Sailthru：十大营销技术预测报告.pdf

THE OF F U T U R E MARKETING MARKETING TECHNOLOGY PREDICTIONS PREDICTION 1 Mass Customization Will Come to Marketing Tech PREDICTION 2 Consumers Will Expect a Better Experience the Longer They Interact With Your Brand PREDICTION 3 The Promise Versus the Reality of Legacy Vendor Integrations Will Be Exposed PREDICTION 4 Value to Marketers Will Come Via Consolidated Solutions PREDICTION 5 More Dashboards Will Cease To Be the Answer to Marketers Challenges PREDICTION 6 Recommendations and Predictions Will be Seen As Different Opportunities PREDICTION 7 The Path to Omnichannel will Become Clear PREDICTION 8 Marketers Will Realize “Journey Building” is Just Rebranded Segmentation PREDICTION 9 Industry Analysts Will Continue to Converge the Categorizations of CRM, Marketing Automation and Big Data Technologies PREDICTION 10 Marketers Will Realize Cost Saving Through Holistic, Natively-Built Platforms 2014 was another year marked by huge acquisitions of marketing technologies. As 2015 approaches, many marketers are wondering whats next for the industry. Most important, they need to know how those coming changes will impact their ability to engage with their customers. The concern makes sense. On one hand, you have the marketing cloud, a newly coined term without much definition around what it means and how it really works. On the other hand, you have many new players in the market and you need to determine which next-generation technologies will continue growing strongly. Our team of technologists, marketers and strategists banded together with clients and analysts to look into what is to come in the next 12 months for the mar-tech industry. The 10 predictions in this ebook cover everything from consumer demands for equal exchange of data to marketers and analysts alike calling for consolidated solutions rather than marketing clouds. Have a prediction of your own to share? Tweet your forecasts to sailthru. Cheers, Neil Capel CEO and Founder of Sailthru Table of Contents GET A DEMO Mass Customization Will Come to Marketing Tech In manufacturing, the past few years have seen mass customization become not only a huge hit, but something expected by consumers. Nikes iD site lets customers design the look and fit of their shoe to make a fashion statement thats uniquely theirs. Motorolas Project Ara goes beyond simply customizing the look of a phone to allow customers to swap out displays, keyboards and extra batteries. Across industries, mass customization has allowed producers to meet each individual customers varied needs with the efficiency bestowed by mass production techniques. In 2015, this same philosophy, and its execution, will come to marketing. Marketers will finally achieve the holy grail of creating customized marketing messaging for every individual, at scale, without breaking the bank. There are two things that will allow advanced, personalized marketing to finally take center stage in 2015. First, customers will demand it. Second, the technology is ready for prime time. It may sound strange to say that customers are demanding a particular type of marketing. But think about it: Theres been a lot of conversation over the past five to 10 years not just about banner blindness, but about customers ability to tune out just about any marketing message. Frankly, the reason customers tune out so many messages is that they know that we, as marketers, can do a lot better. Customers are fully aware that certain aspects of their personal information are well known to marketers, and can be discovered by anyone with a working knowledge of Google. So a 30-year- old married woman without children is right to stop responding when presented with pitches for toddler clothes. She assumes, and has every right to assume, that we will treat her like the person she is. It shouldnt matter if shes interacting with a brand from her phone, her tablet, or a laptop, or even browsing in a physical store. The most savvy marketers have been collecting the data needed to personalize offers and have put it to use at scale. Unfortunately, most have been saddled with processes that are often time-consuming and expensive, thanks to legacy technologies making promises upon which they cannot fully deliver. To boot, these marketers have also long been trusting third-party data sources that dont deliver the quality of information needed to truly automate and execute a personalization strategy. Mass customization saves marketers from having to keep investing in novel ways to break their total audience into smaller and smaller segments, each of which remains unwieldy. Now marketers can look at the individuals who make up their audience, and use technology to design experiences specifically for each person. This kind of “mass personalization” is now within reach of mere mortals whose marketing budgets have not yet reached the stratosphere. Its time has come. PREDICTION 1 1 GET A DEMO Remember those loyalty cards that used to clutter up your wallet? If you bought 10 coffees and collected 10 punches on a card to prove it youd get one free. There was little exchange of data, outside of when you redeemed your coffee card, but you thought that it was a fair exchange (if you thought of it at all). Todays version of loyalty cards are found on smartphones and tablets and are saved into every consumers browser. Whats also different is that todays consumers know that when they interact with a brand theres a whole lot more information being transferred to various databases much more than just how many drinks theyve purchased. Data is known about everything, including what coffee they like to drink, what time of day they prefer to drink it, average order value, and more. The “exchange rate” on that digital currency is about to change. 2015 is the year that consumers will expect to reap the benefits of allowing brands to collect and use their personal information and click-stream data. What brands can bet on is that the particulars of what each person wants will vary, but in the grand scheme of things, all consumers are really looking for the same thing: a better experience. Until recently, most brands have not had the technological infrastructure to offer experiences much more sophisticated than a free coffee (not that theres anything wrong with free coffee). The relational databases used by many brands to collect and store customer information often cant handle more than three months worth of structured data, making it difficult (to put it nicely) to engage with a customer across every device and store location. So when it comes to gauging the long-term impact of marketing actions on customers, most brands have been handicapped in their ability to offer a better experience in exchange for data. Another way to think about this is to consider the beans that go into those coffees that youre now paying for with your iPhone. Since 1988, some coffee beans have been certified as Fair Trade. Customers know that when they buy Fair Trade coffee, theres something that goes on in the background. Most dont know, and dont want to know, every facet of what Fair Trade means. But they understand that whatever the details, Fair Trade is thoughtful and respectful of producers. Customers appreciate thoughtfulness and respect. Marketers should be able to treat them that way, too, and have their brand enjoy that preferential place in consumers hearts as a result aka loyalty. Right now, the relationship between brands and consumers is one-sided. That is destined to change in the coming year as the conversation shifts from just a concern over privacy to a question of what value your brand delivers to consumers in return for the data that you gather over time. PREDICTION 2 Consumers Will Expect a Better Experience the Longer They Interact With Your Brand 2 GET A DEMO In the last 24 months, enterprise software providers have raced to buy up newer marketing competitors ExactTarget, Buddy Media, Eloqua, Responsys, Silverpop, and countless others have all been acquired. To some extent, this makes sense. None of the big players had an end-to-end, homegrown solution to offer to their marketing customers, and in some cases their database technology didnt allow for scaling to actually provide solutions needed by modern marketing organizations. So they bought up a slew of other players and boldly announced the birth of the marketing cloud. In 2015, all these acquisitions are going to be expected to come to market as unified products, fully integrated with not just the assets of the legacy players that bought them, but also those of the other companies their new parents have purchased along the way. It is going to be time to put up or shut up. We are predicting a bounty of Frankenstack nightmares, none of which will be able to deliver on the promise of a flexible and customer-centric solution. The rhetoric around the marketing cloud will go from being a joke to an impediment to growth that drives high costs in both time and money for marketers. The reason its called the cloud is because its completely nebulous. If youre using a marketing cloud, youre using one company for email and three other platforms for three other things. Thats whats in your cloud. Youve signed on with one company, but there could be eight or nine technologies back there chugging along, none of which are fully integrated themselves. In order for your data to be useful as you automate response to real-time consumer engagements, there is a ton that has to happen in an instant and in most cases, the so-called marketing cloud youre paying through the nose for just isnt going to be up to it. Lest you think were being unduly pessimistic, consider the almost comically simple (by comparison) example of merging Excel spreadsheets. If you have one spreadsheet that has columns labeled “lastname, firstname, email, telephone,” and another that reads, “fullname, email, telephone,” well, Im sure many of you have googled how to put those together and wasted valuable time on the mundane. The big acquirers are dealing with this same problem, but on a massive scale. They have to deal with issues as big as high-level integration and as granular as data quality. Even with two years to do it, theyre going to come up short, pushing out time frames, reining in capabilities, and leaving a whole lot of customers holding the bag. 2015 is the year customers will realize that these integrations wont bear fruit and will begin seeking natively built solutions that give them the scale, speed, and flexibility they need. The Promise Versus the Reality of Legacy Vendor Integrations Will Be Exposed PREDICTION 3 3 GET A DEMO Todays leading marketers want their technology in one place. Right now weve got a variety of stacks, but very few consolidated solutions. 2015 is the year when marketers will realize greater lift and revenue from end-to-end providers than stand- alone solutions. The big legacy software providers havent actually had a consolidated solution to offer but theyve had the financial might to buy lots of specialized companies and attempt to stitch them together. Since different groups within the same company often use different stacks, this can misalign KPIs for the business as a whole. It has never made a ton of sense for different teams within the same organizations to be using disparate tools to collect and analyze data that is closely related, when the end goal is a seamless customer experience. These hodgepodges of tools arose by accident, simply because in many companies, data has only recently become an organization- wide priority. When these “solutions stacks” were purchased and implemented, individual managers werent thinking about how they might have to collaborate and share data with colleagues in marketing, sales, information technology and even finance five years down the road. The idea that a marketer could generate a single customer view, enabling true omnichannel marketing, still seemed a bit hazy. Now this fragmentation is impeding business objectives. It increasingly makes less and less sense for each team to use their own specialized stack with a few bells and whistles bolted on to it. And as marketers align around creating a single customer view and following a continuous customer experience, their technology needs to change. To meet these new needs, marketers and CIOs will seek out flexible, natively built solutions that will bring together customer relationship management, personalization, and big data seamlessly under one roof. Value to Marketers Will Come Via Consolidated Solutions PREDICTION 4 4 GET A DEMO Instead of being inspired by the novelty of dashboards, marketers are now exhausted by their ubiquity. Theres good reason theyre boring marketers to tears: Essentially, most dashboards are bottom- feeder visualizations that dont give marketers the insight they need. For a while, though, when no one was asking the tough questions, it was great to be able to throw a slew of those visualizations into a PowerPoint presentation and impress teams across an organization with graphically-represented “progress.” Now everyone is asking the tough questions. And no one needs or wants to wade through 8,000 dashboards to find the data thats truly relevant. Dashboards date from the age when marketers had little information, so any scrap was welcome. Now they have, quite literally, more data than they know what to do with. The truth of 2015 is that marketers dont need more data, they need to derive better information from all that data. Ideally, theyd just like to see the metrics that are proven to matter to their business. As more organizations become data-centric, the idea of sharing all these dashboards throughout the organization, and relying upon each individual user to sort through the information to achieve an actual insight, makes less and less sense. You want to share the information that is related to business needs, and not waste anyones time with the rest. You need to be done with chasing shiny data. The dashboards that will prove their worth in the next year will give marketers insight into the future of their brands using multidimensional data cubes that are more malleable, flexible, and better able to serve the needs of individual brands. There will be fewer dashboards, and they will not show you data. They will give you insight. More Dashboards Will Cease to Be the Answer to Marketers Challenges PREDICTION 5 5 GET A DEMO A funny thing happened in 2014: Marketing Technology vendors all of a sudden became severely vocabulary- challenged. As a result, they started selling recommendations as predictions. Recommendations and predictions are both important. But theyre not the same thing. In our industry, a recommendation is what one person might like to buy (or read) based on what other similar people bought or read after having taken the same series of