Is Marketing Absorbing IT's Role for Marketing Automation? #BMAthriving

As the role of marketing grows with importance within organizations, budgets have begun to shift as well. With marketing becoming increasingly technology based, it now stands as an indisputable driver of IT purchases. So much so that Gartner research predicts that by 2017, CMOs will have larger IT budgets than CIOs.

That was the discussion at a recent Business Marketing Association (BMA) regional conference in Denver. The event was designed to bring together both marketing and IT executives to facilitate conversations on how to better work together as roles, processes and outcomes continue to evolve.

Two closely tied panels during the day included demand generation and marketing automation. Speakers from the corporate, agency and technology spheres shared their perspectives on current challenges and future trends for both demand gen and marketing automation.

No Small Change

Raab Associates predicts that 2012 revenues for B2B marketing automation systems will jump 60 percent, surpassing the 50 percent spike in 2011. Reaching US$ 525 million in revenues this year will certainly underscore the fact that not only do enterprises lean heavily on marketing automation, so do SMBs. This means that companies can now take smarter action in connecting with their customers and prospects, and also can track what’s working, what isn’t and rapidly adjust.

No More Random Acts of Marketing

Marketers need to think first about the early stages that encompass integrated marketing management — the operations side of the house. By better understanding their processes, one company streamlined enough to increase its productivity threefold. Now, they’re also able to consistently measure their results and make smarter decisions once they engage with a prospect.

One of the transitions that panelists see from marketing holding control of their IT infrastructure, is that the skillsets that marketers need as technologists vary drastically from that of the IT department. Today’s marketers need to understand how to align the processes, platforms and people in order to accomplish business goals of the organization. This requires knowing how a technology infrastructure helps move them in the right direction faster.

What are the top things that companies can do to make their demand gen and marketing automation programs more effective today?

1. Clean up your database: Data is everything to a marketer. Make sure yours is clean and that you’ve removed emotionally disengaged contacts. Once complete, you’ll immediately have a much clearer picture of your reach and effectiveness and how to woo sales qualified leads (SQLs).
2. Make your content relevant: Speak to your audience from a buyer’s perspective, not yours as the seller. Keep content current. Understand your goals for the next 12 months and how you expect to interact with prospects. Automation puts the right content in front of the right buyer at the right time.
3. Rally the troops: We’ve moved beyond the traditional art and copy aspect of marketing, and now have to integrate code into all of our decisions. This means getting everyone together — marketing, IT, sales and finance — in the same room early to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and understand the path to reach them.
4. Know your KPIs: While SQLs tend to serve as the ROI metric for most companies, those with a more sophisticated outlook have a model that allows them to push deeper into the funnel. With data feedback on multiple areas, marketers will then understand what KPIs have the most meaning, and let technology help make these areas even more effective.

What’s on the Horizon?

With all that’s changing and at such a rapid pace, understanding tomorrow’s trends is paramount for making decisions today. These panelists had consensus on a few key directions for the future:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Is Anxiety About Our Wired Choices Misplaced?

Instead of dialing up our anxiety about privacy in the changing online world, we should use it as an opportunity to question and test the security of everything--driver's licenses, plastic credit cards, paper medical records.

As an engineer and a millennial who has grown up with an Internet connection, I’m constantly connected to some device. I read email while I’m running on the treadmill. I built an app that knows where you are at all times, which more than two and a half million people opted in to using. Not everyone consumes technology as voraciously as I do, but nearly half of Americans tote around smartphones. As we become more keenly aware of these phones’ ability to track our every move, strangely almost in lockstep we find that we can’t live without them.

Why do we have so much anxiety about being found when we clearly choose to be wired?

If you want to live a truly private life, ditch your mobile, disconnect your Internet, pay with only cash, get rid of your highway toll transponder, forget about loyalty cards, stop answering the census, stop answering the door, build a bunker somewhere underground in New Hampshire (live free or die), drive a pre-2005 unregistered vehicle without a GPS (or better yet, a horse without a GPS), stock up on canned goods, become extremely paranoid--and don’t forget to hide from the IRS.

Unfortunately, going all Thoreau isn’t an option for most of us, despite our desires to keep our online identities under lock and key. And as the recent epic hacking of Wired reporter Mat Honan tells us, we aren’t entirely immune.

But, all things considered, we should be far more paranoid about the real-world constructs centered around identity that we’ve failed to question for decades -- sometimes even centuries. The problem is, we’ve grown up with so many blatant divulgences of personally identifiable information that we think are completely safe.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why don’t we question things like credit cards we carry around in our wallets that link our personal information to static and easily visible digits on a piece of plastic? We willingly hand this piece of plastic to strangers almost daily, allowing so many opportunities for massive fraud to happen. Not to mention we print our social security numbers on paper cards and sometimes even send them--unencrypted--over email.

I’d argue physical media (be it paper or plastic) is our identity’s public enemy number one. From medical records to mortgages, there’s so much paper in the world that exposes our identities to anyone who can open a folder in a filing cabinet.

To contrast, the online world that we understand considerably less is a far safer one. Technology is uprooting some of these decades-old constructs that just don’t work, and shouldn’t be status quo for our modern lives. But technological change understandably scares us, as most revolutions do.

That fear is not totally irrational. The trade-off here is one of scale of security breach. While storing your medical records on paper in a doctors office allows for easy data theft, the limit of that theft is the size of the office. It's easy to break into a doctor's office (I don't know this from experience -- promise!) but you can only get a couple hundred records. On the other hand, while digital storage is incredibly hard to break into, if you do make it in, the scale of the breach is hundreds of thousands of records.

In my opinion, this is a good tradeoff. The absolute value of data theft should decrease with intensely secure centralized storage. Yes, breaches are larger, but there are far fewer of them. The lesson here is that we need to take that natural scale of the Internet into consideration when designing systems that touch sensitive data. Encryption is critical. Human security perhaps even more so. But also old-school techniques like dividing the data across multiple systems with heterogeneous security systems and completely different architectures.

My hope is that consumers will simply be more aware of these tradeoffs. If it turns out that there is a more secure digital solution, let's analyze, optimize, then embrace it. Payments is a prime opportunity. If there isn't a better digital solution, then let's stick with the current physical solution until technology evolves to offer a better one. Driver's licenses are perhaps the most poignant example of this, and they are the last thing that still forces me to carry a wallet.

No matter what, I’m happy that we’re questioning technological changes and becoming more informed consumers. Maybe we should be using our anxiety about our changing online world as an opportunity to question everything, no matter how long we’ve managed to put up with it.

--Author Seth Priebatsch is the founder and chief ninja of LevelUp and SCVNGR.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com