How will the marketing technologies change in 2015?

Today we will share with you the translation of Scott Brinker's article “How will the marketing technologies change in 2015?” - the author gives interesting predictions about possible changes in marketing technologies in the coming year. Ambiguous, debatable ... and therefore interesting. So let's go!

And again, welcome to the season of forecasts (earlier in our blog we shared the "Five of the most promising areas in the field of IT" according to investors). You do not even need to get your crystal ball to guess that in the next 30 days you will be surrounded by all sorts of predictors, including your future in marketing in the coming year.

Personally, I am ready to subscribe to the words of Yogi Berry, that “it is very difficult to make an accurate forecast, especially about the future” (sometimes this statement is attributed to Niels Bohr). Most of the so-called predictions that we will hear in the coming month will belong to one of the following categories:

1. Trends that are already being observed (“mobile devices are increasingly being used”).
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2. The expectations of the one who makes the prediction ("products like mine will rule the world!").

3. Nebulae that can not even be refuted (“there will be big problems with big data”).

I don’t want to be the Grinch who stole Christmas , but for me personally, a real prediction must satisfy the SMART criteria: s pecific (specific), m easurable (measurable), a chievable (achievable), r elevant (actual) and t ime-bound (limited in time).

For example, my prediction:

In 2015, Microsoft will make at least one acquisition on the market of marketing technologies and spend more than $ 1 billion on mergers and acquisitions to position itself as a major provider of marketing platforms.

I will not argue that the prediction turned out brilliant. Microsoft, apparently, is one of the last major software vendors that has not yet made the decisive step in the marketing technology market. Dynamics CRM is a good piece of the mosaic, but only a fragment.

They can purchase a “traditional” marketing platform such as Marketo, HubSpot, SAS, Sitecore, Acquia, or even HP Autonomy. However, in my opinion, it’s just as likely that they will target the intermediate marketing layer (data administration platforms, client data platforms, tag management) or a web service to further move into the trend of digital marketing channels - this could be LinkedIn or Yahoo .

By the end of 2015, one of two things will happen: I was right or I was wrong. Here is a prediction. (However, this is not a tip for investment. Actually, I don’t know what Microsoft had in mind - it’s just my thinking, meanwhile, any company move in one direction or another can affect its capitalization. I have some MSFT shares , which I acquired in the 1990s, so what I say about them is subconsciously justified).

7 very likely predictions about marketing technology in 2015

Although I am not inclined to attach great importance to all sorts of prophecies, I will not argue that the end of the year is the right time to look back at the past year and look into the year to come. In this reflection there will be tendencies, hopes, and even vaguely meaningless words.

So here are: 7 non-quite-predictions that I can make about marketing technologies in 2015.

Number 1. There will be more and more "marketing technologists". No matter how you call them, the number of technicians working in the field of marketing is clearly increasing. I most often had to deal with the term “marketing technologist”, and I think it will take root next year. But where will these previously not existed marketing technologists come from? Basically, they migrate from IT, where there are professionals who are eager to use their technical talents to develop more attractive, customer-oriented innovations that will generate profits, and not just require costs.

# 2. The technology marketing universe will expand, not shrink. Yes, there will be major consolidation deals working against this forecast. For example, if Microsoft goes according to my prediction, it will be consolidation. However, the number of new players this year will be more than the number of existing ones (fortunately or unfortunately). As Niraj Agroal from Battery Ventures told me in an interview, we are only following the fourth inning. There is money there. Opportunities too. And it has never been so easy to develop cloud services.

I can even promise - and this is stronger than a prediction - that in my version of the marketing technology universe - there will be more companies in 2015 than in 2014. And this Universe will still be depressingly incomplete.

The following three factors, however, will gradually make it more structured.

# 3. An independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem around major platforms will thrive. 2014 was marked by widespread support from many major cloud marketing providers — Adobe, IBM, Marketo, Oracle, Salesforce.com — around which communities of independent software vendors were formed. Marketo recently celebrated overcoming the threshold of 400 official members of their LaunchPoint ecosystem. The message goes like this: one company cannot do everything. It seems to me that such tendencies from the side of platforms will increase in the coming years, and it will be easier to select and integrate the right resources from a very large number of more specialized vendors. I think that we will also witness impressive innovations in the depths of this interacting environment - data processing solutions and services will become more natural to fit into the user interface of the platform.

№ 4. Gaining popularity "intermediate marketing solutions." Tag management systems, data administration platforms (DMP), user data platforms (CDP), cloud applications, enterprise service buses (ESBs), etc. will thrive, they are simply doomed to growth in 2015. These software solutions will provide a marketing level of data management that is distributed across many different systems. If this is implemented qualitatively, heterogeneous marketing stacks will become more manageable, which will also allow brands to get rid of dependence on a specific vendor. A more talented IT approach to marketing technology management will contribute to the emergence of more advanced and flexible architectures.

No. 5. The boundary between software developers and service providers will blur. Everyone who works in the field of technology marketing, should read the article " Software vs. Services: Is There Really A Difference , written by Martin Kin of Gartner. It's just a bullseye. And after Publicis announced plans to acquire SapientNitro, the stakes that large holding companies would seek to develop this blurred border increased sharply.

Thinking about marketing as a service (MaaS) - after I argued about this (in the comments) with Jerry Merrey from IDC a month ago, I realized that he was right: this would be a serious channel for marketing software. But not only for large marketing cloud solutions. It will be a terrific channel for innovative and niche marketing applications , including for a wide variety of specialized programs - from original algorithms to cross-system “glue” - which service providers will develop on their own to gain non-competitive competitive advantages.

These three circumstances — the independent developer ecosystem, the interlayer and the convergence of software and services — will contribute to creating a rich and diverse landscape of marketing software that will become more accessible to marketers who do not want to be sucked into a dangerous quagmire of integration. Now they, in fact, will be able to shift all the technical problems to the vendors, the intermediate architecture and service providers, and the question that there are too many such problems is transforming from a bug into a feature.

# 6. Some large companies will become new players in the technical marketing space. The latest example is Dell. About Microsoft, I have already said. Another class of technology giants that I would notice is Cisco, Citrix, Intel, Intuit, and Xerox. I also believe that Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn will significantly expand their range of marketing software solutions (however, besides the latter, this can be expected from a couple of other companies within the Mafia PayPal area of ​​interest). Here, LinkoIn’s acquisition of Bizo is indicative, which triggered increased competition between marketing cloud companies and “traditional” major software makers.

# 7. All technology marketing will be hotter, but some parts will be hotter . 2014 was the year of content marketing and predictive analytics, and this will remain relevant. Next year, it seems to me, five points will become centers of attraction. Four of them - sales support, after-sales client marketing, marketing finance and marketing talent management are marketing hybrids and areas of responsibility of other departments : respectively, sales department, customer service, finance department and personnel department. And the fifth will be innovation, it concerns the Internet of Things (IoT). When I say this, I, of course, help all the hype around IoT, and there are a lot of cheating here. However, the reality is that with the proliferation of connectivity and various kinds of devices, the field of hybrid online offline practice is almost in bloom.

In fact, I believe that there is also the sixth category, which will shoot in 2015. This is interactive content . I say this with a modest downcast look, because, yes, my company, ion interactive, offers marketing software for interactive content (as we have come to life like this, described here ). So you may well regard this as my hope rather than a prediction. But let me say that content marketing is a victim of its own success is obvious. The white noise of passive content (the World Wide Web of manuals and webinars!) Is simply stunning, its effectiveness in terms of growth in the coverage and educational aspect is constantly falling. Interactive content changes the rules of the game, allowing marketers to generate more stable customer contact instead of passing customer communication. And it's not just me here. I see a large number of competitors in this area. So around interactive content in 2015, we should expect a number of truly interesting innovations. Reasoning on the hybridity of the other five categories, it can be understood as the hybridization of communications and consumer experience .

Although, yes, in relation to the latter, I am not objective.

We are waiting for your opinion on the important events that will occur in marketing in 2015.