Digital marketing technology is too immature to effectively address enterprise business strategies. 

That's the stunning conclusion of new research from the independent analysts at Olney, Md.-based Real Story Group (RSG).

Unlike past technology waves, when technologies developed quicker than enterprise strategies, digital marketing technologies are lagging the problems they are supposed to solve. 

The Digital Marketing Challenges  

Jarrod Gingras, managing director and analyst at RSG, told CMSWire the immaturity of the technologies is compounded by enterprise confusion about the solutions. “Enterprises are picking the wrong tools for the job,” he said. Read More.

As digital marketing continues to grow in prominence, more organizations are adopting a company-wide strategy, but many are underutilizing marketing technology.

The “2016 Digital Marketing Technology Survey” from Real Story Group recently discovered that 59 percent of businesses have a digital marketing strategy that spans their entire enterprise.

About 66 percent said they have access to external digital marketing expertise, while 49 percent said they have expertise internally. However, 47 percent of respondents said they did not have the right digital marketing tools for the job.

As digital marketing continues to grow in prominence, more organizations are adopting a company-wide strategy, but many are underutilizing marketing technology.

The “2016 Digital Marketing Technology Survey” from Real Story Group recently discovered that 59 percent of businesses have a digital marketing strategy that spans their entire enterprise.

About 66 percent said they have access to external digital marketing expertise, while 49 percent said they have expertise internally. However, 47 percent of respondents said they did not have the right digital marketing tools for the job.

Read More.

What do enterprise marketers really think about marketing tech?

The following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, a research and advisory firm that covers marketing technology.

The past several years have been exciting times for the digital marketing industry, with major marketplace expansion, ample M&A activity, and fresh understanding about how MarTech should work in the future.

What’s less well known is the state of customer adoption of marketing toolsets. Real Story Group recently surveyed nearly 100 enterprise digital marketing leaders from around the world, and not surprisingly, the results are mixed. (You can get your own copy of the survey results at tinyurl.com/MarTech-RSG.)

At a high level, we can generalize about the key themes that customers are reporting:

1. Enterprise-wide digital marketing strategies are getting put in place
2. Marketing leaders still struggle with toolsets
3. Expertise availability — especially in-house skills — remains a limitation

Read More.

It's the age of the customer — and HP is dumping its customer experience (CX) software.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP Inc. struck a deal today with Waterloo, Ontario-based OpenText to divest its CX assets for $170 million.

Plan All Along?

The news to sell the CX software to OpenText confirms the new HP Inc. had the plan to divest all along, according to Tony Byrne, founder of the Real Story Group. 

"It's clearer HP was prepping these tools for ready divestment," Byrne blogged today. "And today comes news that TeamSite, MediaBin, and Optimost have gone to rest at everyone's favorite graveyard for unloved content technologies: OpenText."

Byrne said old Interwoven customers went through a sale to a "pathologically destructive" Autonomy, then went through an "ugly and litigious acquisition" by HP, then "calved off into near oblivion with the HP printer group." 

"And now, finally," Byrne added, "sold to erstwhile competitor OpenText, in a deal expected to close in Q4."

Read the full article here.

Digital experience management (DXM) refers to the combination of strategy, technology, and processes to provide highly engaging and satisfying digital services to customers. In the private sector, DXM is seen as a competitive differentiator that results in high customer loyalty and higher revenues. In the government sector, the DXM goals are a bit different. The desired outcomes are better service delivery, increased efficiency, and greater inclusiveness. 

However, in reality, until recently the public sector (barring a few exceptions) paid only lip service to DXM. DXM requires a relentless focus on user needs while the vast majority of government websites were inward-looking and complex to use and navigate. Thankfully, things are now slowly but surely improving. Governments across the globe are realizing that citizens expect their governments and leaders to be digitally savvy. They want the government sector to deliver high-quality digital services on par with private enterprises. Read the Complete Article Here.

“The announcement from Facebook is an expansion in scope for the Messenger app — it can integrate with many B2C sites and applications and there is some value to brands and customers in that,” says Kashyap Kompella, Research Director at independent analysis firm Real Story Group.

Analyst Kompella tempers the enthusiasm on deploying chatbots for customer service. “It took us a long time to build a basic modicum of intelligence into Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Similarly, chatbots for customer support and other interactions will have a long trajectory.”

Some basic customer support jobs can be handled by algorithms and bots, says Kompella. “But there is greater value in advertising and marketing scenarios by enabling better personalisation and recommendations,” he says. “For start-ups, this will be bigger than just customer support.” Read More.

Real Story Group analyst Theresa Regli busts the most common myths marketing technology vendors tell customers and prospects, and other martech experts share insight on how marketing pros can navigate the dynamic digital landscape.

When shopping for marketing technology (martech) software, should you believe everything the vendors say? That depends on the merchant, the product category and a number of other important factors, according to Scott Brinker, editor of the chiefmartec.com blog and program chair for the March 2016 MarTech USA conference in San Francisco.

Miscommunications and misguided customer expectations are inevitable in an industry that's growing so rapidly. Just five years ago, fewer than 150 martech software products were available, according to Brinker, who presented new research on the martech vendor landscape at the recent MarTech USA event. Today, about 3,874 martech products exist, Brinker said, and many marketers are trying to keep up with the rapid rate of change of the available tools. Read more.

The Real Story Group's Theresa Regli reveals the top martech myths and the corresponding realities. Columnist Derek Edmond recaps her presentation at the MarTech Conference.

Why do vendors dislike marketing technology analyst firm Real Story Group? According to Theresa Regli, Principal Analyst & Managing Partner at the company, it’s because the analysts tell real stories and debunk false promises.

As she opened her session at the MarTech Conference this week, Regli told the audience she’s been questioning the stories we tell all her life. She talked about being educated by nuns in a Catholic school environment and questioning the stories she heard.

What did that get her? Detention. For weeks. Read More.

Tony Byrne and his team at Real Story Group (RSG) are trying to help businesses turn digital transformation from a lofty aspiration to a practical business reality.

They recently announced the general availability of RealScore, an assessment tool with three key components.

Digital leaders can use it to measure their effectiveness, benchmark against their peers, and better asses future investments in key digital workplace and marketing technologies, Byrne explained. Read More.

“CMOs need to forge tighter partnerships with the CIOs and several other functions within the organization,” said Kashyap Kompella, research director for independent research and consulting firm Real Story Group. While marketing can certainly help the business understand customers better, delivering superior customer experiences extends beyond the marketing department, he added. Instead, "you need a strategy for the overall digital transformation for the organization." Read More.

“It tweaks some things that proved problematic in 2013 (such as mobile and user experience modifications), and belatedly starts to address an increasingly urgent need around hybrid SharePoint deployments,” Tony Byrne, founder, Real Story Group (RSG) told CMSWire

“The majority of RSG's enterprise subscribers still report using SP 2010, and while they can appreciate improvements in SP 2016, it's not front-of-mind for them right now." Read More.

Today, many companies' digital efforts have transitioned from simple web publishing to more full-blown customer experience management (CXM), as they seek to take advantage of the web, as well as other channels (such as offline, print, and mobile), to conduct core commercial operations and grow their businesses.

Digital experience management is the digital component of CXM. It is a cross-organization discipline and includes strategies and practices to acquire, nurture, and manage users throughout their journeys. Users are customers, employees, prospects, and other people who digitally interact with the firm.

Many technologies in the information management landscape are used daily to support experience management initiatives in any given organization: mobile, marketing automation and social media management, analytics, customer relationship management (CRM), digital and media asset management, web content and experience management (WCXM), portals, and so forth.

What Makes Media and Entertainment Different? Read More.

... Analyst Kashyap Kompella, research director with The Real Story, says Hike’s 100 million users may give it critical mass but it is still way behind market leader Whatsapp (1 billion users). “The key question here is whether this is a winner-take-all market or there is space for multiple players,” says Kompella. Smartphone penetration in India is below 200 million.

“I believe there is space for two players in every market,” says Mittal, confident he is surging ahead of other apps in the fray such as Facebook Messenger, Line and WeChat in India at least. While Whatsapp is still purely focused on messaging, Mittal is loading on the features on his app. News, cartoons, stickers, a virtual assistant called Natasha, matchmaking – Hike has them all and is unveiling more by the day. “We have a lot of ideas, especially around voice,” says Mittal, adding that he sees messaging as an Operating System almost.

Kompella agrees that chat apps can be the gateway to doing many things. He says that as mobile wallets and payments take off in India, there is opportunity to leverage chat applications for commerce and transactions.

... But the monetisation issue worries analysts like Kompella. “Whatsapp maintains a “no-ads” approach and recently even dropped plans to charge subscribers. It can afford to do so. Hike will have to find ways to start making money – it is tricky to find monetisation models that don’t turn off the users.” Read More.
 

Cloud services will continue to reshape collaboration and content management trends in 2016. But not all companies can expect a smooth migration to cloud-based ECM.

For companies to become more efficient and intelligent about their operations, they often need to make some changes in how they interact with corporate information. This enterprise data needs to be digital, centralized and easy to access. These needs will drive enterprise content management and collaboration trends in 2016. Read More.

Slow start for SharePoint 2016?

Microsoft focused on the hybrid cloud-based ECM framework. While the company has a decidedly cloud-first approach orientation, it also has to accommodate a conservative customer base that remains primarily on-premises for a variety of services, including SharePoint.

Improved hybrid experience, with a federated search and easier deployment, has been billed as a key selling point of SharePoint 2016 -- but Real Story Group analysts predict that migration to the new product will be slow nonetheless.

"In previous upgrades of SharePoint, it took six to 10 quarters for new versions to reach a critical mass and we don't see that changing with SharePoint 2016 this year," said Real Story Group analyst Jarrod Gingras, during a webinar presentation of the research firm's annual predictions.

Digital transformation has moved up the list of enterprise priorities for good reason. But getting beyond standard pundit exhortations to go “digital first” means answering a practical question: how do you go about it?

Two Gaps Based on Real Story Group’s research, enterprises must close two key gaps:

• Hyperbole: the gap between what vendors say their technology can do and what it really does
• Capacity: the gap between what the technology can genuinely enable and what you have the internal resources and expertise to execute 

At RSG, we sometimes refer to the Hyperbole Gap as the “bullshit” gap.  It’s not that technology vendors lie; it’s just that they tend to exaggerate the ease of use and return on investment of their systems.  The result is that customers typically can’t take full advantage of the capabilities they thought they were buying.

Read More.

With so many marketing tools available, it can be tricky for businesses and marketers to understand which will fit best with their organization and objectives, and have a positive impact on performance. We talk to Theresa Regli, Analyst and Managing Partner at the Real Story Group, about how to approach the decision-making process, engage all relevant stakeholders and the pros and cons of a multi-vendor vs single vendor approach.

View the recording here - http://webcertain.tv/vod/choosing-the-right-tools-for-your-business/5526

Half of Users Are Dissatisfied

With those three use cases providing a sense of the different needs asset management systems can address, let’s take a look at the bigger picture.

“We are constantly interviewing people who work with or deployed DAM systems,” says Theresa Regli, an analyst in the space and principal and managing partner at Real Story Group. “The quickest implementations I’ve seen are 2 to 3 months, and that’s usually a departmental installation.” Six to 10 months is a more typical time frame, depending on the size of the user-base and the types of content being stored.

According to a recent Real Story Group survey of more than 150 organizations using DAMs, asset reuse is the biggest driver of DAM purchases at 73 percent, with cost reduction a close second at 61 percent. Customer satisfaction, according to the survey, of both the product and the vendors was at about 50 percent, which suggests that using asset management software is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Read More.

In the good old days, web content management (WCM) technology primarily served to deliver content to a website-hence the name. At best, "multichannel" referred to the ability to deliver content to more than one type of website (e.g., an intranet and a public-facing website) or, the ability to repurpose experiences using a simplified template to make it palatable on mobile devices. Multichannel means a lot more now.

Of course, things have changed drastically. In a multichannel world, you have to address mobile devices of varying sizes and capabilities, as well as consider watches, bands, glasses, and interfaces still to come-not to mention a plethora of distribution arteries. You'll find variability within each category too. For example, some of the capabilities that may impact the type of content that can be delivered are whether or not the device is touchscreen or keyboard-based or has GPS capabilities. Read More.

Industry experts and academicians at a panel discussion on ‘Industrie 4.0 - Manufacturing Goes Digital’ on the concluding day of the CeBIT India 2015, said that Industrie 4.0 can play a major role in manufacturing.

Kashyap Kompella, research director of Real Story Group, a digital workplace and marketing technology analyst firm in the United States, said: “From manufacturing to services sectors, various elements of Industrie 4.0 will help in the predictive maintenance. We will face a huge gap in skill sets.” said Kompella.

Read the full article here.
 

Theresa Regli, principal analyst and managing parter at Real Story Group, opened up her talk with a brilliant metaphor of marketing stacks as cocktails — and marketing technologists as mixologists.

She shared so many great insights on how to approach marketing stack management, but one that really stood out to me: don’t send RFPs, especially to the major vendors (the “base spirits” in her cocktail model). Almost all of them will check all of the boxes because, in some ways, most of them can kind of do everything — but there are huge variations in how and how right that way is for you.

Instead, she recommends that you sit down and write a series of customer experience stories — how do you envision your different marketing touchpoints working in the context of your business — and then ask the vendors to demonstrate how those specific scenarios would be implemented.

Supert smart advice.

I also loved the “tube map” that Theresa’s firm developed to represent a kind of spatial relationship between the different marketing tech companies that they cover.