WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

WHY IT MATTERS: this report is by far the best reference I found to understand the pricing strategy of software as a service and subscription services. Should be mandatory reading to anyone selling online today.

WHY IT MATTERS: too many solutions in the marketing domain! This report can help identify solutions as it becomes more important to connect with customers and have a central repository of information

WHY IT MATTERS: customer experience measurement tools are useful but expensive. This report from one of the top tier solution highlights important elements of the omnichannel journey is leading organizations.

WHY IT MATTERS: digital transformation often is driven by marketing to deliver new customer omni channel experiences. This 5-book series provides a ton of useful guidance to help sales and marketing teams use digital technology at it max for content marketing and sales.

WHY IT MATTERS: Google data studio is a very simple and useful tool to consolidate and display data from websites, ecommerce, social and other digital activities. Great for marketing but anyone with interested in showing how good (or bad) their digital activities are. Moreover the results can be viewed online or emailed as PDF!

WHY IT MATTERS: interesting to see technology skills in marketing agencies starting to become the norm. Still, limited to data and web when there is so much more: integration, security, eCommerce, store/ physical devices, voice, etc. Marketing agencies need to embrace marTech in a much bigger way to stay relevant...

WHY IT MATTERS: 3rd party cookies are used by advertisers to track down users across websites. The end of support will require new solutions for marketers to continue tracking us all...

WHY IT MATTER: when you spend 10$ on Facebook ads, how much of that spend contributed to the 100$ sale? Simple question, tricky answer in this world of omni-channel customer journeys. This guide provides a very good overview of the problems and solutions as they related to marketing attribution in B2B.

WHY IT MATTERS: technology to capture personal information will have to change in an era of increased privacy needs, legal requirements... and desires for brands and corporation to continue tracking our every move. The presentation has interesting data on trends in this great viz of our data-rich world...

WHY IT MATTERS: chatbots were supposed to solve all customer service issues. That was 5 years ago. Today, we see them deployed with limited value on websites mostly as pre-screeners to qualify leads. As Gartner proposes here, maybe their use is better within organizations to help workers be more productive. Or maybe we're just creating a new "clippy" office assistant

(Microsoft circa 1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant)

WHY IT MATTERS: with customer experience journeys and omni-channel integration the primary focus of marketing teams, web content management (WCMS) solutions are growing in scope to become digital experience platforms (DXP). Or so Gartner says. My recommendation is to be very critical as the implementation of those platforms become large-scale projects with impacts across many business units, leading to easier integration but often solutions you may not need or may not implement for years. Sometimes it is better to go with a smaller solution than a full fledged platform to deliver value short term, especially in less mature organizations...

WHY IT MATTERS: some useful reminders of the the common mistakes that marketers make in their analytics reporting. With some solutions.

WHY IT MATTERS: quelques-unes des innovations du récent salon NRF à New York.

WHY IT MATTERS: a great review of top social monitoring tools with very useful comparative grid to help kickstart your comparative study. Moreover, this post shows how far we've come in terms of breath and depth of tooling for social monitoring, confirming the importance of the channel in marketing digital transformation.

WHY IT MATTERS: this report provides insights in the many transformations that the beauty industry is going through, with many being digital technology driven.

WHY IT MATTERS: most organizations have multiple websites to manage (for different countries, regions, departments, products, focus areas, etc.) making multi-site WCMS solutions essential. Yet most multi-sites are not architected the right way ending up with different look and feel, technologies, databases, analytics, etc. This report provides some insights into key decisions to make.

WHY IT MATTERS: consolidation of customer data for reuse and syndication relies on tools called Identity Resolution that can map customer data from multiple sources to provide a true customer360 database and graph.

WHY IT MATTERS: there are so many solutions you can leverage out there to build apps and solutions, why would anyone build their own?

WHY IT MATTERS: useful comparison tool of 19 marketing automation solutions. Obviously biased in favor of Vbout but useful if you take it with the appropriate grain of salt.

WHY IT MATTERS: Acquia has been playing catchup to Adobe and sitecore in the WCMS platform game and it looks like they have listened to most urgent complaints: CDN, automation, personalization. eCommerce remains weak.

WHY IT MATTERS: there is so much information that you can capture from free or almost free online tools like Alexa that it is a shame not to use them

WHY IT MATTERS: always great insights by RSG, this one is same. The net net: CDP is a great but immature technology with too many use cases and no solution that delivers on all of them. If you have a use case that mandates a CDP, go ahead and pick the best of breed solution that suits your needs. Otherwise, wait. So true.

Listening to the webinar I could not help and wonder: who in an organization should be leading a CDP implementation? The use case scream marketing but the technology requires IT skills and expertise. When will the role of marketingTechnologist finally become a reality?...

WHY IT MATTERS: DMPs we popular a while back. Here is a good report on the use cases and scenarios where DMPs are useful.

WHY IT MATTERS: one third of the marketing budget is spent on technologies, and growing (I assume it was below 5% in 2010). Yet I fear that few IT resources know enough of marketing functions and processes (attribution, campaign management, advertising, etc.) and few marketing professionals know or care about technology requirements (system integration, master data, performance optimization, cloud computing, etc.). The need for marketing technologist is more important than ever.

WHY IT MATTERS: this article provides 4 ways organizations can improve customer experience. The best one is "Every employee should be able to solve customer problems".