Most people (marketing or otherwise) look at the growth of digital technology and see it as a way of creating cost-effective scale . But the real development is in automated intelligence (AI) and how you generate, analyse and then use customer data.
Digital marketing professionals spend their days doing this and many of them will be on their third or fourth iteration of a marketing technology stack that includes (among other things) data management, marketing automation, partner relationship management, opportunity management and training technologies from a colourful array of independent vendors.
As a result, these people can be experts in all things from data analytics, process automation, social selling, customer journey mapping and sometimes even technology integration.
But how many sales, financial, technology, product development or talent management teams get them in to talk about it?
We all now live in an always-on world where digital technology has either moved the Sales process farther down the funnel or has, at the very least, created more educated prospects earlier in it. Future success in every business then, will be determined by how you drive market analytics through the organisation. As such, the marketing function is becoming more about process integration than it is about promotion.
Modern marketing people spend their days thinking about how you unify data sources, how you create collaboration and integrate workflows and how you use technologies that are focused on developing a 360-degree view of the customer. As a result, they are having to become experts in line-of-business integration because that’s the only way that they can optimise their performance.
I’m not sure that there’s a profession that has changed as much in the last ten years as marketing. But this change is not just because of analytics, mobile, cloud and social media. The major change is because of the impact these things have had on the people using them.
We are now living in a world where customers want to self-educate. A world where people are much more influenced by the things that their friends, colleagues and even complete strangers say than any sales rep! That means that we are moving inexorably to a subscription-driven, emotion-charged, loyalty-free world. Where the old ways of influencing people don’t work that well anymore.
In many cases the marketing services industry is being left behind because it has focused too much on understanding digital technologies and cramming their use into existing business models. The best marketing people however, are breaking out of this and creating new customer experiences and disruptive strategies based on dynamic data-based insights. These people are not just redefining marketing, they are re-thinking their entire customer engagement model and the companies that are defining this space (Netflix, AWS, Spotify to name but a few) are all over it.
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