I'm not a big fan of year-end summaries and forecasts, mostly because I produce summaries and forecasts all year round. But I pulled together a few thoughts last week in response to a request, only to discover I had misunderstood what was wanted. Rather than let my precious wisdom go to waste*, I'll share below what I think will be most important marketing technology trends of 2014. Customer Data Platforms mature. Marketers will have an increasing number of ways to build consolidated, multi-source customer databases without...
Monday, 16 December 2013
Friday, 13 December 2013
Let’s face it: no real work will get done next week, what with all the holiday parties and caroling and so forth. So you might as well set aside 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, December 18 and register for the Webinar I’m co-presenting with RedPoint Global on Customer Data Platforms.In addition to uncovering the secret relationship between cuneiform and Justin Bieber, you’ll learn about our latest discovery: a new species of Customer...
Tuesday, 10 December 2013
I stumbled over Woopra in their tiny booth during last month’s Dreamforce conference, where I was intrigued enough to let them scan my badge and promptly forgot why. Fortunately, a diligent sales rep followed up by email and I remembered it was worth a closer look. If you’ve been reading my recent posts, you won’t be surprised that I’ve decided they are yet another Customer Data Platform.In fact, the people most surprised by this news will...
Friday, 6 December 2013
As I wrote last week, it sometimes seems that every system I look at these days is a Customer Data Platform. Of course, this is partly because I’m choosing to look at that type of system, and partly because CDP vendors are reaching out to me. But I do believe another reason is that CDPs are an idea whose time has come: I’ve recently seen at least three CDPs that are just emerging from stealth or beta mode. All were developed because someone else...
Wednesday, 27 November 2013
When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve been illustrating the point recently by asking whether every system I see is really a Customer Data Platform (CDP). The question comes up because nearly every customer management system builds its own customer database, which is one core function of a CDP. What distinguishes CDPs is that they make their database accessible to other execution systems and add some type of customer management intelligence. This intelligence ranges from behavior flags, segment codes,...
Friday, 22 November 2013
I spent the early part of this week at Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference. Here are my observations.The big news was for geeks. The main theme of the conference was Salesforce1, a new set of technologies that make it vastly easier to deliver and integrate mobile versions of Salesforce-based applications. It is apparently a major technical accomplishment and at least one of my technical friends was hugely impressed. But I can’t say I personally found it all that exciting. Perhaps we’ve reached the point where we expect technology...
Friday, 15 November 2013
There are about 3 million companies with revenue between $1 million and $5 million in the U.S., according to Manta. This is an enticingly huge market for marketing automation vendors, and one that seems largely untapped. The largest marketing automation vendor in the segment, Infusionsoft, has under 20,000 clients. This is barely scratching the surface. But this perspective is misleading. Many small businesses do their marketing through CRM,...
Friday, 8 November 2013
I had a conversation last week with a vendor whose pitch was all about providing execution systems with a shared database that contains a unified view of customer information from all sources. Sadly, they were unfamiliar with the concept of a Customer Data Platform as I’ve been developing it over the past few months and didn’t realize that they fit the definition.This post is not about that company.Instead, it will be about another company I also...
Friday, 1 November 2013
There was a really interesting discussion this week over on Scott Brinker’s ChiefMartec blog about the evolution of marketing automation systems into “platforms” that each support a swarm of satellite applications connected through open APIs. This is something I’ve already thought and written about quite a bit, but the discussion did advance my understanding of whether any marketing automation vendor gains a business advantage if third party applications...
Tuesday, 22 October 2013
Last week’s post on marketing automation and its discontents prompted several questions about whether the level of dissatisfaction is any higher with marketing automation than other systems. To some extent, this is asking whether the glass is half empty or half full; and, as the illustration suggests, the answer matters less than the fact that there’s room for improvement. But I do have some data to share on the question of relative dissatisfaction.The...
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
As I mentioned in last week's post, I’m writing a paper on stages of marketing automation deployment. Key findings will be presented in a Webinar next Thursday, sponsored by TreeHouse Interactive; you can register here. The paper itself will be available to Webinar attendees.The premise of the paper and Webinar is marketing automation has a problem: clients who don’t move beyond basic email functions are unhappy. Last week’s post provided statistics...
Wednesday, 9 October 2013
I’ve been writing a paper on the stages that marketers go through when deploying their marketing automation systems, the basic point being it’s important not to stop with just one feature. That much is indisputable, but the next question seemed to call for some empirical data: Which features are used most often? Here’s where things got interesting.Searching through my trove of published reports, I found four recent surveys that asked this question....
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
Systems in our new Guide to Customer Data Platforms range from B2B data enhancement to campaign managers to audience platforms. This may lead you to wonder whether there’s anything we actually left out. In fact, there was: although the final choices were admittedly a bit subjective, I tried to ensure the report only included systems that met specific critieria including a persistent database, customer-level data, marketer control, and marketing-related...
Thursday, 26 September 2013
Raab Associates’ new Guide to Customer Data Platforms is now available (click here to buy).You may not find that news to be fall-off-your-chair exciting. In fact, you’re more likely to wonder whether the world needs yet another report on anything at all. Fair enough. So before telling you what’s in the CDP Guide, I'll tell you why it exists.Simply put, marketers need better databases. If you’re a working marketer, you almost surely know this...
Thursday, 19 September 2013
My detailed study of Customer Data Platforms should be released next week. Now that the information is assembled, I can at last pull back and get a good overview of what I’ve found.Perhaps the most interesting discovery has been that the CDP vendors cluster into three main groups. • B2B data enhancement. These build a large reference database of companies and employees, which they match against records imported from their clients. They generally...
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