modernizing the customer journey. Once this happens, digital transformation tackles more sweeping efforts that involve multiple groups. This is why the organizations who are further along the six stages of digital transformation develop customer-centered roadmaps and then divide and conquer against those initiatives across the enterprise.

Digital transformation was initially intended to modernize technological infrastructure, migrating costly, dated, and complicated hardware and software solutions to more agile and scalable cloud and mobile platforms. But since the early days of digital transformation, the speed of technology innovation has only increased. Now the digital in digital transformation has to keep up with all relevant technology trends as they represent disruptive threats and competitive opportunities. This is likely a key driver of 2018’s dramatic rise of substantial digital transformation budgets.