| MarTech Today | Is There a Right Way to Buy Marketing Technology? (Short Answer: Yes)
Selection teams should focus on their own user stories rather than generic vendor reference implementations. MarTech West speaker Tony Byrne will host a workshop on purchasing strategies April 15.
In twenty years as an industry analyst evaluating martech vendor platforms, I’ve witnessed hundreds of enterprises try to make good technology purchase decisions. All too often they get it wrong.
You can’t blame those decision-makers. Marketers in particular face intense time pressures and can’t readily find good templates for doing this right. Stress around making a poor choice sometimes leads to ill-advised short-cuts or paralyzing over-analysis. Read More...
| Impact Magazine | The MarTech Stack, Why it Should Matter
As we step into a new decade, we are also stepping towards an era driven by technology. As digital media is getting expensive due to competition, premium brands are looking to derive greater ad spend returns, transparency and connected views with the help of marketing technologies.
A Grand View Research report estimates that the global marketing automation software market is expected to reach $7.63 billion by 2025. As per industry estimates, over 60% of marketing leaders the world over are now using at least one marketing automation platform.
MarTech, which has been adopted in a big way in India, is expected to grow at a CAGR of 44% for the next five years. With a projected $250-300 million opportunity in India, the country is certainly riding a MarTech wave... Read More.
| CMSWire | Will the CDP Marketplace Consolidate in 2020?
Last month IgnitionOne, a longtime database marketing / adtech / CDP vendor, announced it planned to liquidate. The vendor had already shed much of its adtech portfolio over the past few years, so what remained was essentially a CDP with a managed services business. Unable to secure that financing or find a buyer for what remained, CEO Will Margiloff told shareholders he needed to shut the doors.
An obvious question ensues: Does this mean consolidation is coming to the CDP market?
I don't think IgnitionOne is a canary in a coalmine, but as an existing or potential CDP customer, you'll want to understand some of the dynamics here... Read More.
Acquia announced it has acquired customer data platform (CDP) startup AgilOne today. The companies did not disclose the purchase price.
CDPs are all the rage among customer experience vendors, as they provide a way to pull data from a variety of channels to build a more complete picture of the customer. The goal here is to deliver meaningful content to the customer based on what you know about them. Having a platform like this to draw upon makes it more likely that you will hit the target more accurately... Read More.
| Document Strategy | The Rise of Omni-Channel Content Platforms
While many industry pundits have focused on traditional enterprise content management (ECM) vendors transitioning from document management to content services platforms, a parallel, and potentially a more interesting, trend has been taking place in the customer experience (CX) world.
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of a new category of platforms that are designed to supply core content to the ever-growing channels of customer engagement. After extensive research here at Real Story Group, we’ve labeled this modern class of tools as omni-channel content platforms. Emerging primarily from the digital asset management (DAM) arena, some key technologies have also spun off from the headless web content management and marketing asset management markets... Read More.
| ChiefMarTec | Two Themes for Martech Stack Leaders: Collaboration and Integration
Earlier this autumn, Real Story Group convened two-dozen martech/CX stack owners from among our larger subscribers for two days of confidential discussions around what’s working well (and less well) within their enterprises. Although the conversations were private, we were able to share 12 key takeaways.
Reflecting some more on those 48 hours together, I think it’s worth highlighting two larger meta-themes that Scott has already been riffing on this year: collaboration and integration. Read More.
| Tech Crunch | Salesforce announces new content management system
Salesforce has its fingers in a lot of parts of the customer experience, so why not content management? Today, the company announced a brand new tool called Salesforce Content Management System, which it says is designed from the ground up to deliver a quality customer experience across multiple channels.
The idea is to provide a way for customers to create, manage and deliver more meaningful content across multiple channels from within the Salesforce family of products. The company claims it doesn’t require any kind of deep technical knowledge to do it, meaning marketers and product people should be able to create and deliver content without the help of IT, once the system is properly set up. Read More.
| Tech Crunch | Microsoft acquires Mover to help with Microsoft 365 cloud migration
Microsoft wants to make it as easy as possible to migrate to Microsoft 365, and today the company announced it had purchased a Canadian startup called Mover to help. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s bundle that includes Office 365, Microsoft Teams, security tools and workflow. The idea is to provide customers with a soup-to-nuts, cloud-based productivity package. Mover helps customers get files from another service into the Microsoft 365 cloud. Read More.
| CMSWire | How to Categorize the Web CMS Marketplace
The web content and digital experience (WCM) marketplace is highly fragmented. That's analyst-speak for: you'll find a hell of a lot of WCM vendors out there. Real Story Group's vendor evaluations cover nearly three-dozen WCM players, but you can source hundreds more around the globe. In fact, this profusion represents one of the consistent themes in the market over the past two decades. Read More.
| Tech Crunch | Ten years after Adobe bought Omniture, the deal comes into clearer focus
Ten years ago this week, Adobe acquired Omniture for $1.8 billion. At the time, Adobe was a software company selling boxed software like Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop to creatives. Many people were baffled by the move, not realizing that purchasing a web analytics company was really the first volley in a full company transformation to the cloud and a shift in focus from consumer to enterprise.
It would take many years for the full vision to unfold, so you can forgive people for not recognizing the implications of the acquisition at the time, but CEO Shantanu Narayen seemed to give an inkling of what he had in mind. “This is a game-changer for both Adobe and our customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets,” he said in a statement after the acquisition became public. Read More.
The global digital asset management (DAM) market will reach $8.1 billion by 2024, according to Zion Market Research. The big questions for marketers, though, are how and where they should spend their brand's money with DAM vendors in a market that some see as fragmented, crowded and ripe for innovation.
DAM, or software that helps brands manage and use digital assets in things like marketing campaigns and brand content, has become a centerpiece of the marketing technology stack. But a lack of proper vetting and falling in love with features and capabilities can be costly mistakes for organizations and marketers, according to Jarrod Gingras, managing director and analyst for Real Story Group. Read More.
| CMSWire | When Creating Your Digital Roadmap, Consider These Lessons Learned
Enterprises are transitioning from reacting to emerging technologies to proactively planning strategies to exploit digital opportunities, leveraging longer-term roadmaps for digital workplace and marketing technology.
Inevitably, some common mistakes will be made along the way, but one way to avoid repeating them is to focus on the lessons learned by those who have gone before. Here is the most common "what I would have done differently" advice I’ve encountered. Read More.
| EContent | VIDEO: Four Key Platforms that Power Omnichannel
Many of you have looked into customer data platforms. Many organizations kind of built these on their own. Some organizations are still choosing to build these on their own, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.
This omnichannel content platform is really interesting. This is a space that's kind of calved off from parts of the WCM world and parts of the DAM world. In this idea that I can have a core set of shareable assets that can be used across all different channels. That marketplace is very young and still kind of in formation. Journey orchestration and decisionining, very interesting as well.
A long history of this technology going back to direct mail in advertising days now kinda getting retooled for the digital era. And then of course a variety of operations hubs. So, these are areas where if we're serious about omnichannel we need to think about investing here, whether it's bringing in new technology or not. Read More.
| Target Marketing | Using MarTech to Create a 'Netflix-like' Omnichannel Stack
Each year in advisory conversations that Real Story Group holds with enterprise MarTech and Customer Experience (CX) leaders, common themes emerge. This year, it seems like the most frequent aspiration is, "We want to create a Netflix-like experience." That certainly sounds good, but what does "Netflix-like" actually mean, and what does it take to get there?
RSG evaluates martech and CX technologies to assist enterprise tech stack owners. To maintain its strict independence, RSG only works with enterprise technology buyers and never advises vendors. Read More.
| CMSWire | What You Need to Know About Customer Journey Orchestration Software
Customer journey orchestration engine software is designed to help organizations analyze customer interactions across multiple touchpoints, execute the best communications and predict future customer interaction.
Sounds like the promises marketers have been hearing all along in the digital transformation era, no? Yet, they still have their struggles. Can these journey orchestration engines, or journey visioning platforms as Forrester calls them, deliver on these promises? Can they sit underneath your engagement systems such as marketing automation, email marketing and personalization engines and successfully orchestrate a customer’s journey? Read More.
| MarTech Today | From MarTech Silos to an Omnichannel Stack
For the past decade, most enterprises have focused on scaling and modernizing their martech and digital experience (DX) stacks, pushing ever-richer content and experiences through web content management (WCM) systems, marketing automation/ESP platforms, and CRM environments, among others. This made sense for improving digital customer engagement in those platforms, but also led to serious challenges that now need attention. Read More.
| CMSWire | Why Digital Asset Management Is Now Officially Martech
For years, digital asset management (DAM) was either not included or was marginalized in the martech conversation. People viewed DAM as the tool of creatives, brand managers, and even (wait for it) librarians.
But it’s well beyond time we recognize that not only should DAM be in the martech conversation, but that DAM has become an anchor service in enterprise martech stacks... Read More.
| CMSWire | 7 Tips to Successfully Implement a CDP
After you have done your research, found out about the benefits of CDPs, how they differ from other customer data management platforms, and found the right CDP for your use-cases, it's time to get prepared to actually bring one in house and get it set up, running and supported.
If you want a successful implementation showing value and ROI back to the business, we have some advice from key luminaries in the field on things you need to think about when implementing a CDP system. Read More.
| CMSWire | Is That New CDP Truly a Customer Data Platform?
Customer data platform (CDP) technology is rising in popularity for good reason: CDPs try to address chronic difficulties marketers have endured around obtaining reliable access to a centralized store of information about their customers and prospects.
The CDP technology marketplace has expanded substantially. At Real Story Group, we evaluate 25 players, with more each quarter. Read More.
| Chiefmartec.com | The New Omnichannel Stack Reference Model from Real Story Group
From a technology perspective, many of us focus intently on martech stacks, but the reality is that most large enterprises have evolved multiple — often overlapping — stacks across the customer experience spectrum: for marketing, sales, service & support, advertising, and web/DX.
Of course, your customers don’t care about your stacks. They expect to be able to engage coherently and consistently with you regardless of channel, and continue doing so when new channels like voice emerge. Read More.
