Chief Marketing Technologist

Good content marketing is a part of customer experience

Today the Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs, and Brighcove released a new 2013 B2B content marketing report with updated benchmarks, budgets, and trends for North America. It sheds light on the budgets, content tactics, and social distribution channels that B2B marketers are using to build brand awareness, acquire customers, and generate leads.

But one of the things I found most interesting was this:

Out of the 1,416 respondents, 56% do all their content creation in-house. Even among large companies (1,000+ employees), 35% of them produce all their content in-house too. That's telling, particularly in an industry (marketing) that is renown for its love of outside agencies, service providers, and freelancers.

Last year, only 38% of those surveyed did all their content in-house (in large companies, only 26%). As content marketing matures, the trend is to insource more content creation.

Coincidentally — or perhaps not — the biggest challenge for B2B content marketers last year was "producing the kind of content that engages." This year, the biggest challenge is "producing enough content." Now, I wouldn't want to confuse correlation with causation, but one possible narrative is this: to create engaging content, you need to create it (mostly) yourself. And that takes quality time and effort, a trade-off to some degree in volume.

But clearly that effort is worth it, as 54% plan to increase their content marketing budgets in 2013.

My take on it: good content marketing is a part of customer experience. In many cases, it's the first experience — the crucial first impression — that a prospective customer has with a business. And customer experience, in all its various contexts and stages, is hard to outsource effectively. To be remarkable and powerful, it has to be authentic; and to be authentic, it must be inherently driven by the company itself.

No doubt, the new set of capabilities demanded of modern marketing — content marketing, social media marketing, marketing technology and marketing operations — presents plenty of challenges for marketers to assimilate them into their organizations. But marketers are also recognizing that they're an inseparable part of the holistic customer experience. And as this trend with content marketing suggests, marketers are up to the challenge.

5 meta-trends underlying almost all of modern marketing

The fast-paced evolution of marketing is a sea of trends, from attribution models to the Zero Moment of Truth. So many trends, in fact, that it can be hard to keep track of them all.

A meta-trend runs deeper, powering more specific trends, like a tidal force that drives waves to the shore. The following graphic illustrates five meta-trends that I believe underpin almost all of the marketing trends we see today — and new ones that we can anticipate in the years ahead:

1. The great digital migration of marketing (and business).

Across computers, smartphones, tablets — and soon TV, cars, appliances, wearable computing, and who-knows-what-next — people are continuously engaged in digital platforms at work and home. Digitally-powered buyers have enabled entire marketing movements such as inbound marketing and conversion optimization.

This huge shift in audience behavior has naturally been followed by a shift in marketing spend to the digital domain. It's not just digital advertising, but investment in technology, human resources in digital functions (such as social media), and budget reallocation towards digital-centric services. This will only accelerate as companies advance from digital marketing to digital business. As Mary Meeker recently said, digital gives us the opportunity to re-imagine everything.

The biggest challenges for marketers in this transformation to digital arise from:

• The explosion from a small number of standardized communications mechanisms to a kaleidoscope of fractured and ever-changing channels, vehicles, devices, and audience contexts.
• The blindingly fast speed at which digital interactions are triggered and evolve.
• The rising expectations of customers in an alway-connected, technology-supercharged, UX-crafted world, where Amazon, Apple, and Google have set the bar high (and are moving it higher).
• The virtual proximity of a much broader range of "competitors" (not always the obvious ones).
• The unprecedented interconnection of nearly everyone via social media into globally accessible, highly specialized, and immensely influential communities.
• The shift of information asymmetry from sellers to buyers — customers now have much more power in the purchasing process than the salespeople who used to be the gatekeepers to solutions.

Meeting these challenges doesn't just require a new bag of marketing tactics. It requires a rethinking of the marketing organization and the business as a whole. From this one mother-meta-trend, the next four have emerged.

2. The convergence of paid, earned, and owned media.

One of the defining characteristics of digital has been the explosive growth in the number of different media, channels, vehicles, devices, etc. that customers and prospective buyers use. This diverse and fractured landscape has generally been divided into three buckets:

Paid media such as display advertising, paid search, TV spots, outdoor advertising, sponsorships, etc. — anything where the marketer is renting time or space for an engagement with their audience.

Owned media such as a company's web site, its landing pages, blogs, mobile apps, Facebook pages, YouTube channels, etc. — anything where a company owns or has control over the content of a non-rented space or experience.

Earned media such as traditional press mentions and word-of-mouth to broad new social media mentions, likes, reviews, links, comment threads, forum posts, Pinterest pins, etc. — anything that someone else says about you that you aren't directly paying them to say.

Marketers have tried to cope with this multiplication of touchpoints by spinning off different groups — or hiring different agencies — to focus on each particular slice of this landscape. But this "horizontal scaling" has led to many silos within marketing that have little continuity and coordination between them.

For the buyer, however, the bright lines between these silos are invisible. They flow from one touchpoint to another, across media, across devices, and they expect their experience with a company to have consistency and continuity. This led to a groundbreaking report published by Altimeter earlier this year promoting the vision of converged media.

Managing the complexity of converged media — as it continues to rapidly evolve — will be one of the biggest strategic, organizational, and technical challenges of marketing for the next two decades.

3. Customer experience as the core of marketing.

Marketing used to interface to the world primarily through communications. Craft the right message, for the right audience, and deliver it to them at the right time, in the right place. The art of storytelling.

But while great storytelling is still essential to marketing success, it is now part of a much larger responsibility: delivering remarkable customer experiences.

There are two reasons why customer experience is becoming the heart of modern marketing:

First, the physical and temporal distance between a communications message (an ad, an email, a link on social media, etc.) and the experience that a prospect or customer has actually interacting with a business has collapsed to a click (or a tap, as the case may be). In the digital world, people go from passively receiving a brand story to actively living that story in an instant. And the experience they have interacting with you — across a myriad of touchpoints via numerous devices — becomes the definition of your brand in their minds.

It's a tautology: great experience = great brand.

Second, social media gives everyone who has an experience with you — good or bad — the ability to share their story with others. These audience stories have the power to magnify or destroy the "official" stories told by the brand. The only real influence marketers have over this is to make sure that the experiences those audience storytellers have give them reasons to say wonderful things about you.

This is why everything in the customer experience is now a part of marketing. This is a huge increase in the scope of marketing, especially given the explosion of customer touchpoints in the digital age. It requires new skills and capabilities within marketing's wheelhouse. But it elevates marketing from a role in the supporting cast to the star of the show.

4. Rise of the creative/marketing technologist.

There are two fundamental sources of power in digital: code and data.

Code, i.e., software, lets us shape the digital world. We can create and alter the experiences that customers have with us — via the web, mobile, and future digital devices — with an ease and fluidity that has no parallel in the physical world. It is The Matrix. And software developers are true Neo-like characters, able to forge virtual reality out of the fire of imagination.

Software developers now pervade modern marketing. They work as creative technologists at agencies. They work as product developers for a vast array of vendors creating marketing technology platforms and applications. They work inside marketing departments — or adjacently in IT — as marketing technologists. They work as "growth hackers" at Internet companies, one of the hottest positions in Silicon Valley today.

Not every marketer needs to be a software developer, but every marketing organization must become software-savvy. The choice of which marketing software to adopt and creative ideas for how to use it are powerful sources of differentiation and competitive advantage. Good marketing management now incorporates good technology management too.

Data is the input and output of this code-crafted environment, and it now flows at a prodigious rate and volume. Data enables us to personalize customer experiences at scale in highly innovative ways. Data scientists in marketing unearth new customer insights and market opportunities. Data may soon be a marketing channel itself.

But perhaps more importantly, data has transformed marketing into a more quantitative discipline. This new accountability is helping marketing evolve from an expense to a measurable driver of revenue. It's making experimentation and optimization, through A/B and multivariate testing, a part of everyday marketing life.

5. Agile marketing management.

It used to be that there was a yearly marketing plan, which was part of a five-year plan. Most of it could be executed in lockstep, quarter by quarter. Marketing had the luxury — or constraints, depending on your point of view — of long planning cycles, which were distinct from long implementation cycles.

No longer. While there is certainly still a need for a guiding long-term strategic vision, the day-to-day operations of modern marketing has to be much more fluid.

Particularly with social media, new crises and opportunities can arise in a matter of hours. But even less urgent interactions with the market are more dynamic in the digital domain. The landscape of potential buyers and competitors changes rapidly.

Thriving in this new environment requires a new approach to marketing management and culture.

This new approach is called agile marketing. It borrows concepts from agile software development, agile project management, the Kanban and Kaizen methods, and the lean start-up movement to help the modern marketing organization be more nimble. (Google has a variation they're pitching agencies: agile creativity.)

Agile marketing emphasizes:

• An iterative approach to developing programs and deploying tactics
• Open and transparent metrics for tracking those programs and tactics
• Efficient and lightweight collaboration that crosses traditional boundaries
• Daily communication among all the participants in an agile "unit"
• Continuous engagement in experiments and data-driven testing
• Deliverables that are measured in days and weeks, not months or years
• Flexibility to dynamically adjust plans and priorities when things change

Agile marketing gives marketing leaders a framework for incorporating performance marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, conversion optimization, and other responsive, data-driven approaches into the "operating system" of their organizations.

The present and future of marketing

As Isaac Asimov said, "The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change."

If you can have clarity on these five meta-trends — and how your marketing organization is evolutionarily adapting to them — you will be well prepared for the "constant change" that is the environment of marketing today.

IBM champions the chief marketing technologist

Virginia Sharma, VP of Marketing and Communications at IBM India/South Asia, recently posted a presentation on SlideShare titled The New Profession on a Smarter Planet: Chief Marketing Technologist.

The chief marketing technologist from IBM India Smarter Marketing

According to Virginia, the timeless responsibilities of marketers everywhere:

• Knowing the customer.
• Defining what to market and how to market it.
• Protecting the brand promise.

…are evolving into three imperatives for a new profession:

• Understanding each customer as an individual.
• Creating a system of engagement that maximizes value creation at every touch.
• Designing your culture and brand so they are authentically one.

"In this transformation of the marketing function, the transformation of technology and the way it's used is critical. The new profession: the chief marketing technologist."

A more realistic diagram of the B2B marketing funnel

Just have to share this terrific visualization posted in a blog article by Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research, Buyer Behavior Helps B2B Marketers Guide The Buyer's Journey.

"The buyer's journey looks at lot more like this," writes Lori, "than the linear models (e.g., the funnel) that we usually use as a graphical representation."

"This buyer dynamic changes the role of B2B marketing in a fundamental way. Marketing now owns a much bigger piece of the lead-to-revenue cycle. And B2B marketers must take responsibility for engaging with the customer through most of the buying cycle. Understanding the customer journey across these touchpoints is essential to the success of any marketing program."

Steven Woods of Eloqua has been talking about this transformative shift from sales to marketing for some time. I think it's clear that the vision has become reality.

Read the full article here.

62% of marketing departments do control their technology

I was a bit flabbergasted when I wrote yesterday's post noting that, according to a recent ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing report, 59% of marketers don't specify what they want in the marketing technology purchase process.

I just couldn't wrap my head around the magnitude of that number. Could that many marketers in 2012 be that disconnected from the modern tools of their trade? I can imagine a lot of excuses — semi-legitimate reasons for why some marketers might still be out of that loop — but not enough to justify 59%.

So last night, after a shot of whiskey, I went looking for corroborating or dissenting evidence.

Luckily (?) I found the latter:

A recent webinar by Laura McLellan of Gartner — Profile of Marketing as a Major Technology Buyer — included a slide claiming that now almost all marketers have responsibility for choosing marketing technology.

Of 251 marketing managers surveyed in the U.S. and Europe in May 2012, 62% reported that marketing has total responsibility for choosing and managing marketing technology; another 35% claimed some responsibility; and only 3% said they had no responsibility.

That sounds more like what I expected! In fact, it sounds better than I expected.

But how could this be so different than the report from yesterday's post? I know the folks at both ITSMA and Gartner, and I have high regard for their research discipline — so I don't doubt the methodology or math of either of these reports. Instead, I think the difference can be attributed to a combination of the following factors:

• The survey questions — and the context in which they were presented — are subtly but significantly different: having "responsibility" for something may be easier to acknowledge than identifying particular steps of formal technical purchase funnel such as "specification," "recommendation," and "selection."
• Particularly in large companies, different people in the same marketing department may have different views of the technology adoption process; it's conceivable that a non-technical marketing manager working on specific programs may not be fully aware of the role that a marketing operations or marketing technology team plays in the process.
• There are a lot of different companies out there, and in both cases, these surveys have relatively small sample sizes (N=155 and N=251 respectively); each of them may have been drawing from different sets — some sort of selection bias — or simply encountering normal statistical variance across such a large and diverse population.

In other word, these results aren't apples-to-apples comparisons.

Nonetheless, the gulf between these two reports serves as a cautionary reminder of the varied and evolving state of marketing technology management today. If the answer changes depending on who you ask, when you ask, and how you phrase the question, then we know the journey isn't over yet.

The real question is: who controls marketing technology in your organization?

Are 59% of marketers driving off a marketing technology cliff?

I accept that the relationship between marketing and IT is a complex one.

Although my opinion is that marketing should specify, recommend, select, purchase, and operate its own marketing technology — I believe it is now an integral part of what marketing is in a digital world — I also acknowledge that other organizational structures can work too. If IT and marketing have a highly collaborative relationship, then keeping more of the technology management responsibilities in IT's hands can make sense. This is especially true if marketing has yet to build out their own technical bench and capabilities.

But one thing I cannot fathom is the notion that, here in 2012, marketing can have a completely "hands off" approach to marketing technology.

Even if marketing needs a technical partner in choosing, implementing, and operating marketing software — be that the IT department or an outside marketing service provider — there's no excuse for marketing to not be in the driver's seat of dictating what they need that software to do. It would be like a master carpenter showing up empty-handed and saying, "Tools? Who cares? I'll just use whatever is lying around — yeah, like this rock will be fine."

So I was surprised — actually shocked — that a recent survey of marketers by the ITSMA and VisionEdge Marketing reported the following roles that marketing plays (or not!) in the purchase of marketing information technology:

• 59% don't specify marketing technology
• 45% don't recommend marketing technology
• 46% don't select marketing technology

And 15% responded that marketing does not play any significant role in the purchase of marketing technology.

Are you kidding me? Is "marketing" not half of "marketing technology" by definition?

(Deep breath.)

Now, I know this is a period of transition. Marketing's having to take on new technology responsibilities that still may seem foreign to many. The organizations in which marketing lives may still have legacy processes and structures in place that hinder marketing's evolution in marketing technology maturity. One can even argue that a "late adopter" strategy has its own benefits.

But in the big picture, the ship has sailed: marketing is now deeply entwined with technology for how it reaches and engages with prospects and customers. If marketing is not taking a proactive role in the decisions of marketing technology, it's ceding a tremendous portion of its control over the outcome of modern marketing initiatives. And if you don't have control, but you're still held accountable for the outcome, you're in a precarious spot.

I'll be speaking at the ITSMA's annual marketing conference later this month. If there's any of those 59% who aren't specifying marketing technology yet at the event, I'm hoping to convince them of the necessity for grabbing the reigns — before the wagon goes off the cliff.

Gartner: 72% have a "chief marketing technologist" today

Laura McLellan, a research VP at Gartner, caused quite a stir at the beginning of this year when she boldly predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs.

Exclaims of, "Really?!?!," echoed among marketing and IT professionals alike for months thereafter. But the evidence was compelling, and those of us working in the marketing technology space have been witnessing this trend first-hand.

Now, Laura is back with even more research to support that prediction, which she'll deliver in a webinar on October 2, Profile of Marketing as a Major Technology Buyer. It's open for anyone to attend and will cover the results of three recent research projects conducted with marketing executives across multiple industries.

Exclusive Breaking News

However, Gartner was willing to share one exciting finding in advance to readers of this blog. Their 2013 High-Tech Provider Marketing Budgets survey included this question: Does your organization have the equivalent of a Chief Marketing Technologist today, and do you expect to have such a function 2 years from now?

Brace yourself for something amazing:

72% answered that they have that role today, and 87% expect to have it within two years.

I danced a jig on the spot.

Okay, there are a few caveats. First, the role of a chief marketing technologist — which was defined as "broadly the equivalent of a CTO and CIO dedicated to marketing, familiar with all kinds of marketing software, data & analytics, social & mobile platforms, content marketing, web mechanics, digital advertising networks, among other topics" — is open to interpretation. Titles and responsibilities no doubt vary tremendously.

Second, not all of the people serving in these roles report directly to the CMO or the most senior marketing executive — although that is the largest cluster of respondents. Overall, 63% of these chief marketing technologists report to marketing today, and within 2 years 66% will. The rest report to the CIO, with a tiny sliver reporting to some other entity outside marketing.

Third, the population of "high-tech providers" who participated in this survey is probably not representative of businesses overall. Being in high-tech, it's reasonable to assume that they are more likely to be in the vanguard of the technologification of marketing. But while they may be ahead of the curve, the shift to digital marketing — and, more broadly, digital business — is impacting pretty much every organization on the planet. I expect others will follow this lead soon enough.

Finally, the summary data that Gartner was willing to share in the slide at the top of this post did not include respondents who answered, "I don't know" to this question, which I believe was approximately 10% of those surveyed. That could lower those percentages by a tad, but it doesn't change the gist of this finding.

Adjusting budgets and implementing new organizational structure are how you enact major changes in a company. What this Gartner research reveals is that companies are doing just that in the pursuit of an effective marketing technology strategy. They recognize that it's crucial to the future of their business. And the largest number of them are putting a "chief marketing technologist" in place, reporting directly to the CMO, to champion this effort.

I look back on my posts over the years on the rise of the marketing technologist, advocating marketing technology leadership at Pivot, and agencies and the marketing technologist revolution — the book of marketing technology on Broadway if you prefer a video version — and can't help but smile to see those concepts coming to life.

Thank you Gartner. Thank you Laura. Now excuse me while I go back to that jig...

"We want to test bold, new ideas that always work."

Nobody likes to see their idea lose. Everybody wants straight A's. Look good for the boss. It's the Lake Wobegon effect: all the children are above average. (If you don't appreciate that joke, take this pop quiz.)

So at some level it's not surprising that survey data of Fortune 1,000 marketers from the CEB Marketing Leadership Council shows that only 50% of marketers agree or strongly agree with the statement: "My team accepts that some experiments must fail in order for us to learn from them."

But if your experiments have no risk of failure, then one of two things is true:

1. You're not actually testing new ideas, you're just polishing the fenders of your old jalopy.
2. You're delusional and should seek the advice of a doctor.

Failure is an inherent part of real experimentation. "We have an idea. Let's try it. Works? Great. Doesn't work? Good to know, let's try something different." You do your best to construct your hypotheses with reason and logic, but also with imagination and creativity. You test those hypotheses, and whether they're proven right or wrong, you've learned something of value.

Jim Manzi reported in his book Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics, and Society that Google ran approximately 12,000 experiments in 2009, with only about 10% of them successfully leading to business changes. That's what experimentation looks like — and in the end, it netted them a large number of wins by absolute numbers, but only from trying a lot of things that didn't pan out.

This is one of the key tenants of agile marketing: continuously running experiments in rapid iterations. Try ideas on a small scale, quickly toss the ones that don't pan out, and eagerly scale the ones that do.

Unfortunately, it hasn't been a tenant of legacy marketing culture, which could better be described as: have an idea, go big fast, pray you end up being right (or that no one can measure if you were wrong), and let your career ride on the outcome. (Good time for a review of survivorship bias in Fooled by Randomness.)

And, sorry, but avoiding innovation is not an option.

The only viable way forward is for marketing to embrace a test-and-learn culture. According to the CEB, about 25% of marketers are doing just that, rating their teams as effective or very effective at test-and-learn experiments. Bravo!

As for the rest... well, at least half aren't above average yet.

Thanks to Anna Bird at the CEB for sharing this data with me and giving me permission to share it with you.

Should marketers be able to answer these 5 stats questions?

Last week, I gently ribbed the Marketing Leadership Council of the CEB over their HBR post, Marketers Flunk the Big Data Test. I felt the statistics they were sharing about marketers not being very statistically savvy were themselves a little questionable.

In response, one of the authors of that post, Anna Bird, graciously reached out to me to address some of my concerns.

The HBR post stated that when they asked Fortune 1000 marketers five "basic to intermediate" statistics questions, 44% of those marketers got four or more answers wrong. Only 6% of the marketers they interviewed got all five right. The implication was that marketers lacked statistical aptitude — a serious concern in an increasingly analytical and data-driven discipline.

My immediate reaction: what were the questions?

After all, statistics can often be technical and counterintuitive. Reams of academic research have shown that people in general are very bad at reasoning statistically. Were the questions asked a fair instrument to judge marketers' capabilities in this brave new world?

You can judge for yourself. Anna shared their questions with me and gave me permission to post them here. How many of these can you get right? (Answers at the bottom of this post — no peeking.)

1. True or False: Variance measure the dispersion of data around a sample average.
2. True or False: How well the sample reflects the target population is more important than how large the same is.
3. True or False: Regressions with more variables are always more credible than regressions using fewer variables.
4. There are two hospitals in town. One is very large; the other is very small. On a particular day, 80% of babies born in one hospital are male. For which hospital is this more likely to be true?
5. A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Okay, scroll down and peek now — how'd you do?

If you didn't ace it, take comfort: there's a small percentage of people on the planet who could. In fact, that was one of my other objections to the original presentation of the CEB's findings. Sure, marketers might be bad at statistics. But if almost everyone is bad at statistics, and marketers are no different than everyone else in that regard, is this worth ringing alarms bells over?

"Our goal wasn't to rate marketers' data savvy relative to other individuals (since the vast majority of people get that [last] question wrong)," wrote Anna. "But just to find out whether marketing analytics actually poses risks (as well as benefits) due to everyone's natural propensity for error when interpreting numbers. We think that this risk is under-appreciated."

So is it possible that marketers, bad at stats as they are, are actually better than most?

"No one is great at stats/analytics, but marketers are actually better than most functions, except finance and strategy. However, marketing's information needs are also far more complex and ambiguous than most functions — so they really need better data skills. Generally, we believe that most employees — but marketers in particular — are unprepared to take advantage of emerging technology and data. And that a bit more stats training (even just basic training) would help substantially.

All good points, and I appreciate Anna's willingness to openly engage in this discussion. I largely agree with their core premise. But I still wonder: are these type of statistics questions measuring the right thing? Are there better kinds of questions to evaluate analytical preparedness? What do you think?

Answers:
1. True. 2. True. 3. False. 4. The smaller. 5. 5 cents.

VentureBeat says Chief Marketing Technology Officers are hot

Well, not hot like the Real Housewives of Madison Avenue. But in their article — The hot new CxO: Chief Marketing Technology Officer? — they acknowledge "a new role that's a cross between the traditional chief marketing officer and chief technology officer." And it's become a hot topic.

"CMTOs are using significant technology and analytical expertise to help companies make sense of and exploit vast amounts of customer and market data from sources as diverse as Facebook, the company blog, customer databases, sales information, and trending tweets on Twitter."

Most of their case for CMTO hotness is presented in an infographic, which I've included below (click on it to go to their original):

I couldn't agree more. Want to learn more about marketing technologists and CMTOs? I humbly offer these prior posts from this blog as a starting point:

• Rise of the Marketing Technologist
• Agencies and the marketing technologist revolution
• Advocating marketing technology leadership at Pivot