Marketing has changed more in the last five years than in the 100 before that. The speed of change in marketing is picking up its pace, and it’s going to keep accelerating.  The implication is that marketers will need a customer engagement platform to keep up. Here's why marketers need a platform, and what that platform looks like.

Advanced/ Excerpt...

Here’s what a marketing platform needs to deliver:

1. UNDERSTAND: Track customer identity, contacts, and context across every digital, social, and mobile channel — then organize this information into a single, open data repository.
2. ORCHESTRATE: Design and coordinate engaging customer experiences and continuous conversations that take each customer on a personal journey over time – and do this in an organized, automated way.
3. PERSONALIZE: Deliver relevant, personalized content and messages across channels and devices.
4. MANAGE: Support the operational aspects of running a marketing department. Plan the marketing calendar, coordinate content, track investments, and tie the marketing budget directly to results.
5. OPTIMIZE: Measure and maximize marketing ROI across channels. Attribute outcomes to each marketing experience, regardless of which application handled the interaction.  Support data-driven decision making at the speed of marketing.
6. LEARN: The pace of change in marketing isn’t slowing down, so the platform also needs to give guidance, best practices, and knowledge to help marketers keep up.

Lastly, as discussed above, a true platform needs to be open to allow other marketing applications to tap into their data repositories, workflow capabilities, analytics, and so on. A true platform provides a backbone of common orchestration, common management, and common measurement, competing with the other platforms to provide the most complete ecosystem of marketing solutions.

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Expert/ Excerpts...

-- >  Marketing technology is the first major business market of the cloud computing era.

-- >  Large marketing technology vendors must wrestle with diseconomies of scale.

-- >  There will still be some large marketing technology vendors — especially platforms and middleware that simplify integration — but they will also accelerate diversity.

-- >  Marketing buyers may actually benefit more from a larger vendor space.

-- >  Agencies/marketing service providers will blur the line between software and services.

-- >  Context: the 50-year trajectory of exponential hardware and software growth.

Software is going to continue to power more and more things in our lives. And not only will marketing use software as tools in its own work — marketing will increasingly be “baked in” to other software applications. We already see this with freemium web and mobile products today. The growth hacker movement was launched this way.

Like it or not, marketing is going to have to deal with a lot more software ahead. (This is why the career prospects for chief marketing technologist roles are very bright.)

I also appreciate the motivation of IT departments to limit the number of hardware and software variables in their environment. But the track record of IT successfully resisting the natural expansion of technology — you don’t need a PC, you don’t need Web access, you don’t need cloud apps, you don’t need your own smartphone, you don’t need a tablet, etc. — is sobering. Every single one of those ramparts has been breached.

That’s why I believe that “other things aren’t equal” — and that the number of marketing technology vendors in the world will never again drop below 1,000 in my lifetime.

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Advanced/ Condensed...

Six classes of marketing technology seemed to logically fit together into a semblance of meaningful structure:

-- >  Internet services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter that underlie today’s marketing environment.

-- >  Infrastructure such as databases, big data management, cloud computing, and software development tools.

-- >  Marketing Backbone Platforms such as CRM, marketing automation, WCM, and e-commerce engines.

-- >  Marketing Middleware such as DMPs, CDPs, tag management, cloud connectors, user management, and API services.

-- >  Marketing Experiences — more specialized technologies that directly affect prospects and customers across their lifecycle, such as advertising, email, social media, SEO, content marketing, A/B testing, etc.

-- >  Marketing Apps — the “front-office” of modern marketing.

-- >  Marketing Operations — the tools and data for managing the “back-office” of marketing, such as analytics, MRM, DAM, and agile marketing management.

Here’s the highlight reel of what [the author] found most interesting while working on this:

1. Marketing Backbone Platforms and Marketing Middleware. Platforms are software that every marketer needs — a CRM, a core web content/experience system, and at least basic marketing automation (i.e., campaigns and customer journey management). Middleware is the “software glue” that makes it even easier for multiple, different products to work together. Combined, these platforms and marketing middleware make it increasingly manageable to orchestrate diverse marketing software products into a cohesive stack. Each business will be better able to tailor a marketing technology portfolio that best serves their mission.

2. The Emergence of the Marketing Apps Category. I believe there’s a new category of marketing software that’s emerging for marketing apps. These products let marketers produce interactive experiences, rather than static content, to engage their audience.

3. Consolidation and Diversification in Marketing Automation. The second largest category of products in this landscape is marketing automation/integrated marketing platforms, with 51 different vendors. Many of these are new ventures or expansions of vendors from other categories (especially email marketing). And there are undoubtedly more that I inadvertently overlooked (my apologies). It’s a big category.

4. “Ad Tech” in the Minority in the Marketing Technology Landscape. There’s still no denying that the vast majority of marketing technology innovation is happening outside the context of advertising. This is indicative of — and directly enabling — the seismic shift of marketing away from advertising to experience-driven marketing.

5. A Rich Collection of Agile Marketing Tools. Finally, I’m excited by the wonderful set of agile management tools that are available today. Granted, most of these were not designed specifically with marketing in mind. But the ones I selected here can work beautifully in supporting agile marketing. More generally, the growth and innovation with these products speaks to the increasing traction that agile and lean management philosophies are gaining across more and more organizations.

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