# Marketing via Technology > Marketing operations consultant and martech solutions architect at CRMT Digital. I blog about martech and how B2B marketers can get the most from marketing technology. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About the Author URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/about/ Last updated: 2025-03-16T22:46:28.000Z [![](//www.gravatar.com/avatar/60fa755d6b89ee9f9d59d0f957711f40?s=250&d=mm&r=x)](https://marketingviatechnology.com/about "Alan Chatfield")**[Alan Chatfield](https://marketingviatechnology.com/about "Alan Chatfield")** Marketing Operations Consultant and Solutions Architect at [CRMT Digital](//www.crmtdigital.com) specialising in marketing technology architecture. Advisor on marketing effectiveness and martech optimisation. I am a Marketing Operations Consultant and Marketing Technology Solutions Architect with a background in marketing automation and information technology. By day, I work for CRMT Digital, a marketing operations agency in the UK. I advise enterprises on how to maximise their investment in marketing technology. This can involve anything from defining the funnel and architecting the marketing technology stack through to end user training and executing campaigns. On these pages, I write how about marketing technology can best be used to improve B2B marketing performance. They record some of the observations and insights I have gained as a consultant advising businesses on campaign strategy and technical architecture. I got into marketing through technology. My first job was as a junior database administrator cleaning data and managing CRM databases. I was IT Manager at CRMT Digital for many years alongside my work building campaigns in Eloqua and Marketo. Over the years, I've created enough campaigns and worked alongside enough marketers to become knowledgable in demand generation and other marketing topics. My technical background can still sometimes show through, but that's no longer a bad thing. Marketing has become increasingly technical. The explosion in marketing technologies has required marketers to learn how technology can be used to enhance their campaigns. The best marketing teams are building complex technology stacks to deliver outstanding results to the business. I advise marketers on how to build the right martech stack to fit their business strategy as well as how to make the most of it once in place. Technology is only useful if it solves a genuine business need. The strategy must always come first, yet many executives fail to realise this. I have seen too many marketing automation and martech implementations fail because the buyer has no real idea of what their brand new system should be used for. This can result in marketers changing their plans to fit the technology they have available, regardless of whether it is the right strategy for their business. My job is to help marketers avoid that trap. ### About this Site This is a personal website written in my spare time, so the content is based on whatever catches my interest. I started this site as an outlet to express my personal views on B2B marketing, marketing technology and enterprise technology, but you will also see off-topic posts on issues relavant to technology or marketing. I do not pretend to be an expert in everything I cover, so do let me know if anything I say is incorrect by leaving a comment on the relevant article. I unreservedly apologise for any offence caused by anything I write on these pages. I'm not writing this to earn money for myself or win business for CRMT. Some of what I write will align with the views of my employer, but other opinions expressed will not. As such, everything on these pages are solely the opinion of the author and do not reflect those of CRMT or any other individual or organisation. I have included a link to CRMT on these pages, purely because the content of this site is relevant to their core business and I happen to work for them. I will be writing articles for their blog too, some of which may also appear here either before or after publication on crmtdigital.com. That is their price for allowing me to have this site. ### Getting in Touch If you want further advice or support with the marketing topics expressed in these pages do not hesitate to get in touch with CRMT. They can be contacted at [www.crmtdigital.com](https://www.crmtdigital.com) or by calling +44 (0) 118 436 2200 or +1 415 590 4884. If you want to get in touch with me directly, message me on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-chatfield/) or email [contact@marketingviatechnology.com](mailto:contact@marketingviatechnology.com). Please do not contact me with offers of work or requests for consultancy. All paid and unpaid work should be arranged through CRMT. ### Privacy Policy URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/privacy-policy/ Last updated: 2025-03-16T22:48:26.000Z This privacy policy was last updated on 15th August 2023\. We introduced comments for newsletter subscribers, but only on newsletter articles. ### Summary This document informs you of our policies and procedures regarding the collection, use, disclosure and protection of information that apply to this website, as well as your choices regarding the collection and use of information. We try our best to minimise the data we collect. We do not share your data with any third parties unless required to operate our service. We only use your personal data for the exact reason it was provided. There are no tracking scripts on this site. We don't track page views. Nor do we track opens or clicks on email updates, if you choose to subscribe to them. 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You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page. ### Contact Us If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us by emailing [contact@marketingviatechnology.com](mailto:contact@marketingviatechnology.com) ### About CRMT Digital URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/crmt/ Last updated: 2025-01-21T20:17:10.000Z [![](//www.gravatar.com/avatar/60fa755d6b89ee9f9d59d0f957711f40?s=250&d=mm&r=x)](https://marketingviatechnology.com/about "Alan Chatfield")This is a personal website written in my spare time. Everything on these pages is the opinion of the author and does not reflect those of CRMT Digital. I have included information about them here because the content of this site is relevant to their business. CRMT Digital is a hybrid agency combining specialist technology capability with sales & marketing expertise to deliver optimum revenue performance through best practice. CRMT Digital help marketers transform their organisations using insight, technology and data to improve customer engagement and marketing performance. We do this by aligning sales and marketing through a combination of best practice consulting, technology implementation and integration, and outsourcing skilled teams. As a marketing operations agency, we have led the way in helping global organisations transform traditionally siloed sales and marketing activities into integrated, agile programmes that deliver efficiency, effectiveness and return on investment. Get in touch with CRMT Digital and discover how we can strategise, execute and transform your marketing activities to deliver operations excellence. **W:** [www.crmtdigital.com](https://www.crmtdigital.com/) **T:** [44 (0) 118 436 2200](tel:441184362200) / [+1 415 590 4884](tel:14155904884) **E:** [info@crmtdigital.com](mailto:info@crmtdigital.com) ### Thank You URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/subscribe-thank-you/ Last updated: 2024-02-02T21:16:12.000Z Thank you for signing up for our newsletter. _This page is for subscribers only._ ### Make the Most of Your Martech Stack URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/subscribe/ Last updated: 2025-01-14T16:04:13.000Z ## Sign up for Marketing via Technology Stay up to date with actionable insights into martech and marketing ops Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Your email will not be shared with anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time ### Technology from the Crossroads URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/subscribe2/ Last updated: 2025-01-14T17:26:03.000Z ## Sign up for the Marketing via Technology newsletter Stay up to date with actionable insights into martech and marketing ops Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Your email will not be shared with anyone You can unsubscribe at any time ### Make the Most of Your Martech Stack URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/newsletter/ Last updated: 2025-01-14T15:53:43.000Z ## Sign up for the Marketing via Technology newsletter Stay up to date with actionable insights into martech and marketing ops Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. Your email will not be shared with anyone. You can unsubscribe at any time. ### Technology from the Crossroads URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/technology-from-the-crossroads/ Last updated: 2025-01-15T20:00:22.000Z _No content available._ ### Make the Most of Your Martech Stack URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/ Last updated: 2025-01-15T20:01:36.000Z _No content available._ ### Social Feed URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/notes/ Last updated: 2025-12-23T00:40:12.000Z _No content available._ ## Posts ### Beyond the Platform: Salesforce meets Claude URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/beyond-the-platform-salesforce-meets-claude/ Last updated: 2026-09-01T07:30:34.000Z Several months ago, Salesforce announced a major product strategy change. The entire Salesforce platform was going headless. A new generation of agents could manipulate Salesforce data and business workflows without logging into the platform. Headless 360 got the attention of developers, who have long been frustrated by the esoteric languages and custom tooling needed to develop within the Salesforce platform. Unfortunately for Salesforce’s investors, much of the functionality required to deliver the headless vision is yet to reach general availability. ### Claudeforce The announcement of Headless 360 also caught the attention of business users. Yet, many dismissed it as a mere back end update. They failed to grasp the possibilities that Headless 360 would open up for their day-to-day contact and opportunity updates. In that respect, the announcement of Claudeforce last week was a turning point. It was an integration that got a lot of attention, far more than most new Claude connectors. Yet, in actual product terms, it's not really a big deal. As such, it was announced during an earnings call, rather than at Dreamforce in a few weeks. Claudeforce has an impressive scope. It promises access to 37 new AI skills, which cover many day-to-day sales activities. Yet, with the right prompting, Claude has been able to do meeting prep and pipeline reviews for some time. Sure, there wasn't an official one click connector for it. However, the same capabilities were available through the Salesforce MCP server released last year. A native connection makes security reviews easier, which is an especially relevant concern for a core business platform such as Salesforce. Furthermore, a native skill saves time by cutting down development time for AI power users and operations teams. ### AI Adoption The entire episode illustrates the rather basic current state of AI adoption in the typical enterprise. For all the talk of agentic automation, AI is not trusted with repeatable tasks. Business users still don't have confidence in AI output, and for good reason. Consequently, the technology is rarely used for business processes that run without human oversight. Where available, rule based automation approaches are the preferred approach for automating manual grunt work. Sure, those traditional workflows may contain an AI component to them, but the actual trigger and execution is deterministic. Instead, generative AI is typically used for one-off routine tasks. The classic example is drafting an email. Templated activity alerts are generated using the same CRM automation tools as always. One-off customer communications are often co-written with AI. It depends on the rep, their confidence in the technology, and their writing ability. This has resulted in a general improvement in the clarity and quality of the typical business email. People are dismissive of AI generated content, but it does have its place. ### Assisting the Routine The real benefit of AI tools such as Claudeforce is in tasks that occur regularly, but are never exactly the same. Meeting prep is a good example. Plenty of AI tools already offer skills to support this. Microsoft Teams will surface relevant documents when viewing a meeting invite in Teams. AI notetakers will send a recap of the previous call. The trouble is that none of these features provide the right level of detail. Every call is different, and requires different types of briefing material. A sales call requires different preparation from a 1:1 with your manager. Salesforce can help with the former, but it's not much use for the latter. However, Claude (or competing AI platforms) can help with preparing for any meeting type, as long as the AI understands the right places to pull the most relevant information for each call. That requires business-specific context only available to a chatbot with access to the entire enterprise knowledge graph. Supplying that context is still very much a human task, requiring a prompt or AI skill developed by the user. The advantage of Claudeforce is that it short circuits the AI customisation process, but only if you're a Salesforce shop. Fortunately, custom AI skills are relatively easy to develop. As such, they're proliferating across the enterprise, even if they're not always shared when they should be. For operations teams, developing and maintaining custom AI skills and custom AI chatbots is fast becoming an essential skillset. It ensures the entire business gets the full benefit of the AI tools being pushed by management. Otherwise, you're relying on vendor trained AI such as Claudeforce, which may not deliver the right answer for every organisation. ### The Quest for ROI Generic AI features do still have their place. They just limit the potential of the technology. AI chatbots have been a game changer in enterprise. Not because of the generative capabilities of LLMs, although that has been useful. The real ROI has been realised through vast knowledge banks. Claude and ChatGPT are now the central tools for accessing information across the business. In part because they are one of the few platforms that have direct access to all corporate data silos. Investor pressure and AI adoption mandates have made such widespread access possible, delivering the promised efficiency gains that business leaders have been looking for. Trouble is, those same executives aren't just interested in quicker and more accurate information retrieval. Justifying the cost of AI investments necessitates a direct impact on the bottom line. That requires more sophisticated usage of the technology, which is still a long way from production in most organisations. ## In Brief ## Integrate Acquires Calibermind The combination is interesting. One is an enterprise lead intake platform specialising in managing content syndication leads; the other is a multi-touch attribution platform that reports on revenue by channel. The ambition is to break down the silos that block end-to-end media ROI reporting. Good luck to them, as they're not the first companies to take on this challenge. [Read the Article](https://www.integrate.com/resources/blog/integrate-acquires-calibermind/) --- ## Operationalising ABM in the Real World: Your Step-by-Step Guide Finding it difficult to navigate the complexities of ABM. A new eGuide from CRMT Digital cuts through ABM hype, explaining how to implement and run an ABM program in practical terms. Boost ROI with practical approaches to account-based targeting, personalisation and engagement. [Download the eGuide](https://www.crmtdigital.com/knowledge-hub/operationalising-abm-in-the-real-world-your-step-by-step-guide/) --- ## Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix A Marketing Operations Roadmap is an essential strategic tool that aligns marketing priorities with your overall business goals. Any roadmap begins with understanding where your marketing organisation is right now, and then defining where you want to get to. This free Marketing Operations Roadmap Matrix from CRMT Digital allows you to do exactly that. [Download the Matrix](https://www.crmtdigital.com/knowledge-hub/a-clear-route-to-marketing-operations-excellence/) ### HubSpot's Data Management Challenge URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/hubspots-data-management-challenge/ Last updated: 2026-07-09T07:30:44.000Z Data is big business. It is the lifeblood of marketing. An entire ecosystem of account data providers empowers ABM programs and outbound sales motions. Every marketing team has a network of data enrichment providers cleaning and enriching different aspects of the marketing database. Sales are no different. Enterprise account teams rely on sales intelligence tools to research the names and job titles of key decision makers within key accounts. ### The Contact Discovery Scandal Consequently, the world initially shrugged when HubSpot announced a contact prospecting tool last week. Sales teams could acquire new names directly from within HubSpot using the data enrichment features bundled with Breeze Intelligence. It seemed an obvious next step for a company that has long had integrated account enrichment capabilities, but who have struggled to upsell customers on paid enrichment credits. Then a few eagle-eyed LinkedIn posters noticed where the data powering the new Contact Discovery product was coming from: other HubSpot customers. Cue total outrage. HubSpot intended to use job title information entered by one HubSpot CRM customer to enrich the job level and function for all HubSpot customers containing the same contact. They wanted to leverage the profile data entered by their customers to build the prospecting database that was being sold to those same customers. In doing so, they misunderstood the role of a CRM system. On Monday, HubSpot hastily cancelled the product launch, but the reputational damage has been done. Questions are being asked about HubSpot's entire product strategy, and their relationship with customers. At the heart of the problem is a strategic disconnect. HubSpot is not really a CRM vendor. Sure, their app has a built-in CRM but HubSpot's core product is Marketing Hub, the marketing automation platform. From a vendor perspective, HubSpot CRM is merely a unified data layer which allows the different HubSpot Hubs to access the same account and contact data. That's not customers see it - to them HubSpot CRM is the core product, and the various hubs are the add-ons. ### Data Platform vs Technology Platform This difference matters. Plenty of sales intelligence vendors allow customers to update the purchased prospecting database accessed by all customers. Apollo and ZoomInfo both do this. It's accepted because ZoomInfo is seen as a data vendor, rather than a technology vendor. You purchase their platform to access their data for CRM enrichment and prospecting campaigns. HubSpot is different. It's widely used as a system of record for customer data. Many SMBs use it to manage their sales pipeline. Companies use it to manage their account information. Data ownership matters, and not just because GDPR says it should. Even before AI, customer data was seen as the foundation of every go to market motion. With AI, good data is a competitive advantage. Customer data shapes market understanding, and enables best-in-class customer experiences. Data even shapes strategy. Before deciding investment priorities, many CMOs seek to map their total addressable market, and rank potential customers by market fit. Contact and activity data is then used to identify purchase intent, and to guide nurture programs. Much of the data used in these programs comes from third party sources, potentially including HubSpot's own data products. First party data is the difference maker. Every marketer has access to the same third party intent data, and to the same account enrichment vendors. Getting ahead of your competitors requires leveraging web activity data or campaign response data to progress accounts through the funnel. Closing the deal requires tapping into proprietary account information, such as purchase history or CRM relationship data. Ops teams are investing huge amounts of time and effort to improve data quality, and to adapt marketing databases to the specific business needs. Marketers don't want their specific database customisations to be shared with their competitors. It neutralises the biggest benefit of a strong marketing ops team. ### The Importance of Infrastructure A data platform which allows marketers to blend first party and third-party data is essential to marketing success in the agentic age. It's the key reason Salesforce Data Cloud exists, and why Clay has become so popular. Yet, these platforms are very much seen as infrastructure. Hubspot don't want their CRM to be seen as infrastructure. They want to be the AI agent running on top of that infrastructure. In order to deliver that vision, there needs to be a best-in-class data platform to store the information powering those agents. For a vertically integrated vendor such as Hubspot, that infrastructure needs to be the built-in CRM. For marketers with complex data needs, a built-in CRM isn't flexible enough. It doesn't allow for deep customisation, cross channel orchestration or complex data management workflows. Increasingly, B2B marketers are looking to mirror the headless marketing automation trend seen in B2C. Introducing a dedicated data tool allows for bespoke data enrichment workflows, or AI assisted audience selection that blends profile and activity information. The benefits are enormous, even if the downsides are just as significant. Such capabilities require a more complex tech stack and a radically different cost model. B2B marketers are still adapting to the required changes. If they do, Hubspot’s vertically integrated product strategy may become untenable. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Agency Vision in an AI World URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/agency-vision-in-an-ai-world/ Last updated: 2026-06-25T07:30:36.000Z B2B marketing has changed radically in the past few years, but not always in the way people expected. AI has made content quicker and easier to produce. It's made data more important. It's made search engines less important, dramatically disrupting acquisition strategies across digital channels. Marketing has become more efficient, but not necessarily quicker or more effective. Marketers are still following the same content development and campaign execution workflows as before. It's just that some steps have been automated with AI, mostly to assist with tasks frequently delegated to agencies or freelancers. That has allowed marketing departments to dramatically reduce agency spend. ### AI Assisted Content Generative AI has been adopted across the full content lifecycle, but mostly for drafting copy and images on an ad-hoc basis. In content workflows, it's really only hero assets and high profile campaigns that are still routinely outsourced. As a result, day-to-day content production is now significantly more likely to be written in-house. That has had a perceptible impact on content quality, but not enough to affect overall campaign performance. AI generated content may be inferior to agency content, but it's good enough for most purposes. Indeed, there are benefits to AI-assisted content production, alongside the obvious disadvantages. AI opens up content production to subject matter experts within the business, particularly for short form content such as blog articles. It allows these experts to authentically articulate the brand perspective, without a copywriter acting as an intermediary. Used properly, AI helps guide the authentic brand voice, even when it lacks that additional layer of professional polish. Instead, the marketer's role shifts to that of an editor. Of course, this only works for thought leaders willing to assist with marketing content. ### Speed vs Quality Creative agencies still have a key role in strategy and media planning, but the days when agencies wrote every article on the corporate blog are gone. AI has not yet revolutionised campaign planning, and it's not clear whether it ever will. It can help generate and validate ideas, but marketers still want human-expertise to confirm brand positioning and validate high level plans against industry peers. That's where agencies now offer the greatest value. As content becomes quicker and easier to produce, the need for third party validation becomes ever more important. The technology industry has always tended to prioritise speed to market over quality of output. AI risks broadening that tendency. Speed is a good thing. In theory, reducing campaign lead times allows marketers to adapt and optimise underperforming campaigns. Badly received messaging can be re-written before it causes long term damage, but poor creative still has an impact. ### The Need for Human Expertise Accuracy, quality, and relevance should not be sacrificed in the rush to be responsive. It requires deep customer expertise to find a relevant message and the right balance. The best content strategy is to develop good content in the first place. First impressions matter. If a prospect's first exposure to a brand is through badly optimised AI slop, then brand reputation will suffer. This is a risk even when content is heavily personalised to the buyer's context. Personalised content is just as likely to annoy prospects as generic content. AI does not replace human judgement, and it cannot confidently predict how particular campaigns will resonate with particular audiences. That is where experience is essential. The leading agencies provide unique insights into campaigns and strategies that cannot be replicated with AI. Such judgements are especially important in the AI age. Customers want authenticity; marketers want results. The right blend of human ingenuity and AI velocity can deliver successful campaigns for everyone. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The AI Pricing Question URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-ai-pricing-question/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T07:30:13.000Z AI needed to turn a profit at some stage. After years of experiments, businesses are finally using AI in production. CFOs are even seeing ROI on some of those long touted AI experiments. Content production workflows have been accelerated, campaign optimisation is happening faster, and data management workflows have gained new capabilities. A wide range of AI start-ups are seeing plenty of interest, if not large scale adoption. A new set of technology firms have become big winners. The only thing missing is profitable AI model makers. We won't need to wait long for them. The impending IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI are dominating both business and technology news. After multiple record breaking funding rounds, the two giants of the AI world will be listing on the Nasdaq in the autumn. The relevant paperwork was filed with the SEC last week. Going public is an important milestone for any startup. However, these listings have much broader significance because they provide the first glimpse into the true costs of generative AI technology. As such, they mark a watershed moment for AI. Until now, the true cost of running large language models has been shrouded in secrecy. The transparency of a stock market listing will pierce that veil, meaning that the underlying cost of generative AI will become public for the first time. That's critical for the future of the technology. ### Predictable Costs Executives have invested fortunes in AI pilots, without any clear picture of the long term costs of the technology. That makes it extraordinarily difficult to measure the long term ROI of a particular AI use case. The likes of Claude Code and Codex have been gaining adoption as a productivity aid, particularly for developers. However, few companies are outright replacing staff with AI, despite tech firms proclaiming the contrary. The technology isn't capable enough to replace every task carried out by any particular employee. Even if it were, CFOs don't know whether the technology will cost less than employee wages over the long term. That's a particularly relevant question, given that model makers are finally raising prices in preparation for their IPOs. Every new model has higher token costs and lower usage limits. All-you-can-eat usage has been replaced with consumption based pricing across the board. Sometimes this backfires, as Microsoft are finding out at the moment. Recent pricing changes to GitHub Copilot have drawn a fierce backlash, resulting in some developers switching to cheaper open source models. The open question is around how far prices will rise. Investors want to know if models are profitable at current prices, both before and after training costs are taken into account. Clarity into the finances of AI firms is critical to the future growth of the technology. Gartner told their clients not to even bother measuring the ROI of AI pilots. It was simply too new. As with any new technology, models were being run dramatically below cost, so executives were told to wait until they knew what the long term cost of AI would be. AI was unprofitable, but Wall Street won't allow that situation to persist for long. Anthropic and OpenAI have begun the long path to profitability. That has implications for AI budgets and SaaS pricing across the entire technology industry. CFOs need certainty around long term consumption costs. Decisions about which AI pilots to put into production depend on the answer. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Systems of Record in the AI Age URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/systems-of-record-in-the-ai-age/ Last updated: 2026-05-28T07:30:15.000Z Data is everywhere. It is the fuel which powers modern marketing. Marketers have spent years building complex tech stacks to make the most effective use of customer profiles and campaign activity history. Marketing technology is the decision-making engine that drives marketing ROI. It turns data into revenue through proprietary vendor workflows or bespoke AI models built into each app. That technology takes the disparate insights collected across the tech stack and uses them to optimise ad spend, identity nurture audiences, or generate leads. ### Information Overload As a result of all this technology, enterprise marketing teams have more information than they know what to do with. It's not just the classic customer profiles found in every CRM system. AI has expanded the scope of useful information to include internal notes, customer communications, and even the marketing content that prospects consume. All those things are data, but they are managed very differently. Over time, specialised SaaS platforms have been developed to manage each dataset. Budgets are often controlled in specialised finance tools such as Anaplan. Reporting data is increasingly centralised in dedicated BI tools owned by the analytics team. CRM data remains locked in Salesforce or Dynamics. The CMS increasingly acts as an asset management tool, as well as a website hosting platform. Vendors develop their products to fit the specialised workflows needed to manage data and activate content within a specific set of use cases. Tech teams mix and match vendors to fit the specific business needs each platform must address. ### Core Competencies Some vendors do cover multiple categories. Salesforce and Adobe both offer solutions across all areas of marketing. However, specialisation matters. The most mature and well designed features from each vendor fit the dataset and use cases that the vendor knows best. That's often the market in which the vendor has the highest pedigree and the deepest institutional knowledge. Despite owning multiple best-in-class customer activation platforms, Adobe's strongest offerings remain those related to content production and content management workflows. Salesforce remains the market leader for CRM platforms. It's no coincidence that the core competence of Salesforce is CRM data and customer engagement workflows. That's where the company started. They’ve been able to expand that strength by developing enterprise grade customer service and cross-channel marketing capabilities. The backend data and content management products have struggled though. Instead, it is Adobe who have become the thought leader in digital asset management systems. While their primary growth driver is built around the related content production tools. The two vendors compete directly, but they still operate in very different worlds, often answering to different marketing stakeholders. That's because they arrive at the same challenges from very different angles, looking to solve critical marketing challenges through the most effective use of different types of information. Perhaps the biggest impact of AI is the ability to link these disparate data types together in a structured way. Adobe look to generate leads from the best use of content. Salesforce from the best use of customer data. Yet, why not do both? ### Value Add Expectations about technology have changed. Marketers don't want unused technology lying around doing nothing. It needs to be always on, constantly powering the customer journey. Mere campaign execution is not enough. Marketers want technology to improve campaigns. The successful vendors have relevant expertise and insight into a specific channel or marketing workflow. That expertise is the moat upon which the vendor’s offering is built. Without it, a technology product cannot survive in a saturated martech marketplace. Complex applications can now be developed using in house solutions. A new technology needs to add value not found in the existing tech stack. That value that is not measured through capabilities, but instead is measured in experience. However, vendor expertise is no longer enough on its own. AI or agencies can provide it. Marketers want bespoke solutions. Each technology needs to work within the customer’s own industry. Vendor capabilities need to be adaptable to the campaigns that users need to run. Marketers expect to overlay their context and their strategy on top of vendor provided capabilities. That linkage requires manual guidance and human insight into the most relevant connections. Technology then allows the resulting strategy to be executed quickly and optimised efficiently, but only if the underlying data has been appropriately tagged, stored and cleansed. Dirty data leads to bad AI. Good data requires the right governance processes for each dataset. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### A Single System for Data Management URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/a-single-system-for-data-management/ Last updated: 2026-05-13T07:30:01.000Z Data is the lifeblood of modern marketing. Yet, no one is happy with their data. No matter what cleansing and enrichment processes are put in place, complaints about data quality still abound. Data can never be good enough. There is always some extra piece of information, or some additional standardisation which will make your marketing database that little bit more useful. That's not the fault of ops teams. Most marketing teams have plenty of data across the business. Yet the reality remains that bad data is the biggest barrier to deeper personalisation or better customer experiences. More recently, executive pressure to leverage AI has added greater attention to the data quality challenge. ### Data as a Competitive Advantage AI transforms the data quality debate. A comprehensive CRM database becomes a competitive advantage. Good data hygiene can deliver meaningful ROI, beyond just a marginally better conversion rate and a few extra leads. AI changes how data is used. It becomes a tool for deriving market insights, for identifying new sectors to target, and for discovering new customer challenges to solve. Trend analysis and recommendation engines become real revenue generators. Targeting decisions can be made based on likelihood to convert rather than gut instinct. AI also expands the concept of data. It's no longer just contact records and opportunity information. Call notes and meeting summaries become actionable intelligence suitable for data mining using Large Language Models (LLMs). Even the content written and deployed by those same LLMs (under human review of course) becomes meaningful data that can be used to share bespoke market insights with top decision makers in key accounts. With AI, all written information becomes data to mine for future campaign and creative concepts. ### Joined Up Maintenance In truth, there are many more types of data beyond just CRM data and written data. Marketers have to manage analytics data and budgeting data too, just to name two examples. Each of these varying data sources is managed separately, often by separate teams in separate SaaS platforms. These sources don't necessarily exist in silos. The links between CRM data and budgeting data are well understood. Indeed, they may both be managed by the marketing ops team. However, they operate in very different business contexts. Different skill sets and different internal structures are needed to understand these disparate types of information. That requires very different collection processes, with very different activation workflows. Each data source is a single component of the broader marketing program. Ultimately, everything comes together to serve the overarching marketing objective. A successful customer experience requires effective personalisation at both the data layer and the content layer. Until now, that has required disparate tools loosely connected together in a bloated tech stack. All-in-one marketing clouds claim to offer a joined up solution, but rarely do in practice. The disconnects between the various components prevent seamless activation across channels, often resulting in fragmented customer profiles and additional data silos. Now, platforms vendors want to add an agentic layer on top of their product bundles. That makes activation more efficient, but it doesn't solve the underlying data maintenance challenge. ### Looking at Data Usage Fragmentation is unavoidable. Internal business logic means that data will remain siloed in different platforms across the business. Budgeting data in one tool, customer data in another. There are valid reasons for that. It reflects data ownership within the organisation. It allows teams to select the best platform to manage that specific data set, and to decide the quickest way to use that data set for its primary purpose. For instance, budgeting data cannot be optimised solely for ROI reporting, even if that requirement is still important. Budgeting data is still primarily needed for managing budget allocations and tracking usage. AI does make it easier to bring all that information together. However, the enterprise wide integration of data and insight doesn't happen magically. It needs to be guided. AI systems need to be trained on each individual dataset, as well as on how the business uses that data today. It needs to be guided on business strategy and marketing objectives. It needs to encompass the types of data and insights not typically managed by analytics teams and operations teams in the past. That will include the marketing content published in campaigns. The brand guidelines needed to produce that content, and the strategy documents that set the overarching objectives for each activation. A comprehensive training process allows AI to produce the best relevant guidance for each marketing team. Such an AI can supplement the strategic insight of a human analyst by drilling into the most relevant details across any marketing disciplines. The resulting discoveries allow for new connections that can be interrogated using new production workflows. Those techniques don't replace existing production workflows. They simply provide additional ways of working for the campaigns or individuals that need them. Nor can AI replace human judgement. It lacks the necessary experience. It can, though, provide the data needed to validate that judgement. From there, the real superpower of AI is to combine content and data in new ways which make the customer experience better for everyone. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Rebirth of SaaS URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/rebirth-of-saas/ Last updated: 2026-04-28T07:30:34.000Z Tech stack consolidation and AI hype have led many investors to question the role that Software-as-a-Service will play in an AI-enabled economy. Such concerns are misguided. Core business platforms are more important than ever. AI merely changes the role of specific apps, and the capabilities needed by operations teams managing the stack. That's an incredibly disruptive transition for technology companies. AI teams need their agents to interact with the existing tech stack. To meet that demand, martech vendors are being forced into deep architectural changes. Yet, AI automation does not replace all manual processes. Tech firms need to redesign their platforms without disrupting their customer's day-to-day workflows. This month has seen several attempts to pull off the required product transition. Both Salesforce and Adobe have announced major platform changes in order to boost the use of AI agents. The two vendors are motivated by subtly different goals. Salesforce are looking to open up their platform to new AI driven business processes. Adobe are looking to automate existing marketing workflows with an AI decision engine that can orchestrate content and campaign processes across their entire portfolio. These ambitions aren't just about meeting customer needs, they're both looking to resolve the key business challenge inherent in being the dominant vendor in a mature technology market. ### Adobe CX goes Agentic Adobe Experience Cloud has long been a mix of disparate best-in-class martech products. There have been various attempts to combine the different acquisitions into a unified suite. None have succeeded in terms of strategic vision or product execution. Instead, the likes of AEM, Magento and Marketo remain separate apps loosely connected through a real time CDP that few people either understand or use. Adobe want their CDP to become a coherent end-to-end marketing engine, but it remains just another Adobe martech product. Building a mix of AI agents into the platform layer at least gives the Adobe CX suite a reason to exist as a collective bundle. Getting Adobe customers to adopt the various agents is the key challenge. As with many agents, Adobe's new AI capabilities utilises a credit based pricing model, which means that simply bundling the features into existing subscriptions isn't enough. To deliver ROI, these first-party agents need to produce meaningfully better outcomes than third party AI products or custom-built agentic solutions. That's a difficult task, given the expanding array of alternatives. AI has reawakened the buy vs build debate with enterprise technology. Many marketing ops teams prefer to build their own AI execution agents in Claude and ChatGPT instead of using off-the-shelf solutions. Doing so gives much more control over output, a critical consideration when faced with privacy concerns and the importance of optimising prompts for specific LLMs. Building agentic solutions using shared models also allows marketing teams to mix AI workflows, traditional automation, and manual processes to fit business needs. It is interesting, therefore, to see Adobe hedge their bets. Adobe Summit also saw the announcement of an MCP integration for the entire Adobe product portfolio and a chat-based interface for Marketo specifically. That will allow existing marketing automation procedures to be AI-enabled without buying into the entire Adobe CX product line. ### The Optional Salesforce UI Salesforce certainly expect their customers to build agentic AI solutions. At their developer conference a few weeks ago, Marc Benioff announced a major architectural change intended to streamline custom app development. Headless 360 is an underwhelming name for a bold vision. Decoupling the Salesforce user interface from the underlying business logic allows any Salesforce workflow to be automated through code, whether or not that's AI-enabled. A headless platform architecture is the starting point for a composable tech stack, with Salesforce positioned as the backend database for any variety of AI agents executing day-to-day business processes. Traditional deterministic integrations benefit from the change too. In an AI-enabled world, the application user interface becomes less important. Bad UX can be worked around using agentic automation. Instead, it is the application business logic that becomes the key differentiator. Data quality is the key to making an app useful. Salesforce want you to build AI agents using third party tools, just so long as they're processing customer data managed in CRM. Importantly, agents are not a replacement for the Lightning UX. AI doesn't remove the need for manual lead updates. It merely provides another way of managing the same information. Not all pipeline reviews and forecast updates can be automated. Many can be though, removing the kind of data maintenance tasks that sales reps frequently neglect. ### Mixing Human & Agentic The same applies in marketing. Adobe are bringing a conversational interface to Marketo. It doesn't replace the traditional UI. That's getting upgrades too. The chatbot has the breadth of skills expected from a basic Marketo user, such as list imports and program creation. Marketers will be able to create an email newsletter from a prompt, both through the native chatbot or through third-party AI tools. With training, the Adobe AI will also be able to support governance tasks, such as monitoring program naming conventions and fixing badly named smart campaigns. It can't configure the Marketo platform for you though, which means that a UI is still needed. Integration is becoming ubiquitous. With MCP, any AI agent can create a Salesforce lead or a Marketo email. That is the vision both Salesforce and Adobe are working towards. Yet, even the most innovative organisations still need to create leads manually. Human review processes still require every outbound email to pass through a manual QA step. We remain a long way from the oft-mentioned vision of humans and agents working side-by-side. However, AI has made automation much easier and much more comprehensive. For agentic AI to be truly useful, it must work with the same applications as humans, and it must be able to use the same features within those applications. The impact of that automation on business outcomes then becomes the key measure of technology ROI. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Context Imperative URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-context-imperative/ Last updated: 2026-04-08T07:30:20.000Z AI has a credibility problem. For all the widespread usage, few people trust AI generated content to be faithful to their original query. Even fewer consider it to be relevant to business needs. As a result, extensive QA processes have been devised to hide the origin of AI content. Yet, review processes are merely band aid solutions. Highly tuned prompts help mitigate any inaccuracies within AI output, but they can’t provide the human experience needed to show insight and prove value. For AI to be truly useful, the challenges facing AI output need to be fixed at source. ### Enter Context In the lab, AI models are trained on the entire breadth of human knowledge. That is incredibly useful for research and discovery, but becomes a problem when you need a specialised agent to guide decision making. Many agentic AI projects fail because the underlying AI algorithm lacks the detailed experience and institutional know-how needed to support the process being automated. Human knowledge workers need extensive training before they can reliably manage a complex business process. Agents are no different. Over the last twelve months, context has become a leading tech industry buzzword. Model makers promote it as the answer to the much publicised accuracy and adoption challenges confronting them. Power users see it as the solution to slop. Context provides the detailed institutional background needed for AI to work effectively. It adds the personalised intelligence and industry insight otherwise lacking in poor quality AI generated content. Without context, AI doesn’t know what your business does or who you’re talking to. It can’t align output to your business strategy or to your specific strengths and weaknesses. That results in generic content to match the generic web information used to train the underlying large language model (LLM). ### Retrieval Augmented Generation Turning AI into a useful decision-making engine requires feeding it with all the business-specific intelligence not shared publicly. Much of that information will already be published internally though. It will be collected and organised for human consumption in SaaS platforms such as Salesforce or SharePoint. It just needs to be made accessible to AI. This should be seen as a content and data engineering challenge rather than an integration problem. The underlying integration work will already have been carried out by the platform developers, but most AI models also require content owners to update the content itself. As such, data scientists have developed a set of best practice approaches for sharing in-house datasets and private information with LLMs, which are collectively known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). At its most basic, RAG is about organising internal business documents so AI models can use them to support business queries. A business analyst might rewrite internal strategy documents to follow a detailed FAQ format, so that they are easily searchable by AI. A revenue operations team might open up the corporate CRM system for AI indexing using an MCP integration. A data engineer might add contextual information to corporate dashboards so that AI can interpret and monitor KPIs. RAG is ultimately about tagging content so that it is easier for AI to categorise, as well as about adding missing business context to reduce hallucinations. Often this requires breaking out long documents into an FAQ format; a strategy that content teams are also using to improve website rankings within ChatGPT. ### Small Language Models RAG makes AI models easier to customise. For all the success of Claude and ChatGPT, many IT teams want to replace them with internal models. That's often driven by security requirements, but internal models are also more responsive to business needs. App developers have very little control over the content returned by a ChatGPT API call. A bespoke small language model can be tweaked for the required use case simply by updating the relevant training material. Increasingly, automated feedback loops form part of the training process. Allowing models to learn from user feedback and successful agent executions with minimal developer intervention. AI projects often fail despite initial good results. Getting AI to automate a task once is relatively easy. Getting AI to successfully automate the same task every time is hard. All too often, an agent can complete 90% of a task 90% of the time. Teams struggle to close that final 10% because the AI hasn't been trained in sufficient depth on the relevant process. A custom model can help close that gap because it removes irrelevant knowledge causing hallucinations, and replaces it with the detailed business context required to complete the task. Much of the time, you don't even need a bespoke model. The leading public models work as well, if provided with all the relevant background information in the system prompt. That does require careful prompt tweaking, as well as adding links to plenty of secondary documentation. Training a model is a long and complex task, regardless of model size. Collating the information needed to automate a process with AI takes far longer than actually developing the relevant automation workflow. However, it is essential if AI is to become the foundation of enterprise automation. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The AI Adoption Slow Lane URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-ai-adoption-slow-lane/ Last updated: 2026-03-24T08:30:39.000Z Until very recently, tech firms had a growth problem. Many software vendors over-invested during the pandemic, accelerating product development to cope with increased customer demand. Businesses digitised their marketing processes practically overnight in order to cope with lockdown, accelerating a wave of digital transformation that had been building for years. The trouble is, digital transformation wave proved to be a one-time event. With the SaaS market saturated, many technology firms were struggling to find new customers. Meanwhile, businesses were struggling to adopt all the new features built into their brand new tech stack. ### Revolution vs Evolution Generative AI has been touted as the solution to both the vendor growth problem and the end user adoption challenge. AI promises to make technology easier, both to develop and to use. Vibe coding has certainly made coding quicker. From an end user perspective, chatbots have helped users to brainstorm ideas and streamline information discovery. Yet, for all the copilots and AI assistants, they haven’t really transformed the way that end users interact with business applications. Some tech firms are still coming to terms with that trend. Late last year, Oracle announced a revolutionary new user interface for Eloqua based around generative AI. Rather than browsing through the various launchpads to create their emails, users would ask a chatbot to take them to the email editor. It was supposed to make advanced Eloqua features more discoverable to basic users. At the same time, it made those advanced Eloqua features much less discoverable to power users. As a result, the grand plan to replace the Eloqua menu system with an ‘Ask Oracle’ chatbot only lasted a few weeks. Oracle were forced to change course. The existing Eloqua menu system will still be replaced this year, but with an updated menu system instead of a chatbot. ### Multiple Usage Paradigms I didn’t cover this change to Eloqua at the time because I believed it would be cancelled prior to release. That is exactly what happened. This botched announcement does illustrate the disconnect that has arisen between AI developers and application admins in recent months. Agents are supposed to be the future of enterprise technology, allowing far more workflows to be automated than ever before. Going forward, users won’t need to use the likes of Salesforce or Eloqua. Agents will do the work for them. At least that’s the theory. The practical reality is still a decade away. As Oracle learned with Eloqua, AI won't replace SaaS in the enterprise. It merely provides another user interface for SaaS. Agents are being configured to build emails or set up Eloqua campaigns. There are scenarios where a marketer would want to develop a basic campaign by describing it to a chatbot. I’ve developed the capability to do exactly that for CRMT Digital. Other Eloqua users have done similarly. Yet, most Eloqua emails are still being developed by dedicated campaign production teams using the same processes that enterprise marketers have been following for years. Those ‘old’ ways of working will continue for a long time yet. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The SaaS Doom Bubble URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-saas-doom-bubble/ Last updated: 2026-03-10T08:30:14.000Z One notable feature of the AI bubble is how disconnected the markets are from day-to-day corporate reality. Random tech stocks keep on being hit because of the latest AI advancements. Every week sees a new model or tech demo from a leading AI lab. The highlighted capability often competes with a range of existing SaaS solutions, which it is claimed to replace. Investors panic. Dumping the shares of unrelated SaaS companies, including vendors such as Salesforce which are used internally by the leading AI labs. AI has resulted in a new wave of tech startups, many of which compete directly with the leading SaaS companies. The likes of Clay and 11x offer to replace traditional sales automation tools. While some existing vendors such as Qualified have gained new relevance from the technology. Yet, forget the legacy players. Investors are acting as if all these firms will also be replaced by vibe coded in-house solutions. More likely, they will be absorbed by incumbent vendors such as Salesforce. Following on from the CRM giant’s purchase of Qualified at the end of last year. ### The Return of In-House Software? What AI does is re-open the debate about buying versus building software. This was once a live argument played out through flame wars about the merits of Access databases. The rise of cheap SaaS software eliminated the cost advantage of in-house apps, especially for non-tech firms. While vibe coding technology is vastly overhyped, it has once again transformed software development workflows and revolutionised the economics of in-house software. As a result, it is much easier to build simple apps. The trouble is that a lot of enterprise software is far from simple Most enterprise CRM systems are complex beasts with sprawling data maintenance processes and vast territory management capabilities. Security and compliance oversight is mandated at every stage. These tools touch every part of the business. Day-to-day operations are powered by the default logic native to the platform. Few companies use every feature of Salesforce but most enterprise customers use enough of the platform to make migrating a multi-year project. ### The Risk for Add-On Vendors Businesses standardise on Salesforce because of the perceived flexibility, the enterprise-grade security and the easy availability of business-critical support. Vibe coding only neutralises the first of these three advantages. That's even before the vast software and services ecosystem built around the platform is considered. For all its complexity, Salesforce’s native capabilities often aren't sophisticated enough. An entire industry of add-on vendors has built up because Salesforce’s standard routing and attribution workflows simply don't scale to use cases in some industries. Some of these add-on vendors will be threatened by the rise of vibe coded apps. If your app offers one feature built on top of another vendor’s platform then it may be possible for it to be replicated by a moderately technical user with generative AI. It may already be possible to replicate your add-on through bespoke customisation or clever workarounds. For that reason, the life of an add-on developer has long been precarious anyway. If your add-on is popular, you're always at risk of being made redundant by the platform owner’s next release. AI merely compounds that risk. ### A Mature SaaS Market The real threat to the SaaS industry is not AI. Where it makes sense, vendors have already incorporated AI into their apps. Home-brewed apps are not a threat to SaaS either. They've always existed, and always will. Few businesses will use vibe coded apps for core business platforms because of the compliance risks and the difficulty of maintenance. The real threat is market maturity. SaaS was popularised by three leading technology trends of the 2010s: digital transformation, cloud migration, and big data. Technology teams adopted vast tech stacks in response. Yet, that migration process was slowing long before generative AI became the hot new technology. Tech stack consolidation was the buzz phrase of the 2020s. Tech firms have invested enormous sums into generative AI, precisely because they have few other sources of growth. Product bundling and suite building emerged as a response to this problem. Yet, that strategy merely cannibalises other vendors. It doesn't grow the overall market. Tech bosses are desperate for AI to solve their growth problems. They're probably going to be disappointed. Prior to the launch of Agentforce, Salesforce was under immense pressure to slow down product development and return cash to shareholders. Recent share price corrections are the first sign of a return to pre-bubble market trends. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Beyond Dependency: The Martech Risk URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/beyond-dependency-the-martech-risk/ Last updated: 2026-02-24T08:30:21.000Z Risk management is big business. There are entire sub-industries devoted to minimising corporate risk, whether it’s through financial exposure, security threats, or supply chain uncertainties. Well known information security certifications such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 are also ultimately about managing risks introduced through the use of technology. ISO 27001 requires IT departments to draft contingency plans for unexpected business scenarios, such as what happens if Microsoft or Salesforce go out of business. ### Plan for Downtime Now, Salesforce is hardly likely to go down permanently. Temporary disruption is a realistic possibility. Even brief spells of downtime could lead to key systems becoming unavailable. Recent experience shows what can happen. Glitches within Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have led to many leading websites going offline, just within the last few months. Meanwhile, high profile hacks caused several leading UK retailers to go dark last year. Those businesses are still counting the cost of that disruption. Proper planning can minimise that cost, while allowing companies to benefit from the scale and functionality of best-in-class cloud platforms. Operations teams build the business around the available technology, assembling a tech stack to deliver all the capabilities necessary for executing campaigns and accelerating revenue generation. Systems are customised to business requirements, while processes are tuned to the available tech stack. That synergy of process and technology allows marketing teams to deploy marketing programs at record speed, and tune them in response to customer demand. ### Map the Benefits For many go to market teams, Salesforce is the ultimate source of truth. Individual sales reps may have their own contact lists in Excel or Gmail, but executives use Salesforce opportunity data to forecast the sales pipeline and manage territory assignments. If Salesforce goes down, many businesses cannot predict future revenue, which affects planning across the entire organisation. That makes your tech stack a business risk, but one which ultimately benefits the business. The risk attached to most enterprise technology is minimal, because the likes of Salesforce are still reliable products despite recent security issues. Nonetheless, the risk associated with a particular technology configuration should be considered when customising the stack. Such concerns need to be weighed against the benefits. Theoretical security issues shouldn’t be a barrier to system integration. Hypothetical data leaks shouldn’t be a blocker to data processing. System architecture can be tweaked to minimise the downsides of technology dependency, while boosting technology adoption. Utilise vendor support to discover the biggest risks, and leverage expert assistance to advise on the configurations which maximise business impact while guarding against potential threats. ### Prepare for Change Serious problems only arise when the risks associated with a particular software product outweigh the business benefits. That could be because changing business requirements mean that a particular application is no longer suitable for current business needs. It’s often because skills shortages result in businesses deploying applications that no one knows how to use. The biggest threat comes from legacy applications, where the vendor has stopped supporting a particular product or feature that is widely used in your business. Typically, that requires a platform migration, with all the associated costs and disruption. Until then, risks can be managed using leading information security management frameworks such as ISO 27001\. It's best to be prepared. Make sure that process can be separated from technology. The business needs to be able to tweak processes or change core platforms. Such transformation projects are inherently disruptive. Stagnating on broken processes designed for unsuitable platforms is worse. If operational challenges are holding back the business, then devise an action plan to fix and issues. If outcomes don’t meet business expectations, develop a roadmap to improving marketing performance. Evaluate the costs and opportunities associated with any technology transformation. Everything carries a risk. Strong planning and effective change management are the keys to delivering constant improvement. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Beyond Marketing: Know Your Customer URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/beyond-marketing-know-your-customer/ Last updated: 2026-02-10T08:30:46.000Z Last week, Adobe unexpectedly ended support for one of their core Creative Cloud apps. Naturally, this resulted in a fierce backlash from users of the affected product, and a partial climbdown. Instead, the app will be placed in maintenance mode, meaning support will continue even if no new features are to be added. Now, I’ve never used Adobe Animate, the app in question. It’s unlikely I ever will. However, the app is an integral part of the production workflows at several leading 2D animation studios. Given the importance of professional creators to Adobe’s business, it’s surprising that they deprecated Animate at all. From an outsider’s perspective, the entire saga looks like an entirely avoidable mistake. However, it does highlight a critical weakness in Adobe’s corporate strategy, with lessons for marketers everywhere. ### Divided Focus At the heart of the problem is Adobe’s sprawling product portfolio. Professional creators are Adobe’s core market. However, Creative Cloud is a mature product and an industry standard. From a strategic perspective, there is very little revenue growth to be obtained from improving the likes of Animate or InDesign. Adobe's consumer marketing focuses on Document Cloud instead, but Acrobat is also a legacy product that few people like using. For that reason, Adobe’s corporate focus has been on developing Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and the broader portfolio of marketing applications. Big money acquisitions, such as their 2018 purchases of Marketo and Magento, have tended to be within the martech space. In the last 3 years, AI has become another focus. Much of the narrative around Generative AI has focused on the technology’s impact on the creative professions. That directly affects Adobe’s core market. Adobe’s share price has slumped as a result. The threat is real, albeit overhyped. Some game studios are using the technology to reduce costs, while image generators such as MidJourney and Google Nano Banana are being used by consumers and marketers for ad hoc image creation. To combat this threat, the Creative Cloud team have shifted their resouces to the Firefly image generator and a suite of AI asset management tools. The focus on marketing technology has definitely paid off. AEM has become highly popular among enterprise marketing teams and is widely used. The rest of the Adobe Experience stack has benefited as a result. The likes of Adobe Analytics are seeing growing market share among large enterprises as well, despite being substantially more expensive than competing products. However, Adobe’s core creative customers have been neglected. As a consequence, many of the lesser used applications in Creative Cloud have seen minimal updates, ultimately resulting in last week’s deprecation announcement for Animate - presumably so that developer resources could be shifted to building out AI products within Creative Cloud. ### Know Your Customer Yet the decision to cancel Animate rested on false assumptions, without considering the ultimate customer impact. Adobe made the decision based on usage data and product positioning. They didn’t look at the list of companies actively using the product, potentially because key decision makers didn’t have access to that information. Adobe Animate is a 2015 rebrand of the old Adobe Flash platform. Flash was primarily intended for multimedia web applications, and was primarily associated with hobbyists and small scale developers. The widespread usage within animation studios was an unexpected byproduct of its prominence during the early days of the web. Failing to understand exactly who uses Animate is dangerous for Adobe. Creators use Adobe because their products are ubiquitous and fully featured. The company is a reliable partner to professional studios, whose products have a long history and a vast user base. As a result, it is easy to find talented creative professionals with the right skills for any type of production. Sure, open source alternatives do exist in many creative sectors, and are used for award winning releases. But these alternatives mostly lack the enterprise support and commercial backing expected from Adobe products. Such intangibles do matter. ### The Importance of Trust No one enjoys dealing with Adobe, the company, especially after the original controversial switch to a subscription model. However, they are the type of solid and reliable enterprise software company that studios are willing to build their business around. Arbitrary and unexpected product deprecations are a very quick and easy way to shed that reputation. Studios plan in multi-year cycles. They need to be able to finish a production using the same tools that they began it with. Long term product support is critical to the Adobe user base. Any hint of backsliding on support timelines will lead to studios re-evaluating their production pipelines. Customer trust is king in any business. At enterprise scale, it’s especially important. Businesses want partners invested in mutual success, not self-interested suppliers. That requires a first-class customer experience and a solid brand reputation. Yet building a brand takes time. Destroying a brand can happen in an instant. That’s why sales and marketing are essential to current and future success. As the voice of the customer, they are responsible for communicating customer needs to the boardroom. Engineers often resent marketing involvement in product development, yet without marketing, they can lose sight of who their customers actually are. Without marketing, there are no customers at all. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### AI in Practice: Test Early And Often URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/ai-in-practice-test-early-and-often/ Last updated: 2026-01-27T08:30:36.000Z There is growing speculation that Salesforce might be cooling on AI. The change in attitude was reinforced at Davos last week, when Marc Benioff used his public appearances to share some fairly stern criticisms concerning the impact of AI chatbots on social media. So far, those views have not been reflected in Salesforce’s overall corporate strategy. Agentforce is still pitched as the future of the platform. However, there has been a subtle change of emphasis. AI is now seen as one pillar of a broader framework. This shift reflects the experiences of Salesforce customers working with the technology. ### Test Multiple Times Driving the updated narrative is one key problem. Designing an AI workflow takes longer than initially assumed. Integrating AI decision steps into an existing process is the easy part. Actually testing the AI is much more complicated. It’s a far more involved process than a traditional development project, requiring many more test runs. Generative AI will give a different output for every test, even if the same prompt is used. As such, it is not possible to test a scenario once and then mark it as pass or fail. Every test scenario needs to be tested multiple times, and each response graded on a sliding scale. That can be challenging given that assessing the quality of AI generated content is inherently subjective. Before launching an AI project, it is extremely important to understand what an MVP looks like. Much like any content creation workflow, clear guidelines around the language, tone and content of AI output are needed. It doesn’t matter whether the AI is generating content for external use, internal sharing or even just for the next stage of a workflow. It is essential to decide what an acceptable result looks like for AI generated content. Once an ideal outcome has been agreed, be prepared for a phased roll out over an extended period. Too many AI projects fail because users don't have a clear vision for the type of content they want the AI to generate. ### Be Focused It’s hard to judge whether a pilot is production ready. Create a checklist of everything the AI needs to consider before starting to test it. That checklist needs to be prioritised, with the must have items clearly marked. Make sure everyone is realistic about what production ready actually looks like, and what the AI needs to consider in order to deliver business value. There needs to be an agreed level of error or acceptable hallucination. Otherwise, it’s very easy to get sidetracked in the pursuit of perfection and ultimately never launch. Keeping AI focused on a single task is essential. The longer the prompt, the more likely it is to get confused. AI doesn’t understand the overarching operation environment or underlying user intent. It only knows the instructions and training data that have been shared with it. Splitting an AI into multiple agents significantly increases accuracy, while also making testing much easier. A multi-agent approach allows the output of each step to be evaluated independently, and the instructions for each step tweaked independently. ### Include A Feedback Loop Much like a software project, AI is a never the finished article. You always need a mechanism for monitoring AI outputs and training the model, even after go live. AI is not a set and forget process. New errors will crop up during day-to-day use. Salesforce have learned the importance of feedback loops and prompt refinement. It’s a critical part of their own AI development toolkit. AI is an iterative process. Testing an AI workflow takes vastly more effort than testing a rule based workflow. That QA process carries on after launch. In every AI workflow, there needs to be a mechanism for teaching the AI new information. Ideally, that would be automated using machine learning. An ideal agent would include a feedback loop showing the AI the downstream impact of its output. However, that is often difficult to set up in practice. Even so, that should be done wherever possible. It saves a lot of manual time and effort. Without an automated learning process, there are no efficiency savings from AI. If feedback loops cannot be built-in, then human-in-the-loop processes are needed. This is about more that just quality assurance. Regular updates to training data are needed too. Those updates should be accompanied by another round of testing. ### Consider The Limitations While AI is still seen as central to the future of the technology industry, there has been a subtle change of emphasis. Rule based workflows have become a key part of every AI solution, including platforms such as Agentforce that were supposed to replace them. This is something that many people have wanted to happen. AI can’t be trusted to follow fixed instructions in every execution, which is why the rule based workflow is needed to actually deliver any actions suggested by AI. Agentic AI isn't going away. It's just that developers are evolving their AI features to fit the limitations of current AI technology. Ops team working with the technology need to follow their lead. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Demand Agents: The Need for Machine Learning URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/demand-agents-the-need-for-machine-learning/ Last updated: 2026-01-26T22:50:39.000Z The Gartner hype cycle is famous for a reason. New software markets evolve along a predictable pattern, which Gartner have spent many years mapping. Every launch follows the same curve, from the initial hype through the trough of disillusionment and eventually to the plateau of maturity. Yet, it can be very difficult to estimate where any particular product is on the curve at any given time. Analysts have spent the last 18 months saying that Generative AI has entered the trough of disillusionment. The implication being that expectations have peaked and ROI is just around the corner. Yet, board-level AI mandates haven't gone away, and the data centre investment bubble is still in full swing. For their latest hype cycle estimates, Gartner broke out the different AI use cases into separate technologies. Each AI product category was placed at a different place on the maturity curve. AI assistants were considered to be approaching the plateau of productivity. Vibe coding and agentic AI are still considered to be in the hype phase. Such a distinction allows analysts to separate the markets where AI has achieved widespread acceptance from those where the technology is still being piloted. ### Mature Assistants Generative AI chatbots are the most mature use case. Broadly speaking, consumers have figured out where they want to use ChatGPT and other LLMs. People are using them much more for search, but only for certain types of queries. According to SEO specialists, AI is primarily used for research and short listing. Traditional search engines are still the preferred choice for navigational and transactional queries. The same applies in an enterprise context, where Copilot and Gemini are typically used for information retrieval. Indeed, user complaints about AI search have grown over recent months. ChatGPT’s recent high profile code red blitz is a sign of a product dealing with slowing growth, while trying to juggle conflicting user feedback. Copilot has been attracting the same criticism in an enterprise context. The Microsoft 365 AI works for some people some of the time, particularly when used to create high level overviews, but isn't accurate enough for every project. Those limitations have dented trust in all forms of generative AI, and are one of the key factors in the widespread backlash against agentic AI. ### Agentic Experiments Agents have their use cases, particularly in a marketing context, but the technology powering them is experimental. Agentic platforms such as Agentforce were released prematurely and are still being developed in public. SaaS vendors are still adding MCP servers to their products. Meanwhile, executives have realised that replacing SaaS with vibe coded AI apps is a non-starter, even at this early stage. That won’t stop the adoption of agents where needed. The investment bubble means that new AI startups are constantly bringing new ideas to market, some of which look set to catch on. Two broad lessons have emerged from these early agentic AI pilots. The first is the continued importance of rule-based automation. Many humans are fairly terrible at executing fixed repetitive processes. Generative AI is even worse at it. Both humans and AI will skip key steps through error or ‘just because’. It took AI vendors a long time to accept this reality, but many have developed their products to combine the best traits of deterministic workflows and probabilistic decision making. ### Machine Learning The second key learning relates to the importance of learning itself. Any AI process needs a feedback loop. Training AI is an iterative process, that takes a lot of reinforcement over a long period of time. That same training process needs to carry on even after the agent enters production. Unfortunately, over-stretched enterprise tech teams simply don’t have the time to constantly monitor AI outputs and tweak inputs. The data model underlying any agentic process needs to incorporate some form of machine learning, so that the AI can evaluate incorrect decisions and avoid repeating errors. The difficulty with self-learning AI is that agentic AI is very much a black box. Training relies on constant tweaking of prompts and foundational datasets through endless testing processes. That makes it difficult to deliver an ROI on AI projects, particularly given how many companies are still struggling with the best way to efficiently test AI at scale, especially for projects which require a human-in-the-loop cycle. AI vendors are aware of this issue, though. Google recently released Antigravity, a new AI developer toolkit, which was widely praised for offering a solution to this exact problem. ### Constant Improvement If Agentic AI is to deliver on the potential, then it needs to be more accessible. Releasing a dedicated AI development IDE is a start, but is only useful for AI developers. Different tools are needed for data analysts and operations teams working with the AI features within their corporate tech stack. At the moment, those training processes are lacking, which in turn limits confidence in the technology as a whole. The ability to run process tests in bulk and compare output across evaluations is an important step in any workflow. It’s especially important when AI is involved, given how subjective AI output can be. Slop has become a buzzword for a reason. Improving output quality is paramount in building confidence, but can continue even after production deployment. Business teams have become more realistic about the best uses for the technology, but there is still a significant gap between ambition and reality. Increasingly, these barriers are due to a combination of experience and tooling rather than fundamental issues with the technology. Bridging knowledge gaps takes time, but will happen eventually. It’s the natural progression of any new technology. It reaches maturity when ops teams become used to working with it. Generative AI is no different. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### 2026 Marketing Operations Predictions URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/2026-marketing-operations-predictions/ Last updated: 2025-12-30T08:30:50.000Z Marketing is at the forefront of AI adoption in the enterprise, but mostly as a tool for drafting content. Some brands are seeing success with heavily optimised custom models, while other brands produce content that requires heavy re-writing before it can be used. Translation is another discipline with strong AI uptake with similar results. Lower cost and quicker turnaround times mean that human translation is being relegated to more complex scenarios. ### AI automation moves beyond the hype phase Trouble is, content generation doesn't justify the stratospheric valuations behind the AI bubble. Investors need AI automation to make a return. A lot of effort has gone into creating agentic workflows. So far, outputs and business benefits have been relatively mixed. AI technology is being used for research and content summarisation, but mostly through the familiar chatbot interface. AI firms have bigger ambitions. AI automation was the story of 2025\. Yet, it remains a long way from becoming a practical reality for many marketing teams. That's far from a bad thing. Many widely touted use cases for the technology make little sense. However, AI chatbots are a day-to-day reality in many businesses, and marketers are adopting them to drive better internal efficiency and higher customer engagement. Many of these pilots are an extension of existing technology trends. Marketers have been experimenting with chatbot based data collection for a long time. The concept is how Drift made their name. Generative AI makes chatbots more useful because it allows them to interpret vague language and understand the underlying context. As an automation tool though, they are somewhat limited. That's one of the key reasons AI startups have seen more success with vibe coding and developer assistants. ### AI startups penetrate the enterprise Vibe coding has its place within the martech landscape, primarily as a mechanism for quickly generating interactive content and internal prototypes. While not the primary audience for vibe coding technology, ops teams still benefit when using it for simple tasks. Security and reliability concerns will hold back adoption among non-developers for a while longer. Instead, VCs are betting on a new generation of domain-specific AI apps to displace the existing SaaS martech stack. However, AI-based apps remain a niche concern. Although there are exceptions. Clay in particular is seeing strong enterprise adoption. An AI data enrichment platform, Clay has been the most hyped martech platform of 2025\. Pioneering a business model that has plenty of imitators, among both new startups and established vendors. In doing so, they've accelerated a trend which has been building for a while. ### AI becomes a data enrichment solution Marketing leaders have long believed that stagnant marketing automation platforms were holding marketing back. Their outdated data model and restrictive workflow capabilities are harming data quality and hampering sales alignment. ABM platforms such as 6sense pitched themselves as the solution, but their feature set is far too narrow to be a long-term solution. 6sense and Demandbase are still very much seen as intent data providers and predictive scoring models, rather than as an orchestration solution. Clay have been able to bridge the gap. Combining AI research tools with deep data management capabilities allows marketing ops teams to better align the marketing database with business needs. It's a much more flexible approach than centralising everything in a rigid CRM system optimised for sales or an inflexible marketing automation platform. That's not why people love Clay though. AI allows marketers to break free of the inaccuracies and inconsistencies of the established data brokers. Existing data management tools are adding AI enrichment features to their platforms. Adoption of these features is growing as marketers become frustrated with the limitations of mainstream data vendors. Getting a good match rate from the most widely used data sources is far too expensive for most companies, and that's before considering whether the purchased data is accurate. AI allows resource constrained ops teams to roll their own data enrichment framework, rather than relying on the least worst data broker. More importantly, AI-enabled data enrichment is a useful answer to two of the biggest board-level mandates of recent years. ### Attribution remains a top priority Data is the lifeblood of the business. Yet, most C-level executives have spent years doing very little to address the problem of poor data quality. AI has pushed that problem to the top of the agenda, which is exactly where marketing operations want it to be. In turn, ops teams need to expand the scope of their efforts - which have mostly focused on gap filling account data until now. If marketers are serious about AI, they need to go beyond that and look at filling the gaps in attribution information too. If AI is to be successful, it needs real time updates about the success of different campaigns and different content. Google and Meta are already using AI to automatically optimise ad campaigns. Martech platforms want to bring the same techniques to content marketing. Predictive content and adaptive nurturing is an old dream that has been re-awakened by generative AI. Except this time, your CMO wants it too. Marketing has long struggled to prove the link between campaigns and revenue. An entire industry has grown up around automating attribution. Yet, not everyone wants a black box reporting solution like Bizible. The CFO doesn't just want ROI, he wants to know how that ROI was calculated. Thankfully, the convergence of AI driven data modelling and better ad tech integrations is helping break down reporting silos. ABM even helps with the age-old sales alignment disconnect. ### BDRs get more help Sales are struggling. Deal sizes have collapsed since the pandemic, while sales cycles have extended. It's a lot harder to close opportunities than it used to be. That's a serious problem for marketing, as well as for sales. In 2026, revenue teams will start using AI to drive increased sales productivity. The leading CRM vendors already offer a host of sales agents, while a host of startups are pitching to replace your BDR team. Sales is the next frontier for AI. Some brands are already experimenting with automated outreach or sales chatbots. These pilots are mostly intended to supplement existing BDR teams, allowing them to focus on higher value deals. CRM vendors are integrating sales coaching into their products. Meanwhile, overly generic sales emails are one tactic that is ripe for LLM driven content personalisation. It's merely a matter of getting the balance right, so that campaigns aren't seen as irrelevant or creepy. ### AI mandates become more realistic Marketing will need to contribute to this AI led effort to drive increased sales support, mostly through better data sharing and better content support. Given the low productivity and high turnover inherent to most BDR teams, AI enablement is a real opportunity to drive increased conversion rates. Just don't use AI as the main touchpoint for high value prospects. The human connection is still very important in closing deals. Expect to see a lot of AI doom talk next year. The limitations of existing AI technologies have become abundantly clear. C-level execs are starting to take notice, as are the LLM model makers. The leading AI labs have new techniques which are in the pipeline, but it's not clear if they will reach the market in 2026\. In the meantime, business teams will still be expected to embed further automation into their processes. The drive for increased productivity has deep macro-economic roots. It isn't going away anytime soon. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Demand Agents: AI Enters the Enterprise URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/demand-agents-ai-enters-the-enterprise/ Last updated: 2025-12-09T08:30:06.000Z As the year comes to a close, AI seems to be the only thing analysts and technology vendors want to talk about. This newsletter is no different. Media hype and boardroom pressure are driving a narrative that doesn’t reflect day to day reality in most businesses. Individual users and specific teams may be seeing some success with generative AI. Yet, for all the experiments and pilots, we're still only just getting a picture of where the technology can deliver a return on investment. ### Understanding the Limitations AI deployment is slower than expected because the benefits of the technology are not evenly distributed. AI is great at spreading baseline knowledge across a team and in providing suggestions for troubleshooting. That makes the technology great at raising the output of weak performers. However, for the top performers, the benefits are a lot less predictable. Most subject matter experts simply don’t need the assistance, unless they want to use a chatbot as a sounding board. Part of the problem is cost. The technology is expensive and unreliable. It requires close monitoring. As a result, many of the promised efficiency gains fail to materialise, which limits how the technology can be used. It makes little sense to use AI workflows for processes that can already be implemented using traditional automation solutions. Some people are starting to use AI for automation, but due to inconsistent output, that is not an ideal solution. ### Choosing the Right Model There are workflows where the technology makes sense, but only if you’re using the right tools. In recent months, Claude and Gemini have become the go-to models for enterprise use cases. ChatGPT works fine as a content generation tool, but has fallen behind in its ability to understand context and parse complex requests. That affects a lot of in-application AI tools, which typically leverage ChatGPT as the foundational model. Microsoft Copilot is a notable example, but it extends to the likes of HubSpot Breeze too. Regardless, business leaders still demand that AI is use in automation. However, the tools available to operations teams simply aren’t good enough to make that happen. Apps have embedded AI across their entire product portfolio, but such features are rarely used. Specialised AI assistants need dedicated training to be effective, which few developers have bothered with. As a result, many business users would rather copy and paste content from Gemini or ChatGPT instead of using built-in features. ### The Rise of Agents In house agents are emerging as a trend. However, their scope is limited. They exist to collect input for deterministic workflows, or to summarise complex content for quick reference. Think project recaps or internal surveys. In a marketing operations context, that means agents are being used to collect information for campaign intake processes. That allows the agent to fill in the gaps that always exist within any campaign brief. The actual campaign setup is then automated using traditional automation, or carried out manually. Technology vendors have adapted their tools to this approach. Automation solutions are adding AI decision steps to their platforms. Chatbot builders can be used to collect structured information and kickoff workflows in downstream tools. It’s this mix of capabilities that allows teams to deploy AI into production. For now, these projects are just for internal use. No one trusts AI for customer facing automation. ### Corporate Expectations Meanwhile, Wall Street are incorrectly betting that internally developed agents will replace SaaS software. That’s a losing gamble. Investors massively underestimate the complexity of the average enterprise technology platform. Few businesses will be willing to invest the necessary resources to develop and maintain core platforms in-house. That’s the reason SaaS software took off in the first place. Vibe coding will be used to maintain existing in house point solutions, but not much beyond that. Nevertheless, many boardrooms are still fixated on the idea that AI can be used to automate end-to-end processes. Unrealistic AI mandates will remain a corporate reality into next year. That needn’t be a problem. The distinction between AI automation and rule based automation is barely understood in many C-suites. Simply deploying more automation should be sufficient to meet the KPIs being passed down from on-high. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Microsoft Ignite AI's Governance Question URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/microsoft-ignite-ais-governance-question/ Last updated: 2025-11-26T18:52:49.000Z It's fair to say that Microsoft's big IT conference didn't satisfy everyone. The head of Microsoft AI took to social media following a backlash against the focus on Agentic AI. There certainly was plenty of AI for the sake of it at Microsoft Ignite, including a myriad of new office agents and a brand new Ask Copilot on the taskbar. Yet, for those attendees willing to invest in AI, there was a notable difference in tone and content compared to other big tech firms. Google and OpenAI have spent plenty of time recently hyping the capabilities of the technology, or tweaking how chatbots communicate with consumers. Microsoft are one of the few AI vendors talking about the biggest issue facing AI in the enterprise. Namely, how to secure and monitor the technology. Along with all the hype about Agents in Windows and Office, there were also plenty of discussion about AI governance and agent control. ### Agent 365 Take Agent 365, one of the biggest product reveals from the event. Agent 365 is a governance layer for AI agents, designed to allow IT Pros to see all the agents in the enterprise, as well as control which Microsoft resources each agent has access to. It's not just for Office 365 agents either. Competing AI vendors such as ServiceNow and Salesforce integrate with it too. Microsoft already have an agent builder for Copilot, now they're giving customers the ability to monitor those agents as they’re piloted across the enterprise. As agentic AI proliferates within a business, it’s important to have a view of where the technology is used. You can’t secure an app if you don’t have visibility of it. An agent inventory allows users and departments to see which processes need human-in-the-loop steps embedded within them. IT teams can also use Agent 365 to restrict agents from accessing confidential data. This is more than just a security issue. It prevents an agent from being confused by irrelevant information to which it doesn’t need access. Controlling background and context has emerged as the best way of improving AI output given the current state of the technology. ### Agent Workspace The same principle extends to Windows. Microsoft announced a new agentic layer for Windows last week. This included an MCP server within the OS, as well as an on-device Agent Registry similar to the one the firm is introducing into Microsoft 365\. Perhaps the most interesting development is the concept of Agent Workspaces. These workspaces segregate agent activity from human activity, allowing agents to run in the background within their own user session. In doing so, agents can execute their tasks locally without interrupting the workflow of the end user. It also enables agents to operate on device with their own permissions and app access, rather than inheriting the permissions of the user. More importantly, this principle of separating agent activity from human activity improves security monitoring. Through Agent Workspaces, every agent action is tracked and logged as being carried out by an AI, ensuring that automated activity can be monitored in real-time. That is a critical step towards building confidence in agentic workflows, both in terms of security and accuracy. It gives IT teams the confidence that agents can’t go rogue. It gives business teams the confidence they can review and correct agent outputs before they’re used in production. Above all, it puts the user in charge of the agents they’re managing. ### Management Toolkits Microsoft’s big pitch is still that of an AI teammate. They’ve spent most of the year promoting frontier firms that are already experimenting with AI. However, for all the executive mandates and vendor thought leadership, widespread adoption of AI can only happen if technical teams feel in control of the technology. We’ve already seen the same trend play out with machine learning and cloud computing over recent decades. Eventually, business teams will probably adopt AI automation is part of the day-to-day operations. But first they need the tools necessary to develop it and manage it. Finally, we’re starting to see that management toolkit take shape. Hopefully, it’s the start of another AI trend. ### Beyond Offers: Content in an AI Age URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/beyond-offers-content-in-an-ai-age/ Last updated: 2025-11-18T08:30:27.000Z If you listen to the true believers, then AI will soon be responsible for single handedly orchestrating the customer journey. Machine learning will select the ideal offer for every contact and then generate bespoke content to sell the resulting package to every customer. Humans will be relegated to designing the strategy and validating the final campaign before launch. Personalised offers are nothing new in B2C. Many large consumer brands will have a portfolio of promotions and discount codes they can roll out to attract a new audience or to boost sales in a slow quarter. Forward thinking B2C marketers are indeed experimenting with AI generated content and AI selected audiences for each offer. It's not clear how such a strategy would translate to B2B, given the importance of content marketing in nurturing corporate buyers. Especially given how poorly defined the concept of a content offer actually is in practice. ### The Importance of Incentives Sure, many B2B marketers would describe their latest webinar or white paper as an offer. Yet, these things are also supporting content to be reused when promoting a different offer. Few organisations can reliably report on the ultimate revenue impact of each individual piece of content. All too often campaigns are simply seen as a reason to call, or a reason to nurture. The hand raiser is the ultimate offer from a business perspective. Everything else is handled by the lead scoring model. Reporting drives this state of affairs. The link between individual offers and individual leads is barely understood in many organisations. Even where it is, everything gets rolled up to the program level anyway. Multi touch attribution was supposed to provide the link, but just adds additional complexity. Regardless, marketers struggle to interpret attribution models, beyond which content drove the most leads. That’s not a metric that businesses are interested in measuring these days, and for good reason. ### The Importance of Data Content needs an ROI. Automating content distribution undercuts that objective. Handing offer selection to AI risks turning B2B marketing into a giant algorithmic recommendation engine, but one that marketers are ill equipped to deal with. People are already getting annoyed with poor quality AI slop, and the push to generate more marketing content faster only compounds the issue. Particularly because, unlike social media networks, B2B marketers lack the enormous volumes of activity data needed to actually drive engagement. A significant number of marketers would be happy to hand off attribution reporting and audience selection to AI. Yet, ops teams struggle with limited data volumes, which leads to meaningless dashboards and inadequate attribution. This is because fundamentally, the average marketing asset simply doesn’t get enough downloads to properly model its impact on the customer journey. That’s the reality of operating in niche B2B vertical with a small total addressable market. AI can't fix limitations of scale. It would only compound reporting gaps with incorrect analysis. Bad data leads to bad AI. ### The Right Experience For events, this issue is much less of a problem. Last touch lead generation and contact acquisition are typically the main objectives for a corporate events program anyway. The desired audience for each event is well understood, and the content used to promote the event is highly templated. Lookalike event audience features already exist, but are rarely used due to cost. It's specifically content marketing where the AI first approach is much riskier. After years of campaigning against batch and blast, marketers have come round to the mantra of account based experiences - compelling user journeys that educate the customer about the business’s brand proposition. Content marketing is the supporting act needed to drive those experiences. It is not the end goal in itself. Now AI risks turning back the clock in a drive for faster content generation and higher engagement. There is more to personalisation than random acts of content marketing. Content marketing is essential, but it's also largely guesswork. Marketers are creating content to drive conversions, which are still ultimately measured in terms of leads. All this content usefully fills the funnel between initial awareness and ultimate conversion. Trouble is, good content is expensive to produce. AI can reduce the costs somewhat, but not by as much as people think without also reducing quality. Bad content is also expensive, but in a different way. Low quality content and incorrect personalisation always come at the cost of brand reputation. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Bridging the AI Chasm URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/bridging-the-ai-chasm/ Last updated: 2025-11-04T08:30:58.000Z It was pretty much inevitable. Last week, I was at Mops-Apooloza, a marketing operations conference in Anaheim. AI was everywhere. Every conversation touched on it. Every breakout session talked about it. Yet, despite being an ever-present topic, the technology attracted surprisingly little hype. Instead, there was a down to earth discussion about what the technology can do, and the steps needed to make it happen. In that respect, AI is rapidly becoming just another tool in the marketing operations toolkit. ### Practical Experience Sure, marketing ops professionals recognise how important AI is to their businesses, and how it can significantly improve the customer experience. Yet, there were none of the excessive boasts or overblown doom-mongering that we're seeing in certain quarters. The AI talk at past events has always felt tacked on; as though speakers had nothing to say on the subject, but felt it had to be mentioned anyway. As a result, any discussion of AI within marketing operations circles has always felt highly theoretical. Not this time. Marketing is at the frontline of AI adoption. It’s one of the few departments that can construct a viable business case for Generative AI, generally on the basis of redeploying agency budgets to AI content generation. As a result, marketing operations teams have been forced to experiment with the technology. Many enterprise marketers have implemented AI content workflows with decidedly mixed results, and marketing ops have been forced to deal with the outcomes. That means the Mops-Apooloza audience could talk confidently about the steps needed to implement the technology but also of the business challenges that it introduces. ### Key Concerns In particular, two key concerns were repeatedly raised at the event: data and governance. Data improvement is typically a major topic at marketing ops events anyway. It’s a core responsibility of the function. Yet, data is a well understood problem that has clear solutions, albeit ones that are difficult to implement successfully. AI adds another layer of complexity to the long-standing data quality challenges. It introduces new data cleanliness standards, and new processes for data maintenance. Governance is a much less understood issue, but just as important. Hallucination is the key blocker to successful AI implementation. Security is an ever-present risk. While cost will become one in time. Oversight is critical in overcoming all these issues, but the question of how to implement human-in-the-loop processes was a major talking point. Addressing data quality is only one part of the challenge, because no AI will ever be 100% reliable. A probabilistic solution will always give unpredictable and occasionally inaccurate results. The need to mix AI with traditional automation workflows was well understood - even if the technology to do it is still very immature. ### An Additive Technology And that's the second big AI related takeaway from Mops-Apooloza. AI doesn’t replace anything. It doesn't replace SaaS. It doesn't replace rule based automation. It doesn't even replace your SDR team. Used wisely, it can improve all those things. It can make everyone more efficient. That’s critical because efficiency is king right now. It's the number one priority in the boardroom. It's what the CMO is talking about with CEO. Yet, the drive for improved productivity is a major opportunity for marketing operations to achieve recognition and deliver real value to the business. Whether it's through streamlined processes, enriched data or optimised technology, Generative AI allows the business to focus on activities which improve the customer experience. A new wave of startups took the stage to promise 1:1 personalisation, even if the technology isn’t quite ready yet. Industry veterans are aiming to usurp the leading martech platforms, such as Marketo. Generative AI promises to transform B2B marketing. And yes, ops might even use AI to deliver those improvements. Assuming it's the right tool for the job. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Enter the Agentforce Enterprise URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/enter-the-agentforce-enterprise/ Last updated: 2025-10-27T15:30:54.000Z Salesforce have been under a lot of pressure lately. Investors want faster growth, customers want a stronger focus on the core platform. Agentforce has been pitched as the solution to Salesforce's growth problem. Coming into Dreamforce, it wasn't clear if Agentforce solved the problem of many Salesforce customers. ### Agentforce First Agentforce certainly has its use cases, but we're a long way from seeing it become an integral part of every customer experience. Marc Benioff has spent the last year describing Agentforce as the centrepiece of his company, without actually delivering this in practice. Salesforce users have seen this all before with Chatter, Einstein and other hot new technologies. This year's Dreamforce is the first sign that the AI hype will influence the existing product portfolio. While Sales Cloud still remains the core platform for users, it's clearly not central to the product roadmap. Dreamforce added several more bricks to the future Agentforce enterprise. The foundations are gradually being put in place for Agentforce to subsume the different Salesforce clouds. Benioff himself acknowledged that AI is a long term playbook for Salesforce, claiming that most businesses won't be ready until much before 2030. ### Tools & Models Much of the post Salesforce analysis focused on the surprise partnership with Open AI. This goes alongside existing partnerships with Claude and Gemini. But is otherwise following an industry wide trend towards multi-model AI. Same with the new Voice mode. For customers within the Salesforce ecosystem, the new Agentforce Builder is a much bigger deal. Agentforce Builder breaks down the barrier between no code workflows and developer scripting, allowing admins to seamlessly switch between the two within the same agent. On top of that, the new builder has some really interesting testing capabilities. Flow already has pretty good real time simulation features, which allow admins to run any record through a flow and see the detailed steps taken. Agentforce now has an upgraded version of this feature, showing the agents reasoning at each stage of a process. That transparency makes testing and development a much easier process. Updates such as Agentforce Builder and Agentforce Vibes give Salesforce customers the tools to deploy agents for their businesses. However, the biggest barrier to AI deployment lies elsewhere. The overarching message coming out of Dreamforce was that businesses need to sort out their data before they can take advantage of emerging technologies such as AI. It's not just Salesforce saying this, their customers are too. People have spent more than enough time experimenting with AI now. They've realised the biggest barriers to production deployment, and data quality tops the list. ### A New Purpose The same could be said of Salesforce's product strategy. A large part of the company's issues relate to Data Cloud. Originally launched as a CDP that no one really wanted, Marc Benioff has spent the subsequent years trying to find a purpose for it. It's been passed between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud several times, until Agentforce gave it a reason to exist. At Dreamforce, it formally became part of the Salesforce AI platform. To celebrate Data Cloud gets a name change to Data 360. Data 360 is now described as the data governance layer for all data in Salesforce, not just data pulled from other tools. The new intelligent context feature helps with this, by making better use of the information stored in notes and documents. Unlocking the value within that information is a major use case for generative AI, so it's good to see a major upgrade in this area. The changes are timely. Directly integrating Data 360 into the Agentforce platform seems minor, but is actually a fairly big deal. Salesforce have spent most of the year tinkering with Data 360 pricing. Most recently they introduced a free allowance for data already stored elsewhere in the Salesforce ecosystem. That at least gives companies a chance to get started with Data 369, while Agentforce gives them a reason to reassess a platform that people have ignoring for the best part of a decade. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Unlocking the Web: Research Agents URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/unlocking-the-web-research-agents/ Last updated: 2025-10-14T07:30:26.000Z Agentic has been the biggest technology buzzword of the year. The ability to automate routine admin tasks is the holy grail of enterprise automation, because it frees up human workers to focus on high value activities. The real world is not so clear cut. Most marketing teams have spent the last twelve months struggling with the age old problems of data quality and target account selection. Two different worlds that will eventually converge when Agentic AI is production ready. Except that AI can help data cleansing right now, and has done for many years. Predictive normalisation is a well established technique that can populate individual profile fields automatically. It has assisted with job level and job function calculation for over a decade. Elsewhere, intent data has become a key targeting criteria for many ABM programs. Here too, predictive AI is used to interpret the vast wealth of intent signals in order to discover meaningful trends and enable account-level insights. ### AI Search Engines This year, another enterprise ready use case for AI has emerged that once again promises to fill the profile gaps that traditional data solutions can't reach. Web search has been the generative AI success story of 2025\. Google's declining market share is the hot topic dominating marketing discussions. Meanwhile, ChatGPT can generate detailed podcasts or multi-page research reports containing everything that a sales rep needs to prepare for a meeting, all sourced from web articles, social media conversations and increasingly from internal documents. That technology is now being integrated into the martech stack. Over the summer, HubSpot announced a direct integration between their platform and ChatGPT Deep Research. That allows SDRs and sales reps to generate research reports for any account directly from CRM. Marketers can use this capability too. A new breed of GTM data platforms is making this possible. AI doesn’t just segment your database. It can enrich it with web information, as well as from external data providers. ### Account Data is Everywhere Everything you need to know has been published online. ChatGPT has a wealth of information about every household name enterprise. Now that data is available for marketers to use. With a research agent, it's far easier to get niche firmographic data from the web than it is from D&B. Most leading brands will have web pages detailing their contact centre strategies to customers and customer counts to investors. Meanwhile, top executives will have published social posts discussing suppliers and customer relationships. All data that is invisible to traditional data brokers, but easily accessible to AI search engines. Research Agents also help address another common issue with purchased data: recency. ChatGPT has direct access to the most up-to-date information about startups and small enterprises not typically found in the leading data providers. Such businesses will have a web presence, but won’t appear in most firmographic databases. For the right product, they're a greenfield market invisible to traditional data management approaches. That’s where research agents can help. They use AI search engines to scrape Linkedin and company websites in real-time, which in turn delivers better match rates for common firmographic profile fields such as industry or employee size, particularly in niche verticals. ### Use Multiple Solutions Finding the right information about midsize businesses in small markets has always been a challenge. The leading data sources typically only have limited coverage, and match rates are poor. Some European markets do have local data providers available, but that’s not true everywhere. Using AI as a secondary data provider helps close those gaps, enriching more of your database than is possible through traditional methods. Such techniques introduce the risk of hallucinations, but then the best data brokers are often wrong too. That’s not stopped marketers from using purchased account lists. Ultimately, good data drives modern marketing. Better data leads to deeper personalisation and better outcomes. Yet, actually improving data quality is an ongoing challenge. The best data improvement programs rely on multiple sources to fill the gaps. That’s particularly true for marketers in small markets or niche industries, who have long struggled to uncover their target account lists. Help is at hand. Large language models have opened up an alternative avenue to solving data completeness challenges. Generative AI is not a magic bullet, and won’t have complete coverage, but it can be used to supplement your existing data strategy. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### AI Beyond the Digital Economy URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/ai-beyond-the-digital-economy/ Last updated: 2025-09-30T07:30:37.000Z AI pioneers have a common dream, which they refer to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI): that nebulous AI model which is more advanced than any human. It's all many tech firms seem to talk about. Yet, no one can agree what AGI is, let alone how it will impact consumers and businesses. Thankfully, we're starting to see a real debate about the impact of AI on employment and the wider economy. This debate is being driven by Silicon Valley circles, and rather ignores the fact there is a real economy which is only partially linked with the digital economy. A recent article in the Economist examined the long-term impacts of AGI. It was a timely article on an important topic. Yet, like many contributions on AGI, it hand waves away the differences between the digital economy and the real economy. That's a mistake, which has very real consequences on how disruptive AI will be in practice. ### The Impact of R&D At one extreme, the likes of Sam Altman are talking as if AI will abolish the law of supply and demand. It won't and it can't. Supply and demand is driven by the scarcity of real world goods. AI potentially provides businesses with limitless access to digital labour, but it doesn’t help with the cost of raw materials needed to produce those real world goods. Nor does it reduce the cost of energy. That's a major concern at the moment because high natural gas prices are currently a major drag on economic growth. This problem is compounded by the rush to build data centres to run ever more complex large language models. Connections to the energy grid are severely limiting the pace of the data centre rollout. In the same vein, high-end servers require liquid cooling. That drives demand for scarce water supplies, which is also a real concern in some regions. AI boomers believe that AI can invent new technologies to overcome current resource constraints. In some fields that will be true. In other fields it won't happen. Either way, tech firms are rather ignoring the timescale needed to develop, test and commercialise new technology. Software firms are used to creating and launching new products in near real time. That doesn't work in manufacturing, where supply chains need to be setup and factories constructed. In the physical world, it takes years to bring a new technology to market, and mass-market adoption is a lot slower too. The much vaunted AI discoveries to solve climate change or the energy crisis probably won't meaningfully impact the economy this decade. AI will speed up R&D, but not enough to accelerate growth any time soon. ### The Impact on Jobs AI doomers believe that AI will cause catastrophic job losses that will tank the consumer economy, killing any prospect of economic growth. Tech firms have stopped hiring in recent years, but that's a trend which predates the AI boom. Technology is a mature industry, and prior to the AI bubble, big tech firms were under pressure to cut R&D. That led to hiring freezes and job cuts. Those constraints still persist. Entry level tech firms are increasingly hard to find in the west, because such roles have been offshored for cost reasons. AI has led to a resurgence in technology R&D, but mostly in the form of new data centres rather than new development jobs. The data centre bubble is a temporary phenomenon that will deflate in time, with knock-on effects for the wider economy. Large scale tech hiring isn't coming back though, but more due to the end of the SaaS boom, rather than because of AI. The rise of SaaS software and cloud computing transformed the technology, sparking a decade-long wave of digital transformation that peaked during the pandemic. Corporate business processes were digitised and shifted online. The rise of digital marketing is emblematic of this. Over the past 10 years, all marketing has become digital. Yet, that transformation process has come to a close. As a result, the pace of net new technology adoption has slowed. For many software firms, AI is an opportunity to recapture the boom times. It allows digital processes to expand outside of pre-designed back office processes. In time, the fusion of AI and robotics may unlock a truly transformational AI revolution. Automomous robots would be the most disruptive use for the technology, but are still a long way off. In the interim, the technology is being gradually optimised to supplement entry level white collar roles. That makes it massively beneficial to big tech firms, but of limited use to anyone else. Eventually, we may see it expand into the real world. Although, as we've seen with self-driving cars, truly intelligent AI is easy to predict but hard to master. The timeline for a truly autonomous AI is far from certain. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Loop Beyond Inbound Marketing URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-loop-beyond-inbound-marketing/ Last updated: 2025-09-18T07:30:48.000Z HubSpot built their business on inbound marketing. While other marketing automation platforms were primarily acquired for their email capabilities, HubSpot focused on generating leads through web, social and digital advertising. Over time, Hubspot has also developed a strong email engine too, but it is still intended primarily for nurturing leads collected from other channels. ### A New Playbook The focus on inbound marketing has given HubSpot a privileged position in B2B marketing. Their software platform doesn't scale to enterprise, but their thought leadership content has become a playbook adopted by marketers everywhere. Not even ABM has disrupted the inbound marketing methodology, but a much newer trend has. Hubspot have a strong AI story. They've invested heavily in predictive features for their larger customers, while rolling out a huge variety of agents to automate content creation across the entire GTM engine. When used correctly, AI allows marketers to create better, more personalised content. Yet, content needs an audience and AI is threatening the web traffic marketers rely on to drive engagement. After years of steady growth, there has been a dramatic reshaping of the sources of web traffic. Google referrals are in decline. ChatGPT referrals are booming. The impact of Generative AI on overall web traffic and conversion rates is still unclear. Undeniably, there has been an impact, and SEOs are struggling to adapt. Everyone recognises that a new inbound playbook is needed. Enter loop marketing, a new inbound model with extra AI. It adds several different layers to the traditional lead generation model for which HubSpot is best known. The loop playbook places a bigger emphasis on brand at the top of the funnel, and expands the range of content channels that marketers should target in order to attract conversions further down the funnel. AI search is placed squarely alongside social media at the awareness stage. AI driven personalisation is embedded in every touch point. ### Personalisation First With AI, personalisation becomes the key driving force behind marketing success. Naturally, that requires extensive use of HubSpot's new AI features to select audiences and generate content for campaigns. At their recent Inbound conference, HubSpot announced a new 'Data Hub' product that builds upon their existing Operations Hub integration product to automate data cleansing workflows. Once cleansed, HubSpot's AI tools can then be used to generate segments for campaigns, based on a real language description. The loop playbook also leans heavily into AI based content personalisation. This doesn't just mean customising content to role and industry. Content also needs to be placed in the correct context, at the optimal point in the customer journey. It's equally important to know the right channels for each customer, and the most relevant content for their buying stage. Context is a notable weakness of the traditional HubSpot playbook, one which can no longer be ignored. Good content is no longer enough; good context is needed for conversion. In an AI-first world, the ultimate aim of content marketing is to generate intent signals, which then determine when a particular account is ready to speak to Sales. ### Intent-based Conversion With click-through rates in decline, intent data is now more important than ever. That's because intent data is ultimately how funnel progression is measured. Loop marketing still ultimately aims to generate leads based on content engagement. It just recognises that not all user journeys are linear, and not all engagements will end in a click. AI answer engines will always have lower click rates than traditional marketing channels. No amount of experimentation can overcome that. A culture of testing and learning is still important though. It's the only way to keep pace with the changing technology landscape. Ultimately, both AI vendors and marketers are struggling to work out a business model for an AI-first world. The Loop playbook is a good first effort. However, the marketplace is evolving rapidly. Loop will need to evolve with it. Witness the increasingly heated debate on conversion rates from ChatGPT. No one can agree on how AI affects lead generation, merely that it does. Expanding the range of channels used and deepening content personalisation are obvious ways to overcome any conversion rate challenges. However, deeper personalisation also requires better content and better targeting. Not all marketers are ready to deliver on that. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Why Process Leads to Reporting URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/why-process-leads-to-reporting/ Last updated: 2025-11-03T23:56:43.000Z We often talk about data-driven decision making because marketing is always evolving. The marketplace is constantly changing. Customer behaviour is never consistent. Nothing is forever. Successful marketing teams learn from their campaigns, always adapting their programs based on lessons from previous initiatives. Customers don't want to see the same content repeated over and over. The business wants to develop new techniques that improve campaign performance. Individual marketers want to develop their skills and test new ideas. Marketers want to use data to boost results. ### The Need for Comprehensive Reporting Developing new strategies requires plenty of creativity and innovation. But, above all, a culture of continuous improvement requires accurate campaign performance data. Marketers aren't experimenting for the sake of it. CMOs use past outcomes to decide future budget allocations. They want to see if experiments improve business results. Without accurate reporting, marketing leaders are flying blind. It's impossible to judge campaign performance if you're missing comprehensive campaign analytics. Gaps in reporting lead to guesswork. Campaign measurement becomes a question of gut feel rather than objective feedback. That's a major problem, because successful organisations shouldn't be making investment decisions based on guesswork. Yet, many organisations do base their marketing planning on gut feel, because they lack the dashboards needed to guide their strategies. So, why is missing reporting such a common problem? ### Optimise Campaign Production Fundamentally, too many organisations lack the operational framework that makes accurate reporting possible. Campaign budgeting and production processes should be designed for peak efficiency and delivered with rigorous accuracy every single time. Make no mistake. Marketing performance reporting relies far more on optimal process than it does on good data or advanced technology. In turn, that depends on comprehensive budget tracking and effective campaign production. This isn't just a marketing operations problem. It affects everyone, and field marketers are often the biggest culprits. Marketers are often tempted to take shortcuts to get to market more quickly. Yet, there are no shortcuts to accurate reporting. Skipping steps in campaign production often leads to gaps between different channels or systems that have to be bridged manually, or not at all. Taking shortcuts directly impacts the accuracy of reporting, which creates more problems for marketers in the long run. Missing UTM parameters mean that web traffic can't be attributed to individual campaigns. Missing campaign codes mean that new leads can't be attributed to specific marketing programs. ### Always QA Everything Everyone hates dealing with campaign codes and UTM parameters. They're very easy to forget when launching a campaign. They create lots of extra admin for marketers. But ultimately, campaign codes and UTM parameters are the basis for almost every marketing attribution model. Regardless of how you're measuring performance, CRM campaigns are the missing link between marketing budgets and marketing qualified leads. That's why it's so important to test campaigns end-to-end. In many marketing teams, no single person tests every aspect of a campaign. Different aspects of the content and journey are tested by different people. Yet, no one makes sure that lead tracking is working properly. The reporting is only checked after the campaign is launched, when it's too late. Ultimately, launching a campaign is a long and complex business. There are many stakeholders with many different responsibilities. Optimising the campaign content is rightfully the priority for the campaign manager. Scheduling and audience building are generally the primary focus of the ops team. Nobody ever thinks about tracking or reporting, unless you've consulted a checklist or are reminded by a project manager. Yet, reporting is ultimately the most important part of the campaign - it's how you justify the investment to the business. Automation helps close the gap by automatically adding UTMs or tagging campaign codes. Someone just needs to test the automation prior to launch. That means skipping the shortcuts and following the full campaign launch plan. Easier said than done. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Revolution When: AI and the Open Web URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/revolution-when-ai-and-the-open-web/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T22:17:33.000Z Over the past 30 years, white collar work has become computer work. An increasing number of careers have moved online, creating new jobs for those that want them. AI threatens that dynamic. Already we're seeing downsizing in tech firms, although this is related more to the fragile state of the economy than anything else. More fundamental changes could happen, but that requires realism from all parties about the current state of the tech industry. Ultimately, the tech industry is not the growth sector it once was. The SaaS revolution drove a wave of digital transformation that has run its course. The trajectory of Salesforce is emblematic of this trend. Just a year ago, Marc Benioff was under immense pressure to cut R&D and slow product releases. Since launching Agentforce, he has become the poster boy for agentic AI. That's not a coincidence. From a Wall Street perspective, Agentforce is not so much about the future, but more about turning back the clock. Tech firms want to launch the next wave of digital transformation. AI is a chance to boost margins and recapture the double or triple digit growth rates of the past. Business leaders are onboard with this, but are still struggling with the maturity of LLM technology. ### Disrupting Marketers Generative AI investment is still having real world consequences though, particularly within the digital marketing ecosystem. Enterprise marketing is increasingly being done in-house. Internal teams are being used for media and content work that historically was outsourced. We're already seeing the consequences within several niches of the digital marketing ecosystem such as copywriters, translators, and SEO specialists. Marketing agencies are struggling. It's worth re-iterating that AI is not the primary driver of this trend. Slow growth and tightening marketing budgets are more significant factors. However, AI generated content makes in-sourcing easier, particularly within enterprise. The same struggles are affecting media publishers, an industry mostly funded by marketers. Genuine concerns are being raised about the viability of ad-funded media, given steep declines in web traffic. That's not a new debate, although ChatGPT has given it a sharper impetus. Journalism has been struggling for a long time because digital media has rarely been profitable for publishers. The news media does have one key advantage though: government backing. We've already seen various laws requiring Google to pay royalties when linking to news articles. The importance of Google News to publishers has hampered the effectiveness of these laws. However, if Google stops driving traffic to newspaper websites, then their owners will have less reason to co-operate with search engines. Newspapers currently earn more from Google News referral traffic than from the royalties enforced in certain jurisdictions. That balance is beginning to change, which in turn, will seriously harm the accuracy of LLMs, particularly when it comes to breaking news. Publishers are already erecting paywalls for website scrapers. Meanwhile, Cloudflare are developing technology to enforce those paywalls. Despite best efforts, there's no way around those paywalls. Perplexity have been caught trying to bypass them, which will have real consequences if that behaviour continues. Publishers, marketers, and search engines all have a symbiotic relationship. AI doesn't change that. It merely changes the business model. ### A Symbiotic Relationship Tech firms are being forward thinking about the user experience. Enterprises are trying to fix their data in an effort to catch up. Meanwhile, the real economy is left behind. In part, because tech firms are yet to work out the business model for AI. Relying on old playbooks isn't working. Generative AI is directly threatening the profitability of big tech's most important ad customers. In the short term, that will cause challenges to marketers and publishers. In the long term, though, it's tech firms that will face the consequences. Paywalls on training data are part of the reason, but there is a far more fundamental threat to the profitability of AI search. The likes of Google and OpenAI are betting on advertising to fund future model development. However, it's not clear how this will work in an AI search interface. It's a question of volume. AI generates fewer clicks than traditional search. Sure, conversion rates are higher, but not sufficiently high to outweigh reduced click volumes. Advertising ROI will go down — which in turn will reduce the number of PPC ads being placed. That's annoying for marketers, who have alternative advertising channels. Google don't have alternative revenue streams. Subscriptions certainly won't cover the difference. Consumers simply won't pay. AI vendors need to map out a solution to this dilemma. Yet they're too busy scrapping data to consider the needs of digital marketers or the open web. The relationship between AI and publishers needs to be resolved sooner rather than later, otherwise governments and the market will force a detrimental solution on tech firms. Shifting the cost burden onto business customers won't work. Businesses see the potential, but aren't seeing the outcomes. That's not an issue at the moment. AI development is funded by either venture capital or monopoly profits. Neither of these are sustainable in the long term. VC firms are willing to pay for AI right now. At some point, they'll want a return. Currently, it's not clear where that return will come from. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Measuring the Value of Marketing Operations URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/measuring-the-value-of-marketing-operations/ Last updated: 2025-08-05T22:18:27.000Z The hardest task in marketing operations isn't managing data or keeping leads flowing. It's proving the value of those tasks to the business. Operations is a cost-centre in any business function - it doesn't directly generate revenue. However, marketing is incapable of generating new revenue without effective marketing operations. The difficulty is in proving that to the board. After all, when budgets are tight, marketing leaders will naturally be looking for additional money to fund a packed events schedule or a comprehensive campaign calendar. The ops budget is an easy target for possible cuts. ### Changing the Question It's notoriously hard to prove a negative, but that is exactly what marketing operations needs to do. When executives start asking about ROI, turn the question around. If the CMO wants to know the impact of marketing automation on the pipeline, calculate how many leads would be generated without automation. The answer is a lot fewer, but proving that is hard. Marketers are used to measuring success by attributing individual leads to individual campaigns. However, operations affects all campaigns. A strong marketing operations function raises performance levels across the board. A rising tide lifts all boats. Some CMOs do attribute parts of the operations budget to individual activities. Campaign delivery is a classic example of this. Even technology spend can be attributed to the campaigns run through the individual platform. But you can't just attribute the entire marketing operations budget to every marketing program. You have to show the effect that better data has on all campaigns, how improved reporting has allowed more comprehensive ROI measurement across the board, or how more efficient lead processes drive improved conversion rates. The trouble is that such measures are much more difficult to calculate than your standard ROI calculations. ### Measuring Key Metrics Unlike traditional marketing attribution, there's no measurable link between individual improvement projects and individual opportunities. Instead, a different kind of attribution methodology is needed; one that many operations teams struggle with. Fortunately, Ops teams will already be generating all the required numbers. Any good CMO should be reporting on funnel conversion rates to the business - it's a standard metric. CMOs may not be monitoring individual channel metrics, such as email click-throughs or form completion rates, but marketing managers will be. These top-level analytics aren't just used for campaign performance, they also form the basis for marketing ops reporting. The missing step is storytelling. Marketing ops needs to be looking for general trends that span multiple campaigns, and linking them back to specific improvement activities. Look at MQL conversion rates before and after a lead scoring update goes live. Compare email click-through rates before and after a database clean-up project. If you're seeing noticeable improvements in top-level metrics then shout about them, and construct a narrative about how your activities help make a difference. Creative agencies and campaign managers will be doing the same thing, and they won't mind if you seek to share the credit. ### Numbers and Narrative When CMOs report on marketing's overall contribution, they tell a story about customer influence, brand reputation and revenue generation. It's a story backed by hard numbers, but generally only the ones that the CMO wants the board to see. Storytelling is a core skill for marketers, so it comes naturally. Marketing operations, not so much. Ops leaders often rely on the numbers to speak for themselves, which ironically means that they tend to show the wrong numbers. Marketing operations projects are hard to measure. Everyone understands that. It's the trend which is important, rather than the exact values. When measuring the impact of individual projects, rough guesses and ballpark figures can be accepted, provided they can be justified and are framed correctly in the accompanying narrative. The numbers are there to back up the story explaining why the project was a success. They are not the validation in itself. Of course, different rules apply to revenue numbers, which must be 100% accurate in order to meet accounting standards. However, ops is rarely justified in revenue terms. That gives ops leaders more flexibility than a CMO gets. They just need to take advantage of the additional leverage. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Revolution When: The Waiting Game URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/revolution-when-the-waiting-game/ Last updated: 2025-07-08T07:30:38.000Z Following years of hype, Generative AI has been added to pretty much everything. Even if it's little more than a checkbox feature. AI assistants have been embedded into every major app . Many marketing technology platforms have introduced some form of content generation workflow. Meanwhile, major tech companies are looking to redesign their products as glorified chatbots (Microsoft 365 is one such example). The trouble is inventing that killer use case, which justifies such a radical redesign. ### AI In Production Everyone knows that AI is the future. Copywriters and translators can attest to the impact of generative AI on their industries. Tech firms are betting on AI powering the next wave of digital transformation. Investors see AI as the path to untold riches. Corporate leaders are scared of being left behind, in case it disrupts established markets. Yet, many firms are still no closer to production deployment of GenAI automation than they were twelve months ago. Executive mandates and AI task forces aren't leading to production deployments. Generative AI does have a role in the modern enterprise, even its current state. Knowledge workers are already using it for meeting notes and web searches. These are both highly effective uses of the technology, but they're not the type of activity that can justify the stratospheric valuations seen by many AI startups. That requires agents to become a corporate reality, but we're still a long way from that happening. Even if they're already being used in many customer service scenarios. ### Customer Hesitation It's no wonder we're seeing a high degree of pushback against AI. Much of the rhetoric emanating from AI leaders is scarcely believable. Increasingly shrill claims about AI driven job losses are being laughed at on social media. Not helped by tech firms using AI to justify offshoring, R&D cuts and pre-existing reductions in graduate recruitment. Meanwhile, even big Salesforce fans could not defend Marc Benioff's recent claim that AI automates 30%-50% of his companies' internal processes. Supposedly, Benioff was only referring to increases in developer productivity. In the real world, Salesforce's Agentforce platform is struggling to overcome customer hesitation. Understandable perhaps when the platform is still effectively in beta. After all, Salesforce still haven't settled on a definitive pricing model for the platform. Major new features are being announced monthly. And the company's own benchmarks show that agents routinely make errors. The same situation applies to other agentic CRM platforms - HubSpot's agents are still mostly in private beta. ### New Technology Given the current market reality, it's tempting to dismiss Agentic AI entirely. There are very real issues with Generative AI that will affect its eventual usage for automation. Even Gartner are advising CIOs to hold off on agent deployments until next year and beyond. However, the market for agents is still very new. Salesforce's Agentforce product was only launched in September 2024 - less than 12 months ago. The current boom sector is development tools - yet, the term Vibe Coding was only coined in early February 2025\. The practice is older than that, but it's still a very new technology in the very early stages of its hype cycle. Senior executives are understandably worried about being left behind, but they needn't be. Generative AI is still very immature. Scientists are still figuring out the limitations of their models, and how to work around them. Few people genuinely know what the technology is truly capable of. It's rare to see a new technology with revolutionary potential developed in the global spotlight. Yet, that is exactly what is happening with AI. LLMs are undergoing an active R&D process that typically only plays out in a lab. It's an exciting prospect, but at a level of maturity that rarely gets deployed to production. Pretty much everyone is still working out the best use cases for Large Language Models. We've seen some promising ones achieve mainstream usage over the past twelve months, with transformational impacts on SEO and on marketing more broadly. A plethora of startups have emerged with other new ideas. The best ones will be copied by established players and embedded into their existing product portfolios. Businesses should be actively reviewing their processes for potential uses of the technology. Ongoing experimentation is a good idea in any field, but don't get hung up on production readiness yet. Keeping a few promising pilots on the back burner is all that is required at this stage. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/what-is-salesforce-marketing-cloud-next/ Last updated: 2025-06-24T07:30:39.000Z Product migrations are tricky at the best of times. Persuading your customers to migrate to the latest and greatest is a minefield which can doom your business. It's especially difficult if the product you're trying to sunset is an industry leading Marketing Cloud solution. Yet, that is exactly the situation that Salesforce finds itself in. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an old product, designed for a previous martech age, when complexity was king and open platforms were less of a priority. The only real surprise is that Salesforce took so long to replace it. ### New Infrastructure A couple of weeks ago, Salesforce announced a new edition of Marketing Cloud, which they called Marketing Cloud Next. Much of the reporting around the launch focused on the new AI features showed off at the keynote. However, those features are not the primary reason for the new product's existence. Marketing Cloud Next is primarily a back-end change, which enables the types of AI agents seen during the product demos as a side benefit. It's much more than an extension of the existing product. Instead, it's a ground up rewrite of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, built on top of the same Data Cloud foundations used by the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. The new products finally break down the silo separating Salesforce's marketing solutions and their sales solutions. To be fair, we are only in the very early stages of the long promised Marketing Cloud migration. They do look promising though, because they finally fix many of the inconsistencies and UX issues that have plagued Salesforce's marketing apps since they were acquired in 2013\. Various modules have been switched out since then, such as new workflow engines and new asset editors. However, the fundamental limitations of the underlying data models still remained. The integrations between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud have improved significantly over the years. However, there are still some areas where competing platforms such as Marketo integrate better with Sales Cloud than Salesforce's own marketing solutions. ### New Product Editions Despite repeated attempts to modernise the platform, very few marketers actually enjoy using either Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Account Engagement. Hence why Salesforce are so keen to replace them with a brand new product. Rather confusingly, there is no actual product called 'Marketing Cloud Next'. Instead, 'Marketing Cloud Next' is an umbrella term that covers several different Marketing Cloud editions built on the new platform. We currently know of three new products all built on the Marketing Cloud Next infrastructure. - Marketing Cloud Growth, which is the Pardot replacement for B2B marketers. This was announced in Spring 2024 and is already available to all existing Pardot customers as part of their subscriptions. - Marketing Cloud Advanced, which is a Pardot replacement for enterprise marketers. It's a more sophisticated version of Marketing Cloud Growth, which was made available to eligible Pardot customers at the end of 2024. - Marketing Cloud+, which is the future of the B2C multi-channel solution formally known as ExactTarget. This is the actual new product announced a few weeks ago, and will be added to existing Marketing Cloud subscriptions in the autumn. Many of the core modules and AI agents will be shared across the entire platform, enabling a much more seamless transition between B2B and B2C marketing than is the case currently. That will hopefully allow B2B marketers to deploy much more sophisticated account based nurture experiences than is possible through Pardot today. Many B2B marketers have long been attracted by marketing cloud's cross-channel functionality, only to become frustrated by the complex technical requirements and limited lead management capabilities. A single platform will close that gap, even if there are multiple product editions. ### Get Started We'll soon find out. Marketing Cloud Growth and Marketing Cloud Advanced are already in market. They certainly caught the attention when released last year, but they're not yet a business priority for either vendor or customers. These are new platforms built on top of the same data model as the rest of the Salesforce ecosystem. That's great for customers looking to integrate their marketing data into the wider business, or for marketers looking to use sales and service data in campaigns. However, the new products are far from feature complete. It will be a while before enterprises can fully move over to the new platforms. In the interim, the different Marketing Cloud Next products are being made available to existing Marketing Cloud customers as part of their current subscriptions. That gives marketers a chance to experiment with the new capabilities, and perhaps use them where they offer some benefit. It will be a long time before anyone is forced to switch over to the new products, but that day will come. That said, it is definitely worth becoming familiar with the new platform. Taking action now will ease the transition when the time does come to migrate. It will also allow customers to shape the future of the Marketing Cloud ecosystem. It's still early days, but already the potential is obvious. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Why Salesforce Acquired Informatica URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/why-salesforce-acquired-informatica/ Last updated: 2025-06-03T07:30:48.000Z Informatica are one of the grand old names of data management. Founded in 1993, they were selling integration software to large enterprises when AI was still in the realm of science fiction. Instead, they made their name selling the tools needed to manage data warehouses. Much later, Informatica were able to expand their business on the back of the cloud computing boom, building a range of technologies to extract, transform and load databases. They even own the Strikeiron email validation service. ### Executive Priorities All this means that Informatica are well placed to benefit from the AI trend. Accurate AI output requires high quality data inputs, otherwise, you end up with garbage in, garbage out. As a result, data integrity and data accessibility have become a critical concern at board level. CEOs have issued AI mandates that aren't being followed because individual AI pilots are unable to produce the desired results. Data quality is rightfully seen as a major barrier to AI deployment. Now, data challenges are nothing new. Marketers have been complaining about data for as long as anyone can remember. Furthermore, data improvement has been a key priority for CMOs for many years. That's never been enough to fix the problem though - one department can't fix all corporate databases on their own. However, if you develop an overarching information governance strategy then perhaps each team can take the necessary steps to maintain data quality while sharing the relevant sources with any tools and services that need it - GDPR and security permitting. With the right data foundations, AI can benefit the business and improve employee productivity. This ongoing process of opening up internal databases to AI provides Informatica with a real opportunity to cement their position as an enterprise data management vendor. Consequently, there was only modest surprise when Salesforce looked at buying the company last year. Last week, they closed the deal. Salesforce will be acquiring Informatica for $8m - their largest deal since purchasing Slack in 2020. ### The IT Challenge Naturally, there was a lot of talk about AI when the deal was announced. It's bigger than that though. Buying Informatica does benefit Agentforce. However, data is the lifeblood of modern business. It allows marketing teams to personalise the customer experience, and sales teams to identify the right tactics for each opportunity. Salesforce have spent a lot of time trying to make Data Cloud central to their ecosystem. They've not really succeeded though. Data Cloud is still a platform you use because you have to, rather than because you want to. Buying Informatica is intended to change that perception. Salesforce have promoted Data Cloud heavily. However, it's struggled to gain either mind share or market share. Largely, because Salesforce were very late entering the CDP market. Data cloud has evolved beyond merely being a CDP for marketing, but it is still widely perceived as a marketing platform for unifying across the various Salesforce apps. It's not seen as a tool for managing data across the entire enterprise tech stack, regardless of whether it touches Sales Cloud or not. In order to boost their AI ambitions, Salesforce need a data ecosystem that has IT pedigree. Companies are struggling to manage ever increasing volumes of information. As a result, enterprise data management is a rapidly evolving market that has been revolutionised multiple times in recent years. New technologies such as Databricks and Snowflake have introduced new ways of manipulating data and managing data warehouses. That has enabled IT departments to deploy a single tech stack for integrating, transforming and securing data across the enterprise regardless of source or eventual use. CIOs want a data management framework which works for all departments, rather than relying on vendor specific point solutions. ### Improving Data Cloud Salesforce may be a leading CRM vendor, but in the data management market, it is indeed seen as one of those point solutions. Informatica does have the IT pedigree needed, as one of the oldest and biggest vendors of enterprise data management platforms. That doesn't mean that Informatica will replace Data Cloud, but it allows Salesforce to control the entire enterprise data foundation. That's critical for a company pitching itself as a general purpose AI automation vendor. They can control the data structures and data pipelines which allow agents to transform business processes. Of course, there is still overlap between Informatica and Salesforce's existing data cloud portfolio. In 2018, Salesforce acquired Mulesoft, another data integration vendor. That formed the basis of the Salesforce Integration Cloud, and the initial attempts to expand Salesforce Data Cloud beyond marketing. Mulesoft is a much simpler product without the complexity of a traditional enterprise integration vendor. Too simple for enterprise use cases, and for a data market where the boundaries between data storage location and data usage locations are blurring. Mulesoft can import your data into Salesforce, while Informatica adds enterprise grade data governance and data cleansing tools to make sure the information is properly tagged and categorised. Salesforce have made a big bet on Data Cloud. It's central to Agentforce, and to Salesforce's overall AI ambitions. That means it needs to scale to enterprise wide use cases. Furthermore, it needs to become a critical part of the enterprise IT stack. That hasn't happened both because of product limitations and because of poor market perception. Buying Informatica solves both of these challenges. It's a critical milestone on the road to making Agentforce a major AI platform. Better data management alone is not enough though. The real difference maker is in how you use that data. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Demand Agents: Human Assisted AI URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/demand-agents-human-assisted-ai/ Last updated: 2025-05-27T07:30:29.000Z There has been a definite shift in the AI narrative over the past six months. Until last summer, companies weren't willing to consider where AI could replace human employees. That changed when tech firms realised that job cuts were the only way to generate a meaningful ROI on their spiralling data centre investments. Yet, in the months since, few companies have actively replaced human employees with AI, despite numerous announcements from CEOs to the contrary. Despite the hesitation, AI adoption is still a top priority in many C-suites. ### Level of Accuracy Companies planning AI projects need to learn the limitations of the technology as well as the benefits. A lot of the debate around AI focuses on hallucinations: the tendency of LLMs to make stuff up. This has long frustrated AI developers and is indeed a bad habit most of the time, but not always. There are plenty of research or creative scenarios where you want LLMs to say new things. There are even more scenarios where 90% accuracy is good enough. For example, in content generation use cases, where the AI writes a first draft for a human specialist to edit. When identifying use cases for AI, it's important to identify where absolute accuracy is required and where it isn't. After all, the technology can do many things. It can generate marketing plans, draft content and analyse campaign results. It can identify the best leads and send a personalised email to follow them up. It can handle routine customer service queries in real time. That doesn't mean it can or should do everything. There is still an important role for humans in the AI workplace. ### Human Support The most relevant concern is exceptions. How do you handle the stuff that AI can't answer? It's all very setting up a human in the loop procedure to check AI output. However, you then need escalation processes that allow a human to take over. This is seen most clearly in customer support scenarios. Customers often want the bot to handle routine contractual queries or common troubleshooting. It's normally quicker than human live chat and less stressful than your typical offshore call centre. However, brand reputation generally lives or dies based on the quality of the escalation process. It doesn't matter how helpful the AI customer service agent is. Customers still need the ability to escalate complex scenarios to a human support rep, or they won't bother dealing with a particular brand at all. Good customer service is all about solving the one-off problems that no one has seen before while keeping the customer happy. Yet, many customer success teams focus on the everyday situations, and forget about the occasional crisis. The ambition should be to have the best human support team possible, and then using AI to avoid over-burdening them. If recent tweets are anything to go by, even AI pioneers such as Klarna have learned that lesson. ### AI Assistant From a business perspective, the most important question is when can AI usefully support human employees. Can it handle the routine administrative tasks that human workers don't want to handle? It already does in many areas. Can it surface the business-specific insights to enable data driven decision making? It's been doing that for years already. Can it overcome blank paper syndrome by providing the starting point for new ideas? It does have access to most of the internet. AI is increasingly delivering value, but more as an assistant than as a co-worker. There is nothing wrong with that, even if tech firms do have higher ambitions. At the macro-economic level, productivity has been stagnant for over a decade. Incremental changes to internal technology may have substantial benefits, but only for a few individuals. Even in the current state, AI can act as a research assistant and as an editor. That in itself is a substantial time saver. AI is becoming increasingly capable, but it's still not a mature technology. In the rush to automate, do not forget the human element. The goal of an automation project is to deliver a better or more efficient output, but not for its own sake. The end goal must always reduce workload and benefit the customer. That does require constant learning. Yet, just like a successful human, AI models are always learning. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to determine what they are learning. Data scientists are still trying to solve that particular problem. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Order and Chaos: Organising Unstructured Data URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/order-and-chaos-organising-unstructured-data/ Last updated: 2025-05-13T07:29:59.000Z The modern enterprise is swimming in data. From customer history to buying signals, marketers have more information than they know what to do with. Yet, nobody is happy with the state of their database. Customer churn is part of that - a B2B marketing database is always outdated simply due to people changing roles within customer accounts. More fundamentally though, marketers just want a more detailed view of their prospects. ### Using Call Notes Sure, you can get budget estimates and technology installed base for most large enterprises. Although, that data is never accurate enough for every campaign despite the best efforts of HG Insights and others. However, many sales organisations do have a clear picture of the competitor landscape and budget availability for the top accounts. It's just not neatly categorised in the CRM system. It's saved in call summaries or account plans - the enormous expanse of unorganised information that analysts refer to as 'unstructured data'. Fundamentally, busy sales reps have better things to do than update every field for every account in the CRM system. Thankfully, there are new technologies in the stack that can do it for them: namely Agentforce or Microsoft Copilot. Generative AI is excellent at summarising long documents or scattered notes. It can find snippets of information from across the enterprise and categorise it. It's the same technique that OpenAI and Perplexity are using to disrupt web search. ### Human vs Machine In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about agents replacing human staff. The reasons for that will be discussed in a future article, but using AI to replace humans does neglect the key advantage of the technology. It complements humans, streamlining admin and grunt work. From an ops perspective, AI works best when it performs the tasks that no one wants to do anyway. For most sales reps, updating your pipeline in CRM is definitely one such task. It goes beyond that though. Agents can also uncover that critical profiling question which data brokers can't sell, but you want to collect anyway. It could be a highly specific sizing question, or a key detail about the buying process. Every business has at least one custom data point they wish to use in targeting and audience selection. It's certainly asked during Sales qualification. There may even be a field for it in CRM, although no one ever fills it in. Regardless of what information you need, Generative AI can extract it from customer notes and populate it in a picklist field on the account record. You just need to ensure the relevant question is included in sales scripts, so the AI can find it. ### A Question of Accuracy Now, hallucinations are a concern, but purchased data is not 100% accurate either. Even the gold standard data vendors such as D&B are often incorrect, and that's just for core profile fields such as industry and annual revenue. Generative AI should only be used for workflows where errors can be tolerated. That requirement should influence how the data is used, but it should not prevent the technology from being used at all. Data management workflows are inherently inaccurate, that's the nature of data. Every data cleansing workflow should have a margin for error. Manual data normalisation techniques always do. Machine learning based data cleansing workflows have long come with a confidence score, indicating how accurate the output is. Generative AI is no different. No database is perfect, and no data cleansing process will ever be completely accurate. Data is constantly changing, but AI is a valuable tool in the ongoing battle to keep customer profiles timely and relevant. In many respects, it's an evolutionary change. However, it does open up new data sources for marketing use. In that one respect, generative AI is genuinely revolutionary. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Rebirth of Marketing Automation? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-rebirth-of-marketing-automation/ Last updated: 2025-04-22T07:30:01.000Z Marketing automation is a mature technology. Yet, marketing strategies are rapidly evolving due to new technologies and new buyer behaviour. ABM has displaced lead generation. Multi-channel has become the new normal. Despite all this, the basic capabilities of marketing automation platforms have barely changed. That has led to a widespread feeling that marketing automation is stagnant. Many marketers appear to believe that Eloqua and Marketo are designed to deliver the marketing strategies of a bygone era. Plenty of new martech solutions have been launched in recent years. CDPs and ABM platforms are now commonplace, and their feature set definitely overlaps with marketing automation. Five years ago, I wrote about the evolution of ABM platforms and the threat they posed to marketing automation. Even back then, people were asking if Demandbase or 6sense could replace Marketo or Hubspot. The question has come up more recently. It was asked several times during the recent launch of 6sense's intelligent workflow engine. The answer is still the same: not yet, but it probably could eventually. ### Overlapping Questions Fundamentally, marketing automation is still a lead-centric database in an increasingly account-based industry. The marketing capabilities within MA are still based around events and outbound email, even though the majority of budgets are directed to advertising. That's even before we consider the overlap with the kind of sales engagement capabilities seen in Outreach and Salesloft. It's no wonder people are asking about the future of MA technology. Yet, we've been here before. Once upon a time, CDPs threatened to become the central system for lead scoring and data integration. Ultimately, though, CDPs never delivered on that promise in most organisations. They were simply too complex. Marketing automation is good enough for most demand generation needs. While ABM platforms are too limited, acting instead as a complementary technology, filling the gaps left in the tech stack by other platforms. ### Beyond Email Marketing automation vendors have made half-hearted attempts to diversify their platforms beyond email. Yet, marketers simply weren't interested. The leading MA platforms all have media integrations, which are only really used for LinkedIn and Facebook Lead Gen forms. However, this is due to a political divide as much as a technological one. Ad budgets are often controlled by media agencies who have their own platforms. Advertising capabilities wouldn't be used even if marketing automation did have the audience targeting capabilities to match dedicated adtech solutions. The leading MA platforms do have a real dilemma, though. Where should they be focusing their development efforts? Many marketers associate marketing automation with email marketing. Yet, outbound email campaigns are a relatively unimportant part of the overall marketing automation feature set. It's certainly not why marketing operations places Marketo or HubSpot at the centre of the martech stack. From an ops perspective, the form management and data integration capabilities are far more important. Marketing automation is the gateway to CRM, even for companies following an ABM strategy. We are seeing vendors try to target both sets of needs. ### Feature Updates So far this year, we've seen Adobe release a new modular email designer for Marketo. That grabs the headlines because it finally integrates generative AI into the Marketo email editor. Yet, many Marketo admins are much more interested in the improved integration and journey builder capabilities arriving later in the year. The Salesforce sync will be significantly upgraded this quarter, and a new visual workflow editor based on the existing engagement maps feature has also been promised. That should make it easier to build sophisticated campaign journeys, which then integrate with CRM and ABM platforms for further follow-up. We're also seeing similar developments from HubSpot. Last week's Spring Showcase focused heavily on sales agents and customer service agents. For marketing, the most interesting announcements focused on Marketing Hub Enterprise. HubSpot are not the first MA vendor to introduce lookalike lists, journey orchestration or multi-account management. However, they are significant upgrades for a platform that historically hasn't been flexible enough for enterprise use cases. Marketing automation was supposed to deliver personalised customer experiences. Yet, in practice, the segmentation capabilities were not sophisticated enough to actually deliver this. Instead, they became a tool for automating field events and drip nurtures. AI offers an opportunity to achieve that original promise by calculating each prospect's journey stage and buyer interests. Combined with the hyper-personalisation capabilities of Generative AI, it may finally allow marketing automation to become more than an integration engine. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Bridging the Gaps: Finding the Buying Group URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/bridging-the-gaps-finding-the-buying-group/ Last updated: 2025-04-08T07:30:28.000Z ABM is everywhere. Everyone is doing it. Traditional lead generation approaches focus too much on the individual and not enough on the actual customer. That led to the widespread adoption of ABM, with its focus on buying groups rather than individuals. Yet, the concept of a buying group has always been loosely defined. Everyone knows that ABM should be based around them. Yet, it's always unclear what a buying group looks like in practice. The concept is elusive, only matched by the difficulty in identifying who belongs to a specific buying group for a specific opportunity. ### Finding Influencers Ultimately, the marketing view of an account doesn't neatly fit actual corporate structures. Many large companies will have multiple concurrent relationships open with the same vendor. According to ABM best practice, the individual subsidiaries behind those different relationships should be split into separate buying groups so that campaigns can be personalised accordingly. In reality, marketers rarely bother. Mapping contacts to buying committees is often a manual task carried out by sales during account qualification. After all, most sales reps will know the key decision makers for a potential opportunity. Finding the critical influencers is far more difficult. Marketers want to be talking to the entire account. The challenge is actually identifying who all the relevant stakeholders are. It's all very well researching relevant job titles at prospect accounts, but that won't give you all the key names. Buying committees have expanded enormously in recent years, and will continue to do so. The relevance of each contact can never be certain unless you have a clear view of the specific purchasing processes and corporate hierarchies within each company. That requires the type of account-specific intelligence that only a top sales rep can glean. Yet, it's still an essential step towards successful account based marketing. ### AI Identification Thankfully, AI is helping to provide a partial solution. ABM platforms now have added functionality to automatically map the buying group for each account. Buying group identification algorithms will never be a match for a trained sales rep, but they can act as a stopgap during the awareness phases of a buying cycle prior to sales engagement. Lead to account matching has become an integral part of the ABM tech stack, linking newly collected contacts to the relevant account based on domain or company name. Buying group identification takes this a stage further, highlighting related contacts so that gaps in the database can be exposed. It adds a persona layer to the ABM stack, allowing marketers to assess whether they're reaching all the key roles in each target account. The likes of Demandbase or Anteriad use this technology to sell you the missing buying group members. Third-party data acquisition has its own compliance challenges, which means that it's not viable for many organisations. However, those same third-party databases still hold value, as they are a source of useful insights that can really enhance ad targeting. If you know where the database gaps are most significant, then campaigns can be created around the missing personas to collect those names and drive awareness for future activity. In turn, that increases the value of marketing to the sales rep working the account. Deeper account penetration is often one of the key objectives driving an ABM approach. Yet, engaging the right contacts is still important. Historically, account penetration KPIs have tended to focus on the number of contacts at each account. Less attention has been paid to whether you're collecting all the top personas. That leads to duplication in the database, and a much less successful ABM strategy. AI enables a more detailed examination of data quality, allowing marketers to look beyond the high value KPIs. At last, marketers can measure the relative completion of each account and automatically identify the buyer role of each contact. In turn, that enables much better account-specific marketing strategies. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Bridging the Gaps: Linking ABX Experiences URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/bridging-the-gaps-linking-abx-experiences/ Last updated: 2025-03-26T08:30:38.000Z B2B buying is becoming more complicated. Buying committees are growing larger, and buying decisions are taking longer. That’s frustrating for corporate decision makers looking to navigate financial controls and corporate hierarchies. It’s even more frustrating for B2B marketers who are finding their jobs much harder. Every campaign needs to speak to more personas over a longer period of time. That requires more content and more touch points across many more channels than in the past. Given all these difficulties, it’s no wonder that B2B marketing is becoming harder. As a result of the increased complexity, every lead needs to be nurtured for longer. Furthermore, just speaking to the decision maker is no longer good enough. The entire buying committee needs to be considered, which means a wider range of messaging across a wider range of channels. In order to meet all these additional requirements, nurture programs need to become much more sophisticated. Yet, traditional marketing automation is struggling to keep up with the new approach. ### Across the Funnel At the top of the funnel, account based targeting is now commonplace. ABM has transformed how awareness campaigns are designed and executed. Marketers focus on heavily curated account lists across both advertising and social channels, with the expectation that a high degree of personalisation will lead to strong campaign performance. Demand generation still has its place, particularly when dealing with lower value audiences. However, account based marketing rules the roost when targeting niche verticals or large enterprises. Yet, further down the funnel the old tactics still rule. While there has been plenty of focus on interactive content and personalised web experiences. Nurture strategies still rely heavily on email campaigns and local events. When marketing to known contacts, ABM becomes much less commonplace. Sure, event invites may be targeted to specific accounts, and email nurtures are frequently designed with ABM in mind. However, at the middle of the funnel, customer journeys are still overwhelmingly lead based, primarily because the technologies used to deliver them are also lead based. ABM is very much an afterthought within most marketing automation platforms. Sales outreach platforms aren’t much better. ### Across Channels Every nurture program should use a mix of tactics, but it can be difficult to reconcile email audiences with social retargeting campaigns. All this creates a disconnect that few marketing platforms can solve, leading to a misalignment between anonymous ad content and nurture email content. Both are personalised, but not necessarily with a consistent message. It’s common for prospects to receive awareness messages through one channel while simultaneously seeing conflicting consideration messages through another channel. That’s not the intended journey, but it happens because of overlapping audiences between the different channels. There’s generally no mechanism for automatically moving an entire account from a top-of-funnel ad campaign to a middle-of-funnel nurture program. All this makes it very hard to manage the type of interconnected account based experiences that marketers want to deliver to their customers. There are too many missing links between channels and buying stages. In many organisations, triggering each stage of the customer journey requires manual intervention by marketing technology teams. That leads to substantial inefficiencies, which directly impact lead quality and revenue generation. After all, B2B buyers increasingly expect to navigate the buying process at their own pace. Yet, fragmented tech stacks frustrate customers and limit the ability of marketers to deliver on that promise. ### Across the Tech Stack CDPs were supposed to solve this challenge, unifying data in one location from which every touchpoint could be orchestrated. That vision never became a reality, at least not in B2B. Initially, that was because CDPs were not optimised for account-based data structures and B2B technology stacks. More recently, data warehouses and ABM platforms have started trying to solve the same problem. Why introduce a new technology to align your customer data, when your existing tools can do the same job? Demandbase have some fairly sophisticated campaign orchestration capabilities, which allows them to trigger campaigns within the leading marketing automation platforms and CRM systems. Meanwhile, data tools such as Snowflake are increasingly central to many marketing technology stacks. Many enterprises claim to have an integrated tech stack and a unified customer journey. In practice, that typically means a shared executive vision and strategic alignment between departments. The practical reality on the ground is still very different, whether due to system limitations or process inefficiencies. Yet, it doesn’t have to be this way. We are starting to see fully integrated tech stacks becoming a reality in B2B. Which means that marketers will finally be able to deliver the award winning experiences they’ve always dreamt of. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Next-Gen Automation: The Outlook for Agents URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/next-gen-automation-the-outlook-for-agents/ Last updated: 2025-03-17T19:06:06.000Z Agents are everywhere. At least, that’s what advocates of AI would have you believe. It seems to be the only thing that big technology wants to talk about. Yet, agents are only a secondary concern for marketers and sales reps struggling to meet their targets in an unpredictable economy. Plenty of businesses are experimenting with AI, and some of those experiments have even reached production. However, even the most forward thinking managers are starting to question the wisdom of deploying Agents at the scale pitched by Marc Benioff and Sam Altman. A bit more openness about the current state of the technology would better prepare businesses for when agentic AI is finally production-ready. ### Slow Progress AI technology definitely has a bright future, but there are still many challenges to overcome before swarms of robots can automate the day-to-day operations of modern business. The capabilities of the technology are rapidly evolving, and accuracy is slowly improving. However, the technology still fails at many simple tasks. AI models only make sense if they can be trained easily and work effectively. They don’t need to be 100% accurate at everything. Humans never are. However, they do need to be good enough and cheap enough. At the moment, the technology is neither. It’s still too expensive, and the user experience simply isn’t good enough. In the meantime, there are plenty of use cases for glorified chatbots. There’s a reason why search engines have become the latest technology to be disrupted. Generative AI has made natural language search a real alternative. Recent studies show widespread adoption of AI search engines for educational queries among Millennials and Gen Z. Sure, hallucinations are still a problem and the technology isn’t good enough for academic research. It works fine for everyday business use though, and Google is still available as a fallback. Not that Google is particularly reliable these days either. We’ve just become used to its quirks. The trouble for investors is that Microsoft and Salesforce have bigger ambitions for Generative AI. They’re looking to automate the majority of business workflows, and then scoop up the cost savings through higher subscription and usage fees. That won’t work. Regardless of the reliability of technology, cost is still a significant barrier to AI deployments. Currently, the technology doesn’t unlock major new productivity gains, and it’s not cost effective enough to replace a human workforce. The success of Deepseek has shown another path is possible. A multitude of cheap models running locally is the way forward, with each model trained for a specific use case. However, the technology doesn’t allow for that at the moment. ### Sales Agents We’re already seeing that dynamic play out within the realm of sales. Last week saw two more glimpses into the transition that is to come. Both Microsoft and Salesforce announced major new AI capabilities intended to automate routine sales tasks using agents. Microsoft revealed a sales agent capable of carrying out the role of a typical SDR. That’s still a reactive capability, requiring human prompts before it can do anything. Agentforce has had a similar capability since its initial launch last year. The next big breakthrough needs to be autonomous execution, where an agent can be triggered by a machine learning model. Salesforce finally announced that capability at their recent TDX event. The idea is that agents can be automatically triggered by data changes or by a traditional workflow. That allows agents to run autonomously when certain pre-defined conditions are met, such as when an account reaches a certain score threshold or when a lead hasn’t been followed up recently. The agent then uses its training and knowledge sources to choose the right action for each lead, based on the list of actions made available to it. ### Autonomous Execution Silicon Valley is starting to pivot towards that outcome across the board. Reports are beginning to emerge of potential new product announcements from OpenAI, including a set of role-specific models intended to have capabilities similar to those of different levels of knowledge workers. To begin with, pricing will be a major barrier to adoption. The rumours also indicate these models will be priced well above the expected salary for a human employee with an equivalent skill set. Although, as we’ve seen with deep research those costs will drop over time. It will be a long time before AI is trusted to autonomously close enterprise opportunities. However, there is a real demand for automated buying further down the value chain. B2B buyers are used to online purchases now. Analyst research indicates that decision makers no longer want to deal with human sales reps unless absolutely necessary. The intelligent use of agents makes that possible, while preserving the human element for deals where it is really needed. We’ve already seen the same dynamic in customer service, where generative AI has elevated the quality of your typical chatbot. More progress is needed before the technology can see similar adoption across other areas of the business. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Overcoming Communication Silos in Marketing URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/overcoming-communication-silos-in-marketing/ Last updated: 2025-02-25T08:30:18.000Z Marketing is a team game, requiring a mix of skills and resources. Delivering the best possible customer journey requires strong alignment between many different roles within the business. From creative design through to data analysis, a lot of effort goes into launching even the most straightforward campaigns. That often involves bringing together a large number of people to contribute to strategy development and campaign delivery. Close coordination is needed to deliver the messaging and customer journey required for a consistent experience. Good planning empowers conversion through the funnel and beyond. In turn, this enables close alignment of each activity and touchpoint to the overall marketing strategy. Communication silos are one of the biggest barriers to corporate innovation. They directly impact the customer experience, frequently leading to duplicated effort. Misalignment between different areas of the business can seriously affect campaign performance. Your corporate structure may be essential to delivering the best products and the optimum experience, but your customers don't care about the internal politics. Any multi-product organisation requires close coordination and strong management to avoid a disjointed customer journey. The same principle applies within a single business unit at all stages of the campaign development process. ### Assigning Roles Open communication and close review are essential during the ideation of campaigns, all the way through to the end of the implementation phase. Approval processes are needed at every stage of the campaign development process. Input from every relevant stakeholder needs to be considered whenever necessary. Approval layers need to be clearly defined. Ownership needs to be agreed upon. To do all that, you need to be clear about who the stakeholders are and when their input is necessary. However, setting out roles and responsibilities is the easy bit. Making sure the right people are always kept in the loop is the hard part. Approval processes are only worthwhile if they’re actually followed. Feedback loops are only relevant if all the right stakeholders can contribute in a timely manner. The channels and mechanisms of communication are just as important as the content of the communication. Project management tools have always pitched themselves as the solution to this problem. Slack sells itself as a replacement for email. Both technologies have their place in any organisation. They’re likely used for every campaign, but are they used to their maximum potential? ### Increasing Visibility The main benefit of project management tools is visibility. Teams which rely on email often suffer from communication silos. A project management tool allows anyone to see the status of every project. Everyone can clearly see when a campaign is approved or when further action is required. Furthermore, it removes the question of ‘who do I need to loop into this message’. When configured correctly, the system can make that decision for you. After all, people are generally left out of the loop due to accidental oversight rather than deliberate neglect. Technology can’t solve every communication challenge. Process is ultimately about putting people first. However, having the right tools can definitely help. If the right tools are used in the right way, then marketers will have more time to focus on the content of their campaigns and less on the process of delivering them. Campaigns are complex beasts, with many moving parts and lots of detail to optimise. If the tech can do the heavy lifting, then better campaigns and better customer experiences should be the outcome. That makes your marketing programs better for everyone. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Data to Deliver: Account Based Experiences URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-data-to-deliver-account-based-experiences/ Last updated: 2025-02-12T18:44:17.000Z Amid an avalanche of content, decision makers have become harder to reach. Leads are qualifying later. Sales cycles are taking longer. To solve this problem, marketers are increasingly looking to better and deeper personalisation in order to drive new revenue. Getting results requires putting the right message in front of the right prospects. Yet, effective personalisation is only possible if there is the underlying data quality to support it. If you don't know who your prospects are, how can you hope to personalise your content to their needs? Marketers need a more comprehensive view of their target market than ever before. Bad data leads to bad ABM. Gartner studies show that bad personalisation is one of the quickest ways to lose customers. That's why data quality has been such a hot topic in recent years. ### The AI Approach It's no longer enough just to have a loosely defined ICP; you need to know all the accounts that fit that profile. Increasingly, marketers are using AI solutions to identify the best fit for their solutions. AI driven propensity modelling is far from a new technique. It's the same concept as predictive scoring, which has been around for a long time. However, the Generative AI boom has driven a renewed interest in the concept of propensity and predictive scoring. Taken together, a well defined account propensity model and strong intent framework allow for much deeper personalisation than was ever previously possible in B2B. The basic idea is that account tiering should be data driven based on an analysis of previously won opportunities. Using the resulting insights, it should be possible to predict the accounts that will most likely become customers. A comprehensive account database is key. Mapping the total addressable market then enables an AI powered scoring model to select the most relevant tier 1 and tier 2 accounts for each solution. Those are the best accounts that most businesses want to target with their ABM programs. ### Experience First The account is the most important element of any B2B relationship. It's what the wider business is interested in after all. Yet, before the rise of ABM, data management focused much more on contact attributes than on the account. That historical focus on contact completeness over account completeness made personalisation much harder. B2C marketers are able to drive detailed personalisation strategies based on the vast amounts of consumer data available both within and outside the business. B2B marketers know very little about the individual contacts in their database, largely because of routine employee turnover and the difficulty of properly tracking people across roles. Aggregating all targeting and activity data to the account level overcomes this problem. With the right data sources, marketers can learn a lot about their target accounts. That enables the type of highly targeted account-based experiences that everyone wants to see. People have been talking about replicating consumer style personalised experiences for years. Yet B2B marketers have lacked the data to deliver them - until now. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Revolution When: The Limitations of Agents URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/revolution-when-the-limitations-of-agents/ Last updated: 2025-01-28T08:30:10.000Z AI will soon revolutionise the world economy. Some people think it already has. Certainly, Generative AI has had a significant impact on the public debate. It's had less of an impact on business operations, although most analysts think that's only a matter of time. Predictions tend to underestimate the amount of time it takes to adopt new technologies. For a technology as immature as Generative AI, this is especially true. For all the hype, analysts are guilty of overestimating the number of situations where AI supported decision-making is actually needed. In many enterprises, the biggest barrier to automation tends to be the lack of a defined process. Too many workflows are ad-hoc or highly manual. Compliance barriers and internal politics are also a major problem, which limits the workflows that executives are willing to automate. AI can't help with any of these issues. Where agents would be transformative is in overcoming technical barriers to system integration. However, they're simply not capable enough to do that at the moment. ### Screen Agents Just last week, OpenAI launched the first version of their Operator agent. This followed similar demos from other AI companies last year. Operator gives ChatGPT the ability to interact with web pages, allowing Large Language Models to fill in web forms and SaaS applications. At the moment, its accuracy is limited. It struggles to complete many basic end user activities. However, I can think of several legacy applications that would benefit from automation but don't have the API access to support direct integration. Operator would be useful for those apps. The trouble is that Operator is a workaround rather than a long term solution. It will always be more reliable to directly integrate two apps together rather than relying on AI to fill in a web interface designed for human use. In that respect, Operator is the AI version of an Excel macro. It works as a quick fix but isn't ultimately scalable and opens up a bunch of security loopholes. If companies want to properly automate their business processes then investing in new technology is a better solution. ### Content at Scale Instead, the most important capability introduced by agents is the ability to automatically generate content at scale. Generative AI works best when rewriting existing content for a highly specific audience. A fully trained Large Language Model can tailor content to the recipient far more effectively than any human copywriter. However, the human option is still better when writing new copy for a mass audience. That's a bigger issue than many AI vendors realise. In B2B, personalised messaging is generally the task of sales rather than marketing. After all, marketers are primarily writing for a broad audience. One to one communication is the responsibility of sales. As such, where AI agents do get adopted in 2025, they won't be used by marketers. It will instead be to help sales and customer service teams provide better content to customers. We're already seeing that with Generative AI chatbots. For marketing use cases, manual prompts submitted through a ChatGPT style web interface are sufficient. Marketing content generation workflows don't need to be automated, because volumes are lower and the content being generated is bespoke to the intended campaign pitch. ### Cost vs Benefit All this means the big winners of the AI agent boom will not be your traditional CRM or marketing automation platforms. It will be the tools sales reps already use for collaboration or content generation. Thankfully, both Microsoft and Salesforce appear to have realised this. Slack and Office are being touted as the main way of interacting with AI agents, rather than through specialist applications. Ultimately though, cost is the single most important factor determining whether a ChatGPT Pro subscriber might choose to deploy Operator or another AI agent. After all, agents are hardly cheap to run - although the cost will come down in the long run. For now, consumption based pricing is inevitable. Agentforce is already priced this way, as are custom agents built using Microsoft CoPilot. Recent comments from Sam Altman indicate that usage caps will even be coming to the most expensive of AI services. That's an issue for consumers, but not for businesses. The concept of consumption pricing is familiar to CFOs - cloud computing services are billed this way. It will slow down corporate adoption of AI in the short term though. Eventually, a tipping point will be reached. At that time, widespread adoption of corporate AI will become unavoidable. We're a long way from that milestone. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Next-Gen Automation: The Role of Agents URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/next-gen-automation-the-role-of-agents/ Last updated: 2025-01-14T08:30:06.000Z Here's my big prediction for 2025: it won't be the year of the AI agent. This isn't a new prediction. I made this claim [last month](https://www.alanchatfield.net/news/revolution-when-generative-ai-in-2025/) when discussing how the typical technology hype curve applied to generative AI. I repeated it [last week](https://www.alanchatfield.net/demand-agents-do-customers-want-ai/) in an AI predictions article on my personal blog. Neither article mentioned the specific factors limiting corporate adoption of AI agents in 2025, hence why I am revisiting the topic today. In media terms, 2025 will be the year of the AI agent. There will be lots of hype around the technology during the year, as well as plenty of interesting demos and use cases. That won't be matched by production usage. There are multiple reasons for this, and AI vendors are a large part of the problem. Vendors are doing an exceptionally poor job of articulating the benefits of AI agents over traditional automation solutions. Until vendors solve that problem, people just won't use them. After all, the underlying Large Language Models are now relatively well understood. People know the strengths and weaknesses of the technology, and are starting to figure out the best use cases for it. The issue is that vendors are still selling AI as a general purpose solution to any business challenge. The technology just isn't mature enough for that. Hallucination is still a problem, and AI reasoning models aren't yet a match for a skilled human. Capabilities and accuracy are improving over time. However, any process that uses AI agents needs to be able to handle incorrect outputs. Most automated workflows just aren't designed for that. ### Rules vs AI Fundamentally, agents are not a replacement for traditional rule-based automation approaches and shouldn't be sold as such. Agents provide new capabilities, which allow new categories of automation to become possible. If you're developing a process which takes a predictable input and transforms it into a predictable output, then you almost certainly don't want to use AI. However, there are plenty of workflows where existing rule-based automation just doesn't work. Scenarios such as extracting information from unstructured documents or generating a written output, work much more effectively when developed with the assistance of AI agents. Indeed, the most effective automations will use a mix of agents and rule-based workflows. We're already seeing this in many Agentforce demos and implementations. Frequently, agents are used to trigger pre-existing workflows. Those workflows could update an opportunity in accordance with a pre-existing process, or they could add the record to an existing nurture stream. The AI is merely the trigger, reviewing the notes and activities associated with the record to decide when the account is ready for progression through the funnel. Sometimes, the agent will be given the option of selecting two different workflows - perhaps a nurture flow or a conversion flow - based on criteria listed in the agent prompt instructions. ### Guardrails Combining AI agents with rule based automation allows for the automation of additional business processes. Rule based approaches can't handle uncertainty or inconsistency. Introducing AI resolves that problem, allowing unstructured or dirty data to be used in workflow decisions. However, it is important that the agent is properly designed and its activities are fully scoped. Guardrails are essential. It's the only way to avoid errors or unexpected outcomes. AI vendors are sometimes guilty of selling agents as a method to avoid fully considering every scenario in a rule-based workflow. That's dangerous. Instructing agents on what they shouldn't be doing is even more important than training them on the intended process. All this requires a very detailed prompt with some quite specific instructions. Writing a comprehensive prompt for an AI agent is not an easy task. It's not clear that business teams are ready for that undertaking at the moment. It's every bit as difficult as designing a basic rule-based workflow. However, it will become even more critical as the skills and abilities of AI agents develop. A lot of the most useful features, like screen automation and autonomous browsing, aren't widely available yet. However, these are the features that businesses are most interested in leveraging within agents. They allow executives to bypass many of the political barriers that impede automation initiatives. Until they're available, agents will remain a niche concern. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Demand Agents: Do Customers Want AI? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/demand-agents-do-customers-want-ai/ Last updated: 2025-01-07T20:34:10.000Z It's the season for new year predictions. I've published my own [marketing operations predictions](https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/beyond-leads-marketing-operations-in-2025/), and seen plenty of tech predictions from analysts and influencers. One common theme among all of them is that 2025 will be the year of the AI agent. There has been a heavy media focus on AI over the past few years, largely because it's the hot new thing in technology circles. Some early adopters have seen success with it, while others have used it as cover for the job cuts they wanted to make anyway. So far, the hype hasn't translated into widespread corporate roll-outs. ### The Unspoken Truth For all the talk of revolutions and digital transformation, it's unclear when mass adoption of Generative AI technology in the enterprise will take place - or even if it ever will. That shouldn't be a surprise. It takes time to build a business case for new technology. Use case definition and requirements gathering are long-winded processes that always move slower than expected. That's even before the CFO can run the cost/benefit analysis. There was plenty of talk through 2024 about the lack of ROI on generative AI projects. We're only just seeing a response to that. In recent months, there has been a notable shift in the sales pitch from generative AI firms. It has always been understood that AI would eventually replace human workers, leading to job cuts. Yet, no one was willing to say the quiet part out loud. That has changed. Microsoft and Salesforce have started explicitly talking about the financial savings from replacing human workers with AI agents. We're going to see more of such talk because it's the only way that generative AI makes financial sense for anyone. A lot of independent analysts still haven't noticed the change in narrative - partly because some AI vendors are now pitching to take their jobs too. See Google Deep Research as an example of this. ### Customer Support In the early days of the generative AI boom, there was a brief craze for announcing AI related job cuts. Most famously, BT said they would make 10,000 employees redundant by 2030\. This wasn't just PR for the markets. These are jobs that companies have been looking to automate for a long time. It's no coincidence that the initial wave of generative AI chatbots focused on customer support use cases, because that's an area where the business case for replacing humans with automation was already well established. Executives had previously decided to replace their first line support agents, and tech firms were already making the requisite job cuts. It's questionable whether GenAI can truly replace human support, but for many companies it doesn't need to. It just needs to be better than existing customer support chatbots, which Large Language Models generally are. Generative AI can't be any worse than your typical first line support engineer. And, these are not the only customer-facing roles in which people are open to seeing humans replaced with automation. I've [previously discussed](https://www.alanchatfield.net/next-gen-automation-ai-in-business/) the impact of AI on translators and creative agencies on this blog. Like customer support, agency budgets routinely face complaints about low customer satisfaction and high costs. Yet, all the talk about job losses often ignores one other career type that people increasingly want to be automated: B2B sales. ### The Self-Service Revolution The traditional VC playbook calls for hiring more and more sales reps as the business grows. There is assumed to be a fixed ratio between revenue and the number of sales reps on the payroll. Other departments can be cut without impacting revenue, depending on the firm's growth stage and product maturity, but never sales. That assumption is starting to come under question. Surveys indicate that B2B buyers are increasingly suspicious of sales reps, and are actively looking to minimise the number of sales interactions when making purchasing decisions. In marketing circles, this has led to product-led growth and self-service purchasing becoming hot topics. Gartner have been pushing both for several years. Neither requires large numbers of sales reps to execute. Executives are aware of the bloat and the inefficiency of the traditional corporate sales model. Yet, they do nothing about it, because it is seen as the only way to keep customers happy. That is changing. Already, Google have been cutting sales reps in their ad business. Instead, they're pushing customers to use their self-service Generative AI tools to optimise ads. This is an example which others will follow. Already, large amounts of the typical sales playbook are heavily scripted. Many marketers want to cut out the middle man by turning those scripted elements into self-service web tools. There are aspects of a sales role that can't yet be automated, such as producing quotes - although developers of AI agents will probably disagree. In recent years, a key task for sales has been to gather information about the prospect, and to customise the corporate sales pitch to the specific customer requirements. Generative AI can do that too. Human sales reps will remain in the loop, but fewer reps are needed if Generative AI is writing all their emails and presenting most of their demos. That's not a bad thing. ### The Customer Perspective Twelve months ago, there was a lot of discussion around human-in-the-loop workflows for generative AI. This was mainly pushed by AI firms, who have moved on to selling standalone agents. That's fortunate because human-in-the-loop never made much sense. Sales is an exception to this rule. Sales reps already spend a lot of time rewriting existing content anyway. It's part of the job. Getting AI to help with that rewriting process saves time and leads to better output. Automated sales emails have become a widespread nuisance. They're also incredibly generic. AI offers a potential solution to that problem. It can add more detailed context than a busy sales rep working on multiple deals. That means better quality sales emails for everyone - assuming people actually want to receive them. The question of chatbots and sales automation illustrates a neglected facet of the AI vs human debate. There has been plenty of discussion about where businesses might want to replace human employees with AI. There has been far less consideration about what customers want, which is ultimately what actually matters. If AI leads to a decline in customer satisfaction, then businesses will be forced to change their approach. We've seen it before with offshore call centres. Some recent reports claim that a slim majority of consumers prefer dealing with AI chatbots over human support agents. I can believe that. Similarly, the desire to automate B2B sales originates from a change in customer preferences. People have become used to automation. It's simply quicker and far less hassle. Customers still want the option of dealing with a human, but only if they're adding value to the customer experience. Far too many sales reps are a blocker to getting stuff done. At least the chatbot knows something about the products or services it's supporting. As anyone who has ever spoken to BT customer support will attest - offshore call centres frequently don't. ### Beyond Leads: Marketing Operations in 2025 URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/beyond-leads-marketing-operations-in-2025/ Last updated: 2025-01-14T14:28:25.000Z For all the hype, Generative AI rarely features in everyday marketing discourse. Marketers have bigger concerns than implementing cutting edge technology. Budgetary pressures mean that everyone is being asked to do more with less. This has resulted in a focus on funnel optimisation and improved analytics to guide better decision-making. ### Focus on Conversion Rates Above all, the business wants to see fewer wasted leads. Lead conversion rates are in decline, and CMOs are being asked to reverse that trend. That's a cross-departmental effort, which relies on the improved sales and marketing alignment built up in recent years. BDRs have a difficult job, which isn't getting any easier. They face increasingly complex challenges around lead quality and the ability to reach prospects. Marketing has a key role in overcoming these concerns. Generally, a focus on BDR efficiency results in more comprehensive lead qualification criteria. The aim is to increase lead conversion rates by only passing the best leads to BDRs for follow up. Reducing poor quality MQLs should allow more time and effort to be assigned to each lead, increasing marketing's overall pipeline contribution. This is leading to a renewed focus on ABM. ### Enter the ABM Funnel According to advocates, ABM is the best way to deliver the required improvements in lead quality. Now, ABM is hardly new, but historically it has rarely extended beyond the programs team. That has changed. ABM methodology is starting to become a significant part of the overall marketing operating model. One of the big trends of 2024 was a shift towards account qualification over lead qualification. Expect that to continue. Operations teams are being asked to implement an account based funnel, that runs alongside the traditional lead funnel. Both account readiness and lead readiness are evaluated at every stage of the funnel to ensure that leads are genuinely ready to engage with sales. This is one of the key drivers behind the success of 6sense and other intent data platforms, because they expand the range of activities considered in scoring, which should result in better quality leads. However, no single technology can solve the deficiencies of traditional lead qualification approaches. Manual scoring still operates alongside the predictive models, although such models do incorporate a wider range of attributes than in the past. ### Propensity & Predictive Data The rise of intent data illustrates the new possibilities unlocked by AI technologies. AI-powered account propensity is now a vital component of any viable lead scoring model. It enables a greater focus on data-driven account selection. Propensity modelling has become much more common, primarily as a way of tiering the entire addressable market, but also for identifying target accounts. In doing so, it provides an objective measurement of account interest that can be trusted by the entire go to market team. After all, better alignment and higher conversion rates require better data. Marketers have spent the last few years rigorously trying to improve data quality. While no one believes their marketing data to be high quality, it has improved. Third-party data sources have been integrated, and data cleansing workflows have been implemented. However, many organisations have reached the point where additional data sources don't justify the cost. The next step is to bring everything together in the systems where it is needed. Then, AI can be used to identify pockets of prospects that have been underserved by existing campaigns. ### Expanded Analytics With budgets still tight, there is an increased focus on each individual campaign. Marketing leaders are looking for activities that aren't delivering to the business, so that money can be reallocated to new concepts. However, the days when ROI was measured only in MQLs are long gone. Businesses want to see the full impact of every campaign on both brand reputation and the sales funnel. That has led to a renewed interest in marketing influence reporting. CMOs want to understand how campaigns impact existing opportunities rather than just looking at marketing sourced pipeline. This is because many boards have discovered the limitations of demand generation, and are looking for new ways to measure the ROI on marketing investment. Brand is one metric under examination, but ultimately marketing must be able to demonstrate the ability to boost conversion rates, accelerate close dates and inflate deal sizes. If not, then CMOs will have much more difficult questions to answer. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Revolution When: Generative AI in 2025 URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/revolution-when-generative-ai-in-2025/ Last updated: 2025-01-12T22:05:32.000Z It is frequently suggested that technology revolutions take longer to arrive than people expect, but then mass adoption happens faster than anyone thought possible. MIT first observed this pattern during the computing revolution, which was predicted in the 1960s but didn't reach mainstream adoption until the mid 1990s. Subsequent digital transformations have followed an accelerated timescale, but the pattern has remained the same. All new technologies follow a very similar hype curve, which Gartner have spent many years modelling. Every year, they measure where specific technologies are in the process. For AI, we're still at the start of that cycle. No one doubts that AI will eventually revolutionise business, but the question is when. Advocates claim the transformational moment is happening right now. Real world experience shows that we're still a few years away from AI seriously affecting people's everyday lives, although some applications of the technology are more advanced. Marketing is at the forefront of the AI trend, because Generative AI has immense potential to finally deliver the kinds of personalised experiences that customers want to see. The technology could be equally impactful for operations teams, allowing many more processes to be automated than is currently the case. We're starting to see good examples of this in certain industries, but the final blueprint for what an AI-powered marketing engine looks like in practice is still uncertain. ### The Year of Predictive AI? Already, one thing is becoming clear. Manual approaches to data management are no longer sustainable. With the shift to digital selling, customers now provide a myriad of different buying signals as they progress through the buying journey. Correctly interpreting these signals is essential for accurate audience targeting and successful lead qualification. Yet, few B2B marketing teams have the data science skills required to deliver the necessary insights out of the different data sets, which is why AI-powered intent data and propensity modelling have become so important. At the start of the year, I predicted that 2024 would be the year that machine learning and predictive AI reached mainstream adoption. The success of ABM platforms such as 6sense indicates that this prediction was broadly correct. The hype around AI has moved on to newer Generative AI technologies, while existing predictive and machine learning approaches get rolled out to marketing teams of all sizes. Marketers are adopting the likes of 6sense and HG Insights because their intent data and predictive scoring capabilities promise to finally fix everyone's data quality challenges. In reality, intent data cannot compensate for poor targeting or incomplete customer data, but it does provide an additional layer of information that can be used for more accurate segmentation. As a result, AI provides clear measurable benefits when used to enrich marketing databases with these additional insights. ### Future Delayed So far, the benefits of using Generative AI are not so clear cut. Fundamentally, the technology cannot be trusted to run independently. Every output from a Generative AI model must be reviewed and closely monitored. That's rarely an efficient use of people's time. There are still plenty of business processes where Generative AI has benefited marketers, but they're mostly content processes that businesses were looking to automate anyway. Translation is a good example. There has been an ongoing shift towards machine translation over many years. Generative AI has merely accelerated that trend. A similar dynamic applies to chatbots. There are exceptions. Generative AI has proved surprisingly effective in one unexpected area: search. Indeed, the Generative AI projects I've worked on recently have all been related to market research. The hype around Perplexity and ChatGPT Search is not totally without merit. The trouble for AI vendors is that such research tasks rarely need to be automated, while agents generally aren't necessary for those that do. ### The Year of the Agent? According to many analysts, 2025 will be the year of the AI agent. A new wave of digital transformation will see the technology reach mass adoption across the enterprise. According to such claims, we will see an explosion of custom built AI applications, all intended to embed generative AI into everyday business processes. Such predictions are reasonable, but the timeline seems excessively optimistic. AI technology is still too expensive and too immature for such widespread adoption. That's because automation takes time and costs money. It also adds complexity. After all, AI agents aren't just competing with manual business processes. They must also offer clear cost and efficiency benefits over copying and pasting a ChatGPT prompt. People have become comfortable using ChatGPT for ad-hoc requests, but ongoing AI automation is still seen as a technology for developers rather than operations teams. Until that usability gap is resolved, AI will struggle to achieve the widespread adoption that people expect. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Terminal Science: Media and Technology Unite URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/terminal-science-media-and-technology-unite/ Last updated: 2025-01-12T22:05:06.000Z The pandemic transformed B2B marketing. The sudden switch to digital tactics dramatically changed the way companies generated leads. Content marketing became critical, and getting that content in front of the right decision makers became every marketer's biggest challenge. This transformed the previously unglamorous business of content syndication into a key channel for generating sales-ready leads. ### New Markets There was just one problem with this approach: content syndication rarely produces sales-ready leads. In the years since the pandemic, it has become clear that while content marketing is great at driving awareness, content consumption is seldom a good measure of purchase intent. This has forced content syndication vendors to expand their range of services. Anteriad are a great example of the transformation undergone by most of the leading content syndication publishers. They've been buying up telemarketing agencies and expanding their third-party email offerings. The idea being that leads who have engaged across multiple channels are inherently more qualified than leads who have only engaged once. This has helped improve lead quality, but not to the degree that content marketing can replace events as the key driver of lead conversion. Meanwhile, everyone in B2B marketing has been trying to improve their data management capabilities. Content syndication vendors have been no exception. Many have been buying data brokers in order to improve their media targeting and in-house data quality. A couple of weeks ago, Demand Science took this trend to the next level when they announced their acquisition of Terminus, a dedicated ABM platform. ### Data First Terminus have been eclipsed in recent years by the success of 6sense. However, they are still among the leading ABM technology vendors, offering an end-to-end platform for managing ABM programs from account selection through to campaign delivery and funnel reporting. Consequently, the acquisition of Terminus by a company better known for lead generation and data acquisition is unexpected. It marks a dramatic shift in strategy for Demand Science, but one which makes sense when considered as part of a broader transition towards data services. Content syndication is now pitched as part of a wider collection of data acquisition solutions, which also includes traditional list purchases and intent data. Terminus's ABM management capabilities are a good fit within the context of this broader service portfolio. ### Self-Service That's because of one relatively understated trend within the data marketplace: self-service. It is increasingly common for purchased lists to be delivered through an online platform that integrates with many of the leading marketing automation technologies. ZoomInfo are the most well-known example of this trend, but they are far from the only one. Demand Science are no exception. Thus, acquiring Terminus can be seen as an extension of this strategy. It was TechTarget who popularised the concept of content syndication as a technology, rather than as a service. Their TechTarget Priority Engine was pitched as an intent data solution, providing a view of accounts and contacts engaging with content across the TechTarget content syndication network. The key thing is that it provided marketers with a way of purchasing leads from TechTarget without requiring the intervention of a TechTarget account manager. ### ABM First Terminus provides a similar offering to Demand Science, allowing companies to execute their ABM programs within the Demand Science network. On top of that, it allows Terminus to leverage the Demand Science database to enhance their account discovery and account selection capabilities - two areas where they are seen as lacking in comparison to the competition. The combined entity then provides an end-to-end ABM offering for marketers. That's important to Demand Science, given that content syndication is struggling to provide value as a lead generation channel. It's still a useful channel for driving engagement at target accounts and expanding awareness within the buying group. However, marketers are generally reluctant to commit their entire ABM awareness program to one vendor. Selling the tools to manage that program, is a valuable hedge against that risk. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Account Based Convergence URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/account-based-convergence/ Last updated: 2025-01-12T22:04:59.000Z AI buzz has accelerated the already pressing need to align the technology and data layer of the business. Corporate leaders want internal operations to match the deep strategic partnership between marketing and sales. Everyone wants more from their tech stacks, and marketers rightfully believe that integrating different systems and databases together will deliver a more personalised customer journey. When it comes to marketing technology, consolidation and integration are hot topics. ### The Rise of Revenue Tech Yet, over the last twelve months, one martech trend has flown under the radar. It has been seen quite clearly among martech vendors such as Demandbase, as well as among Sales Automation vendors such as SalesLoft. It has been a significant driver behind the widespread adoption of 6sense among companies of all sizes. It's even been a consideration behind the far more frequent desire for companies to migrate their core marketing and CRM platforms. All of these factors are driving the increasingly deep convergence between martech and sales automation tools. Now, this is not necessarily a new trend. Martech vendors and sales tech vendors have been trying to encroach on each other's turf for decades. The initial wave of marketing automation promised to address sales use cases as well as marketing ones. When that approach failed to deliver, sales instead adopted new technologies such as Outreach and SalesLoft to fill the gap. The rise of ABM and Revenue Operations has given a new impetus to this trend. ABM vendors of all perspectives increasingly offer solutions that address both sales and marketing use cases. ### New Requirements All this was sparked by changing customer behaviour and the desire among buyers to control the purchasing process. Sales automation vendors have realised they need to move their customers beyond generic drip email sequences, and are developing the tools to run more sophisticated campaigns across more channels. Meanwhile, marketing needs to improve their account qualification process, by taking into account a wider range of factors before passing a lead across to sales. Unusually, Demandbase were late to this trend. They announced a new sales operations package a few weeks ago. In the interim, 6sense have developed a very successful narrative around intent-based account qualification and BDR-focused account discovery, allowing them to become the go-to ABM platform vendor in many markets. The sales capabilities of 6sense are inferior to a specialist tool, but the platform is widely used among both sales and marketing teams to spot engaged accounts and prioritise follow up activities. That sales outreach can be managed within 6sense, but this is very much an upsell for them. It's the data and discovery piece which is the core capability. That is a significant contrast to Demandbase which has long focused on becoming the central hub for actually executing account-based campaigns. The account selection and discovery features do exist, but they have been developed to support the campaign automation features of the platform. Demandbase do not want people to use those features as a standalone tool, although they can be. Whereas, 6sense are willing for their platform to be used purely for data management. ### Divergence and Convergence As for the actual sales outreach, that can be managed by CRM or whatever sales technologies exist in the organisation. Sales outreach sequences were never just about email, although sending BDR emails has become the primary user case for the platforms that send them. Earlier this year, Google caused a panic among BDRs by imposing stricter deliverability requirements for cold email campaigns. We saw a considerable effort by both vendors and sales teams to expand the scope and content beyond generic book a meeting messages. Better, more personalised, sales automation sequences are undoubtedly a good thing, but they do increase the overlap between sales campaigns and marketing campaigns. All that requires better alignment between departments and technologies to ensure conflicting messages aren't being sent. Both marketing and sales need to see the same version of the funnel, and have the same understanding around where each account is in the buying cycle. That need for alignment not just at a strategic level, but also for each individual account is why martech and sales technology are increasingly converging. Two decades ago, CRM was supposed to offer the solution. A decade ago, it was marketing automation. Now, a fully mature ABM tech stack has emerged to offer a new solution to the same challenge. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Next-Gen Synthesis: Data and AI URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/next-gen-synthesis-data-and-ai/ Last updated: 2025-01-12T22:05:18.000Z I rarely get the opportunity to attend industry events these days. Most of the time, my client services colleagues at CRMT Digital have more pressing reasons to attend than me. Last week was one of those rare exceptions. I was able to secure a ticket to Anticon in London, and a slot opened up in my calendar, allowing me to attend. If you listened to technology vendors at the conference, then AI is the only trend anyone seems to care about. It's the one feature every marketing technology vendor in the exhibition hall was trying to sell. There was plenty of talk about AI in the breakout sessions too, but it was not the most prominent topic. ### Beyond AI Most marketing operations professionals working on the frontlines still have far more pressing concerns than integrating cutting-edge technology into the tech stack. The same old challenges around organisational alignment, funnel velocity and data quality remain top of everyone's agenda. AI is undoubtedly exciting, and a topic that everyone is monitoring for new developments. However, people are only interested if it solves one of their day-to-day challenges, and so far, it's not clear that Generative AI technology will do that. Now, this is not a particularly important disconnect, but it's one technology marketers need to be aware of. There is certainly plenty that AI can do, particularly when it comes to data. However, for B2B marketers, the primary use cases for Generative AI remain content generation and media optimisation. It can definitely drive down costs and improve efficiency, but ultimately, few B2B organisations are generating the high volume of content needed to justify the expense of an in-house LLM. Instead, for operations teams, AI resources are going towards more intelligent usage of machine learning and predictive AI in order to improve campaign targeting and lead quality. ### The Data Question If there was one takeaway from Anticon, it is that data is now central to everything marketing does. There was plenty of discussion around the importance of personalisation in improving campaign performance, as well as lots of talk about how changing B2B buyer behaviour is affecting the roles of both marketing and sales throughout the funnel. Having a clear understanding of the customer is essential to meeting both these challenges, and that requires investing in the right technology and processes as well as executing the right go-to-market strategy. Customers have more control over the buying cycle than ever. They expect to engage with companies on their terms and not on yours. Hence the expansion of the so-called 'dark funnel' and the reluctance of B2B buyers to engage with sales outreach. People expect brands to track buying signals and personalise the customer experience. There are plenty of anti-tracking technologies out there, so if people are allowing marketing to track their online behaviour, it's because they want the personalised experience. ### Finding the Blend Data is used for more than just optimising the buyer journey though. It's also needed to measure business outcomes, which in turn justifies further investment in marketing. That requires data, particularly analytics data, to be both accurate and comprehensive. Manual approaches to data management are no longer sufficient. As such, there is intense pressure from both customers and internal stakeholders for marketers to improve their data management game. Data quality has become a hot topic partly because people's expectations around data have shifted. Automation is essential, and AI is increasingly being pitched as the next generation of enterprise automation. Among executives, AI is seen as the technology that can deliver improved data insights. To reflect this, there is a much broader demand for propensity models and predictive segmentation than in the past. Previously, such techniques were restricted to large enterprises, but now they're trickling down to SMEs as well. AI has an important role to play in meeting the much-discussed personalisation challenge, both as a technology and as a process. Marketing databases are used for so much more than in the past. Better data usage has the potential to transform buyer experiences in line with increasingly stringent customer demands. Marketers can meet those increased expectations by optimising their technology, data and processes to put the customer first, but only if marketing operations can find the right blend of capabilities. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Rising HubSpot Breeze URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-rising-hubspot-breeze/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:50:54.000Z AI agents are all the rage right now. Or at least they are if you're in the business of running a marketing technology platform. Hubspot is no exception, but as usual, they have taken a different approach to the challenge of embedding AI into marketing production flows. Rather than promising extensive flexibility and development capabilities, they have focused their AI functionality on the most promising uses for the technology. ### Content AI The full suite of AI functionality has been labelled Breeze, mirroring a unified naming scheme adopted by other technology companies. Many of the announced capabilities aren't actually new. Chatspot, the HubSpot AI assistant, has been rebranded as Breeze CoPilot. Breeze isn't just limited to Generative AI either. It also encompasses HubSpot's existing predictive and machine learning features, such as Predictive Scoring. Rather than pitching a general-purpose AI agent, HubSpot have created a suite of dedicated AI agents for specific use cases, primarily related to content marketing. There is the expected content generation agent, which leans heavily into content remixes and format-shifting of existing content already published in HubSpot. This includes creating videos from blog posts, as well as writing case studies from CRM opportunities, which will definitely be helpful for overstretched SMB marketing teams. Dedicated prospecting and customer service agents can also remix the same content for sales and support scenarios too. All these features do require companies to use HubSpot for sales as well as marketing though, which will limit their adoption. ### Data AI For marketing users, the most notable announcement is the launch of Breeze Intelligence. This is a suite of data enrichment capabilities that significantly expands the rather limited capabilities available today with HubSpot Insights. In particular, Breeze introduces intent data into the HubSpot platform for the first time. HubSpot users can now configure their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which is then used by the new data Breeze Intelligence platform. Using this new intent data service, companies are able to see the overall size of their total addressable market (TAM), in addition to the proportion of that market already present in your HubSpot database. Then, against each company in your database, HubSpot will provide a hygiene rating, highlighting recent intent signals from that company, as well as suggesting accounts for marketing teams to go after in campaigns. All this is available even within the free tier of the platform, although there are limits to the number of accounts highlighted to users. As such, every HubSpot user is now getting some very useful market insights built into their marketing database for free. Even if the intent data model heavily relies on first-party intent data alongside the input from third-party Clearbit data. This is because data enrichment and import of new accounts from Breeze are not free. Breeze Intelligence is intended to be a paid add-on built upon last year's acquisition of Clearbit. Any data enrichment usage must be paid for using a credit-based pricing model. This is actually a significant change for HubSpot users, who are used to a basic level of free data enrichment from HubSpot Insights. That free enrichment capability is going away. ### Evolving Features HubSpot Insights is being sunset. The timeline for its removal hasn't been confirmed, but new HubSpot instances don't have access to it. The platform will no longer enrich account records with additional profile information for free. That now requires Breeze Intelligence credits. Instead, the free HubSpot CRM will display ICP fit and buyer intent information against your accounts. That ICP can be defined using the same technographic and firmographic criteria available using HubSpot Insights, but you can't see the underlying technographic information against each account, nor can you use it for more granular marketing segmentation. For all the complaints about the quality of HubSpot Insights data, this change will be a significant loss of functionality for HubSpot customers. Third-party data can be prohibitively expensive for many SMBs, and Breeze Intelligence looks to be no exception. The features that HubSpot users with Breeze are getting do look to be useful, but it does represent a significant change of approach. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Rise of the Agents URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/rise-of-the-agents/ Last updated: 2024-10-01T19:05:21.000Z Technology trends always arrive in waves. A disruptor releases a revolutionary new feature, which everyone then copies. We've seen this with Generative AI, which has become embedded within every application imaginable, including many that don't need it. Now, we're seeing it again with the next wave of Generative AI. A couple of weeks ago, all the leading CRM providers announced the introduction of AI agents into their platforms. Who says innovation is slowing down? Of course, none of Microsoft, HubSpot or Salesforce have been the first to market with AI agents. They're an evolution of a concept first introduced by OpenAI at the start of the year with their GPTs app store. GPTs allowed developers to train their own AI models on the ChatGPT platform, which could then be used to automate routine tasks with Generative AI. Developing this capability for in-house enterprise use has always been an obvious next step. ### Cost vs Benefit Now, six months later, it is customer conference season at HubSpot and Salesforce. Both vendors headlined their keynotes with a set of impressive AI agent demos intended to demonstrate the power and ingenuity of AI automation. These demos are important because agents are a critical step in addressing the main question that has held back generative AI over the last eighteen months: namely, what do we use it for? Generative AI was supposed to deliver substantial cost efficiencies and time savings that simply haven't been seen to date outside of a few highly specialised use cases, such as meeting notes and review summaries. Investing in AI only makes sense from a financial perspective if it can be used for enterprise automation. That's not happened so far because tech firms are incurring unsustainable losses that need a pay-off sooner rather than later. In order to achieve profitability, AI agents need to deliver cost savings commensurate with the resource requirements of a high-end LLM model. That needs end users to identify use cases for automation that cannot be solved by existing low-code integration platforms. Those definitely exist but are probably not as extensive as advocates would like. We're still many years away from a world where business users are routinely creating new AI agents to automate their day-to-day responsibilities. ### Use Cases At recent conferences, Gartner have been warning about the delayed adoption and low ROI of Generative AI, issues motivated in part by the immaturity of the technology. The initial hype around chatbots died down because marketers realised that the technology couldn't be trusted to tell the truth. Air Canada even lost a court case over a false compensation policy hallucinated by their customer service chatbot. Within marketing, there have been some notable examples of AI being used to generate bespoke content at scale. Brands such as Klarna and Juniper have touted the case savings and increased flexibility of AI generated content when compared to content created by creative agencies. However, this only works for businesses with a highly centralised marketing engine that goes to market with a high volume of campaigns. So far, specialist AI models have struggled amid competition from ChatGPT. There are still far too many AI workflows where business users copy/paste the input into a general purpose AI chatbot, rather than integrating a dedicated AI model for the task. The benefits of bespoke AI models have not outweighed the mindshare and ease of use advantage enjoyed by ChatGPT. As a result, IT departments have highlighted Generative AI as a major threat to enterprise security. Salesforce hope to tackle this problem by leveraging Slack as the user interface for AI agents. That way, users interact with AI agents within a platform they already use to communicate with human colleagues. ### Self-Service Automation? AI agents do solve another critical challenge necessary for Generative AI to reach mass adoption. The types of human-AI work partnership pitched by futurists require customised AI to become more accessible and easier to customise. Prompt engineering is arcane enough. Fully training a new AI model is generally seen as a task for developers, even if it's built on top of a major LLM. A code-free method for training AI is needed, in the same way that the likes of Zapier and Tray.io have democratised enterprise integration. AI agent builders deliver this. Much like low code automation tools, agents expand the range of users who can automate business processes to include operations teams as well as development teams. Previous waves of self-service automation have substantially accelerated digital transformation initiatives by allowing developers to focus on more complex integration scenarios that code-free integrations can't handle. Basic scenarios can then be managed within business teams. If there's one thing we can learn from the demos, it's that AI can automate 75% of many routine tasks. Any business process which follows a defined procedure with clear guidelines around decision-making can be automated using AI or other automation technologies. However, this has been true for some time. Even today, automation is not limited by technology. Instead, poor alignment and a lack of process are the key barriers to adoption within many organisations. Automation is only useful if it delivers an output that businesses want. To automate an existing business process, there needs to be clear business requirements and a defined procedure to follow. AI doesn't change any of these issues. Generative AI does expand the range of business inputs that can be automated due to its ability to interpret free text in a way that wasn't possible previously. The question is about how to deal with scenarios and inputs that the model isn't trained to handle. After all, no business process is foolproof, and even manual processes have exceptions that weren't considered in the process design. Increasingly powerful models are reducing the frequency of those exceptions but will never be able to eliminate them entirely. Human workers can make a judgement call based on experience, and companies are generally willing to accept that. It will be a long time before AI agents are trusted to make decisions without human supervision. ### Enter the Agentforce URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/enter-the-agentforce/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:52:22.000Z September always marks the return of conference season to the marketing world, and not just for event marketers. Both Salesforce and Hubspot hold their main customer conferences in which they present their vision for the next twelve months. That vision has the potential to shape the entire industry, given the importance of their platforms and their long-standing status as CRM thought leaders. This year was no different, especially given the mismatch between Generative AI hype and real-world experiences of the technology. ### Agents Both Salesforce Dreamforce and Hubspot Inbound took place last week and, as predicted, were dominated by Generative AI talk. Both firms announced major new AI platforms for customers, while providing a succession of demos to highlight the incredible potential of the technology to improve the customer experience. However, marketers have seen many promising AI demos in the last two years. The difference is that platform owners are only now introducing the tools for businesses to adapt AI to their workflows. As is typical, Salesforce made the more ambitious pitch. They announced Agentforce, a low-code builder for AI agents. Microsoft made a very similar announcement at a special event just a few days prior. The difference is that few companies do low-code development better than Salesforce. Agentforce uses many of the same customisation tools as the rest of the Salesforce platform, which should aid adoption. Admins familiar with Salesforce Flow should feel right at home when building agents and chatbots using Agentforce - as it uses pretty much the same UI. Agents are not just limited to Flow though. There are also APIs and Apex trigger support for coding more complex use cases. ### Models For all the much-vaunted flexibility, Salesforce have announced a series of pre-built agents that cover the standard customer service and marketing use cases that are frequently handled by chatbots today. On top of that, agents can be internally facing too. Sales coaching is another of the pre-built agents that is available for admins to customise. The Agentforce prompt builder then allows those agents to be tweaked with bespoke training and custom guardrails to fit business requirements. The most useful piece is the integration with Salesforce Flow so that agents can trigger assigned flows based on real-language queries from customers or internal users. It's this integration with business workflows across the Salesforce ecosystem that makes Agentforce so interesting. The same agent could be used in a business process that spans Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud. Salesforce sees agents as a way of pushing companies to buy into all of the different product clouds across the platform, rather than just focusing on the core CRM functionality. The vision for Agentforce very much involves embedding service and marketing workflows into agents even for companies that use other platforms for support or email marketing. ### Foundations Salesforce are even bundling the basic features from the Sales, Marketing, Commerce and Service clouds into the enterprise tier of the platform for free, reversing a product split made a decade ago. The new feature bundle is called Salesforce Foundations and was also announced at Dreamforce. Foundations is pitched as a way of leveraging agents for basic customer service or marketing functionality even for businesses that don't subscribe to the relevant Salesforce products. There are heavy usage restrictions on Foundations, which is being pitched as a try-before-you-buy model, so as not to cannibalise existing subscriptions. It is pricing which will ultimately decide whether Agentforce is a success. Agentforce is heavily integrated into Data Cloud, which uses consumption based pricing. That could limit adoption. Mark Benioff wants to see one billion AI agents created within Salesforce by the end of next year. That's probably too ambitious. However, there are definite use cases for Agentforce. In time, I suspect the internal facing applications of Agentforce will become dominant. It provides an excellent UI for busy sales reps to request quick updates to their accounts and opportunities. In the interim, Agentforce will definitely have Drift and other live chat services concerned. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Oracle: The Forgotten Marketing Cloud URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/oracle-the-forgotten-marketing-cloud/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:52:13.000Z Eloqua was one of the pioneers of marketing automation at a time when digital marketing was in its infancy. It remained at the forefront of the martech community, even after the acquisition by Oracle in 2012\. There has been some attrition in the size of the Eloqua customer base due to a drift among smaller customers to less expensive platforms. However, it maintains a steady market presence, particularly among large enterprises with complex governance or integration requirements. Yet, Eloqua's status within the industry has declined, along with Oracle's position as a thought leader in marketing technology. It is now perceived as a legacy platform, even though it still receives plenty of development and a steady stream of new features from Oracle. The platform was a notable early adopter of AI, a capability which was recently extended to include Generative AI features. That's a significant advantage compared to the relative lack of AI capabilities in several rival marketing automation platforms. ### The Unity Stack Oracle have developed a comprehensive tech stack to complement Eloqua, but a combination of pricing, reputation and complexity have held back adoption. Marketing technology is still a key focus area for the company though, a status which was reiterated at their annual Cloudworld conference last week. For instance, Oracle's recent decision to exit the ad business was justified as an attempt to prioritise first-party data technologies within a more privacy-conscious marketing environment. At the heart of the new product focus is the development of the Oracle Unity CDP, which has become the centrepiece of Oracle's marketing story. Unity and the broader Fusion marketing product portfolio can be combined to create a fully integrated stack for both B2B and B2C use cases. A lot of effort has been put into integrating Eloqua with Unity so that Oracle can sell an end-to-end package that encompasses the sales and service components of Oracle Fusion as well as the marketing technologies. ### New Features The key announcements from Oracle's recent Cloudworld customer conference reflected this theme. They introduced buying group detection and opportunity scoring directly into the Unity CDP. Those are not features unique to Oracle. The entire industry has been launching similar features recently. However, integrating them into the CDP is new, rather than following Adobe in introducing it as a separate product or Salesforce in leveraging CRM for these capabilities. An account profile view has been added to the Unity UI as well - which combines customer marketing data and sales data in CRM with ERP data on commercial relationships. The new view allows both marketing and sales teams to see a single view of accounts that everyone is working on, with the objective of agreeing on common target lists as well as a shared view of customer status across the entire customer lifecycle. ### Enterprise First Oracle definitely pitch their integration capabilities as a key differentiator for their marketing cloud product portfolio. This has allowed them to maintain market share among users of Oracle's CRM or ERP solutions. However, Oracle's sales products have been struggling with declining mind share and market share for years, struggles which have bled into their marketing portfolio. Compare that to Salesforce, who have been able to build a marketing cloud on the back of their market-leading CRM platform. Meanwhile, Adobe and HubSpot have proven reputations for marketing innovation. Oracle are very much an enterprise database company, despite their attempts to diversify. They do tout the undoubted robustness of the Eloqua API and the flexibility of Eloqua integrations, but that's not sufficient to win new customers. The competition is good enough in these areas, while offering a better story in the core marketing capabilities. Which just proves that an enterprise focus on its own is not enough. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Is there a Future for MQLs? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/is-there-a-future-for-mqls/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:04:16.000Z The MQL is dead. Self-service buying has killed it, or perhaps ABM has made it obsolete. It depends on who you speak to. Buyer behaviour is changing, which requires a drastic change in internal go-to-market practices. Revenue Process Transformation is a strategic imperative that solves the increasingly common challenge of getting buyers to engage with sales. At least, that's the diagnosis from leading analysts such as Forrester. The issues highlighted in the death of the MQL narrative are very real. Both B2B sales and B2B marketing are evolving rapidly. The sudden transition to digital selling during the pandemic disrupted the entire funnel, and sales teams are still trying to adapt. That has a downstream impact on marketing, which needs to make sure that leads are sales ready. Yet surprisingly few sales teams seem to recognise that the definition of a sales ready lead has changed dramatically in recent years. ### Sales Challenges Much of the end-of-MQLs talk has become a rehash of the age old sales complaints about lead quality. The basic pitch is that MQLs are inherently low quality, so let's not bother generating leads at all. That can work brilliantly for niche services to fixed verticals, where every prospect account already has a defined sales owner. Otherwise, you are simply reclassifying MQLs as an early stage opportunity, without doing anything to fix the underlying problem of declining lead conversion rates. As any telemarketer will tell you, it's much harder to get in touch with decision makers than it used to be. Response rates to outbound calls plummeted during the pandemic, and response rates to outbound email and LinkedIn messages were never high to begin with. As such, one of the major problems with MQLs is that they're frequently unreachable, and that's even before the question of readiness to buy is considered. ### Qualification Transformation What constitutes an MQL has changed, as does the point at which they're created. Marketing does need to move beyond new logo acquisition, to cover upsell and cross-sell. Many product businesses have never distinguished between these different sales motions, at least not on the marketing side anyway. For subscription or service businesses, integrating customer lifecycle marketing into the mix is more complicated, often requiring a separate funnel and separate KPIs. Yet, MQLs still have an important place in an upsell strategy. They're the handover checkpoint for a marketing-generated sales cycle. The key difference is that MQLs can no longer stand alone. They have to be part of a broader account relationship with a defined product focus. It's not enough to simply collect hand raisers and chuck them over the fence. Both buyers and sales teams expect marketing to ensure that deals really are ready to begin a bottom-of-funnel sales process when handed over to sales. Marketing has a responsibility to pre-qualify leads to avoid duplicating existing opportunities, as well as to verify buyer intent and profile fit. The good news is that all these checks can be automated within the tech stack, allowing sales to focus on closing deals. ### Customer First Much of the narrative around MQLs focuses too much on internal processes and not enough on the customer experience. It doesn't matter whether marketing are working on lead records, account records or opportunity records with sales. Buyers expect sales and marketing to be aligned and for every interaction with both teams to be personalised. Historically that has not been the case, and data silos mean that it still isn't possible within many organisations. A fully aligned buyer journey is essential, which requires both sales and marketing to have the same view of every account with the same list of buying group members. That presents a real opportunity for marketing to take control of additional touch points in the buyer's journey. The dark funnel is expanding, which means that demand generation and content marketing are becoming more important than ever. That has its downsides too. With sales pushed further down the funnel, it is becoming harder to find sales-ready leads. There are quite simply fewer of them, because of the additional qualification steps required before passing over a lead. The nature of marketing qualification has been fundamentally transformed. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Building the ABM Stack URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/building-the-abm-stack/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:52:04.000Z It's been a decade since Account Based Marketing entered mainstream marketing discourse. During that time, ABM has taken on many different meanings, encompassing many existing marketing techniques as well as some new innovations within B2B marketing. Vertical-specific and account-specific campaigns are now frequently considered to be ABM, even if both tactics pre-date the ABM revolution. There is much more to ABM than mere campaign activation though. Instead, ABM is more focused on the broader methodology around how marketing collaborates with sales and goes to market. Over time, a set of core principles have emerged around account selection, sales enablement and funnel management that has transformed B2B marketing. ### New Challenges Now, the concept of target account lists is a very old one. Named accounts were just as commonplace ten years ago as they are today. The difference was in how those accounts are activated and targeted. In particular, ABM has led to a renewed focus on how account lists are selected and managed. A more data-driven approach has become the norm. That has inevitably led to a discussion about data and technology, as existing tools found themselves insufficient for the challenge. In turn, this has required the adoption of new processes and technical capabilities needed to manage and report on ABM effectively. Many marketers have spent many years trying to run ABM using their existing martech stack and have become frustrated with the limitations of that technology as a result. ABM remains a checkbox feature for the traditional marketing automation platforms rather than core functionality. MA platforms are entirely contact-centric, with account relationships being little more than an afterthought. To fill the gap, an entire industry has grown up. The likes of 6sense and Demandbase evolved from being simple data tools into fully-fledged ABM platforms covering both account selection and account activation. ### New Capabilities Indeed, the most striking change to martech stacks of the past eighteen months has not been AI related. It's been the widespread adoption of 6sense among small and midsize enterprises. Dedicated ABM platforms are no longer restricted to large global corporations; smaller companies are adopting them too. The existing marketing automation platforms have noticed this trend as well, and are finally reacting to it. Hubspot purchased Clearbit last year, in large part to improve their ABM story. One of the key drivers for the success of 6sense, has been the ability to collate both sales and marketing information about accounts into a unified view that can be used by both sides. In turn, that data can be used to identify the best targets and report on the status of accounts that are currently in market. The option to orchestrate campaigns from the platform or to overlay 6sense's proprietary intent data on top is simply an added bonus. Neither CRM nor marketing automation allows that to happen today. ### The New Entrant Adobe have finally reacted this gap in their portfolio, recently launching a new application for ABM management. Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) B2B Edition was first announced at Adobe Summit earlier this year, but was finally released a few weeks ago. Marketo has long had an ABM add-on, but that has limited adoption due to restricted functionality. The Marketo ABM module can be used to activate existing account lists within Marketo campaigns, which is fine if you already have the entire buying group added to each account in your marketing database. It's severely limiting for any ABM strategy based around targeting top-of-funnel accounts through digital channels in order to build engagement and collect that buying group. The new Adobe Journey Optimizer introduces full buying group management into the Adobe platform, using Marketo and CDP data to identify targets and link leads to accounts. Once identified, target accounts can then be added to campaigns executed across the Adobe product portfolio, including through web or advertising channels that aren't well supported by Marketo. On top of that it provides reporting and funnel tracking capabilities found in competing platforms. Whether the new Adobe provides sufficient functionality to replace the likes of 6sense or Demandbase is yet to be seen. Adobe have a history of introducing 'me-too' products to their portfolio. Some of these have developed into best-in-class options, others have not. It is clear, though, that dedicated ABM platforms have a clear place in the typical martech stack. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### When will Generative AI Deliver? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/when-will-generative-ai-deliver/ Last updated: 2024-08-07T17:55:45.000Z In the eighteen months since Generative AI entered public consciousness, both technology firms and industry pundits have talked about little else. It's to be expected really. Intelligent machines have long caught the public imagination, and the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT heralded the first glimpses of a possible future that included them. The initial hype around AI was based on the idea that it would automate basic knowledge work, allowing businesses to cut their workforce. There was even talk about single person unicorn start-ups. In practice, the technology is nowhere near mature enough for that world. In the meantime, tech firms are spending billions to train new models with little prospect of an immediate return. There is a serious risk that interest in the AI category could be doomed long before the technology is actually ready for mass deployment. Increasingly, that last point is becoming a critical concern for both vendors and their business customers. Generative AI has its uses, but those aren't pervasive enough or significant enough to justify a business case. You know that a new technology has a problem when Gartner Analysts are "recommending CFOs not to bother calculating the ROI", while The Economist reports it has "almost no economic impact." These are outlets read by CEOs saying that the technology isn't cost effective. That message is getting through to Wall Street, who have been interrogating tech firms about the scale of their AI investments. The answers from big tech CEOs haven't been to the liking of analysts. Microsoft's share price took a dive following their quarterly earnings call, during which the CFO said that AI investments would deliver a return across a 15 year period. That's not the kind of timeframe that Wall Street is looking for across any investment, let alone one with as uncertain prospects as AI. ### Efficiency Gains Generative AI is not about to disappear. It has millions of users across a wide range of industries. Some of those uses will have a viable use case, particularly for high-volume, low-value content creation workflows in marketing or customer service teams. In these scenarios, it's replacing agency costs with a technology cost which will make CFOs happy. The biggest benefit is probably realised by the type of middle-ranking executive who spends all day in meetings and needs help to get 'real work' done. It might save an overworked middle manager a couple of hours per week, which in turn will slightly accelerate project delivery, and boost employee satisfaction. However, managers logging off earlier every day doesn't offset the significant cost of the technology. The trouble is that the most useful benefits of Generative AI don't really impact the bottom line. For many small businesses, automatic meeting transcripts and report summaries are nice to have rather than critical productivity tools. Only large organisations have sufficient numbers of people who need the technology to justify the high price tag of a CoPilot license. Everyone else can get by with the free chatbot bundled with Office 365 or Google Workspace. ### The Next Step Every technology vendor is releasing reports promoting the time savings and efficiency benefits of Generative AI. I read one from HubSpot just last week. However, they all focus on businesses using AI in production, ignoring those who decided not to pursue the technology for cost reasons. The biggest group of businesses is probably those still on the fence about Generative AI. Many of their workers will occasionally use the free version of Microsoft CoPilot or Google Gemini, but not more than that. Any Generative AI projects will still be in testing, due to the questions of cost and accuracy. It's not surprising, therefore, that technology firms are constantly promoting new use cases for Generative AI technology. OpenAI recently claimed that next year's version of ChatGPT will be capable of independent decision-making. Microsoft have been pushing the ability of CoPilot to generate workflows within Power Automate, never mind that those AI-generated workflows require significant customisation before they can be used in production. There will be a time when both these use cases can become a practical reality in business - but it's not the timeline currently being teased by Sam Altman and Satya Nadella. ### Revolution Delayed? Technology revolutions never progress in the way that analysts expect, and many use cases for new technology turn out to be more inefficient or unaffordable than traditional methods. Witness the rise and fall of blockchain in recent years. Generative AI is different, but not revolutionary. Going further back in time, the rise of personal computers led to many secretarial and PA roles becoming redundant. For now, AI represents the next step in that cycle, with traditional admin work becoming more automated. However, it won't be touching every worker across every industry in the way imagined eighteen months ago. It's a valuable tool across a range of sectors and job roles, particularly in marketing where it is seeing active adoption. Generative AI has already impacted the marketplace for copywriting and translation. There are efficiency benefits from the technology too. The open question is when those benefits will justify the high cost of training AI models. Until they do, Generative AI will become an upsell feature for the top tier of enterprise software. The likes of Oracle and Microsoft are already taking this approach. For once, technology firms will have to lower their ambitions. ### Finding Value in AI URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/finding-value-in-ai/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:52:47.000Z Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, technology vendors have been adding as many Generative AI features as possible to their product portfolios. Meanwhile, marketers have been experimenting with the technology in search of possible use cases that can benefit the customer. The one question that few people have been asking until now, is whether the technology can deliver value for money to the business. That is beginning to change following a series of high-profile analyst reports criticising the slow adoption and poor return of AI projects. ### Beyond the Hype We're starting to see an increased disconnect between the media hype behind AI and the practical reality, which can be explained by two main problems inherent to AI in its current state. The first issue is that AI is a supporting technology rather than a fully featured end product. It is not a capability that directly improves internal efficiency or the customer experience. AI is only beneficial if consumers or businesses use it to speed up existing business processes or to unlock new customer insights. Even then, the AI model needs to be cheaper to run than the existing business process it is replacing. The second issue with the AI bubble is that AI is not actually new. Businesses have been investing in different types of AI for years already. Traditionally, AI has been most commonly utilised for data analysis. Predictive lead scoring is one such example, a capability marketers have used for nearly twenty years. Data cleansing is another area in which we have been using AI for a very long time. More recently, we have seen new uses for AI in the data realm, particularly to support deeper journey mapping as well as ABM workflows. ### The Cost of GenAI Generative AI is notable because it extends the capabilities of AI into the domain of text and image generation. That does have substantial benefits within marketing, but only if content accuracy and brand integrity can be guaranteed. AI has proved useful for generating high volumes of low-value content. Chatbots have benefited the most from the technology, and have the clearest path to demonstrating ROI. However, many marketers are struggling to justify the cost of investment even here. The challenge for tech firms is in monetisation, because most marketers are comfortable using some derivative of ChatGPT for any Generative AI requirement. As with most immature technologies, venture capitalists and big tech firms have been willing to absorb the costs of training AI models during the growth phases of the technology. The sheer amount of data and computing power required to operate an LLM means that AI is extremely expensive to operate, and that has been reflected in the costs of AI products that do try to turn a profit. With many companies struggling to bring AI into production, the ROI timeframe for AI technology is now under intense scrutiny. In recent weeks, we have begun to see business analysts questioning the financials behind the Generative AI boom. ### Demonstrating ROI Such concerns will only intensify as we enter the 2025 planning cycle. Corporate tech stacks are already bloated, and early research from Forrester indicates that marketing budgets are unlikely to rise significantly next year. They were quoting budget increases of around 5% next year, which is broadly in line with inflation. Technology vendors would like much of that extra money to be spent on AI, but budgets won't be able to afford such an investment. We are starting to see Generative AI being used for more advanced use cases that may justify additional investment in time. In the interim, marketers are best focusing their AI efforts on data management, analytics and reporting. These are the areas where AI has long demonstrated strong ROI. Everyone wants to make data-driven decisions, but in practice, this is more difficult than it sounds. AI can help both in organising data and in spotting the trends that marketers are liable to miss. The only catch is that you need high-quality data to make the maximum use of the technology. Good data has long been a competitive advantage, but in the age of AI, having the best data is an even bigger advantage than ever. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Optimising the Content Experience URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/optimising-the-content-experience/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:53:05.000Z Content marketing may no longer be the hot new trend. However, it is still vital to many B2B marketing strategies. An avalanche of new content is produced every day to support enterprise demand generation and ABM strategies. The unsolved challenge is how to encourage consumption of all this content so that it drives conversion, whether that's by improving discovery or optimising the visitor experience. Updating the corporate website with a best-in-class content library is typically a critical step in achieving this objective. For those marketers who don't want to engage with a web developer, there are technologies that offer off-the-shelf content experiences. Vendors such as Pathfactory and Uberflip can create user-friendly content hubs that incorporate the full set of personalisation and analytics capabilities expected from any martech platform. Both Pathfactory and Uberflip were heavily hyped at the start of the content marketing revolution a decade ago. They've since fallen out of favour because their platforms can be easily replicated in most enterprise-scale CMS or DAM solutions. It's been some time since I last crossed paths with either platform in production. Until, unexpectedly last week, Pathfactory announced they were acquiring Uberflip. ### Evolution of Experience The pitch for vendors such as Uberflip and Pathfactory is based on ease of use, both for prospects and marketing. They allow enterprises to create personalised content hubs without touching a line of code. From an end customer perspective, the key differentiator is around content bingeing - encouraging visitors to view multiple pieces of content in the same session. This approach has become commonplace across many forms of content marketing but was popularised by Pathfactory and Uberflip. They focus on optimising the user experience to serve the next asset as soon as the current one is consumed, so that prospects are accelerated through the funnel at a far quicker pace than in the past. Combined with strong personalisation capabilities, the idea behind Pathfactory and Uberflip is that marketers can deliver more from their content engine in comparison to the manual approach. Increasingly, this strategy also requires investment in AI features to drive that personalised experience. Pathfactory have made a big pitch around AI in recent months. Their platform has long had predictive capabilities. Asset selection for Pathfactory content experiences doesn't have to be done manually. They can select the most appropriate content for each customer using AI-driven content analytics. On top of this, Pathfactory recently announced Chatfactory, a new AI-powered chatbot capability. They're far from the only ones to spot the benefits of AI chatbots in B2B marketing. However, they entered the chatbot space from a different direction than most. The sales pitch for Chatfactory is focused on content discovery, surfacing the right content from the most complex enterprise websites. In effect, Chatfactory is seen as a tool to empower prospects, by giving them the ability to generate their own content experiences or ABM content hubs without input from the marketer. ### AI in Experience All this fits into another hot B2B marketing trend: self-service purchasing. If done correctly, the technology allows buyers to accelerate themselves through the funnel without needing to engage with a human sales rep. Reducing human touchpoints throughout the funnel has become a hot topic in both sales and marketing circles over the last year, driven by the evolution of digital selling as well as changing buyer preferences. Marketing has a vital role to play in this transition, by making sure the right information is placed before the right prospects at the right time. AI has the potential to deliver the types of personalised buying experiences needed to do this, taking on the interactions that can only be delivered by a human sales rep today. There are definite risks to this approach, particularly around content accuracy and consistency of messaging. Businesses will require the right content, as well as the right technology to overcome these challenges. After all, AI models can only be as accurate as the data they're trained on. However, user experience is the most important challenge of all - the right content can't compensate for excessive buyer friction. However, businesses and technologies should be seeking to optimise the purchasing experience at all stages of the funnel. Those that succeed will be well placed to prosper in the marketplace of tomorrow. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Avoiding the Legacy Trap URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/avoiding-the-legacy-trap/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:53:29.000Z June 28th marked a notable milestone in technology circles, albeit one that most people likely missed. It was the day that Japan won its war against floppy disks. At least, that's the claim of Taro Kono, the country's Digital Minister, who celebrated the repeal of numerous regulations requiring their use when submitting data to the Japanese government. Mr Kono has previously led a bid to end the use of fax machines, another legacy technology still used in Japanese government and business. In doing so, he has driven the adoption of digital business processes that are increasingly common in the West, but had hitherto been ignored by more risk-adverse executives within Japan. Marketers stopped using floppy disks and faxes years ago, but their continued usage in Japan does serve as a warning about the risks of legacy business processes and old technology. Both faxes and floppy disks persisted in Japan because the commonly accepted methods for sending contracts and official documents required their use. Like many business processes, the accepted way of doing things was drawn up in the 80s or 90s as new technology became embedded in business. The same process continued to be used until the current day, even after better methods became possible due to the introduction of newer digital technologies. Marketers need to be careful of the same trap. The only constant in modern business is change. It is vital that business processes adapt to fit the current marketplace. ### The Year of Migration B2B Marketing is no exception. The typical marketing plan has radically transformed over the last decade. The introduction of new strategies and new technologies has unlocked revolutionary new techniques that were unheard of only a few years ago, while the rapid development of AI means those capabilities will only continue to improve. Even foundational marketing tenets are not safe from the march of new technology, as proved by the ongoing debate about the role of the humble MQL in an ABM-first organisation. Given the pace of change, it is essential that every tactic and technology used in your marketing calendar is reviewed regularly. Long gone are the days when companies were reluctant to migrate critical systems. One of the major trends of the year so far is simply the sheer number of businesses migrating either CRM or Marketing Automation systems. I've spoken to a wide range of companies that are switching or consolidating their core marketing and sales platforms. People aren't necessarily consolidating onto the same tech stack either. I'm seeing just as much diversity in tech stacks as we saw in the past. It's just that companies are much more willing to jump to a different platform when business needs change. ### Constant Evolution It's not just technologies that need to be reviewed regularly. Business processes and compliance frameworks need to be audited as well. Marketing Ops teams should be constantly looking out for potential process improvements and operational efficiencies. Conducting a regular dialogue with stakeholders across different marketing functions and business departments is essential. Look out for new business requirements, as well as common complaints. There are always opportunities for improvement in any organisation. Make a note of the concerns raised, and feed them into your marketing roadmap. You don't have to solve every issue immediately. However, understanding everyday challenges and evaluating solutions to common problems is a great way of proving the value of marketing operations to the wider business. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Advertising Privacy Balance URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-advertising-privacy-balance/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:53:56.000Z Mozilla and Adtech are not a natural combination. Best known as the developer of the Firefox browser, Mozilla is a not-for-profit foundation dedicated to campaigning for an open and freely accessible internet. That mission has led to extensive campaigns around privacy, including building privacy protection and anti-tracking technologies into Firefox. Yet, last week, they acquired a small adtech startup called Anonym. It's an acquisition that surprised everyone, particularly given that Anonym's founders used to work for Meta. Mozilla are far from the first privacy-focused vendor to enter the adtech space. Privacy and security are major selling points for Apple, who have long had an advertising division as well. Meanwhile, the Brave web browser and search engine pitch themselves as the most private and security-conscious browser, even though they have built-in advertising features. Privacy advocates often speak of a trade-off between advertising and privacy that all three companies reject. ### Trade-offs Both advertisers and ad platforms rely on access to personal information. Advertisers use end to end tracking to report on the effectiveness of their ads, ideally beyond conversion and through to the point of sale. While ad platforms use personal data to target programmatic advertising towards the right audiences, including by tracking third party web activity to build cookie pools and interest profiles. The consumer backlash against such pervasive online tracking has been fierce, resulting in the spread of GDPR-inspired privacy laws and the impending death of third-party cookies. Adblockers are commonly used among many demographics, while most browsers have some form of anti-tracking protection built in. Both advertisers and adtech vendors now need to consider the impact of data protection on the success of their campaigns, as well as their ability to measure results. Marketers can still enjoy the benefits of both personalisation and end-to-end reporting. They just need to be much more clever about how they achieve it. ### Technology Anonym, the adtech company just purchased by Mozilla, offers a relevant example. Anonym is effectively a data clean room vendor. They provide a GDPR-compliant mechanism to match first-party customer data to ad platform audience profiles, allowing for personalised advertising but without needing to share any PII with third parties. In addition, they leverage machine learning to automate both audience selection and conversion measurement, ensuring that campaign results can be collected from the ad platforms they support and shared back with the original advertiser in a usable format. As with most adtech solutions, Anonym is primarily interested in B2C use cases. However, the techniques they use are still relevant to B2B marketers. There has been a proliferation of B2B focused advertising platforms in recent years, primarily driven by the growth of ABM and account-based advertising. Many organisations have subsequently decided that account-level targeting is the safest way to comply with privacy obligations. That isn't necessarily true though. There are many different ways of architecting a privacy-compliant martech solution, and new technologies are increasing those possibilities all the time. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The First-Party Intent Qualification URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-first-party-qualification/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:54:17.000Z The hardest problem in B2B marketing is working out when a lead is ready to buy. All too often, sales are only interested in speaking to leads with a defined business need and an active project. Anything else is dismissed as a time-waster. Yet, marketing has no real way of finding out whether accounts are currently in market at any given time. In many cases, even the buying group within an organisation will not know whether they're intending to purchase or merely researching potential options. It all depends on how procurement approval works within the business in question. The safest approach is simply to wait until someone fills in a contact us form or a demo request. That's a definite buying signal, but also runs the risk of being too late. You always want to be the first person to speak to the prospective customer, as this significantly increases the chances of closing a deal. Ideally, you want to call the lead at the point they're picking up the phone. That requires looking beyond a single buying signal to see if there is an ongoing pattern of activity that is consistent with the middle stages of a buying journey. ### Third-Party Many data vendors would like you to believe that intent data is the magic bullet that will solve any questions around buyer readiness. The additional data source is indeed valuable, particularly in identifying the solutions areas of current interest in key accounts. However, purchasing data always comes with caveats around time lag and relevance. As with any third-party data source, the intent information you get about enterprise accounts in North America is far more comprehensive than the data you get about SMB accounts in Asia-Pacific. That's because it's easier for data vendors to aggregate data in the US, where data protection laws are still far more lax than in other regions. Intent data does still have a valuable role in determining the level of buyer engagement. However, it is not a standalone solution. Intent data works by calculating the interest area for every online activity tracked by the data vendor, and then counting the number of times each account engages with a specific topic. That provides a real-time view of the most relevant interests within each account. If you're tracking the right topics, then it is possible to determine which accounts are in market for which solutions. However, intent data needs to be paired with your first-party activity data for a more rounded view of whether accounts have an interest in your specific solutions. ### First-Party Many of the same methodologies used to collate third-party intent data can be used within the marketing team to create your own first-party intent. Through lead scoring, many marketers already track the number of times prospects engage with specific solutions. Many marketers already roll-up individual contact activity up to the account level as part of their ABM programs. By combining these two existing data management processes, marketers can create their own intent data solution that is far more targeted than any external data purchase. Not only is first-party intent data more accurate; it's also more timely too. There is always a time lag in any third-party intent data provider. The data you're purchasing is often a week or two old, and can sometimes lead to wasted sales efforts as marketers chase prospects that have already purchased elsewhere. By pairing your own activity with third-party data that risk is minimised. Given the increasingly strict privacy protections across the industry, first-party data is becoming even more important than in the past. Marketers have a goldmine of data at their disposal, but have rarely made the best use of it. For any business struggling to identify the right buyer stage or product interest, a deep dive into your existing customer data is a good starting point. Make sure to have a clear idea of the interests or keywords you're looking for in your database. From there, it can be surprisingly easy to build a list of relevant accounts for any business need. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### What Happened to Martech Consolidation? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/what-happened-to-martech-consolidation/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:55:03.000Z Technology is central to marketing at every type of company. Without technology, there would be no website, no CRM and no reporting. For years now, CMOs have invested a growing share of their budgets in marketing applications in order to drive more revenue and expand marketing capabilities. Tech stacks have now grown to the point where, in many organisations, the discussion is often about tech stack consolidation rather than technology acquisition. Yet, every single time I've worked on a tech stack optimisation project, we've ended up adding new technologies as well as removing existing ones. ### The Landscape The same discussion has been taking place regarding the overall marketing technology landscape for several years. There has been plenty of buzz around vendor consolidation, and numerous high-profile merger and acquisition deals in the martech sector. Such talk only heightened after last year's Venture Capital crunch, which resulted in a significant drop in investment for start-ups across the entire technology ecosystem. For all the talk of vendor consolidation, the reality is very different. A couple of weeks ago, Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma released the 2024 version of their famous Martech Landscape diagram that attempts to map every marketing technology available to purchase. According to their research, far from shrinking, the Martech sector actually expanded by 27.8% last year to encompass an astonishing 14,106 different software apps. ### The Long Tail Operational flexibility is one of the key reasons for the growth in martech. Acquiring any new application requires adapting your processes to fit the application, as well as customising the application to fit business requirements. Companies have always struggled with onboarding applications for this reason, to the point where many Fortune 500 enterprises are choosing apps from niche vendors over market-leading solutions. These niche vendors may only have a small number of customers, but they're typically far more tailored to the unique requirements of those organisations. These long-tail applications are rarely at the core of enterprise technology stacks. If anything, there has been greater standardisation of CRM and Marketing Automation systems across marketing departments in recent years. However, firms are more flexible about which point solutions they're willing to integrate with their core applications. There is significantly greater diversity in the event apps, data platforms and management tools deployed within tech stacks compared to five years ago. For technology buyers, integrating such applications into their technology stack is much easier. The growth of open APIs means that businesses are not reliant on expensive custom development to integrate apps into their core technology stacks. The right integrations are often a selling point of niche applications, while low-code development platforms mean that custom integrations can be spun up quickly and easily where needed. ### The Modular Approach In theory, low-code development allows entire applications to be built from scratch within the marketing team. This does happen in most organisations, but only for one or two very simple use cases. Low-code development still has a significant learning curve, while also being more restrictive than dedicated tools. As such, custom CRM or marketing automation workflows are still the preferred approach for bespoke requirements that can't be fulfilled cost-effectively by external applications. Together, these trends encourage a modular approach to building a martech stack - an approach known as composable architecture in tech circles. It is now much easier to rip and replace elements of the technology stack as business requirements evolve. This massively improves both cost efficiency and business agility, particularly in fast-growing organisations. Composability is a hot topic in technology circles right now. The low cost of developing new web applications means that the number of apps available to purchase will only grow, even if individual tech stacks start to shrink. And that's before AI-assisted development opens up technology to non-technical users even further. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Rise of Passkeys URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-rise-of-passkeys/ Last updated: 2024-05-17T17:30:27.000Z Last week was World Password Day. Yet none of the events and announcements to mark the day mentioned passwords. All the discussion was about the technology that technology firms believe can replace passwords: passkeys. Security professionals and big tech companies have been trying to get rid of passwords for many years. Poor password hygiene has long been the weakest link in online security. Extensive lists of commonly used passwords circulate the dark web, with new security breaches regularly added to that list. In the battle between users and hackers, the bad guys are winning, with reused passwords as their trump card. ### A Question of Hygiene Password managers are widely used among more tech-savvy users as well as in business contexts. Many less technical users maintain an offline list of passwords instead of using a LastPass or 1Password type service. Keeping a physical notebook full of passwords is particularly common among older users. Such solutions do significantly improve password uniqueness and complexity, even if they introduce other problems, not least the risk of losing access to whatever password management solution is in place. Ultimately, maintaining good password hygiene is hard. We're required to create new accounts for numerous services - I have over a hundred saved to my password manager - and are expected to create a unique password for every website. It's simply not possible to remember all those passwords, and not everyone is willing to trust a password manager. As such, password reuse is rampant because many people have simply decided they won't try to maintain basic hygiene. ### Existing Solutions Faced with a losing security battle, tech firms have concluded that the only solution to password reuse is to eliminate passwords entirely. The replacement technology is called passkeys and follows similar principles to the public key infrastructure (PKI) technology long used by SSH connections and server authentication. Passkeys are an attempt to create a user-friendly version of PKI technology, with the passkey in effect being a private key used to authenticate with an online service. In a traditional PKI scenario, users are given a private key file that needs to be stored securely on their device. This file is then shared with the remote server whenever the user needs to authenticate their connection. Passkeys merely hide the key file from the end user, storing it in the device's cryptographic keychain before retrieving it whenever the user logs in to the relevant website. This transparency reduces the likelihood of a successful phishing attack because it is the device that selects the applicable private key to use for authentication rather than the user. ### Fear of the Unknown Many early adopters have questioned the security and user experience of passkeys. This is often due to a lack of familiarity with key-based authentication. These are concerns that are more pertinent to technical users, who typically expect to understand how any new service works. Less technical users don't expect to understand the details and will be happier with the high-level concept. Technology firms have started pitching passkeys as a way of signing in to online services using a mobile device - conceptually it's an extension of iCloud Keychain type experiences. That's an approach which is simple at a high-level, but is more complicated at a technical level. Indeed, Microsoft users have been using passwordless login for several years, including among both personal and corporate accounts. They did this by extending the number matching process in their Authenticator app so that it could be used for initial login as well as for second-factor verification. As a result, they've received very little pushback from users since their rollout of passwordless authentication, although there was plenty of scepticism when it was initially announced. ### Lock-in However, there are two common concerns with passkeys that are less easy to dismiss. The first of these questions relates to cross-device usage. At the moment, there is very limited cross-platform support for passkeys. Like many users, I regularly use a mix of Android, Apple and Windows devices - indeed, this article was partially written and edited across all three platforms. However, passkeys are generated and stored within the device they're created on. Apple and Google sync passkeys between devices within their ecosystems, using either Apple Keychain or Google Password Manager. However, that's not helpful if you're constantly switching between different OS ecosystems. Thankfully, the leading password managers have been able to provide a solution. Third-party password managers such as 1Password or Bitwarden can store passkeys and share them across devices in place of the device's native keychain. That not only provides a valuable service for end users, but it also guarantees a future for password managers in a post-password environment. ### Fallback The second problem with passkeys is not so easy to solve. It concerns the question of lost or stolen devices. Passkeys make sense to people because they use the fact you're logged in on one device to access sites on any device. That works well until you lose your phone. Suddenly, you have no way to access your passkeys - at least not until you login to another phone using the passkey saved on another device. For people who use multiple devices, that isn't a problem. It is very much a problem for people such as my parents and the vast majority of non-technical folk who only own one mobile device. When these people lose their phone, they simply aren't able to access their passkeys until they've finished setting up a new phone. Big tech firms have yet to find a satisfactory solution to the lost device problem. At the moment they're falling back to using passwords and SMS-based MFA. That's far from ideal because it keeps open the security holes that passkeys are designed to resolve. There will always be a weak link in any security model, but if passkeys aren't actually removing passwords from security infrastructure, then they're not really improving the security situation. They are more convenient, as people won't need to use passwords as often. The key to successfully adopting passkeys is to eliminate passwords entirely, but that will take time. ### The Return of Events URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-return-of-events/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:54:37.000Z Prior to the pandemic, events were central to every marketing calendar. In the enterprise space, many field marketers spent most of their time and budget organising local seminars and breakfast briefings. Smaller companies focused their marketing efforts on sponsorship of a small number of industry tradeshows. My own employers at CRMT Digital were no exception. Since 2019, events have become a much less important part of the marketing mix, as marketing has moved towards digital channels. Eventually, even webinars were superceded by the general push towards content marketing. Again, my own employers are no exception. It is interesting, therefore, that in 2024, CRMT Digital are sponsoring an industry event for the first time in five years. That is one anecdote from one company, but it is reflective of the broader industry trend. ### Content Readiness The shift towards event marketing is happening across the board. This isn't just due to sales wanting more face to face opportunities with customers, although, that is a factor. It's also driven by very real concerns about the effectiveness of content syndication, the tactic which mostly replaced events as the main source of sales-ready leads during the pandemic. For all the investment in content marketing to boost awareness and drive engagement, marketing teams are struggling to identify when even the most active accounts are ready to engage with sales. It doesn't matter how optimised your scoring model is, content marketing isn't quite hitting the mark in this area. BDRs frequently complain that the leads they receive are passed over too early in the buying cycle. Much of the discussion around the decline in email nurture is driven by this problem. In the past, companies used conversations at in-person events to identify when engaged prospects were ready to buy. Engaged accounts were invited to local events in the hope that an in-person conversation would result in a potential sales opportunity. Various attempts to find digital alternatives to this strategy have been tried, but nothing has come close in effectiveness. Sales teams have even started to create their own bottom of funnel conversion nurtures in an effort to generate meetings from among the leads sent to them prematurely. Such sales nurtures are generally no more successful than the marketing equivalents. ### Dark Funnel The problem is that customers expectations of sales have changed. Many B2B buyers are engaging with sales much later than in the past. The length of the so-called dark funnel has grown, because buyers are conducting much more of their research and requirements gathering before engaging with vendors. The explosion of thought leadership content has filled the gap, but engagement with such content isn't indicative of any particular buyer readiness or purchase timeframe. In an ideal world, business development teams aim to informally qualify prospective customers before they raise their hands to vendors, and ideally as soon as they initiate a business change project. That allows your organisation to get a headstart on the competition, and influence business requirements before they are finalised. With so much of the buyer's journey carried out anonymously online, Events are now one of the few opportunities to achieve that goal. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Evolution of Lead Nurture URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-evolution-of-lead-nurture/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:55:56.000Z It has long been fashionable to predict the death of email nurture. Whether it was the widespread usage of BDRs, the rise of ABM or the current AI hype, every new marketing trend is predicted to mark the end of email marketing in B2B. Yet, nurture campaigns are still running, and are still producing results. In truth, much has changed within B2B marketing and that has impacted lead nurture strategies more than most. The traditional formula for large-scale drip nurtures stopped generating leads years ago. Poor content sent to a mass audience no longer converts, regardless of the channels or strategies you use. ### Content is King Nurture is a personalisation play. It needs to be relevant. Nurture should be about sending the right content to the right audience at the right time. Designing a nurture program starts with identifying the best ways to identify purchase intent among cold prospects, and then finding the right content to progress leads to the next point in the buyer's journey. This may sound like an impossible task, but it doesn't have to be. Nurture is an excellent opportunity to reuse evergreen content. When selecting content to use in a nurture program, look for assets and asset types that have already been successful with the target personas at a similar stage in the past. Then, reuse that same content for nurture. Companies with a mature content generation engine shouldn't be looking to create significant volumes of new content just for nurture campaigns. Content created for lead generation activities or ABM programs can then be repurposed for nurture once the initial content promotion has been completed. ### More than Email Also, don't limit nurture campaigns just to email. It is a good idea to nurture contacts over web and social channels as well. Tools such as Pathfactory, Folloze or Uberflip have built their platforms around a digital nurture board concept that is an excellent fit for nurture campaigns. The same experience can be built directly on the web using a related content module on your resource pages to highlight the next content in the nurture stream. The key is to build a content experience that keeps contacts coming back to the website for the next asset. Email is the easiest and quickest way to do this. However, also consider building nurture sequences using ad retargeting through social or programmatic channels. These personalised ads can be combined with email touchpoints, or used to replace email depending on contact preferences. ### Getting Started Planning a nurture should work the same way as planning any other marketing program. The starting point has to be who the target audience is, where that audience is in the funnel right now, and where you want them to get to at the end of the campaign. In effect, the most important step in planning a successful nurture is identifying what level of interest is needed to push the campaign audience to the next step in the buyer's journey. The content and channels you include in the nurture are then selected to fit the personas and buying stages identified for the campaign. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Tech Stack Fragmentation: The Platform Effect URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/tech-stack-fragmentation-vendor-effect/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:55:39.000Z There has been plenty of talk about tech stack fragmentation in recent years, yet the number of applications used by marketers has continued to grow. Much of the frustration has focused on underutilised features, as well as the overlap between applications. CMOs naturally want to ensure their technology budget is utilised in the most efficient way possible. Yet, the explosive growth in martech is ultimately driven by the growing complexity of B2B marketing, particularly for those operating at enterprise scale. Whenever I've worked on a tech stack consolidation project, it's never just been a question of removing existing applications from a mature stack. We've always ended up identifying capability gaps that require new technologies. After all, the quest for data improvement, ABM maturity or internal alignment cannot generally be fulfilled through process changes and the unused features of the existing technology stack. Sometimes, a new project management tool or an additional data source is needed to deliver the efficiency gains needed to increase the effectiveness of individual campaigns. ### Platform Expansion The big technology vendors follow a similar approach when building out their platforms. Gone are the days when Salesforce or Adobe would roll out a major new module for their existing marketing automation tools. Now, their annual conferences include the announcement of multiple new applications that expand their already sprawling product portfolios to a scale that few can comprehend. Last week's Adobe Summit is a case in point. During their annual customer conference in Las Vegas, Adobe announced three new products for their Experience Cloud. One of them was the obligatory Experience Cloud AI assistant to go alongside their new GenStudio content creation product. Another was a data clean room for their CDP, which allows brands to share audiences with publishers within an environment that respects both data protection regulations and tracking restrictions. Data clean rooms are one of the technologies that ad tech vendors are using to replace third-party cookies. They allow advertisers to share their first-party customer data for matching with the databases operated by advertising platforms. As such, they're one of the key technologies that will be used for conducting programmatic advertising without third-party cookies. ### Adobe Experiences ABM From a B2B marketing perspective, perhaps the most interesting announcement at Adobe Summit was for Adobe Journey Optimiser - B2B Edition. This upcoming product adapts Adobe's existing cross-channel orchestration tools for ABM use cases. It acts as a buying group identification and aggregation layer for the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud, collecting and scoring contacts at target accounts. The relevant personas at each account can then be pushed into campaigns delivered through Marketo or through other digital channels. The concept behind B2B Journey Optimiser is hardly new. It is based on capabilities pioneered by ABM platforms such as Demandbase or Terminus. However, the major platform vendors have previously tended to integrate such capabilities directly into either their CDP or marketing automation products. Seeing it launched as a standalone product is the difference. This subtle change in strategy will be motivated by commercial considerations within Adobe. However, it does suit the way that marketers manage their technology stacks. Recent data from Scott Brinker shows that the majority of marketing teams prefer to mix and match technology from multiple vendors rather than adopting a singular solution based on the offerings of a single vendor. Most mature ABM programs will already have a tool for identifying and orchestrating buying groups. It's unlikely that such marketers would be interested in buying a new technology just because it was released by Adobe. However, it does represent a potential cost saving further down the line, when the time comes to renew their other Adobe products. Whether companies actually adopt B2B Journey Optimiser depends on how it measures up against the competition. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Cookie Compliance Question URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-2024-cookie-compliance-question/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:56:26.000Z For years, advertisers and technology firms have worried about the impending replacement of third-party cookies. No other technology can truly replace the ability of cookies to track people across websites, yet pressure from privacy advocates and security researchers have forced browsers to deprecate them. It's not just external consultants driving the change. In an effort to sell their platforms to increasingly privacy-conscious users, Safari and Firefox blocked third-party cookies years ago. Third-party cookies are already ancient history on iOS devices. As a result, most use cases for third-party cookies have already found alternatives. Web analytics and marketing automation platforms switched to secure first-party cookie solutions years ago, but these platforms only need to track users across one site. Websites using third-party cookies for login also switched to more modern alternatives - although Microsoft 365 is a notable exception. Ad tech vendors still need tracking across multiple sites, a capability explicitly blocked by more modern first-party cookie solutions. ### Competitive Concerns Google have taken the lead in designing replacement solutions, which is hardly surprising given their dual role as both the leading browser vendor and the leading digital advertising platform. However, many of their proposals have been rejected by the industry. At the start of the year, Google finally launched Privacy Sandbox, a pilot of their cookie replacement technologies. Their competitors in the ad tech space aren't happy. In a recent ruling, the UK Competition and Markets Authority blocked Google from progressing their roll-out of the Privacy Sandbox due to its impact on other advertising platforms. Several weeks ago, Microsoft proposed an amended version of the Privacy Sandbox for Edge. This expanded the capabilities available to ad networks in a world without third-party cookies. Most notably, it allowed advertisers to run their own programmatic auction servers rather than relying on Google's services. These are still relatively new proposals that have been submitted to the broader industry for feedback, but they do form the starting point for a comprise approach. Microsoft's late entry into the cookie debate does mean that the 2024 deadline for deprecating third-party cookies is likely to be pushed back again. However, this time, any delays will be at the behest of regulators and advertisers rather than Google. ### Compliance Burdens In the interim, the EU's new DMA regulations have imposed compliance requirements on Google, that they are now passing onto advertisers in order to resolve privacy questions that were leftover from the introduction of GDPR. Since 2018, both Google and Meta have required advertisers to collect consent before any personal data can be shared with their platforms for re-targeting. This was initially interpreted to only apply to profile information shared for matched audience creation. Subsequent EU court judgements expanded the consent requirement to also apply to tracking and web activity data, but that was never enforced by Google and frequently ignored by advertisers. Then, last year, the DMA regulations kick-started a change in attitude. As a result, Google have started enforcing their consent requirements. Website owners must now explicitly notify Google when consent has been collected for ad personalisation in the EU. This is done using Google's consent mode tools, which integrate the Google marketing platform with cookie consent banners. If consent mode is not used, then Google will simply not use activity data to personalise ads. This naturally reduces the effectiveness of retargeting campaigns. Consent mode is not a new solution, so many digital teams will already have it implemented. It was originally introduced to allow for cookieless tracking within Google Analytics. The DMA-enforced update is the addition of specific requirements for ad personalisation, which means it can no longer be ignored when marketing to EU customers. The question of consent has been central to EU policy-making for many years, but there has never been a consistent mechanism for managing it in the back-end. Now Google have provided a solution. It is up to marketers to make use of it. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### How to Identify Good Analytics? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/how-to-identify-good-data/ Last updated: 2024-03-18T08:30:40.000Z Data is everywhere in marketing. A successful marketing program requires finding the right audience, which is then measured with even more data. Everyone understands that accurate reporting requires good data. Yet, few people understand what good data actually looks like and where it can be found. Every technology platform has its own analytics features. Every channel has its own KPIs. When measuring marketing performance, actually deciding how to calculate a KPI is more difficult than identifying which KPIs to measure. In any technology stack, there will be inconsistent analytics. Event platforms and CRM platforms will contain contradictory contact profiles, while web analytics and marketing automation may contain different metrics about page views and form fills. This is normal, and ultimately comes back to the different ways data is collected in each application. Wherever there are multiple ways of measuring a particular reporting metric, identifying the most accurate source for that information is essential. ### Measuring Data Accuracy In most cases, the app used to execute a particular channel will provide the most accurate reporting metrics. Tracking information often isn't passed from channel to channel as contacts progress through a campaign. This is a particular problem for digital advertising, where accidental clicks are common and cookie consent requirements can prevent sites from collecting conversion information. Bot clicks are also a widespread problem, and not all channels can successfully remove them from reporting. Then there is impact of internal visitors or test clicks which can't always be suppressed, and is particularly problematic in a world where remote work is common. When reporting on a specific metric, decide the dataset which will be used as the single source of truth for that specific information. This won't necessarily be the application which provides the best numbers, consider instead the underlying mechanisms that each platform uses to collect data. Choose the data source which most accurately reflects the KPI being measured. ### Balancing Probability When reviewing data sources, do remember that no dataset is 100% correct, whatever its origin. Every report has a built-in margin of error due to the inconsistencies of the collection methodology or the inaccuracies of the underlying data. The aim of any data engineering exercise should be to build a database that is good enough to properly reflect campaign performance or mirror business trends. Marketing leaders are often less than willing to accept inaccuracies in reporting. Yet, the risks of poor quality analytics data are often overstated. Absolute accuracy is only really needed for financial reporting when actual revenue is being measured or when budgets are being reconciled. For marketing performance reporting, it is the accuracy of the interpretation which matters more than accuracy of the measurement. So long as a consistent reporting methodology is used across quarters and years, a small margin of error will be sufficient even for the most closely watched metrics. This is because the trends being observed are generally more the absolute numbers. ### Better Reporting Ultimately, the reports produced by marketing ops only need to be accurate enough to guide investment decisions and campaign priorities. This applies to individual campaigns and entire marketing programs but also to specific technology or data investments. The value of good data to sales and marketing teams is enormous, but often appears in many intangible ways. Better data leads to better lead conversion rates, higher opportunity win rates or higher click rates. It gives marketers the ability to tune their programs for maximum output. In many ways, data is the hardest investment to measure in any business, but it can also be the biggest differentiator. In a business environment overwhelmed with big data, finding a marketing ops team that can select the right data sources is the quickest shortcut to improved marketing performance. ### The Disconnect behind Tableau Pulse URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-disconnect-behind-tableau-pulse/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:56:48.000Z One of the most misunderstood roles in marketing is that of the data analyst. The popular perception is that BI is mostly about creating attractive graphs in one of the leading data visualisation tools. While data presentation is indeed a core skill for any data analyst, it only forms a small part of the role. The day-to-day language of a data analyst is based around extracting, transforming and loading data rather than discussing the merits of pie charts versus bar charts. After all, few things annoy a CMO more than seeing inconsistent or inaccurate reporting. The bulk of a data analyst's time is spent in back-end data manipulation, building the unified data models needed to power the charts that everyone sees. These data models take the disparate datasets that exist across the organisation and transform them into a set of metrics and KPIs that can be filtered and drilled into using whatever attributes make sense to the business. Many of the leading BI tools even have separate applications for building the back-end data model as compared to the front-end dashboard. This allows one data model to be shared across multiple dashboards, ensuring that key reporting metrics are tracked consistently across the entire enterprise. As AI enters mainstream business usage, the distinction between front-end data presentation and back-end data model is poised to become even more important than ever. Both Salesforce and Microsoft are embedding automatic data visualisation tools into their applications. A few years ago, Microsoft introduced a 'visualise this view' feature to Dynamics 365, allowing any user to automatically create a report summarising the contents of a CRM lead queue or opportunity view. The graphs this feature creates are fairly basic, but they are useful for creating operational reports showing the status of open leads. ### Metrics Layer The rise of Generative AI has allowed Salesforce to take the concept of self-service visualisation one stage further. Last week saw the general availability of Tableau Pulse, which introduces the concept of headless BI to the Salesforce-owned BI platform. Tableau Pulse introduces a new metrics layer to Tableau that allows data analysts to define key KPIs the business wishes to report on, as well as build the data flows needed to enable that reporting. The headless concept refers to the fact that this metrics layer doesn't include any capability for creating graphs or charts, merely the raw data with the most important data points tagged as a named KPI. Headless BI is a relatively new concept in the BI world that formalises the separation between front-end data presentation and back-end data model. The theory is that business users shouldn't be limited to the visualisations created by a data analyst but instead can create and customise their own reports and visualisations using the data stored in the metrics layer. This enhances data discovery while ensuring data accuracy is maintained. Dashboards can be customised in real-time to the specific questions that need to be answered without calling upon a data analyst to create a whole new set of reports. ### Insights Layer Naturally, Generative AI plays a vital role in enabling anyone to find the most relevant reports and insights for their current challenges. Tableau Pulse also introduces a separate Insights platform that allows users to track key KPIs and provides status updates on the state of those metrics. These insights are presented using natural language alongside the relevant graphs. Business users can even interrogate the numbers using a Q&A style conversation interface, making it easy to drill into the details behind the reports being presented. The concept of an Insights layer itself marks an important shift in the role of BI within the enterprise. Making dashboards more interactive has been a trend for many years. However, Tableau has taken this one stage further. In Tableau Pulse, users no longer monitor reports or dashboards. They monitor metrics directly. The BI tool then generates the relevant reports necessary to drill into that metric at whatever level is required. This changes how executives interact with reports, allowing them to focus on the most important information. Then, when needed, the traditional Tableau dashboards will still be there to present a more holistic view. To the uninitiated, the whole concept behind Tableau Pulse sounds like a threat to the traditional role of a data analyst. However, that's not actually the case. Instead, it allows data analysts to focus on the skills that deliver real value to the business. The ability to present data in an easily digestible visual is not a skill unique to data analysts, many marketers can do it too. It's the ability to organise different data sources into a usable format that sets a good data analyst apart from the rest. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Drift to Salesloft Deal URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/the-drift-to-salesloft-deal/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:57:08.000Z The exact boundary between marketing nurture and sales follow-up has long been a source of conflict, particularly since the likes of Outreach or Salesloft became a mandatory part of the enterprise tech stack. Both sales and marketing now have tools to send multi-channel outbound communication sequences. As such, there has been plenty of talk in recent years about the overlap between marketing technology and sales technology. Web chat is one area where marketing and sales often clash about technology ownership. The primary internal users of web chat applications are often business development teams, yet the technology itself is owned by marketing as part of the website stack. Marketing control of chatbots is often used to justify this split, but bots are generally a secondary use case for web chat. Investment in web chat applications is driven by the live chat capabilities, providing either BDRs or SDRs the ability to engage directly with prospects online. ### A Question of Ownership Conversational marketing tools have a unique place in the technology stack, because of the potential overlap in ownership between web teams, sales teams and marketing operations teams. The poster child for marketing-driven chat has long been Drift, with its best-in-class personalisation capabilities and its focus on conversational marketing. Chatbots built on the Drift platform are pitched as a tool for marketing campaigns, but they have equally effective use cases across the wider business. Drift can even be included as a touchpoint in sales outreach sequences. The clearest evidence for the multi-disciplinary usage of chatbots came last week, when Drift was acquired by Salesloft, a sales engagement platform. There has been speculation that the acquisition might herald a wave of mergers between sales technology firms and marketing technology vendors. However, there's little evidence that Salesloft want to become a platform for running marketing campaigns. Instead, it is more likely that Salesloft are looking to diversify their platform beyond the core email capabilities. Given the recent crackdown by Google and Yahoo on cold email that is a wise move. ### A Question of Touchpoints Sales leaders reacted to the recent Gmail email deliverability restrictions by looking for new ways to engage with prospects. In many businesses, the pandemic-induced switch to digital selling simply replaced in-person touchpoints with email-based ones. The limitations of that strategy are becoming apparent. An increased focus on events has been one reaction to the problems with current digital sales programs. An expansion of web-based touchpoints is another. However, that could lead to additional conflicts between marketing and sales. In the press release announcing the deal, Salesloft promoted Drift as a way for sellers to engage with buyers further up the funnel. That's an awkward claim for marketing teams trying to reclaim email nurture campaigns from trigger-happy lead development teams who often overuse sales outreach sequences instead of recycling leads back to marketing. The deal may not pose a competitive threat to martech vendors, but it may still cause problems for marketing teams trying to clarify the distinction between marketing campaigns and sales outreach sequences. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Big Operations and The Automation Myth URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/big-operations-automation-myth/ Last updated: 2024-02-07T08:30:20.000Z Publicis used their recent quarterly earnings release to promote themselves as an AI platform company, stating that "everyone within Publicis will become a data analyst, an engineer, an intelligence partner, with all the information they need at their fingertips to supercharge client growth." I would expect the truth of those claims to reflect Publicis's status as the world's third largest advertising firm. As a vision statement it is compelling, but is it actually achievable? Scott Brinkler of chiefmartec.com backed Publicis's claim, offering as evidence a recent report by Workato on the types of users building integrations using the Workato low code integration platform. The report is an interesting one, that highlights the gap between the AI hype touted by Publicis as compared to the dawning corporate reality. ### The Right Mix More cynical folks have spent the past year arguing that no amount of AI can turn everyday business users into data experts or analytics gurus. I would also argue that it's undesirable to do so. Businesses are successful when they employ a broad mix of people with different strengths and different backgrounds. Forcing every white collar professional to become an AI expert or data analyst risks the debilitating effects of groupthink. Instead, a more accurate statement by Publicis would say that every business team will need to have a data analyst, an engineer and an intelligence partner alongside their day-to-day responsibilities. Those skills could belong to different individuals or they can belong to the same person. The real narrative is about the increasing importance of operations teams within business departments and how they are taking on many of the responsibilities traditionally owned by IT - including developing integrations. Nowhere is this more true than in marketing. ### Big Operations In many organisations, application ownership has become the responsibility of department heads rather than IT. A distributed technology stack requires each department to recruit administrators with the expertise needed to manage their application portfolio, many of which are highly sophisticated. Big data has added another layer of complexity, requiring a separate group of data analysts to draw insights from the varying datasets available to departments. The people filling these new roles are just as technically proficient as IT staff. They simply report to a different department. These new application administrators and data analysts typically become part of the operations team within each department. However, in smaller groups, they could be a part-time job for a technically proficient marketing manager or sales representative. Regardless of the formal job title, someone has been tasked with managing the apps and data used in day-to-day business workflows. In 2024, that someone is rarely part of the IT team unless you're talking about a core business application. ### The Automation Myth It's these operations teams that are using Workato for their integration needs. That's particularly true when it comes to Generative AI workflows, the majority of which are owned by operations or applications teams. Workato would like people to believe that regular marketing or sales users routinely use their product to build complex automation workflows. That's simply not the case. For starters, 56% of Workato automations are owned by IT. Only 11% of their automations are owned by users outside of operations or technology roles, and many of those will be the aforementioned defacto ops guy historically guilty of creating Excel macros. Enterprise technology is a complex beast, particularly once you consider the proliferation of niche services used by a single team for one task. It simply isn't possible for IT teams to understand and manage every application in modern enterprise tech stacks that contain hundreds of specialised systems. However, IT does still have a core responsibility to know where business information resides, how it is processed and whether it has been appropriately secured. This requires visibility of the entire tech stack, even if other teams are responsible for the actual configuration. ### Maintaining Standards Operations teams need to work closely with IT to ensure that security standards are enforced and that best practice information management processes are followed. An open and collaborative relationship between IT and the business is an essential ingredient for a healthy technology stack. Yet, I've worked with many operations teams who view IT with suspicion. Sometimes, that concern may be justified. Frequently, it is not. The relationship between IT and operations typically boils down to the nature of collaboration between departments. If IT is seen merely as the people who say 'no', then they will be sidelined by the wider business. Instead, they need to be seen as the source of information standards and security best practices willing to offer constructive solutions to potential risks and inefficiencies. In an era of distributed application ownership, IT must become a coach for operations teams, who often overlook the dangers posed by applications in the rush to get things done. No one expects everyone in the organisation to analyse large databases or engineer new services. Yet, every team needs access to those skills. The job descriptions and reporting lines are secondary and depend very much on organisation and cultural factors. Once in place, such individuals are responsible for delivering both business value and information security. Delivering both requires trade-offs, and identifying the right trade-offs is a separate skill in itself. ### How Technology Can Streamline ABM URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/how-technology-streamlines-abm/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:57:25.000Z Pretty much every technology platform going has released a major AI update over the last 12 months. This week alone saw Integrate and Demandbase introduce new AI features. These newer releases aren't just a "me too" type text generator that few people will ever use, although ON24 have embedded one in their platform as part of a broader update. Instead, technology vendors are now introducing AI in a way that complements the strengths of their platforms. Put together, the various AI updates are a major step towards solving one of the biggest challenges with ABM within an enterprise environment. For all the transformational promises, ABM often ends up being a re-run of existing types of campaign to existing audiences. Marketers don't use the selection of accounts in the target account list to meaningfully change the campaign content or customer experience. That's because many ABM programs ignore the contact layer when deciding on ABM targeting. ### The Missing Middle Target audiences may be selected based on firmographic profiles and customer fit, but the ultimate aim of many ABM programs is still to generate new leads at the relevant accounts. The focus on account acquisition and sales alignment means that the middle-of-funnel stages are frequently skipped. Accounts are targeted as a single entity at the top of the funnel and followed up as a single entity by sales at the bottom of the funnel. However, the middle-of-funnel nurture stage is typically still executed using a lead-based approach. That's a restriction within the standard martech stack, but it severely limits the potential of Account Based Marketing. ABM is intended to be a land and expand methodology. The aim is to engage the entire buying team with content relevant to their persona and business needs. Marketers should be looking to round out the account profile with all members of the buying committee by capturing their details and nurturing each of them until there is activity from multiple contacts at the account. Then, when sufficient members have engaged, the entire account is passed to sales as a single entity. ### Account Modeling The trouble is that few tools are capable of actually executing such an approach at scale. Many ABM tools focus purely on the account engagement piece, delegating contact-level engagement to marketing automation platforms that aren't able to visualise the individual buying team members as a collective. That missing step of linking together the entire buying group simply isn't possible within a traditional technology stack, particularly for businesses that can sell to multiple departments within the same company. To truly separate the different buying groups within each company as well as identify the role of each individual in the buying process, you need a clear visualisation of the corporate structure within each account. That requires accurate job title information and a data platform capable of automatically mapping the organisational hierarchy based on how buying groups are typically structured. This can be done manually, but at scale, it requires AI-based machine learning. As such, it's no wonder that both Demandbase and Integrate have used the current wave of AI products to integrate buying group identification features into their account-based advertising platforms. The next step is to use that same information further down the funnel as part of the cross-channel nurturing program. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The Opportunity to Improve Sales Automation URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/opportunity-improve-sales-automation/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:57:48.000Z When Google announced stricter spam filters for bulk senders last year, there was a spike of alarm from email marketers. The concern subsidised once marketing technology teams reviewed the guidance and realised that it was merely formalising a set of best practices already followed by any permission-based email marketing program. I wrote about the implications of the changes at the time. Meanwhile, LDT leaders and sales operations executives are still talking about the impact that tougher spam complaint thresholds could have on their email outreach programs. The differing reactions are not unexpected. Marketers have spent the past decade adjusting their strategies to fit increasingly stringent data protection rules. At the same time, legitimate interest guidelines have been used to spare sales teams the same restrictions. ### Sales Automation Due to the rise of sales automation tools in recent years, sales teams have taken on more responsibility for bottom-of-funnel content creation. Sales acceleration nurtures are typically deployed by sales reps through the likes of Outreach or Salesloft with limited marketing input. The quality of the content being sent has suffered. There are too many repetitive book-a-meeting requests that lack supporting messaging or alternative call-to-actions. Sales reps are using scattergun outreach tactics that were abandoned by marketing departments a long time ago. Google's new bulk sender restrictions will force a change in behaviour among many sales teams, mirroring the journey that marketing has been forced to follow. Many lead development teams will have to take another look at the content they're sending by email, providing an opportunity for marketers to utilise their content expertise to help drive better conversion rates from sales campaigns. ### 1:1 Personalisation Sales teams will no longer be able to create generic email sequences for prospects they can't reach on the phone. Both content and channels will need to be adapted to fit buyer preferences. Personalisation is king, just as it is for marketing. Ironically, this fits the historical modus operandi of sales teams far better than the traditional batch and blast marketing tactics adopted in recent years. Most sales reps would rather personalise the content they send to their accounts. Indeed, this has been one of the key arguments in the often fraught relationship between marketing and sales. It's just that the rise of Outreach-style sales email sequences has made it far easier for reps to just trigger the latest generic content rather than write their own. After all, Sales reps are often poor copywriters. ### Sales Enablement There is an opportunity for marketers to fill that gap by offering better content and supporting call-to-actions that fit the campaigns being run further up the funnel, particularly if they're part of an account based marketing initiative. Marketers don't need to write the entire email sequence, but they can provide support and guidance for sales enablement teams as part of existing sales alignment efforts. Ultimately, poor quality or incorrectly timed sales automation campaigns harms both sales and marketing efforts. Customers don't differentiate between sales content and marketing content. That's purely an internal division. Unwanted or overly pushy emails can impact brand perception, damage marketing efforts, and potentially lead to unsubscribes. Marketing needs to make an active effort to improve the quality of sales content while being mindful of the corporate politics and personal sensitivity involved. Any bottom-of-funnel nurture aims to generate meetings for sales, which results in different messaging compared to higher up the funnel. However, this doesn't necessarily require a hard sell. Acting in an advisory capacity is an essential first step to getting better conversion rates for everyone. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### 2024 Predictions URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/2024-predictions/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:58:11.000Z Last year was all about Generative AI. At least, that's what many analysts would like people to believe. As always, the truth is more complex, and businesses have multiple priorities. AI was a major discussion point throughout the year. There was lots of investigation and ad-hoc experiments, but relatively few companies reached the point where they were deploying it in production. ### AI & Personalisation 2024 will be the year we start to see widespread usage of Generative AI across B2B marketing. Many marketing teams have been working on guidelines for when Generative AI should be used to create content, as well as what approval processes are required before generated content can be published. At the moment, the process of generating and then reviewing AI content is a manual one. That is already beginning to change. Technology vendors have spent the past twelve months integrating ChatGPT with their platforms. Marketers will start utilising those tools, and then fill in the gaps with dedicated AI products. There will be lots of discussion around the usage of AI for 1:1 content personalisation, particularly in the context of ABM. Data protection concerns have held back testing of account-specific content created using Generative AI. However, the required technology and legal frameworks are now in place. Expect pilot campaigns to launch during 2024\. Hyper-personalised content is very much the next step on the AI deployment roadmap. ### Data & Targeting The drive for additional personalisation will lead to a renewed focus on data quality. In recent years, much of the attention has been on integrating first-party data sources and getting ready for the retirement of third-party cookies. Many companies have run out of internal data sources that can be used to enhance their marketing database, while at the same time, data quality still isn't good enough to meet modern segmentation and personalisation requirements. As a consequence, a renewed interest in the best third-party data sources is inevitable, particularly once the impact of Chrome's third-party cookie deprecation is better understood. Different ad vendors have utilised very different approaches to closing the capability gap left by third-party cookies. This will lead to further centralisation of programmatic advertising as brands flock to the data vendors with the best audiences and the best targeting capabilities. ### Analytics & Attribution The end of third-party cookies will also have a significant impact on reporting and attribution. Any full-funnel attribution solution that relies on web tracking will be affected. It will become harder to link web activity across different platforms, particularly now that Firefox and Safari are also restricting the use of URL tracking parameters. At the moment, browsers are not targeting UTMs, but other types of tracking codes are being removed from URLs, including those that link web activity to contact records in both Marketo and Hubspot. Cookieless conversion tracking has been around for a while, but not everyone has implemented it. Expect a decline in tracked conversions as a result, although not in form fills. The challenge will be in tracing the source of those form fills as well as the preceding activity across both website and external channels. Much of the relevant tracking information will still exist, but not in a format that can be easily linked together for a customer journey analysis. AI solutions will emerge to fill that capability gap. Technology vendors can use machine learning to fill the missing data based on trends observed across their user base, in a way that can't be done using the data available to just one company. Marketing teams with in-house AI expertise will try to conduct their own attribution analyses to supplement vendor-supplied insights. This will be particularly relevant when trying to identify target accounts or priority channels, as well as when selecting the most appropriate content for campaigns. For all the discussion around AI-based content generation, AI will become most useful in the realms of reporting and data analysis. 2024 will be the year that predictive data analysis becomes a mainstream part of the marketing toolkit, with automated content generation acting as a supporting tool for use cases where manual content generation workflows are unable to scale. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Next-Gen Automation: How AI will Impact Business URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/next-gen-automation-ai-in-business/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T08:30:41.000Z It was only ever a matter of 'when' AI entered the public consciousness. Too many novels and science-fiction films have been made about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. The prospect of thinking machines has long captured the public imagination, as has the dangers presented by such a technology. We're still a long way from the doomsday scenario envisioned by the likes of Terminator or System Shock, but 2023 has given the first indications of how AI will impact society over the coming years. Already, there have been signs that the technology will disrupt business and society in new and unexpected ways. No one foresaw that the first casualties of AI would be copywriters, but that is precisely what we saw at the start of last year. There are still plenty of copywriters in business, but far fewer than twelve months ago. Many small businesses now use ChatGPT for their marketing copy instead of paying a freelancer. Expect translation to be the next industry to be totally disrupted by Generative AI. Both copywriters and translators suffer from the same problem. Many marketers would rather do it themselves. When someone else does either task, there are always vocal complaints about the quality and speed of output. That reflects the fundamental problem that will affect large swathes of the services sector. Why outsource tasks to another company when AI can do it for you instead? ### AI Outsourcing The last couple of decades have seen a wave of outsourcing to low cost locations. Consumers have become used to dealing with overseas call centres for customer service, while businesses have moved routine back office processes to offshore contractors and outsourcing companies based in countries with low wages. Such outsourcing contracts are still expensive once mark-up and account management fees are taken into consideration, while the quality of the output rarely meets customer expectations. As soon as the technology is ready, companies will look to replace long term offshoring contracts with AI. That should allow companies to reduce costs while also increasing flexibility. When business needs change, it will be far easier to retrain an AI script than to retrain a team of human workers based in a different country. ### Front-line AI At highest risk are jobs that businesses have tried to offshore in the past without success. These are the people that companies such as BT are looking to replace by 2030\. Call centres will be a top target, as will the aforementioned copywriters and translators. Replacing onshore workers carrying out routine tasks in high cost locations is how the biggest cost savings will be made, and make no mistake: cost-cutting will be a significant driver for AI adoption in enterprise. Anyone who uses a computer to follow a script or carry out routine tasks will be impacted. As always, the brunt of cuts will fall on more junior workers. These people won't struggle for alternative employment. Employment levels are at record highs across the western world. Despite this, there are widespread shortages of teachers, nurses and social workers. We will see a wave of career changes as people made redundant through automation retrain for front-line careers in public services. Meanwhile, many office workers will see a substantial change in their roles as AI begins to impact their day-to-day responsibilities. Entry level job descriptions will be need to be redefined, becoming more focused around AI oversight and internal collaboration. This will provide new recruits with the ability to ascend the skill ladder. I'm not forecasting drastic changes or widespread redundancies at middle management level though. ### AI Management Generative AI may be fast becoming a multi-purpose tool. However, it does not have the inter-personal skills or human experience needed to engage in management tasks. It cannot mentor junior team members, manage the changing business environment or engage in office politics. Ultimately, AI lacks accountability and the decision-making power to do those things. Human nature demands someone to blame when things go wrong. That will be the manager responsible for the relevant business function. Businesses will still need their existing management layers to keep reporting lines flowing as well as to decide strategy. AI changes how managers approach their responsibilities, but it doesn't change the need for management tasks to happen. Each department will need an AI expert responsible for training and managing the AI models used within the team. That will likely be the relevant operations team already in place. ### AI Operations Managing AI is about more than just prompt engineering, although this will be an important skill in the short and medium term. It's also about maintaining the data flows and technology integrations necessary for the AI model to deliver the expected output. The proliferation of code-free integration tools is already making this significantly easier for the modern enterprise. Mapping data flows and designing integration use cases requires a level of technical expertise beyond the skill of the typical manager. AI can offer advice and suggested field mappings, but it cannot validate all the necessary use cases and downstream impacts on other systems. System architecture is a specialist field for this reason. The need to comply with data protection and information security legislation adds an extra set of considerations, requiring human input from a specialist. It will never be possible for a business user to configure a new AI model just from a single prompt unless that model is a standalone AI that doesn't use any data or applications available across the wider business. Compliance standards such as ISO 27001 will demand a design and governance process in order to prevent data leaks and ensure the model is non-discriminatory. We may also see copyright and brand compliance concerns leading to additional legal reviews for AI generated content in many situations. ### AI Investment As with any new technology investment, business cases will need to be written and budget secured before any new AI models can be deployed. That won't change as the technology matures, but gaining approval for new AI implementations will become easier over time. Once businesses understand the costs and benefits of AI, it will make scoping new use cases for the technology easier. No business will adopt AI just for the sake of it. The technology will need to provide a return on investment. Much of the benefit from AI comes in the form of efficiency gains, which is generally the most challenging type of improvement to measure. The work hours saved through AI usage will need to be quantified in dollar terms, as this will offset the technology or server costs of using AI - which is currently very expensive for your typical Generative AI model. It is far easier to prove the financial benefits of AI if it is being used to slash agency budgets and contractor fees. That is another reason why translators and copywriters are especially vulnerable to being replaced by AI. ### AI Productivity Economists have been talking for years about stagnant corporate productivity. AI has long been touted as the source for any future efficiency gains, but older machine learning technologies were often expensive and didn't always deliver sufficient output to justify the high price tag. It's unclear as to whether this same problem will affect generative AI as well. We are still in the very early days of the generative AI product cycle, and the most exciting use cases for the technology haven't made it into production yet. That shouldn't stop businesses from exploring use cases for AI. They can stop worrying about the impact of AI on their own jobs though. The technology does pose a significant threat to a highly limited set of careers. Everyone else should see substantial benefits, provided they have the operational and technical skills to make the most of this new and exciting technology. ### AI-Generated Personalisation URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/ai-generated-personalisation/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:58:33.000Z There has been a fair amount of talk about the decline of email nurture this year. Many people have stopped believing in email as a channel and nurture as a strategy. Yet, we're not seeing a consistent decline in nurture campaign results across the board. Some marketers are still getting great results from their nurtures. As with any other marketing tactic, email nurtures are successful if they deliver the fundamentals: the right time, the right content, and the right place. Poor-performing nurtures are often the result of unsuitable content sent to uninterested contacts at the wrong point of the buying cycle. The difference between a successful nurture and an unsuccessful one is personalisation. ### The Bare Minimum In 2023, AI generated content added to already overwhelmed inboxes and social feeds. People have become more discerning about the content they read. Poor quality and unoriginal content is ignored, while content personalised to buyer interests and persona has become non-negotiable. Targeted content has stopped being a nice-to-have and is now an essential component of customer engagement across all stages of the funnel. Improved personalisation has been central to every major B2B marketing trend of the past few years. ABM is explicitly a strategy for achieving 1:1 personalisation, based on account attributes. However, not every product or campaign is necessarily suited to an account-based targeting strategy. Many businesses still see greater success with persona or vertical-based strategies, particularly for products or services that are of interest to a broad audience. ABM has tended to result in a shift towards micro-targeted social campaigns and programmatic media, with the result that email campaigns have been left behind because they are seen as too difficult and time-consuming to personalise properly. Creating dynamic emails in platforms such as Marketo or HubSpot is still a very long-winded process, requiring both copy and audiences to be manually created for every content version. That's even before concerns around first-party data quality are considered. ### The Next Step Automating dynamic content creation is the next major milestone for generative AI in B2B marketing. Generative AI already does an excellent job of taking existing brand-approved content and then rewriting it for different personas. Meanwhile, data analysts have been using machine learning to calculate buyer interests and marketing personas for years. Combining these two different elements of AI will allow marketers to scale email personalisation in a way that hasn't been possible in the past. All that's missing today is the integration between AI and marketing automation, required to remove the manual editing currently needed to create dynamic email content. Once those integrations are in place, marketers will finally be able to create 1:1 personalised marketing automation campaigns that match the targeting capabilities found in ABM advertising platforms. Interest in email nurture has always been cyclical, rising and falling as new marketing automation capabilities are unlocked. Email marketing is definitely in a slump at the moment. However, AI-based personalisation will be the next revolutionary capability to drive the adoption of one of the oldest and most enduring of digital marketing channels. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Measurement through Unification URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/unification-through-measurement/ Last updated: 2023-12-13T08:30:25.000Z Many marketers view marketing operations through the operational responsibilities that give the discipline its name. However, marketing ops has many roles within the business. The day-to-day tasks of budgeting, campaign execution and lead flow management are important, but they frequently take precedence over the broader role that MOPs can play in the modern enterprise. By allowing the tactical to drown out the strategic, businesses ignore the true value of marketing operations as the discipline which allows marketing to measure itself. For many CMOs, reporting is the most important role for marketing operations. The value of marketing ops is delivered by aligning the technology stack and first party databases to overall marketing objectives. It is these technology and data skills that make marketing operations so integral to the success of any B2B marketing team. Without them it would not be possible to report on the success of individual campaigns, let alone the overall marketing program. ### Mapping Technology Sprawl Every application in the martech stack has a different use case, contributing to the overall health and performance of the business. Regardless of whether it's the visitor tracking data in Google Analytics, the event attendance history in Zoom or the opportunity information in CRM. The modern enterprise has hundreds of different data repositories each containing information about a small part of the overall funnel. Delivering an accurate view of marketing performance requires combining all these sources into one dataset. That's far easier said than done. In any business, both marketing and sales activity is fragmented across numerous channels and technology platforms. According to Scott Brinker of chiefmartec.com, the average SMB uses 172 apps across their business. That's actually 10% fewer than last year. This technology sprawl scales rapidly as companies grow, with the largest enterprises using 622 different technologies. In a data driven organisation, the impact of each application needs to be measured both individually and as a unified whole. How these disparate applications and data sources are joined together affects the metrics that can be used to set benchmarks and measure the success of campaigns. Identifying these individual data sources and linking them together requires a skilled data analyst. That's even before the analyst has created a single report for the business. Before designing any dashboards, catalogue the individual applications and map the links between them. That doesn't just mean mapping integrations and data flows, although this is important. It also means considering any overlaps in data or usage between applications. ### The Value of Process Some overlap in application functionality is inevitable. Vendors always look to extend the functionality of their products to make them more sticky. Where feature overlap does exist, Marketing operations need to provide guidance on which application to use for every situation. That guidance should be turned into a formal procedure, which is then rigorously monitored and routinely enforced. Marketers will find it tempting to bypass established processes in order to bring campaigns to market more quickly. In taking shortcuts, they are only harming their own ability to measure the end-to-end results of their programs. It is common for campaigns go live before reporting requirements are considered. That is why templates and processes are so important. They make sure that all the tracking and reporting requirements are considered before a campaign is launched. Otherwise, small but important configurations such as UTM parameters or campaign codes can be missed, which leads to gaps in campaign tracking and ultimately reporting. ### Guiding Marketing Attribution All too often, attribution projects fail because top-of-funnel engagement history can't be matched back to opportunities at the bottom of the funnel. Data analysts cannot link disparate touchpoints if campaign tracking or technology integrations are incorrectly configured. That is why the role of marketing ops in setting standards is so important. Marketers frequently assume the technology 'just works'. It's up to marketing operations to make sure it actually does work, in a way that meets business needs. As such, always test everything from end-to-end, even if it's just to make sure that leads are passed to all the right places with all the correct information. Every campaign needs to provide a return of some description. That is why attribution reporting is so important. However, ROI doesn't need to be measured in revenue or leads. For much of the marketing technology stack, business value can be measured through the operational efficiencies it generates and the resulting savings in man hours. Automation unlocks possibilities that simply cannot be achieved through human effort alone. Without an integrated technology stack, multi-touch and full-funnel attribution simply aren't possible at scale. That makes it incredibly hard for marketing leaders to accurately plan future marketing investments. In this situation, planning is just guess work. The right technology and data investments enable more informed decision making, that can lead to improved marketing performance. However, only marketing operations has the skills to make this happen. They just need to be given the opportunity to use them. ### The Rise of Self-Service AI URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/rise-of-self-service-ai/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:58:59.000Z 2023 has undoubtedly been the year of Generative AI. Everyone has long been aware of the potential risks and benefits of Artificial Intelligence - many science fiction novels and films have spoken about the subject. It was only ever a question of when the tremendous potential of AI turned into an everyday reality. Yet, for many data scientists, AI and machine learning have been a critical part of their daily workflow for the past decade. Martech vendors have been announcing major new AI features for the last six or seven years. Machine learning in the realm of data management has been around for far longer than that. The revolutionary change brought about by ChatGPT was the introduction of those capabilities to the general public. ### Custom Applications AI models are no longer the domain of specialists. It is now possible for non-technical users to utilise advanced AI in their everyday workflow. Developers have been integrating the ChatGPT API into their apps precisely to enable the kinds of AI-enabled workflows that are now starting to emerge. Every martech application is working on an AI feature set, leveraging one of the major LLM models, such as OpenAI or Google Bard, in the backend. In the last few weeks, the major AI vendors have started rolling out self-service AI tools for business users, launching no-code tools for creating custom AI applications based on ChatGPT. OpenAI kicked off the trend with the announcement of their GPTs app store early last month, while Microsoft announced CoPilot Studio at their recent Ignite customer conference. ### Custom Workflows These new AI builder tools will expand the reach of artificial intelligence to every corner of marketing operations. It is already possible to embed AI into the custom applications and integrations that are endemic across many enterprise organisations, but these AI builders will allow AI to be integrated at scale into manual workflows too. The use of AI in data cleaning, audience selection or predictive analytics is hardly new functionality, but such capabilities have previously been restricted to expensive add-ons or niche enterprise products. Soon, AI builder platforms will allow marketing operations to leverage custom automation in their day-to-day data or reporting workflows without purchasing additional technology. ### Custom Personalisation In particular, AI can support first-party data initiatives by collecting analytics data across channels and then using it to determine customer interests, as well as the optimum content and channels to reach specific accounts or contacts. Any AI-derived data and insights can then be used to expand campaign personalisation through content sourced from generative AI. This is functionality that technologies such as 6sense have built highly successful businesses on. Concerns about readability, accuracy and brand compliance mean that some level of human review will always be needed. However, AI can be used to initially generate hyper-personalised versions of the same content for different verticals or segments, as well as to automatically publish the approved versions to the final asset. AI-enhanced automation tools can then select the most appropriate content version for each account, without needing a resource-intensive manual review of the entire target list. In a market where generic content is no longer good enough, AI has the potential to supercharge campaign performance. Using the right AI-enhanced automations will enable marketing teams of all sizes to deliver effective personalisation to customers of all sizes. Soon, good use of AI will become a vital component of a successful campaign. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### AI enhances Business Intelligence URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/ai-enhances-bi/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:59:19.000Z 2023 may have been a breakthrough year for AI among the general public. However, data analysts have been using it to categorise and normalise data for far longer. There's been a lot of talk about using AI to build complex machine-learning models that spot data trends, which can be used to improve future marketing performance. However, that's not actually a new capability. The same technology has powered intent data, social media algorithms and predictive lead scoring for at least the past decade. Extending those AI models to assist with data interpretation has long been an ambition of data scientists. Recent advances in generative AI have finally made that possible, democratising machine learning techniques by opening them up to a general business audience, beyond just highly-trained data analysts. Perhaps the real breakthrough for Generative AI is to aid marketers in navigating the typical marketing performance dashboard. ### Easier Discovery In recent months, many leading BI vendors have announced AI assisted discovery and integration tools for their platforms. For Salesforce and Microsoft, this was unveiled as part of their platform-wide CoPilot services. While standalone BI vendors such as Domo and Qlik have integrated ChatGPT into their products. Each of these tools allows marketers to query dashboards using natural language search terms, rather than just using pre-defined filters configured by the dashboard owner. Most executive dashboards have a lot of data on them, far more than the best practice guidance of 6-10 reports. This makes it difficult for managers to see the specific piece of information they need, particularly for those not used to interacting with a BI dashboard. Generative AI allows marketers to pull out the specific reports they need in a search query, which is especially useful for more complex requests such as filtering down to an arbitrary group of campaign codes. ### Better Interpretation Then, once the right data is displayed on screen, AI can write a summary of the visualisation in natural language as well. Executives are typically concerned with trends and benchmarks rather than raw numbers. Yet, a lot of the graphs floating around the typical enterprise don't show such comparisons. Accurate reporting requires knowing the context. Without a trend line or benchmark metric, few people understand whether the graph they're looking at shows good performance or bad performance. Due to the nature of their roles, senior executives are often divorced from the vital details needed to make sense of the raw numbers. To decision-makers, explaining the context behind a graph transforms it from a pretty visualisation into a meaningful business insight. That's why benchmarks are so important. They allow the dashboard viewer to judge overall performance in the context of the business. After all, everyone wants their marketing strategy to be data driven. The real challenge is finding the data insights needed to drive investment priorities. In most organisations, the necessary data to guide planning already exists within the business. There may already be a dashboard which covers the relevant topic. It just hasn't been collated together and displayed in a format which makes sense to marketing managers. That's where AI can make an immediate impact. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### HubSpot acquires Clearbit URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/hubspot-clearbit/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T22:59:51.000Z > ABM is an area of weakness for HubSpot, due to gaps in their account based targeting capabilities. For a platform focused on inbound marketing, that's becoming a problem. Now they're buying a data vendor to fill the void. Hubspot has long pitched itself as an all in one solution, covering the different marketing technology capabilities necessary for small businesses. In recent years, this has included improved integration and reporting tools for marketing ops. Last week, they supercharged their data enrichment capabilities by acquiring a dedicated data vendor, Clearbit, for an undisclosed fee. The deal has not yet closed but is expected to be finalised early next year. Built-in data enrichment is not a new concept for HubSpot customers. The platform already has a basic account enrichment capability called HubSpot Insights, which is used to append firmographic and technographic information onto account records. There have been plenty of complaints about the accuracy and completeness of this service, which means that many HubSpot customers choose to use alternative data providers. ### Improved Insights Clearbit is intended to enhance the existing HubSpot Insight enrichment capability, and not just through better quality data. Strong integrations have always been central to the Clearbit value proposition. For this reason, they are widely used as an account data source by martech vendors such as Drift. Accompanying this focus has been a strong emphasis on using AI to enhance data quality, such as through automated industry classification. Clearbit are far from unique in using AI in this way. It's been standard practice within the data business for years. However, HubSpot do not have any such capabilities within their current platform. This is a critical oversight, given the importance of ABM to modern B2B marketing. By embedding Clearbit into their platform, HubSpot are looking to expand the range of account data available to their customers. Just enriching existing account records is no longer good enough, both sales and marketing want visibility of the entire addressable market. That is what Clearbit brings to HubSpot: the ability to expand the marketing database of their customers by adding a list of lookalike accounts that can be targeted through ABM techniques. Many enterprise businesses do this manually already, including in HubSpot, but smaller marketing teams often lack the budget or data expertise to create a comprehensive database of every company that meets their ideal customer profile. ### New Intent On top of this, Clearbit brings another vital ABM capability to HubSpot: intent data. HubSpot does a good job of tracking engagement across first-party channels, and does have a predictive scoring capability at enterprise tiers. However, it currently has no way of summarising buyer interests nor visibility of third-party activity. Like many data providers, Clearbit has made a significant effort to aggregate account activity into meaningful intent topics describing areas of engagement for active accounts. This will significantly improve HubSpot's target account list capabilities by allowing data-driven account selection. Acquiring Clearbit resolves a crucial weakness within HubSpot's segmentation capabilities. Like many marketing automation platforms, HubSpot's account targeting capabilities are poor. This is a curious oversight for a platform that has long been optimised for inbound marketing. B2B media spends are increasingly optimised towards account based audiences. However, HubSpot has limited tools for building a target account list for ad campaigns. Integrating Clearbit into their platform is a significant step into closing this capability for HubSpot customers of all sizes. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Why Reporting is Storytelling? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-narrative-behind-measuring-marketing-performance/ Last updated: 2023-11-03T13:42:21.000Z In an uncertain economic environment, the question of business value is paramount. Marketing is a revenue generating activity. The most successful CMOs are measured on pipeline delivered as well as leads generated. However, not everything marketing does has an easy to measure revenue contribution. Brand awareness is an obvious example of this, but it applies to demand generation activities too. For many campaigns, business value comes from influencing existing opportunities rather than sourcing new ones. Whether it’s through increased deal sizes or accelerated close dates, marketing can have a significant impact on the outcome of sales-sourced deals as well as on marketing-sourced opportunities. Yet the moment the sales pipeline starts to look empty, leadership focuses on lead generation to the exclusion of everything else. There will be revenue targets to meet and KPIs to hit. It doesn’t matter how the CMO is measured. Too many senior leadership teams only care about how marketing can deliver a full pipeline of new leads for sales. The broader benefits of marketing are forgotten. It then falls onto the CMO to present the complete picture of marketing’s contribution to the bottom line. However, the marketing language of MQLs and SQOs is rarely understood by the business. It is the CMO’s job to translate those metrics into a language the typical board member does understand. ## Clarity The task of selling marketing to the business is about far more than numbers though. It is ultimately about interpreting those numbers to maximise the business value of marketing. A good CMO will tell a narrative of how marketing is enhancing business performance, all backed by the data and metrics delivered to them by marketing operations. They will highlight the numbers that show the highest business impact and provide explanations if there is a significant underperformance. When it comes to reporting, choosing the best metrics to present is just as important as calculating accurate figures. All this requires the CMO to have the right numbers available to sell their performance in a way that benefits the wider marketing team. Although, the CMO is not solely responsible for interpreting reports, just as data analysts are not solely responsible for building accurate dashboards. Both accuracy and narrative are a shared responsibility. A strong data analyst can play an active role in crafting the narrative, even if their most important job is to keep everyone honest. ## Integrity In a data-driven business, reporting on past performance is used to improve future outcomes. Decisions need to be made based on the actual numbers, both good and bad. All the metrics presented right across the business have to be accurate. As such, it is vital that everyone challenges the spin and avoids misinterpreting the data. Inaccurate numbers and invented narratives always get exposed eventually. Narrative is important in providing context around the results, but only if it matches the real-world reasons for campaign performance. Marketing operations has a critical role in finding the right numbers, in both senses of the term. A successful marketing operations team isn’t just reporting on the KPIs set by others. Instead, they’re actively defining what can be measured, and deciding which KPIs make sense for the business. No one else has visibility of all the available data in the enterprise, nor can anyone else provide an end-to-end view of marketing performance in a single suite of dashboards. ## Consistency Many dashboards try to do too much, combining numerous unrelated attributes into a single view to aid discovery. All too often, this overwhelms users, confusing them with lots of graphs and filters they don’t understand. Clarity and consistency are critical. The design must start from the perspective of the person consuming the dashboard. Consider the questions they intend to answer as well as the stories their users want to tell. Then work back from that to the specific attributes, layouts and filters needed to meet that requirement. Reports are much more impactful if they are focused on a small set of related metrics that can be combined into a single narrative. However, no dashboard should ever attempt to spin the metrics. That needs to be added afterwards when the numbers are presented to the business. For the business to succeed, it is essential that marketers can separate the narrative from the cold hard facts. This article was first published by [CRMT Digital](https://www.crmtdigital.com/knowledge-hub/the-narrative-behind-measuring-marketing-performance/). ### New Deliverability Requirements for 2024 URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/new-deliverability-requirements-2024/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:00:19.000Z > Google and Yahoo have announced new guidelines for high volume email senders. The changes are merely enforcing existing best practices, but do check the configuration of your marketing automation platform. Getting marketing emails into the inbox has always been difficult. Marketers are collateral damage in the ongoing battle between email providers and ever increasing volumes of spam. Each year, additional deliverability protections are introduced for legitimate bulk email senders to differentiate them from spammers. In 2024, those guidelines required to get emails delivered will get stricter. Google and Yahoo recently announced updated deliverability guidelines for anyone sending emails to mailboxes hosted on their platforms. As part of this, companies sending more than 5,000 emails per day will have much stronger guidelines to follow than other senders. The new email deliverability guidelines cover both B2B and B2C marketers, as they affect anyone sending to business email hosted by Google Workspace, as well as consumers with Gmail or Yahoo email accounts. The aim is to guard against spoofing, which is the common spammer tactic of sending emails in the name of your boss or another senior executive at your employer. ### Server Configuration Firstly, Google and Yahoo will now require a best practice DNS setup for anyone sending email. Any form of server misconfiguration will see emails marked as spam. There are 3 parts to this, which most marketing automation platforms already enforce anyway. The following are now required for all servers: - An SPF record listing the IP address or server used to send emails - DKIM authentication is configured for all domains used to send emails - The IP address used to send emails has a valid reverse DNS record configured Do check with your IT department that all relevant DNS records have been created for any domain used to send marketing emails. Your marketing automation platform will provide guidance around the exact DNS records that need to be configured for any domain used to send marketing emails. ### Spam Complaints Secondly, Google have now published a benchmark for spam complaints. Inbox providers have always closely monitored the number of spam complaints received, but the exact thresholds they use have never been published until now. Google will require that the spam rate be kept below 0.3%, and recommend that marketers keep this below 0.1%. This is based on the number of people marking the email as spam in the email client. It isn't measured by marketing automation providers, but can be tracked using Google Postmaster Tools or Sender Score. Thirdly, Google and Yahoo are now enforcing a DMARC quarantine policy with stricter requirements for high-volume senders. They will start blocking impersonated email addresses. To comply, marketers will need to stop using their corporate email domain (e.g. example.com) in the from address of their email campaigns, and instead send emails from the email domain configured in their marketing automation platform (e.g. marketing.example.com). This is already best practice but has never been enforced previously. ### List Unsubscribe Finally, Google will now require a one-click unsubscribe link to be included in all marketing messages sent by high-volume senders. This is used by the list unsubscribe message displayed above the email in Gmail. Most marketing automation providers already add the necessary email headers to any emails deployed through their platform, but it does require a valid unsubscribe link to be included in the footer of every email. As such, always test the unsubscribe link in every campaign before hitting the send button. Failure to do so will now have an impact on future email deliverability. Email providers need to be confident that you won't send spam to their customers. Deliverability has always been about reputation and server configuration rather than content. It's the history of your marketing automation platform, as well as the history of your from address that determines whether marketing emails reach the inbox. Now, the more emails you send, the stricter the guidelines you will need to follow. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Drift goes Bionic URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/drift-goes-bionic/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:00:44.000Z > In the run up to their recent product announcements, Drift claimed that they were going to revolutionise B2B marketing. They haven't quite lived up to that claim, but they have shown how important Generative AI is to the future of conversation marketing. Drift like to claim they invented conversational marketing. They certainly pioneered the use of chatbots within B2B, taking the personalisation capabilities seen within B2C websites and applying them to B2B buying journeys. In the years since then, they've taken those conversational capabilities beyond chatbots into email and landing page scenarios. At the same time, many Drift implementations have struggled to prove ROI amid internal pressure to adopt a cheaper all-in-one chat solution that can be used by support or e-commerce teams, as well as marketing teams. Drift is a high-end solution and comes with a price tag to match. The main problem with Drift is that many companies are still using it to create very basic chatbot experiences, that appear very superficial to end users accustomed to in-depth support or e-commerce use cases for chat. It's rarely been a solution that customers can use to enter arbitrary questions and expect to get a relevant answer. All too often, it's used as an alternative to web forms, particularly in situations where marketers want to pre-qualify website visitors for relevance before collecting their personal information. It's pretty good at that, but can be used for much more. Instead, the true power of Drift lies in their AI capabilities. This has been the case for a while, but is particularly true now that Generative AI has finally reached the mainstream. Last week, those capabilities received a rebrand and a GPT enhanced facelift. That allows Drift to act as a true chatbot with the ability to answer arbitrary questions using website content or associated marketing assets to train the AI model. Effectively, Drift can be used to summarise your website content and better direct visitors to the right page. That supplements the playbook scripts configured on specific pages for specific campaigns. ### Site Concierge More interesting is Drift's attempt to move beyond just being a chatbot service. They're offering a new Site Concierge user experience, which breaks out the various components of the Drift chatbot into separate floating buttons that overlay website pages. This allows for a dedicated book a meeting button to be displayed alongside a GPT-powered search button. A personalised content recommendation engine is also promised, using AI to recommend assets and pages related to the pages visitors have already viewed. In effect, Site Concierge replaces the Drift chatbot on pages where visitor interaction is unlikely. The Drift chatbot becomes another widget in the Site Concierge toolkit that can be placed on campaign pages or entry points, in order to direct visitors to the right content for their buying stage and persona. The book a meeting capability then becomes another lead capture mechanism to be included on pricing or solution pages, as well as conversion pages. It's an open question whether Site Concierge can replace the existing search or content recommendation mechanisms already used on enterprise websites. Drift would certainly like them to because it gives their product a stickiness that they have often lacked. I can certainly see the benefits of this approach for website visitors, for whom chatbots aren't appropriate in every situation. It won't replace the value of a good chatbot script on the right campaign page, but it doesn't need to. Plenty of website pages don't have a custom chatbot script today. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### CoPilot: Generative AI meets Windows URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/copilot-generative-ai-launches-in-windows/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:03:56.000Z Generative AI hype has overwhelmed the technology sector for the last nine months. It was Microsoft's alliance with OpenAI that kickstarted this buzz. The launch of ChatGPT and Bing Chat at the start of the year opened the eyes of the world to the full potential of Artificial Intelligence. Tech firms have spoken of nothing else since. During this time, Microsoft have announced multiple generative AI products across much of their enterprise software portfolio. This week, those capabilities finally reached Windows with the release of Microsoft CoPilot. ### CoPilot for Windows CoPilot is not the first time that Microsoft have tried to embed an AI based virtual assistant into their flagship operating system. It was only earlier this year that Microsoft removed the last vestiges of the ill fated Cortana. Many of the capabilities of the old Cortana integration are available in Microsoft CoPilot. The ability to find files or tweak settings based on natural language prompts is a key pitch for CoPilot in Windows, just as it was for the old virtual assistant. In effect, CoPilot can act as a supercharged search function, which is useful but is probably not something that people will need day to day. That's what killed the equivalent Cortana functionality. Not enough people needed it to justify the cost of the backend cloud services. The new CoPilot button in Windows does also offer a direct integration with Bing Chat, but it's unclear how many people will actually use it. In recent years, Microsoft have made a big effort to unify the search capabilities across Bing, Office and Windows. The idea is that you should be able to get the same results across all channels. This sounds nice in theory but has also been controversial. Not everyone appreciates seeing their OneDrive or SharePoint files in Bing search results, even if it is presented securely. ### Microsoft 365 Chat CoPilot does have one significant advantage over Cortana that will drive adoption. It is a Generative AI after all. The real pitch for CoPilot is its integration with Office, and the associated cloud services in Microsoft 365\. Here too, Microsoft are building on top of existing capabilities, but they're also able to offer something new. A chatbot built right into Microsoft Office with all the capabilities of ChatGPT. They've even given the chatbot its own branding: Microsoft 365 Chat. Much of the discussion around CoPilot has focused on its ability to help draft or redraft documents and emails. Yet, the Office team has been working on similar capabilities for a while. Features such as Editor in Word or Designer in PowerPoint could already redraft individual slides or paragraphs. These capabilities are already helpful, if somewhat inflexible, and will be massively enhanced by the integration of a Generative AI. However, for many executives, the ability to transcript meeting recordings or summarise content will be more useful. Microsoft has previous experience with auto-generated meeting transcriptions and highlighting actions in emails across much of its Office 365 portfolio. Outlook has had a suggested actions feature for years, an add-on which has gradually become more useful over time. Generative AI adds an extra layer to this capability, providing the ability to summarise an email thread as well as greater accuracy for video transcriptions. ### Cost Control The use cases for CoPilot in Microsoft 365 are compelling. The pricing is far less so. At $30 per month, I can see many companies choosing to pass on this innovative new technology just due to cost. The equivalent Google Bard functionality doesn't have a steep price tag, which could prove to be a significant competitive advantage to Google Workspace. Microsoft does have one advantage, which could help them argue against cost concerns. Few technology companies are as trusted by enterprise, which should overcome many of the compliance and security hurdles that slowed the adoption of Generative AI in a business context this year. Much like Bing Chat, Microsoft doesn't use the conversations of business customers to train the underlying ChatGPT AI model. It's still early days, and business usage of Generative AI is still in the experimental stage. Not all of the envisioned use cases for Generative AI will achieve mainstream adoption. It's also not clear how much companies or individuals will be willing to pay just for Generative AI functionality. This has impacted the market for virtual assistants such as Alexa or Siri, growth of which has stalled in recent years. We're already seeing limited usage of the technology for content writing and translation, but mostly only among financially stretched small businesses. At the moment, the output of a good human copywriter is still vastly superior. This may change over time. ### Salesforce debuts Generative AI at Dreamforce URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/salesforce-debuts-generative-ai-at-dreamforce/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:01:04.000Z > At Dreamforce, it was Salesforce's turn to launch an AI assistant. In many ways, CoPilot is similar to the products launched by their competitors, but it does introduce some additional use cases for Generative AI. Salesforce have long been at the forefront of the AI trend. For years, they've been gradually embedding their Einstein AI capabilities across all aspects of their product portfolio. Indeed, activating the various Einstein features within Sales Cloud is an excellent way for midsize companies to get started with AI. There has been a sense though that some of their recent talk about AI is more about bandwagoning on the buzz around Generative AI buzz rather than about delivering effective product solutions. Dreamforce did a lot to dispel that notion. The Generative AI hype has slowed in recent weeks, due to concerns about accuracy and security. Businesses have introduced strict guidelines around its use in order to guard against potential data leaks. Meanwhile, well publicised discussions about the risk of hallucinations have led to consumer mistrust. ### Copilot A wave of enterprise Generative AI tools have been launched to meet those concerns. Salesforce are no exception. The launch of a Siri-style Generative AI assistant called Einstein Copilot mirrors similar product launches from their competitors. Much comment was about the integration between Google's AI assistant and Salesforce's AI assistant. Much more interesting is the positioning and use cases envisioned for the new product. Salesforce talked about the typical use cases for generative AI in an enterprise context - sales content creation, account summaries and meeting transcription. Developer support was a big area of focus for Copilot with the launch of the Copilot Studio. As with all Salesforce solutions, this supports admins in making both code and no code customisations. ### Copilot Studio A dedicated prompt builder tool is an interesting inclusion, which will help in crafting and refining AI prompts to get the best results. Expect more vendors to copy this approach as it's a good tool for training users, but it is particularly important for the sprawling Salesforce platform with its multiple customisation options. Even experienced Salesforce developers can struggle to keep up with the best ways to create a workflow for every use case. The keynote added another rarely discussed use case for AI assistants: data discovery. Einstein Copilot was pitched as an extension of the Salesforce Data Cloud within the CRM. This ties into the other big product announcement from Dreamforce, Einstein 1, which is an AI layer on top of the existing Salesforce Data Cloud. ### Einstein 1 The keynote extensively discussed metadata frameworks for integrated applications across Salesforce and third-party applications. This isn't actually a new concept. It's a redefinition of the existing approach used by many CDP vendors to combine datasets into a single customer view. Direct integrations with Snowflake and AWS data lakes make importing third party app data easier, but they're not a revolutionary new capability. Data integration and aggregation have been a focus area for Salesforce for a while now. They were late entering the CDP space, and have been trying to catch up ever since. Including an easy to use AI layer is an easy differentiator for them in a crowded market. It allows for automated data integration and the development of custom AI models on top of the Salesforce platform. None of these capabilities are unique to Salesforce, but few enterprise technology companies do AI quite as well, particularly for firms looking for a no-code solution. Perhaps the most significant change to Data Cloud was in the pricing announcement - Data Cloud will now be bundled with Enterprise editions of the CRM. This may encourage more companies to start using the Data Cloud capabilities and ultimately purchase additional licenses or storage capacity. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Why Everything is Nothing for Apps URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/everything-is-nothing-app/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:04:41.000Z For Elon Musk, it is very much the one that got away. He may be best known for Cars and Spaceships, but the South African-born entrepreneur started his career in the technology sector during the heady days of the dot-com boom. He once owned an online payments app called X.com that famously merged with PayPal before he was ousted as the CEO of the combined company. The full story has been widely recounted in recent weeks, and the parallels between his ambitions at the new X.com and the old X.com are striking. When he took over Twitter, Musk said he wanted to create an everything app. His vision was for an app that can be used to buy or book anything whilst also acting as a social network. It is clear he wants to finish the app he started developing twenty years ago. ### Global Ambitions To be fair to Musk, he is not the only tech entrepreneur who has spoken about building an everything app, equivalent to China's WeChat. Facebook, Uber and Amazon have previously made moves in this direction. Neither have come close to succeeding. In part because of significant structural barriers that exist in Western markets but not in Eastern ones. WeChat started out as a social network. It became the go to destination for money transfers, primarily because of its vast user base. It was the only app in China that everyone used, partly because the Chinese government blocked rival social networks in order to simplify censorship. Grab, the south east Asian ride-hailing app, have been able to make a similar transition more recently for a similar reason. It was able to offer financial services to drivers often underserved by traditional banks, and expanded its user base from there. Its payment services are seeing widespread adoption in the region as a result. They have plenty of competition too, from apps such as Gojek and Sea. ### Western Disincentives Meanwhile, Facebook have tried to make the pivot to financial services more than once, but their payment services have never been widely adopted outside of their own social networks. Fierce competition and powerful incumbents are the reason. The failure of everything apps in the West is nothing to do with technology-averse consumers, but is instead due to the relative power of the mobile platform owners. There are Western tech companies that have succeeded with mobile payments, but these companies have no incentive to extend this success to other areas. Apple and Google could easily develop a multi-purpose app which combines messaging, social media and mobile payment in the same way as WeChat. They already have apps for most of these things in their respective app stores. It's just they'd rather release each function as a separate app. Neither have any real reason to create an everything app. They don't need to, because they already own the hardware and have their own app stores. To Apple and Google, apps are secondary to the main goal of increasing usage of the underlying OS by users and developers. Developer engagement is critical here. WeChat has launched its own built-in app store used to distribute mini apps created by third party developers. These mini apps are a major reason why WeChat has evolved into the behemoth it is today. Such an approach is totally impossible to replicate in the West because both Apple and Google ban apps that act like app stores from their respective marketplaces. Epic Games tried to get this policy changed through the courts but lost. ### Payment-first The success of everything apps in Asia is based around their digital wallet features. Both WeChat and Grab have succeeded in becoming everything apps because they've become the most widely used digital wallets in markets where large populations don't have access to credit cards or bank accounts. In these countries, everything apps are the easiest way to pay for goods and services. They attract developers and businesses to list on their apps because that is where the money is. In the West, the market for digital payments isn't controlled by app developers. Instead, it's controlled by banks and big tech. The leading digital wallet providers are Apple and Google, whose payment services are increasingly popular. Yet, both are still dwarfed by the amount spent on credit cards. Musk's ambition to control half of all digital payments puts him directly up against the big banks, who have already seen off the challenge of fintech companies such as Monzo and Revolut. Apple and Google were able to negotiate with banks and payment processors in order to get their services widely accepted by retailers. PayPal has struggled to achieve the same reach precisely because it's never really had the same backing from the financial sector. PayPal are the oldest and best known of the US digital payment firms. They also spent a decade under the ownership of eBay. The marriage between eBay and PayPal was probably the nearest the West has ever come to an everything app. Ultimately, that combination failed due to competition from Amazon, who became the go-to-destination for e-commerce. PayPal was eventually spin-off because increased competition in online payments meant the links to eBay became a competitive liability. Retailers refused to support a service owned by a competitor, while the ubiquity of credit cards meant that consumers could use alternative payment providers. ### What Revolution? Just offering existing technologies in one app isn't sufficient to ensure mass adoption. Super apps have managed this in Asia because they expanded mobile payments to millions of consumers who previously relied solely on cash. Mobile payments are significantly less important in the West, where technologies such as Apple Pay and contactless credit cards are ubiquitous. Indeed, large parts of Northern Europe are already cashless societies. If X are to succeed in their ambitions as an everything app, they will need to find a way to revolutionise financial services in the West. It is certainly possible that Elon Musk could have managed this with PayPal in 2001, given more time. Two decades of fintech innovation make this a lot harder now. ### Marketo Supercharges Dynamic Chat URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/marketo-supercharges-dynamic-chat/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:01:22.000Z > Adobe have announced a major product update for Dynamic Chat, the often ignored chatbot feature within Marketo. The update finally gives Adobe a viable conversational marketing product, that will interest Marketo users without an alternative chat solution. Adobe have been heavily promoting the Dynamic Chat capability within Marketo for a while. They see it as an important upsell for users of the Marketo platform. It was rolled out to all instances last year. However, adoption of Marketo's conversational marketing capabilities has been limited by a restricted feature set. Perhaps the most significant limitation has been the lack of live chat. At the moment, Marketo Dynamic Chat can only be used to create chatbots, which means that it's often ignored in favour of an all-in-one chat solution. Many brands look to include the option of live chat with LDRs as part of their conversation flows. A purely bot-based chat solution simply isn't flexible enough, even for marketing, as it can't cover bottom of funnel use cases. ### Prime This week, Adobe will release a new Dynamic Chat Prime SKU that includes Live Chat capabilities. The new feature will include dynamic routing and ABM-based routing, as well as an SDK that can be used to implement Dynamic Chat on any landing page. It's still early days. However, it does mean that Marketo is now a viable solution for piloting chatbots across any campaign. Before now, it's been used for pilot projects or one-off campaigns rather than as a key channel for lead generation. The launch of a viable Adobe solution for conversation marketing has implications for other vendors of chatbot apps, particularly marketing-focused solutions such as Drift. Conversational marketing definitely has a role to play in aiding content discovery and accelerating lead generation. Chatbots are an excellent channel for personalising the customer experience, because they allow you to seamlessly collect the information needed for the personalisation to be accurate and effective. ### Beyond Marketing? Although, the use cases for customer chat extend far beyond marketing. For many enterprise organisations, chat is often seen foremost as a support or sales capability rather than a marketing capability. That's ignoring any e-commerce use cases, which Marketo can solve, but for which there are more specialist solutions. However, that introduces friction into the customer experience because it means that customers can't be transparently passed between teams depending on their requirements. For many brands, chat provides an easy way to screen support queries before they reach sales. That's often the first thing that marketers use chatbots for. If sales, marketing, and support are all using different systems, this is more difficult. The latest Marketo Dynamic Chat enhancements at least give prospects a way to directly reach sales through chat. This is just as important. Adobe have generally tried to pitch chat through the content discovery and personalisation benefits, which are harder to get right and have lower ROI. Typically, these capabilities are something you experiment with once you have the conversational marketing capability in place. When implementing chat on the website, marketers are instead pushed to prove ROI through better lead collection. This requires live chat to be effective. With that capability in place, Adobe now have a solution which can be pitched against the likes of Drift as a key part of the martech stack. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Eloqua 23C Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/eloqua-23c-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:05:11.000Z Oracle would have you believe that the headline feature of this month's Eloqua release was UI changes to the settings area of this platform. Yet the Eloqua 23C release is a packed one, with lots of minor updates even if it does lack that headline grabbing new functionality. Even then, the addition of webhook support to the Eloqua platform is actually fairly significant from a technology perspective, even if it probably won't excite marketers. Long-time Eloqua users will have to make do with a truck-load of minor tweaks that fix some of the biggest annoyances and inconsistencies that afflict such a mature platform. The most high profile update is probably the addition of auto-expiry for landing pages. Eloqua has long had the ability to redirect landing pages as well as to expire forms. However, the capability to expire landing pages has been curiously absent, perhaps due to the redirect feature. Now auto-expiry fixes this oversight, allowing landing pages to be automatically redirected on a specified date and time. This means that users don't have to go into Eloqua manually in order to configure redirects when event registration closes, which was never a great user experience for either marketer or visitor. ### Hyperlinks Oracle have also finally fixed one of the biggest inconsistencies that afflicted Eloqua landing pages. Unlike competing marketing automation platforms, Eloqua does not automatically redirect email links for tracking purposes. Instead, users are expected to manually apply tracking to untracked external pages by checking a checkbox under the link settings. This thoroughly confuses marketers, who are never sure whether the checkbox in question needs to be checked or not. As a result, most Eloqua users are trained to always check the 'add redirect tracking' checkbox when adding website links to an email, which is fine except for one small problem that specifically affects Eloqua landing pages. Eloqua does have a different UI for adding Eloqua landing pages to emails compared to external webpage links. The link type setting controls which UI is used. However, virtually nobody actually uses the Landing Page link type - it's far easier to just add the link as an external webpage and then tick the 'add redirect tracking' checkbox. Consequently, that's what everyone does. Unfortunately, this behaviour has the unintended side effect of breaking personalisation of the page and blocking form pre-population. That can be a serious problem if you're linking to a custom preference centre. As a result, Oracle have made a very small UI tweak to the link settings panel, which will have a major impact on the ability to track landing pages properly. If a user links to an Eloqua landing page from an email, then the 'add redirect tracking' checkbox will be disabled. Following this minor update, customer admins can safely update their user training to state that the 'add redirect tracking' checkbox should always be checked when adding email links regardless of destination. ### Page Tags On the subject of tracking, there has been a slight tweak to the page tag settings that should substantially increase the usefulness of auto-tagging rules. The problem with Eloqua page tagging is that it was designed for the early days of the web when corporate websites were much smaller and simpler than they are today. The default site map refresh settings are very aggressive, archiving pages if they haven't been visited in the last seven days. That limits the usefulness of page tagging, which until now had no way of adding newly detected website paths to an existing page tag. Auto-tagging rules can only tag existing website paths. However, auto-tagging rules can't add new pages or sub-folders to a tag, only new HTML documents. Consequently, it is common to see pages removed from a webpage due to low activity but which are not re-added when traffic picks up again. The introduction of the new 'Auto Select New Folders' checkbox to auto-tagging rules fixes all these problems. It will allow Eloqua users to tag specific website paths, while ensuring that the site map won't accidentally remove existing pages from the tag or miss new pages that should be added. This should make page tagging vastly more reliable, allowing it to become the set-and-forget configuration everyone thinks it should be. The new checkbox has also been added to auto meta tagging rules as well, which will be helpful for sites with more complex URL structures. ### Unmapped CDOs Any Eloqua customer that extensively uses custom objects will be aware of the issues caused by unmapped custom object records. It's very easy to accidentally create them, and almost impossible to delete them in bulk. At some point, any Eloqua user that manually uploads custom object records regularly will have forgotten to check the box which maps those records to the contact. There are ways to automatically map CDO records to the contact record, but these need to be configured separately for every CDO. Worse still, unmapped CDO records can't be used for very much beyond reporting. They certainly can't be used in segments or shared filters, the most common reason to create CDOs. Most of the time, unmapped CDO records just sit in your database until someone manually deletes them one by one. They can be deleted by a program, but again this needs to be configured before any CDO records are uploaded to your Eloqua instance. Now there is another way to delete unmapped CDO records. They can be deleted in just three clicks using a new 'delete unmapped CDO records' option under the custom object settings. I know of a few Eloqua customers who will be very happy with the addition of this menu item. ### Integrations There's a new feature in the Salesforce integration app, which I would recommend to anyone who integrates Eloqua with Salesforce. When using integration actions to create or update records in Salesforce, there is an option to write back the ID of the updated Salesforce record to Eloqua. This has long been a mandatory part of the integration configuration. It's now possible to update additional Eloqua fields using the same write-back settings. You can't use this option to sync additional fields to Eloqua, but you can add a static text or date value to any contact field. The primary use case for this new option is the Last Modified by CRM System field, typically set using an update rule in your CRM Update program. That update rule is no longer necessary and can be replaced with this new option. Although, the most interesting integration enhancement in this release is the one I touched on at the beginning of the article: webhooks. Oracle have developed a new webhook app, which they have made available on a controlled availability basis in this release. This significantly simplifies outbound integrations from Eloqua to third party platforms. Webhooks are a lightweight integration technology that allow you to push contacts to external applications from campaign or programs without needing to develop an entire custom integration. There are plenty of third party data providers who support webhooks for data enrichment workflows, or for a more secure method of re-posting form submissions to external sites. I've even used them in competing marketing automation platforms to enhance CRM integrations. Interested Eloqua users will be able to apply to join the webhook app controlled availability program in a few weeks. The Oracle Eloqua 23C Update was scheduled over the weekends of August 5th, 2023 and August 19th, 2023\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to APIs, can be found in the official [release notes](hhttps://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/23C/23C-eloqua-wn.htm). ### Hyperforce Has Lift Off URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/hyperforce-has-lift-off/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:01:41.000Z > Salesforce are in the early stages of another major platform migration. This one is purely a backend change, but Salesforce admins should still check for any customisations that may break when they are migrated to the Hyperforce infrastructure. The migration from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning feels like it happened only yesterday. Yet, it actually wrapped up three years ago. For many Salesforce admins, the total revamp of the Salesforce UI was highly disruptive, even if users didn't really share that pain. Yet, no sooner was the Lightning migration complete then Salesforce started the countdown to their next major platform migration. The new Hyperforce architecture was announced in 2020, and is part of a plan to shift Salesforce infrastructure onto public cloud services such as AWS. That has significant cost benefits to Salesforce, as well as allowing more flexibility in where Salesforce instances are hosted. That's not to say that Salesforce are closing all their first party data centres, they're not. Some products and regions still haven't been made available on the Hyperforce architecture. The vision is that the majority of Salesforce users will have been moved to public cloud hosting within the next couple of years. ### Migration A few months ago, Salesforce released a Hyperforce assistant tool to prepare users for the eventual migration of their instances to the new backend. That tool has now reached general availability. Hyperforce is only a backend change with limited user impact. However, admins that have heavily customised their Salesforce instance should check if there are server-specific dependencies in their customisations. Also, things like certificates and IP addresses will change, which may have downstream impacts on IT teams. Some Salesforce customers may not have to wait long before their instance is transferred to the architecture. I'm already seeing many low usage instances being migrated this year. Typically, the migrations are scheduled for new release maintenance windows, such as the one for next month's Winter '24 release. Larger and more complex instances will have to wait much longer, just as they did with the Classic to Lightning migration. ### Winter Release In the interim, there is still plenty for Salesforce admins to be doing. The Winter release is as packed as ever, even if it lacks a headline-grabbing new feature. There are a lot of smaller enhancements that affect opportunities (with split opps being a particular focus in this release), related lists and the customisation experience. Salesforce Admins also should start preparing for the impending changes to user profiles by documenting their existing profiles and permission sets. There are some permission-related enhancements in this release, but the big changes aren't due to begin rolling out until Spring 24, with the final removal of permissions from profiles happening in Spring 26\. The permission changes will result in user management becoming significantly simpler, but preparing for the change will require a lot of work. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### Marketo: The Potential of Engagement Maps URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-engagement-maps-potential/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T09:17:44.000Z The usability of the Marketo user interface has long been a subject which divides opinion. In the early days of marketing automation, Marketo was considered very easy to use. Over time, the likes of Eloqua and Pardot radically redesigned their platforms to improve their ease of use. Not so for Marketo, which at a basic level, still works the same way it always has. The big difference between Marketo and the competition is how workflows are designed and built. Hubspot and Eloqua use Visio-style workflow editors, while Marketo does not. Pardot has a hybrid approach, but engagement programs do allow users to build branching workflows using an editor with a visual layout. Features such as executable campaigns have made it easier to link multiple smart campaigns in Marketo over the years. However, smart campaigns are still fundamentally linear in design and are merely a list of steps in both design and execution. Even some experienced users struggle with the differences between triggers and filters, as well as between choices and constraints. While Marketo is simple in concept, it looks complicated to non-technical marketers while limiting the kind of workflows that can be created. ### Launch Hype Consequently, there was a fair amount of excitement when Adobe announced the launch of Engagement Maps a few months ago. At last, there would be a way to present a Marketo program as a visual workflow diagram akin to Visio. Sure, it would be limited at launch, but at least it was a first move towards a more marketer-friendly user experience. Last week, the Engagement Map feature actually launched to all Marketo customers, and so far, the usefulness of the feature is minimal. It's still early days, and even Adobe acknowledged that the real benefits of Engagement Maps wouldn't be seen just yet. This was just a phase one. The ability to edit an engagement map won't be available until early next year. That's when the full potential of the feature will really be seen. At the moment, Engagement Maps serve as an interesting sneak peek into the likely future of the Marketo user interface. However, they're actually a somewhat convoluted way of viewing or presenting a smart campaign. When presenting a campaign to a non-technical user, the better option is still to use the overview screen with its text summary of the flow. For one thing, the export option doesn't always export the entire detail of the flow. Steps with choices can be collapsed and can not be exported when in this state. Also, the step description is sometimes cut off. ### Future Potential There are two areas where I think Engagement Maps will be particularly helpful over time. Firstly, it will help people understand the full power of step choices. This is functionality which is typically underused when building smart campaigns - partly because it is difficult to visualise the full impact of choices in a flow. It's common for people to create multiple smart campaigns instead of using step choices or smart list constraints, both of which are much easier to use when presented as workflow branches in a visual manner. The other main benefit of the Engagement Map can be used right now. They include full details of Execute Campaign steps, which isn't the case in the regular UI. When an Execute Campaign step is used, the Engagement Map includes all the steps of the executable campaign being requested. This is massively helpful when reviewing smart campaigns that use this feature. I tend to use executable campaigns only for reusable flows that need to be triggered from multiple places in Marketo, such as data normalisation or lead routing flows. However, it can be difficult to fully QA workflows that include them, because the actual steps don't appear in the parent workflow. Engagement Map fixes this problem. Widespread adoption of the Engagement Map UI will need to wait until the editing capabilities are rolled out next year. From a personal perspective, I would expect to start using them at that point. Hopefully, Adobe will look at better integrating Engagement Maps into the Marketo product at that time. At the moment, they're launched by a blue button in the Smart Campaign menu bar, which makes them look like an afterthought rather than an integral part of the Marketo Engage product. Until then, the use case for them is limited to a small number of sharing scenarios. It's a pity, as they have huge potential. ### Coming Soon URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/news/2023-08-coming-soon/ Last updated: 2025-01-09T23:02:06.000Z > Technology migrations are never easy, but rigorously managing the project scope is essential to building confidence in any migration project. Switching technology platforms always seems like a good idea at the time. Yet, almost half of all migration projects are judged to be failures. The numbers vary, but according to some sources up to 40% of migration projects are aborted. Many more are delivered significantly over budget. Delays to the launch date are so common that they're almost expected at this point. It doesn't matter how complex a migration is. Nothing goes to plan, regardless of whether you're changing the CMS used by a small website or migrating CRM or ERP systems to the cloud. The rare projects that do launch on time, are typically delivered with so many bugs that they're basically unusable. All too often, delays and cost overruns are caused by poor planning at the start of the project. I've seen many CRM implementations that didn't include data migration in the scope, or marketing automation roll outs that decided migration of existing campaigns wasn't a requirement until a few weeks before launch. It's fine to exclude non-essential items from the scope of a project, but make sure that all stakeholders are onboard with everything that won't be delivered in a project as well as everything that will. Where an item is ruled as out of scope, make sure that stakeholders have alternative ways of that meeting the relevant requirement. It's totally fine to push low priority requirements to phase 2, but only if they have another method for meeting the same business need in the interim. If you don't, then it will suddenly become a crisis when you least expect. You don't have to solve for every business need in every project, but stakeholders will have a lot more confidence in your solution if you can direct discussion on out-of-scope requirements to alternative teams in the business. Users will start losing confidence in your ability to deliver, if there's a requirement that can't be solved by any existing solution in the business. People will accept temporary work-arounds. For instance, it's fairly common to say that reporting won't be available at launch. Most marketers will accept a response of 'do it in excel', so long as it's not the long-term solution. However, that doesn't remove the need to measure performance. Work-arounds for the missing reports need to be considered during the design stage, rather than waiting until go live. Just make sure that the scope and frequency of those reports is clear, before finalising the project plan. _This post is for subscribers only._ ### The X Factor Behind Social Media URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-social-x-factor/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:05:53.000Z Journalists everywhere are proclaiming the death of social media. Twitter is regularly broken. Reddit is losing its most active users. Facebook lost a major privacy court case in the EU. There has been plenty of bad news for the major social networks over the last 12 months. Yet, the explosive growth of Tiktok, the spectacular debut of Threads and the steady rise of Discord shows that there is still a market for new social media platforms. If a new entrant can find the right concept and attract the right influencers, then people will come. As with any technology start-up, good leadership is critical. All too often, new social platforms enter the space without a clear business model. They rush to attract users, but don't build any revenue streams until a few years down the line. As a result, social media firms have long struggled for profitability. Meta may have been a highly profitable enterprise for many years, but few of its competitors have repeated the trick. TikTok look like the sole exception. Not even Snap have managed to be consistently profitable. ### The Money Problem In an era of cheap money and limitless venture capital funding, a focus on user growth was easy to justify. The last 18 months have seen a sharp change of priorities across the board for the technology sector. It is now much harder to raise finance, and existing companies trying to raise money are expected to show a clear pathway to short-term profitability. Long gone are the days when Snapchat could launch without a plan for earning any revenue at all, let alone turning a profit. The much documented travails of Twitter are largely a consequence of Elon Musk's struggle to reach profitability. Many of those problems are self-inflicted. Musk scared off a substantial proportion of Twitter's biggest advertisers in the chaos that followed his takeover of the site. Confusion about moderation policies has kept advertisers away. Twitter's struggles have been compounded by long-term concerns about the relatively poor targeting tools available on the platform. The site has long held a reputation for having lower ROI on campaigns than competitors. Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO of Twitter, will have to address these concerns if the site is to recapture its former position among advertisers. The recent launch of Threads has made her job much harder. The Meta-owned site is a spin-off of Instagram focused on text-based content as opposed to images. That Instagram connection has allowed Threads to build up a substantial audience within a few days, breaking records in user growth. Already some leading brands have set up accounts on the site. Running paid campaigns on Threads will have to wait, as the site launched without advertising. However, both Instagram and Facebook have best-in-class advertising tools that can easily be ported to Threads, assuming users remain active once the initial hype has worn off. ### The Network Effect Then there's Meta's new archenemies at ByteDance. TikTok have also just joined the rush to replace Twitter, announcing the release of text posting capabilities this week. This capability will have been aimed as much at Instagram as at Twitter, but it does highlight one of the broad trends in social media. Namely, there won't be one single replacement for the Twitter platform. The social media landscape has been gradually fragmenting for a long time. The last fifteen years have seen the launch of many new Facebook killers, some of whom built a loyal following without displacing any of the existing big players. The successful ones have had a key differentiator that allowed them to build a brand and audience among a particular demographic. But there hasn't been a mass social media migration akin to the MySpace to Facebook transition in that time. The only high profile site to totally shut down in the last decade was Google+, but that was due to a change in strategic priorities at the notoriously flighty search engine giant. Twitter was able to build an audience for microblogging and remains the primary platform for this type of content in the West. They had an opportunity to own the short-form video space too, but instead allowed TikTok to take control of that format a decade later. In the same vein, Instagram owns photo sharing, Twitch owns live streaming, and LinkedIn owns professional networking. First mover advantage allowed each of these sites to build a brand synonymous with a specific type of content. They all have direct competitors, but network effects mean these apps are the go-to destinations for their particular format. Consumers have no reason to look beyond them simply because that's where their friends are. ### The Value Proposition Consequently, the biggest threat to Twitter's long-term viability is not Threads, Mastodon or TikTok. It's the recent rebrand to X. Musk is deliberately trying to shift the platform away from a micro-blogging service and into an 'everything app' akin to WeChat. There is an open question about whether this is a good idea - I'll discuss that in a future article. The big issue with the rebrand is that this shift in focus could scare away Twitter's most valuable asset: its audience. X totally changes the Twitter value proposition in ways that users might not accept. Whether it's the restrictions on the number of DMs that someone can send or the requirement to log in before viewing someone's timeline. Every controversial change will see a small number of users deactivate their Twitter accounts. That's fine in a world where Twitter doesn't have a direct competitor owned by a big tech company. Most people will grumble and accept the change, and many of the lost users will eventually return. However, Twitter does now have a major competitor owned by Meta with a built-in audience that exceeds the Twitterverse. After the initial hype, the number of people using Threads has dropped significantly. For many users, the app was missing too many critical features to be viable. Over time, those features will be delivered. This is the danger for Elon Musk. As Twitter evolves away from a pure micro-blogging app, we may reach a tipping point where Threads becomes a more mature social media platform than Twitter. If this ever happens, we could see the tickle of users leaving Twitter become a flood. Not everyone will close their Twitter accounts. Even MySpace still exists, and Musk has a large following. However, if enough people leave Twitter we could see the platform replaced in the public consciousness with a new micro-blogging app. That would consign X and its media-hungry owner to a fate worse than bankruptcy: namely irrelevance. It's been a long time since we saw a mass platform migration online, but that doesn't mean it won't happen. ### And the Fediverse... P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of those who has deactivated their Twitter account and moved to a competing platform. For those who want to connect with me, I can now be found on [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@alancf22). The Fediverse has a reputation for being unnecessarily complex. This is unfortunately inherent in the decentralised model. Mastodon has made significant strides in user friendliness over the last nine months, but it still doesn't match pre-Musk Twitter in simplicity. The other significant barrier to widespread Fediverse adoption is even more insurmountable. The Mastodon community has made a conscious choice to reject algorithm based timelines. There are valid reasons for this based on privacy concerns, but it's not a decision that will be popular among all demographics. For now, I'm very much part of a tech savvy minority. ### Artificial Errors: Why AI Gets It Wrong? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/why-ai-is-often-wrong/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:06:19.000Z It's been a long time coming. AI has been the future of the technology industry for years. Every major software announcement for the past decade has seemingly touted new AI or machine learning features. Then on release, those new AI automations are ignored by the majority of users. That's because AI has rarely been the main feature of any customer-facing application. Everyone knows about the mysterious algorithms that underpin social networks and search engines. These are the most prominent examples of AI affecting people's experience of the world wide web. They're also wildly unpopular among both users and regulators, contributing to a general distrust about the benefits of AI in web applications. ### Measuring Confidence Only in the sphere of data management has a widespread reliance on AI and Machine learning been normalised. Enterprise scale data normalisation and data cleansing services are expected to incorporate machine learning in order to increase the number of records that can be processed by their models. There are several key reasons for this. Perhaps the most important is that data scientists inherently grasp one key concept that the general public have only just noticed. Namely, that the computer isn't always right. AI models of all sizes are often wrong, and that isn't a bug. It's a feature. In the realm of data analysis, any form of fuzzy matching or machine learning model comes with a confidence score indicating the estimated accuracy of the output. The data analysts using the model will then decide the threshold below which potential matches are rejected as inaccurate. The AI is expected to be wrong, and there are processes in place to deal with this. Captcha form validation works on the same principle, providing a match score indicating how likely a particular form submission is to be spam. The typical recommendation is to reject anything with a score of above 0.7\. This ensures legitimate form submissions are accepted but does allow some spam through too. That's why no form spam solution is perfect. It's very difficult to tell the difference between a high quality spam submission and a poor quality legitimate form submission. ### Beyond the Binary ChatGPT is far more advanced than the machine learning models used for reCAPTCHA or data normalisation. However, the same fundamental rule applies. Artificial intelligence models are designed to move computing beyond the binary into subjective problems with no right or wrong answer. Whether the technology is used for writing essays or cleaning databases, AI will sometimes get facts wrong. In that respect, it is no different from human intelligence. Much of the commentary around ChatGPT has focused on its ability to replace search engines. It even panicked Google into prematurely launching their competing Bard service last week. However, ChatGPT is pitched as a chatbot rather than a search engine. It is not designed to provide answers to factual questions. It can do that, but as with human intelligence the answers are occasionally inaccurate. Instead, the revolutionary aspect of ChatGPT is its ability to write prose that sounds natural to a human. It's an excellent tool for producing a blog outline or a potential sales pitch. It can even write code in a pinch. However, anything it produces still needs to be fact checked and edited, just like the copy produced by a human copywriter. Microsoft acknowledged this when launching its new Bing with ChatGPT service last week. The AI powered version of Bing is still in its pilot stages but displays ChatGPT responses and conventional search results side by side so that users can fact check the answers produced by the AI. They clearly see ChatGPT as an extension of the traditional Bing search rather than a replacement for it. ### Trust Like any intelligence, AI can learn from its mistakes. No doubt, the accuracy of ChatGPT can be improved over time. That is one benefit of AI. It can be highly specialised to the requirements of one specific task in a way that no human ever can. How Bing and ChatGPT evolve will depend on the needs of their users. Other AI services will be launched to fill the gaps left behind. In order to win the trust of sceptical users, vendors will need to be clear on the benefits and limitations of their AI models. We're still very early in the AI hype cycle, and people are still working out the best use cases for the technology. However, as the adoption of AI accelerates, a balance will need to be struck between the ambitions of technology firms and the needs of consumers and businesses. Not all AI products will succeed. Plenty will, though, and it is essential that those AI which do gain traction are adapted to the needs of society as a whole. ### 2023 Marketing Predictions URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/2023-marketing-predictions/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:06:45.000Z 2023 promises to be an uncertain year for B2B marketers. Amidst slow economic growth and some predictions of a recession, marketing will need to re-focus priorities towards those initiatives that directly impact the bottom line. ### Customer Lifecycle In a tough economic environment, businesses always focus on protecting their customer base. Retention becomes a priority, while up-sell and cross-sell will once again become important drivers of growth. Customer marketing becomes the key audience for growth, necessitating a shift in strategy and tactics. This isn't the revolutionary approach that it once was. B2B marketers can use many of the highly-personalised tactics developed and tested through their ABM programs. Up-sell campaigns are an excellent use case for the ABM approach and can be scaled quickly to different aspects of the customer base. ### Partner Marketing The expansion of partner networks has been a critical focus for many companies over recent years. Yet, not all of these partners are driving value. Some channel partners care more about adding an extra logo for marketing purposes than driving sales and revenue for the vendor. This is the year that changes. Pressure will be placed on channel partners to deliver results and business value. However, in the channel, business value is about more than just revenue. Consultancies and System Integrators are critical influencers that rarely close deals but do have a significant impact on the solutions that their customers choose. Your partners are often your best brand ambassadors, and providing them with the right content and message can have a significant impact in the long-term. ### Email Automation Email marketing has seen a resurgence in interest over the last year. The days when everything went through email are over. However, it definitely has its place as an easy and cheap way of getting new messages into the market. It still has one of the highest ROI numbers for any channel. The key decision is finding the right content and audience for your email campaigns. As a channel for distributing highly targeted messages to an engaged audience, email marketing is still unmatched. It should definitely have a place in your customer marketing initiatives. This is the one group you'll have a significant amount of data about, and they're also an audience that regularly engages with your email campaigns. ### Sales Alignment Revenue operations has been a catchphrase for several years now. The oft-discussed merger of sales operations and marketing operations hasn't always worked in practice. It requires close alignment between sales and marketing about priorities, which isn't always present even in the most forward-thinking organisations. It's become difficult to justify complex lead generation programs that don't result in opportunities. As a result, marketing will be asked to focus on sectors and accounts that sales can actually convert. At the top of the funnel, the discussion is increasingly about reach and awareness. Proving to the board that marketing is engaging with those accounts they want to win next year is critical to proving value and ultimately protecting budgets. ### Data Aggregation The long delayed migration away from third-party cookies has sparked plenty of discussion about the role of first party data in marketing. 2023 is the year that this talk will turn into concrete action. Until now, a lack of clarity about future ad tech standards has held the industry back. This is beginning to change. Technologies such as data clean rooms and next-generation web analytics can be combined to enable digital advertising even in a world where third-party data use is heavily restricted. The good news is that none of these technologies are new. Many organisations have been using them for years. First-party data isn't a new initiative either. All they're doing is extending the reach of your existing customer data improvement programs to the top of the funnel. ### Out of the Bottle: Salesforce Genie URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/out-of-the-bottle-salesforce-genie/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:06:58.000Z Salesforce does many things, yet it is still known as a CRM vendor. All those other applications are very much secondary to the core Sales Cloud product. It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that this week's Dreamforce conference has seen very little discussion of CRM and a lot of discussion about customer data platforms (CDP). Genie may be pitched as a real-time CRM, but in practice, it is very much a CDP. Salesforce were late to the CDP market. A curious oversight for a company who are so frequently thought leaders in the arena of both sales and marketing technology. Adobe and Oracle both had products in market before Salesforce Customer 360 was even announced. They're still playing catch up today, with Salesforce Genie becoming the latest iteration of the platform. As the CDP market has matured, questions of relevancy and scale have become paramount. Few businesses doubt the impact of CDPs when it comes to collecting and collating customer profiles across channels. They're designed from the ground up to categorise data from across the enterprise and organise it into a single customer view that can be used for both marketing and sales. Previous database technologies have often struggled with the complexity of this task due to the large amount of data sources in the typical enterprise as well as the sheer volume of data that needs to be processed. One of the big concerns about Salesforce Customer 360 initially has been its focus on integrating with other Salesforce products. There is a lot of automation and AI under the hood, which streamlines the user experience for those customers who have gone all in on Salesforce. That comes with a price though. The platform is more rigid than the competition, relying on other Salesforce products such as Mulesoft or marketing cloud for core functionality found in other CDPs. This has led to the perception that it is less able to integrate with third party platforms than its peers. The latest version of Salesforce Customer 360 goes a long way to fixing these issues and thereby closing the feature gap. Branded as Genie, the new capabilities add real-time data processing and an app catalogue to the platform. Real-time has been a buzzword within the CDP market for a few years. Traditionally, much of the data processing needed to make CDPs work ran on a schedule leading to significant delays before new data could become available for use. That's a problem for a platform sold on its ability to instantly deliver cross-platform customer experiences. It could lead to significant delays between customers' purchasing and follow up campaigns being triggered in downstream marketing platforms. Two related enhancements are needed to fix this problem. The first update is a continuous real-time integration with all applications and databases feeding the CDP. The second change is to run any data processing required to join the different data sources together as soon as new records are added to the platform. Genie introduces both of these things to Salesforce. The final aspect of a real-time CDP is to ensure that the data in the platform can be used in real time. That requires triggering workflows and marketing campaigns based on prospect activity and customer updates. Salesforce already have this covered using deep integration with marketing cloud, but enhancements to Salesforce Flow automation will allow CDP to instantly trigger marketing campaigns or CRM workflows. Tying all this together is the Genie Collection. This addresses one of the key complaints about Salesforce's existing CDP efforts, namely its reliance on Mulesoft integration cloud for data intake. The new Genie Collection on AppExchange allows for more customisable integrations with third party data sources. In particular, direct integrations with many leading data lakes will simplify data pipelines from source applications into CDP. The exact details can even be configured within the source system, so that data analysts can control data flows in a platform they're familiar with. Data analysts may also be interested in the other big integration announcement for Genie. Salesforce have always touted their Einstein AI capabilities as a key differentiator for their CDP. The theory is that by feeding CDP with data across the enterprise, Einstein can spot more trends and make better recommendations to end users in Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud. The trouble with Einstein is that the suggestions it makes aren't always useful. It's not really possible to tune Einstein to improve the output it gives, which can be frustrating for teams with in-house machine learning expertise. Genie allows for custom AI models through a partnership with Amazon SageMaker. Data scientists can build custom machine learning models within SageMaker, using data sourced from Salesforce and elsewhere. The model outputs can then be fed back into CDP for use in workflows and campaigns. This is a niche capability that not everyone will be able to take advantage of. However, those enterprises with significant AI investments will find the option to use third party machine learning tools to be invaluable. In general, Genie is not revolutionary, but then it doesn't need to be. From a feature perspective, it brings the platform much closer into line with competing CDP platforms. Salesforce are copying existing trends in the CDP space. They already have a viable solution for those businesses already invested in the Salesforce Cloud. Salesforce Customer 360 provides a less complex UX in return for feature limitations. Genie is a major upgrade that turns the product into a viable option for more complex use cases. ### Moving Nurture Beyond Email URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/moving-nurture-beyond-email/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:07:13.000Z Marketing nurture is very much an established tactic. Its place in the B2B marketing ecosystem has remained unchallenged for the past decade. Other tactics and strategies have risen to complement it, but few question the importance of nurture campaigns within an overall demand generation model. However, the value being delivered by individual nurture campaigns is still very much in question. All too often, an analysis of underperforming nurture campaigns leads to a discussion around content and data. Agencies will blame poor quality data, while field marketers bemoan a lack of content to entice prospective buyers. The question of whether nurture campaigns are using the right channels often remains absent from the debate. For many marketers, nurture remains intrinsically linked with email. Sure, you might build a website or landing page to complement the campaign, but email remains the primary mechanism for pushing content to the audience. Additional tactics are seen as a mechanism for collecting new contacts to feed the campaign, rather than as a method for serving nurture content once those contacts are in your database. The trouble with email is that more than half of your audience is unable or unwilling to receive it. People are much more hesitant about providing their personal details to companies than in the past, and a new wave of GDPR-inspired data protection legislation is making it hard to use that personal information once collected. For many marketers, email requires the collection of explicit opt-ins. This is a challenge even for those marketers that use legitimate interest or soft opt-in to communicate with prospects that have recently engaged with their brand. Soft opt-in often leads to high unsubscribe rates. Today's prospects only want to receive marketing emails on their terms, not yours. Building a self-service nurture experience is the first step to overcoming the limitations of email nurture. It requires creating a dedicated nurture hub with all the campaign content on a single page. The key here is to remove dead-ends and encourage content bingeing. Every asset should include a link to the next asset, and registration should be a one-time action only required when the content has enough value to justify an immediate follow-up. The aim here is to imitate Netflix in terms of design and layout, as well as in the use of website personalisation. Don't go for the co-branding approach to personalisation. Contacts don't want to see the name of their company plastered over the nurture website. This creates awkward questions and can result in legal complaints about the unauthorised use of trademarks in certain sectors. Instead, personalise the highlighted content to the role and industry of the person viewing the page. Relevancy is vital, and the more specific the content, the more likely you are to get engagement. Using AI to dynamically adjust the recommended next asset based on the assets previously consumed is a great approach. This is an area where the major content marketing platforms and leading CMS vendors are investing heavily, precisely because of the impact it has on overall content consumption. Indeed, content recommendation was one of the earliest applications of AI in marketing, and as a result, it has developed into the most mature use of the technology. Personalising the next asset links generally leads to more accurate content pairing than the traditional manual approach precisely because it dynamically adjusts the user journey along tracks that have worked in the past. However, there is more to nurture than just publishing content to a microsite. Nurture campaigns are effective when they push content to the places people most want to engage with it at a time when it's convenient for them to read it. That's why email has been historically so central to nurturing, because it places the content in the recipient's inbox at a time that people are ready to be distracted from their day-to-day workload. Complement email with social or advertising outreach. Offering similar content across multiple channels increases your chances of generating engagement. Particularly using some of the more personalised advertising tactics available on LinkedIn and Facebook. Sponsored Inmails and Conversation ads have a definite place in the advertising mix for those contacts that can't be reached through first-party email. The key is a coordinated outbound marketing program that targets accounts that have shown engagement. Quickly identify the best channel to reach each account, and use it to execute a nurture stream of between four and six touches. Those contacts that show continued engagement can continue to the next phase of the customer journey. Those that don't should be kept warm through a light program of introductory content until they're ready to engage. It's not possible to force nurture engagement. You just need to have the right content available for when prospects do show interest in a particular topic or solution. ### Marketo Engage August '22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-engage-august-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:07:40.000Z It's been a busy year for Marketo, with the general release of dynamic chat to all Marketo Engage customers marking the introduction of a major new product area for many customers. The new capability has been gradually rolling out to all instances over recent weeks. This chatbot capability is not yet as sophisticated as dedicated competitors. However, it is good enough for basic use cases. Furthermore, every release has brought subsequent enhancements to the chat capabilities, and this month is no exception. Custom avatars and the ability to view chat transcripts are the new capabilities introduced this time. Sales teams will benefit too, as chatbot interactions will now be displayed in the Marketo Sales Insight plugin for Salesforce and Dynamics 365. ### UX The other ongoing change to Marketo is purely cosmetic. The next generation user experience has been gradually rolled out since last year. Every release sees an additional screen updated to the new style. Initially, the new UI was disabled by default. In the spring, it was enabled by default for all Marketo customers. Now, it's being extended to design studio with a refresh of the images and files screens, as well as the snippets screens being updated to the new layout. There are two more important UI changes in this month's Marketo release. The first affects the asset editor screens, which are finally being updated to have the same Adobe branding and colour system as the rest of the application. That removes a slightly jarring inconsistency, given they're the only part of the UI which still uses the old Marketo purple background. From a functionality perspective, a slight change to the program interface should make a noticeable difference. It may not be universally popular though. The list of folders in the move and clone dialogues will no longer be arranged in alphabetical order. Instead, the complete folder hierarchy will be displayed in the same order as the main folder tree allowing users to navigate down the tree when selecting the new location for a program. This may be slightly slower for those with complex hierarchies, but makes it easier to identify what all the folders in the list are supposed to be. The change only affects assets saved globally in the main folder tree, folders within a program will still be listed in alphabetical order purely because there are fewer of them. ### Forms The new release introduces several new enhancements for Marketo forms. Security teams will appreciate the introduction of native support for captcha v3\. This will increase the security of Marketo forms and lower spam submissions without negatively impacting the user experience. The new versions of captcha are invisible to users in most circumstances, only appearing if suspicious behaviour is detected. They're also optional, and can be disabled on some or all forms if conversion rates are impacted by the change. It's always been possible to integrate captcha into Marketo forms using a combination of custom JavaScript and webhooks. However, this isn't natively supported and has its downsides. The new built-in capability will make implementing captcha simpler for everyone, and will also automatically block contacts who fail captcha from entering the database. Custom solutions don’t do this. They only delete spam form submissions after they've made it into Marketo, which has risks and can skew reporting. Also being introduced is a new user permission for approving forms. This eliminates one of the major inconsistencies in Marketo user security. Until now, it hasn’t been possible to restrict users from approving changes to forms. The theory was that restricting approvals to landing pages was sufficient, given that updates to form fields require re-approving all landing pages using the form as well. However, it is now far more common to use Marketo form embeds on the website than it is to use Marketo forms on Marketo landing pages. When the embed code is used, any changes to Marketo forms are automatically updated on the website as soon as the form is saved and approved. This can be a problem for companies that require a power user to review any changes before they go live. For emails and landing pages it is possible to enforce this workflow by restricting approval permissions to the delegated users. In the past, this hasn’t been possible with forms. Now it is, which will please Marketo admins that have a strong focus on QA. These are not the only updates this month. There are API and munchkin tracking enhancements too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/release-notes/current.html?lang=en) on Adobe Experience League. ### Beyond Measurement: The Value of Business Intelligence URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/beyond-measurement-value-of-bi/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:08:26.000Z Designing reports is hard. Marketers often struggle to get the numbers they need. In many organisations, seemingly simple metrics around campaign ROI or lead velocity can be impossible to produce. This has real world consequences on campaign results and the overall health of the funnel. Comprehensive analytics requires reasonably complete data on the subject of the report. Everyone understands this, but gaps in reporting coverage can lead to a loss of confidence in the marketing programs being analysed. Yet such gaps are generally a fixable problem. It just requires a joined up approach to data management. ### Flexibility Technology is often at the root of the problem. Poor reporting is a common concern across all Martech applications. This is true across the board, affecting the best in class applications in many categories. I've even heard complaints about the reporting capabilities of Salesforce, which many organisations use as the foundation of their pipeline reporting. For many data analysts, the problem with built-in analytics is that they lack flexibility. Even Salesforce analytics are restricted to showing only data stored in Salesforce. It doesn't matter how easy it is to use a particular application. A CMO won't get all the numbers they need if an analytics professional can't customise the reporting to display all the views and metrics requested by the business. Even specialist marketing analytics tools suffer from this problem. Apps such as Bizible or Terminus help with marketing attribution but can't provide a complete picture of revenue performance or the customer journey. As such, they're luxury tools for enterprise organisations with a diverse tech stack across a wide array of channels. These multi-touch attribution technologies provide an automated mechanism for collating all these marketing channels together and visualising results in accordance with a best practice multi-touch attribution framework. They remove a lot of the complexity that comes with building accurate marketing reporting at scale, but they can't answer every question posed by the business. ### Presentation Ultimately, there is only one way to get a genuinely customised view of marketing outcomes across all channels. To get the right metrics, most businesses will need to build their own dashboards in a specialist business intelligence suite. It doesn't matter which BI tool your business has available, so long as there is someone comfortable with using it in your team. The leading BI platforms directly integrate with the leading marketing technologies. Tableau, Power BI or Domo are the tools I see most often in enterprise organisations, but the market for enterprise analytics is broad and competitive. There are a lot of viable options open to companies of all sizes. Specialist BI tools provide the most flexibility in terms of visualisation. They allow every business to display the numbers in a way which makes sense to their stakeholders. Marketers are not restricted to the terminologies and metrics provided by individual applications; they can create their own. Nor are data analysts limited to a fixed range of chart types available in the typical application dashboard. They can collate unrelated sets of metrics onto a single CMO dashboard, regardless of source. Arbitrary filters and drill-down reports can then be overlayed on every view, enabling field marketers to see the detailed results for their campaigns and territories. ### ETL However, improved visualisation capabilities are not the key differentiator for specialist business intelligence tools. The magic ingredient is in their data manipulation capabilities. The most important job of a data analyst is not actually presenting the final numbers. It's manipulating the various data sources together into a format that can be shown in a single set of reports. This is what takes the time when designing a new dashboard. BI tools are designed to be combined with a dedicated data repository. This data repository extracts data from across the martech stack, transforms it into a unified data set, and loads it into the final dashboard for presentation to the business. The value of a BI application stack is measured in this Extract Transform Load (ETL) process rather than its presentation capabilities. Some, such as Domo, have ETL built-in, while others should be combined with a dedicated data warehouse. Integrated or not, it's this data repository which is delivering the capabilities that application-level reporting cannot. Not even Salesforce's best-in-class reporting capabilities can match the flexibility this solution provides. It's the only way to bridge the individual data silos in your tech stack and present an end-to-end overview of overall marketing performance at every level. Finding a data analyst with the skills to deliver this capability is the hard part. ### Security vs Functionality: Microsoft Office URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/security-vs-functionality-office-security/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:09:04.000Z Microsoft Office is the lynchpin of many businesses. Not even Google have been able to displace its position as a corporate standard. In part, that is due to its versatility. The sheer number of features means that it can be adapted by anybody for any requirement. Companies of all shapes and sizes rely on Excel for critical processes and functionality. My own employer is no different in this respect. We use Excel for everything from task logs through to project plans and client billing. Sure there are specialist tools that can do all these things. We even use them alongside Excel. However, few specialist tools are as easy to use as the humble spreadsheet. We track project budgets in our project management tool. There are dashboards in this system that account managers and consultants use to ensure we stick to both time and budget. However, these reports can't be shared with clients. We can export them, but the numbers and layout aren't in the correct format for a client to understand. Producing a client budget reconciliation used to require exporting multiple reports and hours of manual Excel manipulation. A few years ago, one of our data analysts automated the entire process using an Excel macro. This saved weeks of time for everyone, allowing clients to see budget utilisation in real time for the first time. In June, Microsoft rolled out an immediate ban on VBA macros in Microsoft Office. This only rolled out to the consumer version of the product, but even that caused a considerable backlash from businesses that use Macros for core business processes. The ban on macros was lifted a month later. Security professionals were not happy about the change; knowledge workers had a very different perspective. The new restrictions only ever applied to macros in files downloaded from the web. Files in trusted network locations and macros signed by a security certificate were also still permitted, regardless of the source of the file. This follows a long term trend towards restricting access to files shared online. Microsoft have included security warnings about macros for years. Users have to enable them separately after opening the file. The new block changed this behaviour so that the option to enable macros was removed from downloaded files. Microsoft are still happy for businesses to use Macros in Office, but only in trusted files developed by dedicated developers on behalf of users. This balances the benefits associated with Office macros against the risks they bring. If such files are stored in a central location, then that removes the risk associated with macros. The ultimate idea is that office macros should be subject to the same development, review and distribution processes as software applications. One such expectation is that files containing macros should be digitally signed using a code signing security certificate. For large companies with dedicated developers such a requirement can be considered reasonable. Code signing certificates are already used for distributing desktop software. Reusing the same certificates for Office macros is not a big ask for enterprise IT. Even if it was, large organisations generally have dedicated infrastructure for issuing and managing internal security certificates. Instead, it's the legion of smaller companies that are most challenged by macro restrictions. However, they're also the people suffering from the problems that motivated a crackdown on macros in the first place. Macros are an extremely powerful tool, but that power opens up significant security vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office. That's because they allow Office to interact with other programs, as well as the user's PC. This exposes the underlying operating system to an application that was not designed to have that level of access, risking unauthorised access and unwanted privilege escalation vulnerabilities. Sending booby-trapped office documents is a common virus or ransomware tactic. These documents will contain macros that infect the user's PC when run, exploiting any security vulnerabilities that exist within Office. In theory, these types of attacks shouldn't work. Microsoft changed the defaults for downloaded documents years ago. Users have to explicitly enable macros on such documents, bypassing multiple security warnings. However, many office workers still fall for such scams despite mandatory security training in most companies. These are the loopholes that security professionals are trying to close. They want Microsoft to remove macro functionality from Office, so that such attacks are no longer possible. That isn't happening. However, users will find it increasingly difficult to use macros as time goes on. The reversed security changes are being re-implemented from next week. Microsoft just wanted to find a better way of presenting them. ### Marketo June 22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-june-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:09:51.000Z 2022 has been a busy year for the Marketo development team. The launch of dynamic chat earlier in the year was a significant milestone for the platform. In parallel, the gradual rollout of the next generation user interface has been proceeding at a regular cadence. On top of this, a set of major new developer capabilities will drastically expand the power and flexibility of Marketo workflows. ### Self-Service Flow Steps Marketo has been able to integrate external services into smart campaign workflows for a very long time. The Call Webhook flow step allows the platform to call to external applications directly within a trigger campaign. This capability is used by custom CRM integrations, consent management databases and requests to third-party applications. It's a key mechanism for embedding Marketo into the wider tech stack. However, webhooks are a very limited capability. They're an open standard but not one that is widely implemented. Most third-party apps have custom interfaces into their API that are more feature-rich and more secure. The release of self-serve flow steps allows Marketo to integrate those services directly into any smart campaign workflow. Most importantly, the new self-service flow steps can be used in any type of smart campaign. This is relevant for two reasons. Firstly, it increases the flexibility of the platform. Custom integrations can be requested from batch campaigns and executable campaigns for the first time. That will be a valuable boost for companies struggling not to exceed Marketo API limits, which is a common problem for instances with large numbers of integrations. The new capabilities will help reduce the burden on the API by allowing custom integrations in batch campaigns. As a result, multiple contacts can now be combined into a single request, saving time and server resources on both sides. Webhooks still have their place in the Marketo ecosystem. They're even getting enhancements in this release too. Marketo webhooks now support a broader range of request types for improved compatibility with more web services. Within the platform, they'll remain a great way of pushing low volumes of simple API calls to external systems. For more complex requests, the new self-service steps are a better fit. ### Tracking & Validation The global form validation rule feature introduced late last year becomes much more useful in this release. While a great idea, this capability has been limited by a distinct lack of flexibility. In particular, any configured rules could only be applied to all forms or none. It wasn't possible to apply a rule only to specific forms. This restriction is partially removed in this release because it is now possible to exclude particular forms from a configured rule. That means that rules blocking the submission of personal email addresses can be applied to lead capture forms on the website but don't have to apply to business-critical system forms. From a GDPR perspective, this change is highly important because it allows companies to collect opt-outs or update email preferences for any person subscribed using their personal email address. Until now, this hasn't been possible when a global form validation rule was enabled. This new feature fixes that, allowing Marketo users to restrict data collection to business email addresses only when it makes sense. Just remember that any enabled global form validation rules are applied to all new forms by default. Elsewhere, a small but useful enhancement to email tracking should eliminate a frustrating oversight that catches out many Marketo users. Until now, it has not been possible to track clicks on mailto or tel links. These are the types of link used when linking to an email address or a phone number rather than a web page. That limitation has been corrected. Future email sends will track clicks on these links, allowing them to appear in reporting for the first time. ### UI Updates UI updates have been a major theme in Marketo this year. Last month saw the new UI enabled by default where it has been implemented, as well as the refresh of the Email Template screens in design studio. This month, there are no new changes to the next generation user experience. Instead, custom object users will see a small but welcome change. The create and update dates for individual custom object records will now be visible in the Marketo UI. This will help with data validation when viewing custom objects in the person detail screens. Finally, there are some small permission changes for Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) in Salesforce. The MSI plugin is licensed per user, but it has always been challenging to actually enforce these license limits in Salesforce. That's because there is no way to restrict MSI access by user in Salesforce, only by security profile. A new Salesforce permission has been released to correct this problem, enabling better compliance with Adobe license terms for those companies using MSI. These are not the only updates this month. There are reporting and routing enhancements to Dynamic Chat too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/release-notes/current.html?lang=en) on Adobe Experience League. ### The Data Story: Reporting for B2B Marketers URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-data-story-reporting/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:10:13.000Z Data is everywhere in the modern enterprise. From customer contact information through product purchase history to website analytics, the typical marketing department has more data than they know what to do with. End to end tracking and 360 degree customer profiles mean that every stage of the buyer's journey is recorded in infinite detail. Yet, marketers consistently state that reporting is one of their biggest challenges. Many marketing leaders aren't getting the insight they need to make decisions. Data driven marketing simply isn't possible because there are no metrics available to guide decision-making. Instead, campaigns and content are recycled and reused based on anecdotal feedback from the field rather than any objective analysis of return on investment. ### Revenue First In a corporate environment where every dollar counts, this is a serious problem that limits the contribution marketers can make to the business. The board isn't interested in bleeding edge design or well written content. They want to see the impact of marketing on revenue. Strong engagement metrics are all well and good, but if it doesn't lead to sales, then that's not interesting. All too often, marketers are stuck with disparate reporting across a wide range of data silos, each telling a different story. LinkedIn will tell you how many clicks you get on your social campaigns, marketing automation will report on the number of leads captured on the website, and CRM will show the value of opportunities sourced by marketing. However, nothing is linking these separate stories together into a coherent narrative on the influence of paid social on opportunity win rates or deal sizes. ### Detail, Detail, Detail It is these stories that the boardroom cares about. Clicks don't matter to the CEO, nor ultimately do lead volumes. It's brand perception, sales pipeline and business efficiency that management wants to hear about. That's true for the CMO too. It's their job to interpret the outcomes of each program and channel, turning them into outcomes understood by the wider business. The detail concerning individual activities simply doesn't matter to anyone in the c-suite. Email clicks, website visits and white paper downloads really aren't interesting to the typical CEO. They're all valuable measures of engagement but mean very little outside the context of a campaign. It's the aggregate revenue from all campaigns which is important to the business. However, email metrics and website analytics do have their place. It's just not in the boardroom. Those kinds of detailed results do matter very much to field marketing, and to campaign managers. They're essential for planning the next campaign. Robust activity reporting is crucial in identifying successes that can be incorporated into future campaigns, as well as failures to avoid. ### Questions, not Answers There is a lot which can be learned from past campaign results. The difficulty is in asking the right questions. Website analytics can be used to discover which content is working, where leads are coming from and where the drop-off points are in the customer journey. So long as you configure Google Analytics correctly, the data to answer all these questions is readily available. You just need to present it in a format that makes sense to the wider marketing team. The job of a data analyst is to organise all the relevant data in a user-friendly format that allows for proper interrogation of the data. However, data analysts can only do that if they know the questions that the end user will be asking about the data being shown. Context matters, and different audiences will be asking very different questions. A good dashboard should always be configured to the needs of the audience consuming it. That way, it can be tailored to the right level of detail and the specific areas of interest. Putting every metric onto one single view is tempting, but that rarely works in practice. You don't even need to put all the reports into one location, so long as there is clear guidance about where each set of metrics can be found. Separate out the metrics by audience so that senior executives aren't bamboozled by detailed campaign information they don't understand. This also ensures more junior staff are focused on the metrics that matter for their day-to-day. It's easy to get lost, chasing irrelevant metrics in an area of the business that will only marginally impact future campaign results. Finally, interactivity is important too. Filters, drill-downs and dynamics views are all essential in a good dashboard. Anyone viewing a report will always have follow-up questions. Allow the end user to tweak and interrogate the presented reports so those questions can be answered. It saves time for everyone in the end. ### Pardot Summer '22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pardot-summer-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:10:36.000Z Pardot is no more. At least that's what the Salesforce marketing team decided back in April, when the marketing automation platform was rebranded as part of a nomenclature update across the broader Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So far, the rebrand hasn't caught on. Even the Salesforce release notes refer to the platform as Pardot rather than the overly long official name of Salesforce Marketing Account Engagement. That will likely continue until the next rebrand, and the emergence of a much shorter name for the app formally known as Pardot. ### Completion Actions To compensate for the confusion, Salesforce are releasing one of the most highly requested features from Pardot admins. Conditional completion actions are finally making their way to Pardot! Completion actions are a vital component of the Pardot platform because they are used in so many different places for different purposes. They can handle follow-up actions after form submissions, automate responses to email clicks, or engage web visit triggers created using page rules. However, they've always been an all-or-nothing utility. All the completion actions configured on a specific asset run for all prospects that engage with that asset. The only exception is email click completion actions, which can be filtered to specific links in the email. No more. As of this release, the prospect criteria selectable when defining automation rule conditions can now be used on completion actions. The available filters cover both prospect field conditions and activity based conditions, such as email clicks or form submits. For example, field updates can be restricted to only those prospects in CRM. Alternatively, prospects can now be given a different CRM campaign member status depending on previous activity in the same campaign. Multiple completion actions can be grouped together under the same condition, although only one condition can be configured for each completion action. More importantly, it's possible to create multiple completion action groups on the same asset. As such, you can configure one set of actions for prospects in the US, and a different set of actions for prospects in the UK. Conditional completion actions can also be mixed with unconditional completion actions that run for every prospect that engages with the form or email in question. This is a very welcome change which will be very useful to all users of the Pardot platform. In particular, it will reduce the need for automation rules and engagement studios triggered after prospect activity. It's common for separate automations to be created for lead routing or campaign association, where a lead quality threshold must be met before prospects can be routed to Salesforce. Now that routing can be configured directly on the form completion action itself, with the routing conditions defined using a Prospect List condition. That will reduce the complexity of many Pardot instances. However, conditions are not the only enhancement coming to completion actions. The brand new Slack notification completion action is now being made available for all Pardot users. That will allow Pardot admins to replace any email or task notification actions with Slack notifications. How valuable this is depends on your organisation's usage of Slack. Many sales teams find it easier to track prospect form submissions in a dedicated Slack channel rather than over email. As with tasks, the content of the Slack message can be customised per asset. Field merges can be added to include any relevant prospect information stored in custom fields. Rich text formatting can even be added to the generated Slack message using markdown, which is a significant benefit over the standard task notifications. To take advantage of this new capability, Pardot first needs to be connected to your team's Slack instance. This just requires a Slack admin to install the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement App from the Slack App Directory. After that, any Pardot admin can connect any Pardot asset to any Slack channel. ### Lightning Editor Updates Elsewhere, further enhancements are being made to the Lightning Email and Landing Page builders. It's the landing page editor that is getting the biggest changes, with a set of new capabilities and some user experience updates. From a developer perspective, Lightning is getting support for iframes, noscript tags and HTML comments in code blocks. All minor changes, but still widely used across the web. Marketers creating pages using the editor are getting additional styling capabilities. It's now possible to style checkboxes and radio buttons on forms within the editor, as well as apply background images and column spacing to table rows. From a UX perspective, landing page names can now be longer than 255 characters. The page URL displayed in the editor is now clickable, which sounds minor but is actually incredibly important when testing pages as they're being created. Users new to the lightning editor will appreciate the improved help text explaining what all the styling options do. Elsewhere, the property panel in the email editors is now adjustable or collapsable, which allows more space for content editors to see the asset they're creating. ### Reporting Finally, Pardot users will see much improved email bounce reporting after this release. A new email bounce report shows the list of bounced email addresses in one place, alongside the bounce date and reason. This will help significantly when troubleshooting deliverability issues in Pardot. Admins no longer need to drill down into individual email reports to get this data. Those individual email reports are also getting much improved deliverability reporting. 4 new metrics are being added to list email reports, highlighting exactly which prospects are and aren't receiving emails. The new metrics are called "total prospects on recipient lists", "total suppressed prospects", "total unmailable prospects", and "total duplicate prospects". This will provide better visibility into the difference between prospects who meet the list criteria for a particular email and those who actually get sent the email. That will help answer a common question when there are a large number of suppressed or unmailable records in the prospect database. It will also guide data management decisions, and may help Pardot admins sell the idea of better database governance to the wider business. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. Full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.rn%5Fpardot.htm&type=5&release=238). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### Eloqua 22B Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/eloqua-22b-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:10:49.000Z Constant evolution is a fact of life for all marketing automation platforms. After a series of big ticket releases around SMS and AI, Oracle are now devoting time to fixing the smaller items that have long frustrated Eloqua users. Some of this quarter's changes build on those new modules. Others are intended to make life easier for admins. ### Reporting Perhaps the biggest change is the addition of another new email reporting metric. Bot clicks have long been an issue for email marketers. These automated clicks by email security filters serve a valuable purpose but come with unintended consequences. They inflate click-through numbers and make it harder to identify contacts who have genuinely engaged with campaigns. Over the last few years, the industry has finally started to tackle the bot click issue. Other email marketing platforms have begun to exclude opens and clicks by security software from email metrics. Last quarter, Oracle finally followed suit, introducing a new metric called "Auto Opens" that counts emails opened by security scanners. Now Oracle is doing the same thing for bot clicks. A new "Auto Clicks" metric splits out the bot clicks from the real clicks. That means the click-through metrics seen in Insight and the system dashboards will be accurate for future email campaigns. Unusually, Oracle have chosen to explicitly show the number of bot clicks to marketers rather than simply stripping them out in the back end. This will make it easier to compare the success of future campaigns that have excluded bot clicks against past campaigns that included them in the results. ### SMS Users of Eloqua's SMS capabilities have a lot to be happy about in this new release. SMS was only released as an add-on module in November and is now getting additional features for better integration into the Eloqua platform. Users of the SMS module will now see two additional campaign canvas decision steps, as well as some new form processing steps. It is now possible to route contacts on multi-step campaigns based on responses to SMS activities. Marketers can move contacts down different campaign paths based on keywords in the SMS response. Also added in this release is a Sent SMS decision step, allowing marketers to base campaign flows on whether the contact received a specific SMS campaign. More interesting are the additional form capabilities in the enhanced SMS module. Eloqua now supports phone number validation for the out of the box Mobile Phone and Business Phone fields. Once valid phone numbers are collected, Eloqua forms can manage SMS subscription settings. The full range of subscribe and unsubscribe form processing steps are available, enabling contacts to be opted-in or opted-out at both group and site level. This brings parity between email subscriptions and SMS subscriptions in Eloqua. ### Sales Tools Another add-on getting some useful updates is the Eloqua Engage sales tool. The Microsoft Outlook plugin is gaining support for contact views. This enables admins to customise the fields shown to Sales when searching for contacts in the Eloqua sales tools. That has two benefits. Firstly, it ensures that reps have visibility of any important company specific properties such as account type or sales territory. Secondly, it allows admins to customise the fields required when Sales reps add contacts to Eloqua using the plugin. That will help improve data quality over the existing setup which only displays the default system view when contacts are added. Data governance will be further assisted by the addition of send limits to Eloqua Engage. This is an area which has been strangely lacking in Eloqua until now. Admins can configure a daily, weekly or monthly cap on the number of sales that can be sent to a specific contact. The time range of the communication limit is flexible, as is the number of emails that can be sent. Once applied, any sales emails sent from any of Eloqua's sales tools will be affected by the limit. Marketing emails sent by the main Eloqua application are not affected by the Engage Send Limit. ### Platform One less welcome limit is to the number of active lead scoring models. Apparently, this is to improve the stability of the platform. After the current release, Eloqua users will only be able to activate up to 15 models on standard edition or 30 models on enterprise edition. This shouldn't affect the majority of Eloqua users but does limit the flexibility of the platform for multi-brand or multi-product companies sharing a single Eloqua instance. Another change with potentially unexpected impacts affects data exports. Eloqua is now applying contact level security to scheduled data exports. Any exports configured in the Data Import and Export area of the application will now be run in the context of the user who created the export. This prevents users from exporting contacts to which they don't otherwise have access. That's a good thing, but it could cause issues if exports are configured by a user with different permissions from the user consuming the export. Eloqua users are advised to check the configuration of all exports they've created. A less disruptive security change applies to security certificates for secure microsites. SSL certificates can now be automatically renewed by Oracle without admin intervention. This is part of a wider move to securing all microsites by default. For now, automatic security certificate renewal is a controlled availability feature only available in some pods. It is highly recommended that eligible Eloqua users take advantage of it. The Oracle Eloqua 22B Update is scheduled over the weekends of May 6th, 2021 and May 20th, 2021\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to APIs, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/22B/22B-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Planning the Personalised Journey URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/planning-the-journey/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:11:09.000Z The word campaign describes many things in B2B marketing, from a single email blast through to a coordinated program of cross-channel activities spanning months or even years. A successful marketing department needs to run both these things and everything in between. The vast scope of what a campaign can be makes both planning and reporting challenging for businesses of all sizes. In a world where marketing needs to justify every penny, every marketing activity must contribute to the customer journey. The days of scattered one-and-done activities have ended. Business value and marketing efficiency are now the foundations for ongoing success. Good planning and coordinated strategies are much more important than they used to be. Random acts of marketing have been replaced by 13-week calendars that roll up to a set of mutually agreed campaign themes fitting the core business objectives. Marketers need to be able to report the business outcomes of these themes to the board, as well as the results of each individual activity to the CMO. ### Objectives Marketing no longer operates in a silo. Many CMOs now have revenue targets that they must meet. Those that don't are expected to measure the success of their activities in language that the CEO and CFO understand. That means pipeline and product growth, rather than leads and opportunities. Campaigns need to generate actual business value rather than promises of future growth. Businesses want the age-old misalignment between sales and marketing to be solved, and are incentivising both sets of departmental leaders to close the gap between marketing outcomes and sales expectations. These changes in reporting and measurement influence marketing at every level. Every marketing plan is based around a core set of themes and messages related to how the business wants to present itself to the outside world. When defining those themes, marketers start from the basic go to market strategy decided at board level, building their messaging around the growth sectors and the competitor threats. Personalisation is the name of the game, focusing on the value that each product or solution brings to a specific customer. Actually delivering a revenue or growth target, requires that message to be focused on the customer, not the product. Modern consumers will tune out businesses that talk too much about themselves. There is simply too much content and too much noise in the marketplace for such a self-centred approach to cut through. Instead, marketers need to start with the buyer's perspective. Your customers want to know how your business helps them. Consider the core challenge solved by each product, then articulate this challenge and the potential benefits of solving it. If that message aligns with the goals and values of your audience, then success will follow. ### Message B2B buying is a complex and long-winded process. Marketing reinforcement is needed at every stage. As such, every message has to resonate across the funnel. If simply collecting large numbers of leads is not a measurement of success, then that message must be relevant to all the right market segments and should continue throughout the customer journey. It should solve the brand awareness need, defining the values and positioning of the business and its products or services. With subtle tweaks, that same theme should also work in a lead generation context, acting as a tent pole for evaluation stage content, thereby providing a reason for prospects to convert. That theme will then continue down the funnel as a starting point for sales conversations, linking the different teams and departments within the business together. Sales enablement collateral will translate that initial concept into the essential benefits of whichever products or services are being sold. ### Tactics Personalisation is about more than just content. It's about tactics too, allowing prospects to consume that content at the time and location of their choosing. Your content needs to reach the buyer in the places they research potential problems and possible solutions. That's never the same for every individual. It's not enough to simply rely on customers to organically reach your site. They'll already have compiled a shortlist by that point, and you probably won't be on it. You want to be setting the parameters for that shortlist, defining the requirements and fixing the boundaries that every vendor must meet. That way, the buying process is already stacked in your favour even before customers start thinking about brands. Every buying process is different, and in a competitive marketplace, every little advantage helps. Try to understand the most common customer journeys, and look to influence the buyer at critical moments by placing your content and message at the optimum locations. Not every channel needs to be served, that's just not efficient. However, the right channels need to be served, with the right content, for the right buying stage. Learn the strategies that work, and those that don't. Repeat the successes, but also try something new every time. In doing so, it is possible to deliver value for both the customer and the business. Your customers are always learning, and you should be too. ### End of the Platform Era? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/end-of-the-platform-era/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:11:24.000Z For many technology start-ups, building a market-dominant platform is the aim of the game. Platform has become a buzzword among investors seeking the next unicorn. Founders are looking for the ability to scale, and platform effects are seen as an easy way to achieve this ambition. As a result, a small number of technology platforms have been ubiquitous in the daily lives of internet users across the globe. Some such firms have attracted close attention from regulators as they attempt to disrupt mature markets. Uber and Airbnb have become hugely controversial in many of their largest markets because of their impact on local taxi and housing markets. Microsoft, Google and Apple have attracted anti-trust scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. ### Digital Markets Act Now, a new wave of legislation threatens to make life even harder for the largest technology giants. In the EU, the oft-mooted Digital Markets Act is poised to curb the benefits enjoyed by being the largest players in their particular spaces. While in the US, reining in Silicon Valley is one of the few causes that still enjoys bipartisan support in a deeply divided Congress. The scope of the proposed regulations is narrow. Lawmakers are keen to protect the highly competitive technology sector by eliminating barriers to entry for start-ups seeking to take on the giants. The Digital Markets Act will only apply to companies with a market capitalisation of more than €75bn, or European revenues of more than €7.5bn. That is a high bar that will impact no more than a dozen household names. ### Break Open In recent years, the biggest players have attempted to protect their positions against each other by building lock-in into their products. App store restrictions are the most famous examples of this. Apple and Google have used security concerns to control app distribution on their platforms, with the aim of maximising service income and raising barriers to switching platforms. Social media networks have increasingly restricted their APIs, in an effort to increase advertising revenue by forcing users to access their services only through official apps. These are tactics that the digital markets act is explicitly intended to stop. Data interoperability will now be mandatory. Third-party access will be protected. Self-preferencing will be banned. As such, it's no surprise that tech executives are alarmed by developments and are looking to push back against legislators in the name of customer experience. Apple greeted the act by criticising its impact on privacy and security, a familiar refrain when facing scrutiny surrounding their business practices. Google warned about its impact on innovation. Not all the smaller players are happy either. The requirement for interoperability between messaging platforms has faced opposition from the likes of Signal and Threema, because it could impact their business models. Signal would need to weaken the security of their platform to comply, which kills their USP. Threema expressed concerns about their ability to monetise their app if people can just message Threema users from WhatsApp. ### Break Up Instead, the critics want the EU to go further and break the tech giants up. This goal has been explicitly rejected by Brussels, whose aim is to encourage competition from EU based start-ups. Their mantra is to break open, rather than break up. That's not necessarily the case in Washington. A very different conversation is taking place on the other side of the Atlantic, but the legislative outcome looks to be fairly similar. The Senate Judiciary Committee recently approved a bill that bans online services from self-preferencing their services. Tech giants would be forced to give competitors equal access to their platforms. This means that Google would be barred from preferring their own services on search results. Amazon would not be able to use purchase history when deciding whether to launch own-brand products on their marketplace. Few things get broad bipartisan majorities in Washington these days. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act does, as did the Open App Markets Act, a bill requiring app stores to accept third party payment providers. It will take time for these proposals to complete their passage through Congress, let alone become law. However, the direction of travel is clear. ### Externalities Technology giants are under closer scrutiny than ever. In the past, the White House has lobbied for them against proposed EU regulations, as well as in EU Antitrust investigations. No longer. Now Washington is home to their fiercest foes. Apple, Google and Meta all have positions of power, but have yet to adjust their cultures and business models accordingly. A large groundswell of opposition has risen up against the impact of technology firms on the day-to-day lives of regular people. Big tech is seen as arrogant and ignorant of the consequences of their action. This is inherent in cultural differences between Silicon Valley and the wider community. Silicon Valley was built on the principle of move fast and break things. That doesn't work when politicians see democracy as being among the things being broken. However, there is a risk that regulators don't break the technology industry in an effort to protect the broader marketplace. Let's hope that doesn't happen. ### Live Chat Enters the B2B Marketing Conversation URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/chatbots-enter-the-b2b-conversation/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:11:36.000Z Conversational marketing has been a hot topic for a while. Like many new tactics, it emerged in B2C marketing as a way to increase eCommerce sales. Live chat provides a mechanism for online retailers to connect their customers with the products and services they're looking for. Common queries can be automated using a chatbot, while more complex questions can be directed to a human sales rep for a more considered answer. In B2B, chatbots first saw widespread adoption as a customer service channel. They allow customers to directly engage with support teams, providing a bespoke service while bypassing the frustration of overworked account managers and overburdened telephone support queues. Indeed, web chat is now one of the most popular ways to reach customer support among both businesses and consumers. ### Contact In recent years, Drift have pioneered the concept of conversational marketing. In doing so, they adapted the obvious benefits of chatbots and live chat to B2B marketing. New ways to get prospects in front of sales have been opened by the deployment of chatbots on company websites. The ability to route leads to their account manager for a live conversation is often pitched as a key differentiator for B2B chat applications. Meetings can be booked in their Outlook or Gmail calendar if the relevant sales rep is unavailable. Typically though, telemarketing agents are the people on the front line of any B2B live chat capability. There are both cost and efficiency benefits to this. Training every sales rep to accept and use live chat is always a challenge, even before the substantial licensing costs that come with equipping the average enterprise sales team. A more frequent approach is to enable direct routing to the allocated rep only for key target accounts, where any possible interaction might have a bigger impact on the business. ### Capture The other key B2B use case for chatbots is as a data capture tool. The theory is that contacts are much more likely to hand over their personal details in a two-way conversation than through the typical website form. That does require the proper structure and incentives to encourage conversion. Just as with any other data capture channel, contacts will only provide their email address in return for a strong offer. A properly structured playbook will have a lower abandonment rate than a form, provided details are collected in the right order. Start with less identifiable information such as name and then company name. Only request email address at the point of conversion, when the contact is already committed to registering for whatever content or event is being promoted. It's important not to make the contact realise how much information they're giving out. If the chat script is too long, that will lead to higher abandonment rates compared to traditional forms. For this reason, chatbots are not a direct replacement for web forms. The only form use case they definitively can replace is contact us forms, simply because they cut out the middle man and allow for a real-time response to customer requests. When it comes to asset downloads or event registration, they are very much a supplementary channel. Most contacts will find the traditional web form a much easier and more natural experience simply because it's the expected behaviour. From a user experience perspective, enabling data capture in a chatbot only makes sense if the user is already engaged with the bot for another reason. It eliminates a potential drop-off point from the journey. ### Discovery Marketers need to first get users engaged with the chatbot. The main reason for that is content discovery. Users often struggle with even the best designed website navigation, simply because you know your product portfolio far better than they do. In an ideal world, a chatbot would be able to direct users to the best content for any relevant topic. AI is being trained for this purpose, but hasn't reached the level required to do it yet. In the meantime, a strong chatbot script highlighting the most important content for common queries is a valuable component for any B2B website. If that content is gated, then integrating the registration process into the chatbot removes a barrier to conversion. It also allows topical campaigns to be quickly promoted on the homepage without taking up real estate that could be better used for more valuable information. ### CDP Takes Centre Stage at Adobe Summit URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/cdp-takes-centre-stage-at-adobe-summit/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:11:51.000Z A dazzling array of speakers took to the stage last week to showcase the state of the digital economy, the power of AI and the potential of 1:1 personalisation. The themes may have been the same as last year, but there was still plenty of new and interesting content as Adobe's annual customer conference went virtual for the third year in a row. Even the metaverse got a mention. Adobe are big players in enterprise marketing, with their Experience Cloud portfolio becoming increasingly common in large companies across a wide range of industries. They've become a go-to vendor for in-house digital teams with complex web requirements. This has been complemented by the strength of their ad tech and marketing automation products. Marketo and Adobe Audience Manager are among the leading products in their field. However, the integration between the various parts of the Adobe Experience Cloud has often been stronger on paper than in practice. Some of the newer parts of the portfolio don't play nicely with AEM and Adobe Analytics, which can limit the multi-channel orchestration capabilities that Adobe tout as their USP. Three years ago, Adobe launched their real-time CDP to close those capability gaps. Since then, it has been integrated into most Adobe products in order to provide a unified data layer across the entire tech stack. This year sees Adobe Target and OneTrust embedded into Adobe's CDP. Target is already closely linked to Analytics andAudience Manager, so doesn't benefit that much from the added integration. The new functionality will simplify data pipelines synching from third-party applications powering web personalisation. However, it doesn't unlock major new capabilities for users of Adobe Target. Integrating OneTrust into the Adobe CDP is much more interesting. Stronger data protection is now a global phenomenon, with GDPR inspired laws becoming increasingly common across the globe. Having a central consent management database is critical to compliance, and for many digital teams that system is OneTrust. Their cookie consent tools will be familiar to anyone who regularly visits enterprise websites, but they can also manage any form of consent or preference data. These additional preference capabilities now sync directly into the Adobe CDP, and can be leveraged to ensure profiling and marketing permissions are respected in systems that engage with the customer. Consistent enforcement of privacy controls is a key step in building customer trust, thereby enabling consumer confidence in the personalised customer experiences that marketers are expected to provide. For B2B marketers, two new CDP related announcements are of particular interest. The first affects Marketo Engage users, who will be able to leverage a new sales opportunity predictions AI. This adds predictive lead scoring to Marketo's target account management features. The CDP link is what makes this interesting, because it extends predictive lead scoring to activity data across the entire marketing technology stack. In theory, a predictive scoring engine powered by the wide array of activities recorded in Adobe Analytics should be more accurate than a scoring model that only uses Marketo data. Adobe's new Sales Opportunity predictions features will put that to the test when it lands later in the year. Adobe are also bringing AI to attribution reporting, as part of a major relaunch for Bizible. For starters, Bizible has been rebranded as Adobe Marketo Measure. The use of the Marketo name is new here. This was avoided in the past, because Bizible does not require Marketo and can work on a more limited basis with other marketing automation platforms. That will continue, with the new name simply being a sign that Bizible is finally being integrated into the wider Experience Cloud. The new functionality comes as part of a brand new Adobe Marketo Measure Prime product. This integrates Marketo Measure into the Adobe Experience Platform data layer that underlies the entire Adobe stack. Marketo Measure is an attribution platform, and accurate attribution requires a complete picture of customer activity across the entire funnel. Leveraging the existing integration capabilities of the Adobe Experience Platform should enable Marketo Measure to integrate with a far wider range of technologies than Bizible does today, including with CRM and marketing automation products that currently aren't supported. Custom integrations will be supported, with any relevant profile and activity information transferred into Adobe's data structure ready for measurement by Marketo Measure as well as for orchestration by the wider tech stack. Attribution is going to become a much more important part of the Adobe tech stack, with new attribution AI being added to the Adobe CDP. This will power the dashboards you see in Adobe Marketo Measure, but can also be proactively used in improving the campaign journey. The Attribution AI will be used for customer journey analysis in Adobe's analytics tools, but is also incorporated in the predictive scoring and customer experience modelling capabilities that are available across the Experience Cloud portfolio. ### The Rise of Microsoft Teams URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-rise-of-microsoft-teams/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:12:08.000Z There have been drastic changes to the marketplace for video conferencing in the past few years. Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom are now ubiquitous across businesses of all sizes. These weren't the dominant platforms for online meetings before the pandemic. WebEx and GoToMeeting have been relegated to niche concerns after losing mind share and market share to newer players. It's remarkable to think that Microsoft Teams launched less than five years ago. Teams has evolved rapidly since launch, changing from a poor Slack clone into the gold standard for online meetings. The app has its flaws, particularly when it comes to instant messaging. However, it is genuinely popular, unlike its widely loathed predecessors. It's taken Microsoft a long time to get web conferencing right. Their first foray into this space was Office Communicator in 2007\. Successive rebrands into Lync and then Skype failed to hide the fundamental flaws in the product. Neither Lync nor Skype for Business actually worked reliably. The only organisations that had any real success with Lync were those who used it as a phone system. It required close management by dedicated network admins with experience in enterprise telephony. Phone systems have very different network requirements to computers, which hampered the usability of Lync across its various incarnations. For IT departments, it was good enough to do the job despite the criticism from those forced to use it. Lync and Skype for Business were never the market leaders for either enterprise telephony or web conferencing, but they were successful enough to gain substantial market share among Microsoft shops. Teams was launched as a brand new app in mid 2017, based on technology used in the Skype consumer network. Initially, it was pitched as an instant messaging service to compete with Slack. Over time, it became clear that Microsoft intended Teams to replace the telephony and video conferencing features of their previous applications. That wasn't popular among IT departments at the time, who resisted the transition for several years. In the end, they weren't given any choice. Skype for Business Online was retired in July 2021. The success of Teams is down to multiple factors. Firstly, many companies use it as a one stop shop. It is a front end to the full array of Office 365 services. Teams channels are about more than just chat. They can be used to store files on SharePoint, assign tasks using To Do or take notes on OneNote. That has its downsides, but it leads to a centralisation of knowledge that is popular among many categories of workers. As a video conferencing solution, it just works. Unlike its legacy competitors, the platform was able to accommodate the pandemic induced increase in usage. Only Zoom and Google Meet have been able to keep pace. Microsoft shops have switched to it throughout the pandemic due to better reliability and the fact it comes for free as part of Office 365\. Google shops have done similarly with Google Meet, which replaced Google Hangouts around the same time as Teams. The available usage numbers illustrate the growth of the Teams platform. Before the pandemic, Microsoft claimed that Teams had 32 million users. That jumped to 145 million users in the space of 13 months due to the explosion in video conferencing and remote working. Google Meet and Zoom have seen even bigger increases in usage due to widespread adoption among both consumers and businesses. Now Microsoft have broader ambitions. In the spring, they added webinar capabilities to Teams. Once again, this is not a new area of business for Microsoft. Skype for Business had live events capabilities too. The better presenter experience means that Teams is a viable platform for hosting basic virtual events. There are even apps that allow for in-session polls and surveys. The only thing lacking is the marketing features. Teams has the capability to create registration forms and manage attendance. It just doesn't integrate with anything. Enterprise-grade webinar platforms such as ON24 and BrightTalk achieved their market position by being easy for the marketer as well as the presenter. The established webinar platforms reached their position by integrating with the Martech stack to drive registration and automate attendee follow up. Even Zoom does this, although it lacks the library management features of its competitors. Teams doesn't even integrate with marketing automation unless you're one of the few companies using Dynamics 365 Marketing. There is plenty of time for this situation to change, but it requires a firm commitment from Microsoft to improve its offerings for marketers. Such an effort would go against history and would probably harm their strategic alliance with Adobe. Office 365 is full of "me too" copycat capabilities, which get launched with much fanfare before being left to rot. The initial launch of Teams was very much the exception. Enterprise communication and web conferencing have been core capabilities within Office 365 since day one. However, the adoption of those features lagged behind the rest of the suite. The arrival of Slack turned this relative weakness into a strategic threat that Microsoft was eventually able to overcome. Virtual events will never be strategic for Microsoft. Don't expect a big push to improve them. ### Eloqua 22A Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/eloqua-22a-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:12:33.000Z Oracle have long had a reputation for neglecting existing products in favour of the big new thing. That's not been the case with Eloqua in recent years, even if the most interesting new capabilities have been released as add-ons. This month's release is no exception, with some long overdue enhancements to form submissions and campaign canvas. ### Campaign Canvas The introduction of a native A/B testing solution on Campaign Canvas is long overdue. Since its inception, the simple campaign wizard has allowed for easy A/B testing, with built-in audience splits and automatic winner selection. At the same time, Campaign Canvas has continued to rely on hacks involving the Eloqua Contact ID in order to enable A/B testing within a longer campaign workflow. The 22A release adds a new step to campaign canvas which fixes this problem. The split decision step allows marketers to randomly split contacts down two different paths within a campaign workflow. The step allows users to configure the desired split, so they're not limited to a fixed 50/50\. There is still no way to automatically select a winning email within an A/B test. Hopefully, that will come in time. At least it is now possible to build a workflow that automatically splits a segment into the requisite send lists needed even for the most complex A/B tests. ### Email Reporting Eloqua's core email functionality is also enhanced by the introduction of an extra reporting metric. Apple's new email privacy features have caused plenty of uncertainty over the last six months. They compromised the accuracy of the already unreliable opens metric by automatically downloading the tracking pixel of every marketing email regardless of whether the user opened the email or not. Some email service providers have used bot filters in order to overcome this problem, a technology that has long existed to screen out systematic clicks by email security filters. Oracle have taken a different approach. They're still filtering out the automatic opens from the standard opens metric. However, they've also introduced a new metric to count the number of opens by Apple's privacy tools. Given the relative inaccuracies of email bot filters, this additional transparency is welcome. Other providers reckon that bot filters cut open rates by 50% compared to 12 months ago. Having both the total open and auto open metrics allows a clearer picture of campaign performance over time. ### Forms This release also expands a feature pioneered in the previous release. Blind Form Submit URL shortening closes a minor security loophole inherent in the very useful blind form capability. Blind forms, by their very nature, add human-readable personal data into email links. That's far from ideal, and some Eloqua users don't use them for that reason. The new URL shortener feature automatically masks that exposed personal data in email links, with no user configuration required. All you need to do is add the blind form link and then save the email. One nice side benefit is that it will make blind form submits more reliable too, which should also encourage their adoption among more Eloqua customers. Form security is also enhanced by another new controlled availability feature. Oracle have introduced optional spam protection to Eloqua forms. This can be enabled on a per form basis to filter out bot submissions on forms suffering from spam attacks. The feature works automatically for forms on Eloqua landing pages. Whereas the HTML for forms on external websites will need to be manually updated should the feature be enabled. Importantly, you can also view the spam form submissions being filtered on protected forms. ### AI & SMS There are also a few small enhancements to the optional SMS and Advanced Intelligence modules. The fatigue analysis features of the AI add-on are being extended. Fatigue Level is now calculated for bouncebacks and unsubscribes, just in case they become emailable again. That closes a loophole that affected resubscribers. Additionally, the expanded Fatigue Level rating will now be visible in Profiler alongside the Account Engagement score. That introduces those metrics to sales, who may find them useful when deciding whether to get in touch with a specific contact. Meanwhile, the SMS module receives expanded reporting and configuration options. A new UI has been introduced for SMS keyword management. Additionally, a new SMS dashboard gives easy access to the results of SMS campaigns, while deeper analysis can now be done using a whole host of new SMS metrics in Insight. These are supplemented by extra activity logs for SMS activity on the contact record. The Oracle Eloqua 22A Update is scheduled over the weekends of February 5th, 2021 and February 19th, 2021\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to APIs, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/22A/22A-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Pardot Spring 22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pardot-spring-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:12:49.000Z Pardot has changed radically over the last few years, with brand new email and landing page editors built in the lightning experience. Not every Pardot customer is using these editors. They're nowhere near as sophisticated as the old editors, missing numerous regularly used features within the classic user interface. Those feature gaps are closing rapidly with each release. This month's Spring 22 release is no exception. ### Email Editor The most notable enhancement in this release comes to the lightning email editor. It's now possible to use the new editor to build emails for auto-responders in automation rules and completion actions. Previously, lightning emails could only be used in batch sends and engagement studio. This is a small change, but an important one as it finally allows the lightning email editor to be used for all email types. Requiring two sets of email templates in different editors was always a non-starter and severely limited adoption of the lightning experience. Another limitation of the lightning email editor is the lack of customisation. The classic email editor gives users total control of the email HTML, often at the cost of usability. The lightning editor limits users to a standard set of layout and content modules that don't cover every use case. This release introduces custom components, which goes a long way to eliminating this problem. Custom components aren't a direct replacement for the flexibility of the classic Pardot email editor. Building a custom component for the lightning email editor is far more complicated than coding a traditional email editor. Custom components need to be installed as unmanaged packages in Salesforce, with accompanying XML definitions. As such, they require development skills beyond the capability of the typical Pardot power user. Still, these changes do make the lightning email editor a viable feature for many more Pardot users than in the past. Admins that haven't tested the feature should take a look to see whether it could help speed up email creation. However, several dependencies need to be configured within both Pardot and Salesforce before the new editor can be activated. ### Landing Page Editor The lightning landing page editor is much newer, only seeing its debut last October. It was a very welcome enhancement, given the severe limitations of the classic landing page editor. However, it's initial iteration needed some more work before it could be used in production. Many of the most pressing issues are resolved in this release. For starters, a couple of UI enhancements mean that it's much easier to build multi-column layouts in the new editor. The ability to customise form designs was the most pressing issue that has been addressed this month. The new landing page editor introduces styling options for the Pardot form component. This allows users to adjust fonts and colours for forms when they're added to enhanced landing pages. There are also a range of layout options that can be used to tweak margins and label positions, among other settings. The new suite of form styling settings is fairly comprehensive, although it doesn't allow every possible design variation. Still the available options will be good enough for the most common form designs. A second highly requested change means that it's now possible to add scripts to enhanced landing pages. That means custom scripts and custom styles can be added within the lightning landing page editor. The most common use case for this will be external web analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Hotjar. However, custom javascript also opens up additional customisation options beyond those permitted by the editor UI. Another new option introduces custom redirects for unpublished landing pages. This is intended for closed registration pages that have been taken offline after the associated campaign has ended. Visitors can be redirected to a replacement page or to a dedicated index page, instead of the main website home page. ### Einstein Einstein introduces a couple of useful AI capabilities that have been seen in competing marketing automation platforms. Einstein Engagement Frequency is an important capability for those marketers sending multiple emails per week. It detects subscribers suffering from email fatigue before they unsubscribe. A new default field identifies prospects that have received too many emails, allowing marketers to exclude them from low priority sends. Sending too many emails is the number one cause of unsubscribes, so leveraging this option will go a long way to reducing list churn. Anyone using Einstein's ABM features to identify target accounts, will appreciate the other new AI capability in this release. Einstein Account Tier automatically ranks identified target accounts into 4 tiers, based on propensity. Tier A accounts are the top accounts suitable for the 1:1 ABM treatment. The remaining target accounts are split across tier B, C and D, allowing marketers to prioritise the accounts suggested by Einstein for ABM targeting. ### Reporting Finally, a couple of minor security changes should significantly impact overall reporting. Firstly, visitor filters will now be applied retroactively. Typically, visitor filters are used to exclude tests and internal visitors from Pardot reports. However, their usefulness was limited by the fact they only applied to future visits rather than all web activity. That has been fixed, which should improve the accuracy of Pardot reporting. The other visitor filter change applies to email clicks. Pardot has long tried to exclude clicks by email security filters from campaign metrics. However, this filtering has rarely been comprehensive or effective. As such, the thresholds are being tweaked to catch bursts of multiple opens and clicks from the same IP. Such activity patterns are rarely seen from humans, so they're now excluded from reports on the grounds that such activities are more likely to be bot clicks rather than recipient clicks. Finally, Pardot is introducing bot protection on forms. Google reCAPTCHA will be used to protect those forms which see an unexpectedly high volume of submissions over a very short period of time. This protection will not be applied to forms seeing typical volumes of submissions, meaning that the Captcha will only be loaded when needed, balancing the security benefits of Captcha with the associated user experience cost. Other form builders should emulate this approach. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. Full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm&type=5&release=236). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### Marketo January 22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-january-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:13:02.000Z The ongoing integration of Marketo into the Adobe Experience Cloud was always going to have casualties. Some minor login features have been removed to accommodate Adobe's own login system. Now Marketo Sky can be added to the list of features that have been culled due to Adobe integration requirements. When it was launched in 2018, Marketo Sky was pitched as the future of the platform. Sky was intended to be a ground up rewrite of the Marketo user interface that would modernise the platform and enable faster product development. Its premature beta release a few months later killed the momentum behind the redesign. There were too many bugs and not enough reasons to use it. The main problem with Marketo Sky was that large chunks of the platform were missing from the initial release. Creating lists required switching back to the classic user interface, as did some program types. Those capabilities were added over time through a widely touted rapid development model, but nowhere near fast enough. People moved on long before the new experience could actually be used for day to day campaign production. ### Next Generation UX The Adobe acquisition undoubtedly played a significant role in killing off Marketo Sky, but a different approach to interface redesign has long been necessary. Last year's navigation and tree update was the first step in that new path. The new interface incorporated many of Sky's filtering and search capabilities. Last year saw a new form detail screen that bears a strong resemblance to the Sky user experience. As such, Marketo Sky will still be a key driver for the platform's future but not in the way initially intended. Sky is being turned off in March, with the few remaining exclusive features added to the classic UI. That will introduce the incredibly useful asset expiration and Smart Campaign override options to a wider audience, which is good because they're often ignored by users unfamiliar with the capabilities of the new UX. In the meantime, the landing page details screen is getting the next generation user interface treatment. As with the revised form details screen, this is an optional beta feature that can be enabled using a toggle at the bottom of any asset page. It adds additional asset information to the landing page details screen, as well as giving the layout a facelift. What the new UI doesn't do is enable new features in Marketo. Everything is available in both the old and new detail screens. ### Domain Blocklist There are still new form and landing page features being added. Although, these are all admin level capabilities. The most interesting is a new domain blocklist feature for forms. This allows Marketo admins to specify a list of email domains that are blocked from filling out Marketo forms, improving overall data quality in your person database. Anyone who tries to submit a form using a blocked email address will get an error message. The list of blocked domains is configured globally for all forms, with a system list of the most common consumer email providers available out of the box. Blocking consumer email addresses will be the most common use case for this new feature. However, B2B marketers should consider the downsides of preventing potential customers from signing up for content using Gmail and Hotmail email addresses. There are valid reasons for requiring a business email address on contact us or event forms, where sales follow-up is a likely outcome of the engagement. Requiring business email addresses on asset download or email sign-up forms is a very different conversation. Many decision makers deliberately use their personal email addresses when in the early stages of the buying cycle precisely they don't want to be contacted by sales. Requiring a corporate email for top of funnel content could harm conversion rates and reduce overall engagement with your brand. There are two areas where enforcing the domain blocklist does make sense. These are for junk email addresses and for competitor domains. Preventing obviously invalid email addresses from being added at source will objectively improve data quality and could potentially improve overall email deliverability. Even if you're only blocking example.com and zzz.com, then your lead database will see benefits from this capability. Also, consider if there are any competitors you don't want to sign up for content with, and add their email domains as well. Both these categories should already be blocklisted on your Marketo mailing lists, but preventing them at source is always helpful. ### Landing Page Security Security conscious Marketo customers will also appreciate the release of landing page header security features. These are two related capabilities that may already be used on your website. Marketo admins can now enable HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) on landing pages, which forces browsers to connect to websites using HTTPS. Typically, browsers fall back to an insecure HTTP connection if HTTPS doesn't work on a website. The HSTS header blocks this fallback from happening. Marketo's support for this feature is essential because landing pages are widely used to collect personal data. This release also adds support for the X-Frame-Options header on landing pages. This controls which sites can render web pages within an iframe on a different page. Embedding your web pages within another page introduces security vulnerabilities because the parent page can control the content of the child page. There are valid use cases for iframes, but hackers commonly use them for phishing or clickjacking. It's likely your corporate website will already have controls around iframe usage, so aligning Marketo landing pages to this standard is desirable. ### Dynamics Integration Finally, there are upgrades to the Microsoft Dynamics integration. Multiselect picklist fields can now be synced between Dynamics and Marketo. This wasn't possible previously due to the specific way that picklists work in Dynamics. Additionally, the integration can now be configured using Server to Server authentication rather than user authentication. This allows the integration to communicate using server-side OAuth, bypassing any login restrictions or multi-factor authentication requirements that may be in place for user logins. These are not the only updates this month. There are more enhancements to Sales Insight, will the Adobe Experience Platform connector gets an upgrade too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/release-notes/current.html?lang=en) on Adobe Experience League. ### Events: The Hybrid Future URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/events-the-hybrid-future/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:13:29.000Z It's been a tough few years for everyone. Covid-19 forced businesses to accelerate their digital transformation plans far faster than anyone expected. Digital marketing has become central to everyone's marketing strategies. Digital selling has moved from buzzword to the new normal. The old ways are history and will never return. That's not to say that digital is the only way forward for marketing teams. In-person events and meetings are still valuable, but they won't go back to dominating marketing budgets as they did before the pandemic. ### Hybrid Today Last year saw tentative signs of a return to physical events. Some small-scale seminars and conferences took place in the last quarter. New variants have only partially disrupted the returning tradeshow calendar. Events are still taking place, but at a much smaller scale than before the pandemic. CES went ahead last week, but some major vendors were absent from the tradeshow floor. Many attendees opted to attend the event virtually instead, with sessions and exhibitors having both a physical and virtual presence. The most significant announcements from the show were streamed online rather than being presented in person. It's still early days in the hybrid event industry. Sharing a physical event online is not a new concept. Vendors have been streaming conference keynotes for years. Streaming breakout sessions also sometimes happened too, but these were intentionally second class experiences. The primary goal of any event has always been to make the in-person experience as smooth as possible. Catering to the broader customer community was a method to generate greater buzz for new product announcements rather than a genuine attempt to replicate the attendee experience online. ### Hybrid First Running a truly hybrid event is an entirely different concept. Marketers have long known how to run a successful physical event. Over the last few years, marketers have also learned how to run a successful virtual event. Balancing the two modes of engagement requires a paradigm shift. As such, an experimental approach is necessary. The first wave of hybrid events won't get everything right, but organisers will find the best formula over time to blend online and offline into a single event. As with all marketing activity, customer engagement is key. People understand that the virtual experience will always be inferior to the in-person experience, but it still needs to work as a standalone event. It's the networking element that distinguishes a successful event from a typical conference or tradeshow. The best events allow attendees to learn from their peers, as much as from the speakers and exhibitors. It's the reason why they're such great sources of new leads and opportunities. The pandemic made it difficult to find ad-hoc business conversations. Sure, there's LinkedIn, but virtual interactions will always be inferior to in-person interactions from a sales perspective. People are much more open in face to face conversations than they are over video conferencing or on a phone call. The biggest comment from those who did event events last year was how much they missed the networking aspects of the experience. ### Hybrid Technology Technology can help here, but only to a limited degree. Social networking features have long been a part of the typical event app. Major events often allow attendees to message each other and to post their profile in the app. Before the pandemic, these features were generally underutilised. In a hybrid event, they're much more important because they allow virtual attendees to interact with each other as well as with in-person attendees. As such, it's no surprise that virtual event platforms such as ON24 built social networking features into their hybrid event technology. Last week, Splash did the same. Splash is historically a platform for managing in-person events. Their new Splash Studio product introduces hybrid event features to their portfolio. This new capability directly completes with ON24 by introducing a session streaming experience for Splash events. In doing so, Splash points to the future of all major events. ### Hybrid Future Purely in-person events still have a place in the marketing mix, but only for small seminars. There is too much money at stake for large scale events to be restricted purely to in-person attendees. A hybrid experience ensures that event content reaches the widest possible audience, maximising engagement for minimal additional cost. The new hybrid event model has its downsides. Hybrid adds complexity to the already complex discipline of event management. However, in a digital-first world, that complexity will pay for itself through additional leads and revenue. The people, processes and technology for hybrid events have now arrived. It's time to take advantage. ### Is Hybrid Working Really the Future? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/is-hybrid-really-the-future-of-work/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:13:45.000Z It's been a long time coming. The shift to remote working was accelerated by the pandemic. The new normal requires different management styles, different applications and different working patterns from the old ways. Various businesses are adapting at different rates. Some firms have already gone back to working in person, much to the dissatisfaction of their employees. The ability to work remotely is now a competitive advantage for recruiters. After two years of remote working, many candidates now prioritise flexibility before more traditional considerations when choosing their next job. ### Retention Over the summer, there was much talk about the great resignation. A surge in people changing jobs was overdue. The pandemic recession led to many workers staying in their existing jobs longer than intended. White collar workers typically move jobs every few years. That churn slowed markedly in 2020. Accompanying the return to business as usual was a wave of career changes. Lockdowns gave many people the opportunity to re-evaluate their lives. The hospitality sector has spent the last six months complaining about skills shortages. That's because many chefs and waiters took jobs doing home delivery during lockdown, with substantial benefits in terms of pay and work-life balance. The same trend is true for knowledge workers. The ongoing story of Big technology's attempts to return to the office turned into a long running saga, which still hasn't reached a conclusion. Fully remote start-ups are finding it far easier to poach talent from the likes of Apple or Facebook than in previous years. ### Balances There has been plenty of talk about hybrid working over the past 12 months, but patchy evidence of it actually happening. It is still widely assumed that everyone will eventually go back to working in the office for at least a few days per week. The majority of businesses have announced plans to this effect. Not many companies actually implemented them. Some firms did go back to the office part time over the summer. They quickly discovered that there was a balance to be struck between on-site working and retention. They were hit by the great resignation as much as everyone else, but the impact varied according to their approach. ### Choices Flexibility is essential. For many employees, the threat of hybrid working is worse than the reality. So long as people can plan around their days in the office, then hybrid working can be successful. This requires individuals and teams to choose the best schedule for them. Frequently, personal commitments and childcare needs dictate which days individuals can work on-site and which days they can't. Then there are the vagueries of the work schedule. Some tasks are better done face to face, such as brainstorming or group collaboration. Other tasks are much easier done at home away from the distraction of colleagues. Both types of working need to be planned according to the individual. ### Expectations That need for flexibility has its limitations. Over recent months, one of the big debating points has been the exact amount of time each employee should be expected to spend in the office. Surveys consistently show that bosses want more time in the office than more junior staff. Office working only makes sense if you have sufficient members of your team with you in order to justify the time and cost of commuting. When launching hybrid working in the summer, some companies gave their staff total flexibility in how often they come into the office. There was an expectation that people would occasionally, but with no guidance around how frequently. This helped with recruitment and retention, but not with actually getting people into the office on a more regular basis. For many employers, the net result was that offices remained empty for the majority of the week. Even those people who wanted hybrid working stayed at home because the alternative was coming into the office on their own. Better coordination and communication can resolve this problem. ### Routines For hybrid working to happen, it needs to be a routine. People need to start with the assumption that they'll be in the office on a particular day each week or every two weeks. That ensures a sufficient number of people will come in each day to make remote working worthwhile. People can still change their days in the office depending on circumstances, but it does create a habit that becomes self-perpetuating. I've seen this approach work successfully for individuals before the pandemic. There is no reason why it can't work for anyone who wants hybrid working. However, employers need to be sensitive to the concerns of those teams who want full time remote working. Plenty of businesses manage that successfully too. Every organisation is different, and that diversity is a strength for the broader economy. ### How to Select the Right Marketing Technologies URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/selecting-the-right-marketing-technologies/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:13:59.000Z Technology is not the solution to every problem. Plenty of businesses thrive without it, but it is essential when a particular task or process needs to be scaled. Technology exists to solve particular business needs. In its absence, human ingenuity and manual effort solves those needs instead. Lead routing is a classic example of this. In a small team, all marketing leads are passed across to the same sales rep. That person then allocates those leads out to the rest of the sales team based on workload. Technology isn't needed for such an approach to work. However, as lead volumes increase and additional sales reps are hired, this breaks down. A company might start routing leads to a nominated rep or queue in each territory. The lead routing features of Salesforce are implemented to manage this process. Finally, as daily lead volumes move into the hundreds, a dedicated routing tool such as LeanData might be used to handle complex territory mappings or automatically balance lead volumes across the team. ### Making Choices There are a lot of point solutions in the modern marketing technology marketplace. Scott Brinker's Martech 5000 diagram now encompasses 8000 different applications, covering the major marketing cloud providers through to niche technologies that solve a particular pain point or automate a specific business process. No company needs every application. All this technology solves a valuable business purpose that many marketers are struggling with. However, the functionality within these tools frequently overlaps with other technologies or processes already deployed in the typical marketing department. When adding to the tech stack, it's important to properly define exactly what the new technology should do. Then, review whether the existing stack can fulfil that need before kicking off a procurement process. ### Decide Business Objectives Defining the right use case for a particular technology purchase can be tricky. Frameworks such as the Martech 5000 are a useful overview of the capabilities available in the marketplace, but they are not detailed enough to guide procurement decisions. That can only come from within the business. Every business is different, and every tech stack is different. No two business requirements are exactly the same. Begin by considering the capabilities or processes that need improvement. What would be the real world benefits from making improvements? These could be expressed in financial terms, such as a revenue target. They could be efficiency gains measured in man hours or scalability improvements measured in lead volumes, or increased campaign output. Every technology purchase needs a business case with actual business benefits expressed in language meaningful to the boardroom. ### Collate Requirements Use this objective as a starting point for the technology selection process. Consider all the teams in the business impacted by the desired outcome. Each team's individual needs should be considered in the list of business requirements. List out the specific processes and capabilities that need to change to achieve the desired business goal. Then consider how those processes could be improved. Apply a bit of blue sky thinking, and imagine the ideal process or solution for the specific situation. Also, consider the customer and partner perspectives. Are they impacted by the proposed change, and how could their experiences be improved? Ultimately, customer experience is king. It's far easier to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one. Anything that enhances the customer journey will positively impact the business far beyond the initial investment. ### Prioritise Requirements This exercise will result in a set of ideal business requirements. However, no solution can deliver everything. Be prepared to compromise. The key is to prioritise the list by working out the must have items and those items which are less important. Repeat the exercise until you've selected five essential business requirements. These are the items that your selection process must deliver. Everything else is optional and should be discarded where necessary. Make sure the business requirements aren't too detailed. That will prejudice the selection process in favour of your existing tech stack, which most businesses want to avoid. Technology vendors are used to receiving wish lists as part of the typical RFP. From their perspective, a key part of the sales process is to work out the essential items and the items that can't be delivered. Few sales reps will admit that their proposed solution can't deliver every customer requirement. Yet, inevitably that is the case. ### Review Options Always consider which of your requirements can be delivered by the existing tech stack. That may require discussion with the incumbent vendors to review features and solutions that aren't being used today. It's likely that at least one requirement is best delivered through changes to existing technologies or processes. Be prepared to press ahead with that, regardless of your eventual decision. If all your critical requirements can be delivered by the existing stack, then you're probably better off sticking with what you already have. Adding new technology to the stack is disruptive. Tweaking an existing solution is far less risky because there is a ready-made backup plan if the change doesn't work out. Make sure to have a fallback option even when replacing an existing solution. ### Consider Change Management Everyone always underestimates the change management aspects of technology implementation. It's rarely considered until after the new platform is purchased. Ask about training upfront, and make sure to check out any online tutorials and documentation before signing the contract. Reviewing help sites is an excellent way of finding out what a particular solution can't do, as well as the level of complexity. These are things vendors will try to downplay in pursuit of a deal. Proper due diligence can be a slow and frustrating process, but it's essential to making the right decision. There is a reason why large companies have such strict purchasing controls. They typically lead to better decision making and less wasted spending. Take your time to navigate the process and build consensus. It will lead to the best outcome. ### Oracle Eloqua 21D Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-21d-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:14:14.000Z Oracle has long sold Eloqua as a tool for B2B cross channel campaigns. Yet, the platform has no native multi channel capabilities. It integrates with some media publishers and social networks through the App Cloud, but Eloqua is still focused very much on outbound email. The latest release changes that by introducing native SMS capability for the first time. SMS traditionally has not been a major channel for B2B marketing. Business communication is still sent primarily through email, so marketers follow that trend. There is strong consumer resistance to receiving bulk messages on mobile phones, which applies even more to businesses. On top of that, not all knowledge workers use mobile phones for work purposes, particularly if they don't have company phones. However, there is still definitely a place for SMS in the B2B marketing mix, which can now be run through Eloqua. The new features are an add-on capability that requires an additional purchase. They enable both outbound and inbound SMS messaging to Eloqua contacts directly from the campaign canvas. Messages can be sent from branded numbers in 180 countries globally, and any links included in a message are automatically shortened using a branded URL shortener. ### Transactional and Promotional The primary use for SMS in B2B marketing is probably transactional messages rather than promotional messages. Eloqua supports both types, with promotional messages respecting local laws that may exist around mobile marketing. Transactional messages will see greater adoption. Event reminders and emergency service notifications are the two most prominent use cases for SMS that are typically seen in marketing automation. This is particularly true for companies that use Eloqua for customer service notifications as well as for marketing communications. Polls and surveys through SMS are also allowed by the new module. Eloqua supports inbound SMS communications using campaign specific keywords to a branded SMS shortcode. Contacts who message in can be added to a campaign for follow up through SMS or email. Additionally, there are a suite of reports that can view any SMS messages collected for each campaign. Not every Eloqua User will have a use for these new SMS capabilities. The channel is very much a niche within B2B marketing, but the new module is a game changer for those organisations that do use SMS to communicate with their customers. ### Salesforce Integration The other main set of enhancements in this month's release relate to the Salesforce Integration app. This app has continued to evolve since it replaced the previous native integration last year. The current release introduces a particularly broad set of new capabilities from which all Salesforce users will benefit. Improved campaign response creation and more granular filters for email activities are net new features that weren't previously available in the native integration. Eloqua users syncing custom objects see the biggest benefits, though. It's now possible to use the upsert action with custom objects, which simplifies integrations by combining create and update actions into a single action step. The upsert option has already been available for contact actions for some time, so this change is a step towards providing parity between contact and custom object syncs in Eloqua. Additionally, it is now possible to test custom object actions within the app using the test configurations screen, which will substantially speed up QA workflows. ### Greater Parity The test configuration change was already available in the native integration but was sorely missed by those Eloqua users who needed it. That's one of several features being ported over in this release. The app now allows you to update Eloqua picklists from Salesforce. This is a niche capability that was heavily appreciated by those who needed it. It enables you to sync any two fields from any salesforce object into an Eloqua picklist. Companies using lookup fields in Salesforce as an alternative to picklists are the most common beneficiaries, but it does automate maintenance of Eloqua picklists, a task that admins find easy to overlook. Also being migrated from the native integration is additional logic around field updates on imports, which provide greater control over data priorities for those that need it. Finally, you are no longer required to write back the ID of the newly created record in create actions. This was an issue for custom task or activity integration workflows, where a new record is supposed to be created every time. ### Higher Limits However, the most welcome update in the 21D release isn't actually a new feature. There has been a big increase in bulk API limits. Previously, Eloqua had a soft limit of 2000 API calls per day, which was far too low for customers using a large number of apps or integrations in their Eloqua instance. Any API usage is included in this limit, which covers marketplace apps and the CRM integration apps, as well as direct API calls. It was very easy to accidentally run into that limit if you weren't careful. Thankfully, this API limit has been increased to 2000 API calls per hour for imports or exports and 4000 API calls per hour for syncs. Larger Eloqua customers will benefit substantially from this, as it removes a major pain point for them. The Oracle Eloqua 21D Update is scheduled over the weekends of November 20th, 2021 and December 3rd, 2021\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to Insight, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/21d/21d-eloqua-wn.htm). ### Through the Metaverse URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/through-the-metaverse/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:14:32.000Z Metaverse is the big revolutionary new concept. Yet, its not actually new. It has been under discussion since the early 2000s, when the concept of online virtual worlds first entered mainstream consciousness. Second Life was launched in 2003 as a virtual world, briefly becoming a cultural trend and a target for consumer marketing campaigns during the late 2000s. That initial hype is long forgotten, but the game still exists with a loyal customer base of just under a million users. Now, virtual worlds are making a comeback as part of a broader industry trend. Technology companies see the metaverse as the future of the Internet. They envisage a persistent virtual environment where people can interact as of they were in the real world. Metaverse takes the existing virtual worlds and adds a layer of virtual reality to the mix, so that the gap between online and offline is bridged. There are examples of this already, particularly in the gaming industry. Virtual reality has been around for a long time. VR gaming has existed since the 90s, before entering the mainstream in 2016 with the release of PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive. The much hyped Roblox has been around since 2006, before exploding in popularity during the pandemic as a platform for user developed VR games. Nor is Facebook's interest in virtual reality a new phenomenon. The technology giant purchased Occulus VR in 2014\. At the time, Mark Zuckerberg explicitly pitched the company's VR headsets as the future of social media. With the company now under pressure from both customers and regulators, that vision is set to become a reality. They don't have much choice. ### The Brand Problem The rebrand of the Facebook parent company to Meta, was going to happen anyway. The company has been rocked by years of data protection violations and privacy scandals. The core Facebook brand has become toxic among young people. It's seen as the social network for their parents. The cultural zeitgeist is instead focused on Instagram, which has not been damaged by attempts to link its brand to the parent company. The success of Instagram keeps Meta relevant now, but future growth requires them to be ready for the next big thing too. The success of Tiktok proves that there is a place for new social networks so long as they can offer something different. Metaverse's attempt to bring VR into the mainstream is clearly one possible avenue for disrupting Facebook and Instagram. However, for metaverse to succeed it needs to offer a clear benefit to the consumer over existing social media platforms. This is something that Zuckerberg failed to articulate when he outlined his vision for the Facebook metaverse. Grand promises were made, but the presentation lacked any detail of actual products or use cases that can be brought to market. ### Why Metaverse? Such examples already exist. However, they're not mainstream. Gaming comes closest, but not in a way that is helpful for Meta. Online gaming is full of metaverses. MMOs such as World of Warcraft are persistent online environments that are hubs for human interaction. Fortnite has gone beyond gaming, hosting concerts and virtual events during the pandemic. There is no reason why such events cannot continue as a form of user engagement in a post-pandemic world. Meta aren't looking to build a video game. They want to link all these virtual worlds together into a parallel reality that people can interact with just as they would the real world. The problem is that most people are too busy living in the real world to bother with Facebook's virtual imitation. It's the same issue that Second Life faced in 2003\. The metaverse will only get widespread adoption if it offers experiences unavailable offline. Zuckerberg didn't articulate what those experiences would be, he just said they existed. ### Corporate Metaverse Microsoft are already working on some use cases for business users. The enterprise software giant is approaching the metaverse from a very different perspective. To Microsoft, the metaverse isn't a replacement for Facebook or Instagram. It's an extension of Teams. At their recent Ignite conference, they announced the forthcoming addition of 3D Avatars and virtual environments to their business collaboration platform. They want businesses to turn their meetings into VR conference rooms. At Ignite, they presented several case studies that showed the benefits of this approach. This allows companies to overcome many of the limitations of a 2D video call. Physical objects can be replicated in a virtual conference room, allowing a manufacturing firm discussing a particular component to work on that item during the meeting. The mere use of a virtual conference room replete with avatars of every participant should increase engagement with meetings. This is particularly true for whiteboarding sessions which are notoriously difficult to do over a video call. It could even solve the age old problem of hybrid meetings, where virtual participants inadvertently get side lined by those attending in-person. ### User Experience Whether VR events and meetings will become commonplace depends on the quality of the experience. If virtual avatars are to become the main mechanism for interacting with colleagues, then those avatars need to be life like. People will want to see an accurate representation of their colleagues behind the 3D model. It's not clear that the technology currently exists to do that. The images we've been shown so far do not look promising. Without that level of realism, the metaverse is just a reality simulator. It's a place that offline activities can be carried out online, both work and play. The unanswered question is why people want such a place. Particularly, at the end of a global pandemic. People have been stuck at home for months. Now they want to get out and experience the real world. The world is opening up, and live is getting back to normal. Any attempt to get people back inside is doomed to fail. ### Nurture: Finding the Audience URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/nurture-volume-vs-personalisation/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:14:47.000Z Building the right nurture campaigns is an essential step towards marketing automation success. All too often marketers struggle to hit the right balance between too much nurture and too little. Anyone who under invests in nurture will be leaving leads on the table by not warming up contacts when they want to hear from you. Too many nurture emails can lead to customer frustration and unsubscribes. It's important to strike the right balance. That balance varies by brand and by solution. As with any campaign, start with your audience. Are your nurtures aimed at disqualified leads? Or are they aimed at net new contacts collected from content syndication and social campaigns? These are different audiences. Start with cold prospects at the top of the funnel. You're going to see relatively low click through rates for these people because they have no history with your business. Then add in disqualified leads and existing customers at a suitable point part way through the campaign. ### Telling the Story The goal of any nurture is to identify which prospects are interested in becoming a lead. Consider how long it typically takes new contacts to become a sales ready lead, then set that as the length of the campaign. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, that is likely to be a 3 – 6 month process. Contacts are added to nurture when they show interest in your products or services. At this point, they'll only be at the top of the funnel. Nurture is your best opportunity to take those new prospects and tell the story of your brand, and how it can help your customers in their personal or professional lives. Focus on everything you know about them, and tell the story most relevant to their immediate needs. You will already have some indication of their interests based on their persona, as well as any previous activity. In order to be added to a nurture, each contact must have responded to an earlier campaign. You're trying to send them a follow-up to the topic they're already researching. Focus on nurturing your engaged prospects with the most relevant messaging, but avoid creating a separate nurture for every campaign. That just leads to duplication. It doesn't matter how good your content is or how good the leads are, email marketing is a numbers game. There's no point creating a nurture for less than 400 contacts. Average click-through rates for nurture emails are still roughly 1-2%. With small audiences you're simply not going to get enough opens or clicks to justify the investment. ### The Right Volume Personalisation is important, but it can't come at the expense of volume. That's why best practice is to centralise all nurtures into a single always-on workflow that every campaign feeds into. That allows you to get enough contacts in the campaign to justify interest based workstreams. Start generic and get gradually more personalised as contacts flow though the campaign. Automation is key here. The rules for deciding which content someone gets added to should be calculated automatically based on content with which the lead has recently engaged. Make sure your nurture emails are not too content heavy. You're not sending a newsletter. Nurture emails are often too long and have too many call-to-actions. Keep it short and sweet. The optimum number of CTAs in a nurture email is 1\. The entire email should be designed around that button, because people won't click the button if you make it difficult to find. It's better to have 6 emails with 1 CTA in a nurture, instead of 1 email with 6 CTAs. You'll get more clicks if each email is focused on a specific piece of content. ### Beyond Email Don't get too focused on email though. The best nurture campaigns are multi-channel these days. Your nurture will be focused on a digital journey that can be navigated on the web. Email is merely one tactic to drive people into that experience. Organic social, paid media and SEO should also be used to generate engagement with your nurtures. All these channels are entry points for the online experience that acts as the centrepiece for the campaign. This could be a set of campaign landing pages, a dedicated content hub or a content experience built in a tool such as Uberflip or Pathfactory. The critical point is that each stage in the nurture is signposted. Consuming one asset should immediately lead you on to the next asset. Prospects shouldn't have to wait for next week's email in order to continue the journey. Your nurture emails are simply a mechanism to re-engage contacts who didn't complete the nurture journey during their previous visit. You should be looking to serve up content on your audience's schedule rather than your schedule. You'll get much higher engagement that way. ### The End Goal Eventually, you'll see enough engagement to determine that a contact is showing intent to buy. That is the point to remove them from the campaign, and hand them over to sales. Remember that they'll be receiving other campaigns alongside the nurture, and to factor that activity into the scoring process used to measure readiness. As for those who never reach the lead threshold, eventually they'll reach the end of the campaign. At that point, they'll have gone cold. Their lead score will have decayed to zero, but that doesn't mean they should be removed from your database. Reduce the frequency of communication and keep them informed using your regular campaign schedule. That may come back when they're ready to engage with you once again. ### 5 Essential Data Management Capabilities URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/5-essential-data-management-capabilities/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:15:04.000Z Poor data quality has a devastating impact on marketing. It doesn't matter how good your content is. If you're sending it to the wrong people, you're always going to get low open and click rates. Selecting the right audience is just as important as crafting the right message. Too many marketers avoid data improvement projects because of the complexity of managing data quality. Yet, data doesn't have to be complicated. The first step is to identify the accounts, contacts and fields you want in your database. Once you've done that, there are a set of basic data management processes that need to be created in order to make the most out of the data you have. ### Data Governance Identify the gaps in your database by running regular database health checks. How many contacts do you have in key verticals or personas? How many of those contacts are engaged? How many of them are emailable? These are all important questions to ask before running any data improvement project. Finding the contacts you can't use for campaigns is just as important as finding the contacts that can be used. Once you've identified your bad data, draw up an action plan to turn those contacts into good data. That can be through any of the data improvement capabilities outlined below. Remember that it is much easier and cheaper to clean your existing database than acquire new contacts to replace the junk data. ### Data Enrichment Find the right accounts and contacts for your business by taking advantage of external data sources. Use their information to fill in gaps in contact and account profiles so that you can accurately segment everyone in your database. Use that information to improve campaign performance through more targeted segmentation. Make sure to select the best data vendor for your use case. The big data brokers such as D&B or ZoomInfo work well for enterprise technology firms in North America, but local vendors frequently have better information in other countries and sectors. It's common to use multiple data sources to get full global coverage but be careful with the additional complexity that comes with combining multiple data sources. ### Data Normalisation It is much easier to segment your database, if all the key information is standardised using picklists. Having a fixed set of options for Industry and Job Role makes it much easier to build audiences in marketing automation for personalised campaigns. Actually deciding on a list of picklist options for key fields is only the first step. Next, you need to translate all the free text job titles you've already captured into your job role picklist. You don't even need specialist data management tools such as OpenPrise, RingLead or Normalator, to build a successful data normalisation program. A contact washing machine program in CRM or Marketing Automation is sufficient for smaller databases, using lookup tables created by a data analyst. ### Data Deduplication There are few things worse than sending someone two copies of the same email. Yet, this is an everyday occurrence if your database contains duplicate contacts. Make no mistake, duplicates are a problem in every database. Even in databases that require unique email addresses. Many people have multiple email addresses, while typos can create unintentional duplicates. That's even before the much trickier problem of duplicate accounts are discussed. All the major CRM and marketing automation systems have mechanisms for identifying and merging duplicate records. Also, consider the impact of duplicate accounts, as well as duplicate contacts. All too often, discussions about deduplication focus solely on the easier problem of contacts. However, duplicate accounts is often a more widespread problem that can lead to poor or inconsistent marketing segmentation, particularly if you're focused on an ABM strategy. ### Lead to Account Matching Do you want to know whether new leads are customers or prospects? Would you like to see all your account information populated for every form submission? Account based marketing is becoming more and more important, and with it the ability to accurately link every contact to the right account. Both sales and marketing can benefit from identifying the right account for every lead before they even reach your CRM system. Use deduplication rules or lookup tables in marketing automation to populate account details on all new records. Alternatively, a more comprehensive solution is possible using your CRM system. Remember that all the major CRM systems include built-in solutions for lead to account matching. Consider leveraging this before building custom workflows. Data is forever changing to reflect the constantly evolving digital marketplace. There is no such thing as a perfect marketing database. Contacts change jobs, companies merge, and opportunities close. Trying to keep up with all this change is an impossible task. Implementing these capabilities will go a long to closing the data quality gap and improving campaign performance. ### Salesforce Pardot Winter '22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pardot-winter-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:15:21.000Z Fresh out of a low-key Dreamforce, it's time for the next Salesforce release. The Winter 22 release takes place over the next couple of weeks, including a bumper crop of new features for Pardot. Neither, Dreamforce nor the release offer any major changes of interest to B2B marketers across the core Salesforce platform. The major headlines out of Dreamforce related to Slack, which is being integrated into the wider Salesforce ecosystem after last year's blockbuster acquisition. One of those products being integrated is Pardot, which sees a new completion action that can be used across all assets and page rules. ### Integrations It is now possible to replace email notifications in completion actions with Slack notifications. This new Slack completion action works much like an email alert, allowing you to customise the notification content with free text content or merge tags. Slack users might want to create dedicated channels for form submissions or lead alerts. Their team can then join this channel and use it to be notified about new leads as they are added to the system. That's not the only integration enhancement in the new release. Pardot now supports custom activities, which is a handy update for customers seeking to build automation rules related to offline or off-platform activity. Third-party apps that integrate with Pardot will be able to create new activity types using the API, all within data structures configured by Pardot admins. This allows webinar providers to create webinar attendance or event registration activity types, with details of the specific event attended. That will simplify any post-event workflows that are run out of Pardot. ### Emails Additional customisation is also being added to the lightning email editor. Emails built using this capability can now be used in Engagement Studio. More significant, though, is the arrival of custom components for lightning emails. This closes a major weakness in the new email editor compared to classic Pardot email templates. These new components allow the creation of custom layouts and custom modules within the Lightning Email Editor. Individual sections of a component can be marked as editable using a variety of content types, including images, rich text and links. This allows custom components to be more powerful and potentially more flexible than a standard email template. However, this power comes with the price of complexity. You need to be a front-end developer to create an email editor component because the editable sections of a custom module need to be marked out using the Salesforce SDK. ### Landing Pages The biggest change, though, is the launch of the lightning landing page editor. This fixes one of the biggest weaknesses in Pardot, namely the poor landing page creation capabilities. The major feature gap between email and landing page editors has long frustrated Pardot users. The new editor finally eliminates this problem. It includes the same modular layouts as the new lightning email editor, as well as the same easy drag and drop user experience. Furthermore, it also integrates with Salesforce CMS for image and file storage. Templating capabilities are available too, but suffer from the same limitations already seen in the email editor. Any such limitations shouldn't prevent Pardot admins from actively investigating the new editor where available. It does require using the Pardot Lightning App, which isn't possible for all users. Some initial configuration of Salesforce CMS for Pardot is required for anyone not already using the new email editor, which will require the assistance of your Salesforce admin. The benefits of the new editor and the flexibility it unlocks substantially outweigh those setup steps and any associated disadvantages. Also affecting landing page templates is the ability to customise the unsubscribe and resubscribe page content. This was already indirectly possible through custom templates, but new UI settings to change the default text make this much easier. This applies to all the default text used by the default pages, opening up full localisation and translation for the default unsubscribe page. ### Prospects Pardot admins also benefit from improved control over prospect mailability in this release. The summer release introduced a new mailability indicator that reaches general availability this time. That opened up the ability to reset the Do Not Email and Opt Out fields within Pardot. Now it is possible to reset hard bounces and soft bounces as well. This means that email addresses marked as invalid in Pardot can now be emailed, once any issues affecting deliverability are fixed. Such powers are welcome but must be used wisely. Email sends to previously bounced email addresses are widely tracked by the blocklist companies, as they are a common way of identifying spam. Resetting the bounce counter for large groups of email addresses could lead to deliverability issues. New user permissions have been introduced to control the usage of these features by standard users. It is recommended that those are reviewed by any Pardot account that uses custom security roles. Perhaps the most useful change for admins relates to list creation. It's very easy to create too many dynamic lists in Pardot, and difficult to work out the purpose of lists once they've been created. This is a problem given the limit to the number of dynamic lists that can be created. The addition of create and update history to the list screens should help when auditing lists, by specifying who created a list as well as the date of creation. It will then be easier to identify lists that need to be deleted when cleaning up Pardot. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm&type=5&release=234). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### What Are The Right B2B Data Sources? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/building-the-best-b2b-database/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:15:44.000Z There is no such thing as a perfect marketing database. Data is forever changing to reflect the constantly evolving digital marketplace. Contacts change jobs, companies merge, and opportunities close. Trying to keep up with all this change is an impossible task. Yet, too many marketers don't even try. Responsibility for data accuracy often rests with marketing ops and sales ops. Keeping all this information up-to-date is a team effort, requiring the co-operation of everyone across marketing and sales. After all, your sales teams are generally the most accurate data source that you've got. Unlike most data vendors, they'll have spoken to the customer directly. As such, they'll have the latest information about the state of the business, as well as the roles and responsibilities of the people working there. Of course, few sales reps want to take responsibility for data updates. However, they can be persuaded if incentivised to properly use the CRM system. Actually persuading them to enter information into Salesforce or Dynamics is often the hard part, but data quality will improve substantially once a routine is established. Giving sales ownership over their accounts and contacts is essential, particularly in an era of increasing data protection. They can be your best source of opt-ins, but they need to feel in control of the conversation. Creating email templates and call scripts that allow sales to promote marketing opt-in to their customers is vital. If that can be extended to include data validation too, then that saves time for everyone. None of this replaces the need for a reliable source of account and contact information from outside the business. It simply isn't possible to profile new accounts correctly if you're missing their industry and company size. Sales or telemarketing can't be expected to manually research these details for every net new lead that crosses their desk. Besides, it's probably too late by that point anyway. You need to accurately segment them when you start marketing to them. ### Choices, Choices, Choices For many enterprise organisations, the decision about where to acquire account data is simple. Dun & Bradstreet has been the gold standard firmographic vendor for a very long time. Their DUNS number hierarchy is the foundational layer for many marketing databases. D&B's unique identifier is used to detect and merge duplicate account records in the CRM system. D&B are the obvious choice for a good reason, but they are not infallible. When it comes to US headquartered multinationals there generally is no one better. However, their data becomes less accurate the further you stray from this sweet spot. Local data suppliers are often more accurate if you're interested in small business information in Asia and Europe. Similarly, for contact information, ZoomInfo has rapidly become the default data source for many enterprise organisations. Their data is more likely to be validated by the contact themselves, making it more reliable than competitors. They suffer from the same biases as D&B though. Their focus on North America means that other suppliers are frequently better when sourcing contact data in Europe and Asia. Not many decision makers in France or Germany have an actively maintained ZoomInfo profile. The same regional biases are true for intent data. Bombora popularised this category, turning the page views of publishers and media firms into a real-time view of what companies are researching. Their business model requires them to ingest vast amounts of web analytics from their publisher network. That network is biased towards English language sites though, which means they have a much smaller coverage in Europe and Asia. Competing intent data vendors such as the UK based Cyance are less exposed to this problem. ### Setting Priorities In general, there is no single data provider that provides a global view, which means that organisations looking for such a view need to combine the major vendors with local sources. That can lead to complexity, especially when trying to judge the relative accuracy of different sources. Identifying the best data source for each market or segment is essential. The likes of D&B or ZoomInfo can then be used as a backup when the local sources are incomplete. Try not to get too detailed when prioritising data sources. No matter which vendors you use, it is inevitable that good data will get overwritten with bad. Be careful about updating records that field teams are manually maintaining. Agree on rules of engagement around those accounts. After all, the last thing you want to do is discourage sales from taking an active role in improving data quality. All other accounts are fair game for any data enrichment process. Just remember that no database is perfect. ### Losing the Lead URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/losing-the-lead/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:16:01.000Z In 2005, Sirius Decisions invented the MQL. The concept of a marketing lead is as old as the hills, but the demand waterfall brought a structure and taxonomy to lead management that has become the gold standard throughout the industry. MQLs have been a key metric for B2B marketing teams ever since. That metric is formalised in a lead quality definition that is agreed between marketing and sales, hopefully ending the age old dispute over what makes a good lead. Not even ABM has succeeded in usurping the MQL from its place at the heart of the marketing funnel. Although, it has brought into sharp relief many of the fundamental limitations in how CRM systems manage lead records. The CRM lead object was originally intended as a dumping ground for suspect data. Sales would qualify the good leads, before converting them into a contact and an opportunity. Meanwhile, the bad leads would be disqualified or deleted. ### The Unwanted Burden That's all fine in theory, but sales have never wanted the job of screening lead records. That burden has instead fallen on marketing, and more recently on lead development teams, who have been specifically employed to pre-qualify leads until they're ready to become an opportunity. On the other hand, many sales reps have spent the last twenty years diligently ignoring any leads assigned to them. At least that's what it seems to marketers frustrated by the refusal of sales reps to convert leads using the proper conversion process. For Sales, opportunities are the only things that matter because that's how they're measured. The impact of neglected leads ultimately falls onto marketing through less accurate attribution and lower campaign ROI. ### The Data Challenge Compounding this issue is an entire set of data and technology challenges that marketing experience when handling lead records. The underlying split in CRM between lead and contact records is an artificial one. When segmenting a campaign audience, there is no real difference between the two. Sure, they might be at different points in the funnel, but even that distinction can't be taken for granted. Marketing automation platforms frequently combine leads and contacts into a single list, with little practical difference between the two types of records. This leads to duplicates in some systems because many companies create leads for existing contacts. Marketo and Pardot both struggle with the consequences of allowing such duplicates on their platforms. Eloqua takes the opposite approach, merging leads and contacts, which blocks the ability to create multiple leads for the same contact as well as complicating integrations. ### New Opportunities The ultimate solution to this problem is to change the role of the lead record entirely. Microsoft Dynamics treats leads as an early stage opportunity, hiding the fact they're separate records by showing them as part of a single process flow. Leads are expected to be associated with accounts and contacts. They also are supposed to have a probability and a lead value. Many Salesforce users are trending in the same direction by requiring new leads to be linked to a contact as well as an account. Ideally, leads should already be linked to both accounts and contact on creation. In an ABM funnel, you may want the ability to add multiple contacts to the Lead too. This has the additional benefit of providing all the necessary relationship history to telemarketing teams prior to calling a lead. All this is possible with the right tech stack. There are plenty of ways to implement lead to account matching on a tight budget. I've even done it using custom flows in Salesforce or Dynamics. Treating leads as early stage opportunities rather than as a separate entity helps with sales alignment. Always create a new lead record for every enquiry passed to Sales, and then simplify the conversion process so that it's quicker than creating a new opportunity. It should simply be a button that progresses the deal into the next step in the sales process, just as you would in any order stage of the sales process. Unfortunately, Salesforce makes this difficult by preventing the creation of sales paths that span both lead and opportunity records. Let's hope that changes in a future release. ### Real Alignment At the recent Forrester Summit, Sirius Decisions took a more extreme approach. They suggested that the lead record should be completely replaced by opportunity records at all stages of the funnel. Marketing Automation should directly create opportunities whenever a lead is passed to CRM for follow up. This certainly simplifies funnel reporting but could lead to operational issues in many organisations. Typically, sales work opportunities and telemarketing work leads. There is a clear delimitation in ownership between the two teams, with each record type optimised to the needs of that business function. They generally have a very different set of fields. It's a setup that works given the internal politics that bedevils the relationship between marketing and sales. Everyone has clarity on who owns what, and the handover process can be formalised using a methodology that makes sense for everyone. None of these obstacles are insurmountable, but it will require Sales to give up control over the opportunity object, so that it can be adapted to fit both Sales and Marketing. Following that is a change management process, with new SLAs, new handovers and the associated re-training. ### Technology Transformation At the moment, all these operational challenges are academic though, because few martech platforms are currently designed to create opportunities. All these platforms import opportunities to facilitate closed loop reporting, but that's typically a one way sync with a limited use case. Some organisations even block that basic integration on legal or security teams to prevent external agencies working in marketing automation from seeing sensitive pipeline information. It's definitely possible to create and update opportunities directly from Eloqua and Pardot, but it does require significant customisation. No doubt these challenges will be sorted over time, but in the interim, technology is keeping the humble lead record alive. Sales teams simply aren't set up to allow marketing to directly create opportunities, and not every business has the tech stack necessary to do so. Analyst best practices always need to be adapted to the unique circumstances of every business. This one is no different. In many organisations, sales and marketing alignment is becoming a reality rather than a mere talking point. ABM programs have brought sales and marketing closer together. Removing the distinction between leads and opportunities is the next logical step in that journey. ### Marketo Engage August '21 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-engage-august-21-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:16:22.000Z It's all change for Marketo this week after a milestone release landed over the weekend. While not quite as large as last quarter's mega release, there are still plenty of interesting new features for Marketo Engage users to get their teeth into. The biggest update is only for new customers at the moment. It will be rolled out to existing customers in the middle of next year. In particular, Bizible has seen a lot of new enhancements. Those Bizible updates are enabled by the identity changes that headline this release. Adobe are integrating the Marketo product portfolio into their existing Adobe user authentication platform. Starting from next month, any new Marketo instances will be provisioned with Adobe's login system rather than Marketo logins. This will bring Marketo into other Adobe products, all of which can be accessed by a single login. That will be hugely convenient for organisations already invested in the entire Experience Cloud tech stack. IT teams for such companies will likely have already configured any required security policies as well as the obligatory single sign-on for enterprise environments. Everyone else will need to invest a lot of time in setting up Adobe IDs for their entire marketing department, along with any required policies or integrations. The new login system is being extended to existing Marketo instances next year. Customers should be aware of the change, but no preparation is required at this time. Adobe will notify Marketo users when such work is required. In the interim, Universal ID is being enabled for all Marketo instances. This is a pre-requisite for the planned login changes, as it allows a single Marketo login to access multiple instances. It does require those instances to be part of the same subscription though, a restriction that will be lifted when Marketo instances are migrated to use Adobe IDs. ### Bizible Bizible is also being updated to use the same Adobe ID login system, but at a significantly quicker pace. It is expected that everyone will have been switched over by the end of the year. As a result, some cross-platform Adobe services will become available to Bizible customers for the first time. These include the Adobe Privacy Service, which can be used to manage data deletion and subject access requests as mandated by GDPR and CCPA. The Bizible UI is also being updated to use the Adobe nav bar already seen in the new Marketo UI. Even without the login changes, there are still plenty of new features for Bizible customers. New metrics open up additional reporting possibilities around funnel velocity and cohort analysis. The velocity dashboard has been updated with additional filters, enabling the same types of drill-down seen in other Bizible dashboards. Meanwhile, a brand new cohort waterfall journey dashboard will allow deeper analysis of conversion rates and conversion triggers throughout the lead funnel. For the first time, these metrics include LinkedIn Lead Gen Form activity, which has been added to the Bizible LinkedIn integration in this release. ### Campaign Flow From a Marketo perspective, there is a significant enhancement to the brand new executable smart campaigns capability that was introduced three months ago. This added a new Execute Campaign action to the platform, meaning that smart campaigns can call other smart campaigns. The new functionality enables admins to share flow steps between multiple campaigns. That capability has been extended to allow executable campaigns to be nested. Campaigns can be nested up to three levels deep, enabling further consolidation of system operational flows. There are plenty of use cases for this, but so far, the most common relate to data maintenance and lead lifecycle workflows that need to be run following a program success. Another existing flow capability is being upgraded in this release. Single flow actions have existed for years but can be tricky to find. The option only exists when viewing a list of people in the database. That works fine in some situations, but not when scanning the field details or activity log of an individual person record. This can require switching back to the lead database and searching for the person again before running a single flow action. Not anymore. A new menu has been added to the person detail page, allowing users to run single flow actions while viewing someone's activity log. That should save multiple clicks for admins when adding people to lists or making ownership and partition updates to individual records. ### API Updates Then there are the API enhancements. Recent releases have seen multiple new APIs, substantially expanding the scope of what developers can create on behalf of Marketo users within the platform. This time is no exception. It is now possible to create and update fields using the API. That is particularly useful for LaunchPoint integrations, which previously needed to ask admins to manually create any required person fields as part of the configuration process. Now they can do it automatically, simplifying the setup experience for external applications that want to integrate with Marketo. The Submit Form API has been updated to support duplicate person records. Previously, this API would ignore form submissions if the email address included on the form existed on multiple person records in Marketo. This was far from ideal, given how common duplicates are within the typical database. Fortunately, the API has now been changed to update the last modified person in line with standard Marketo form behaviour. That makes the API far more useful and should increase its usage compared to alternative methods of integrating forms with Marketo. These are not the only updates this month. There are more enhancements to the API, while Sales Insight gets an upgrade too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/marketo/using/release-notes/current.html?lang=en) on Adobe Experience League. ### Eloqua 21C Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/eloqua-21c-release-overview/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:16:35.000Z The Eloqua release schedule has been relatively quiet this year, after a blockbuster series of updates in 2020\. This month's 21c release is no exception. Although there are some useful new features this time, with more promised for future releases. For now, Eloqua users will have to settle for a set of smaller changes. The most interesting new feature is a planned change to blind form submits. Improved security has been an ongoing area of focus during their ownership of Eloqua. Forms in particular have seen a lot of changes in this area. Throughout these changes, there has always been a risk of exposing personal data with blind form submits, because they expose contact names and email addresses in plain text. This becomes a concern when emails are forwarded or otherwise seen by someone other than the original recipient. Oracle are now introducing a blind form URL shortening capability to Eloqua forms. For now, this is now an optional feature, although Eloqua customers are advised to enable this option as soon as possible. When enabled, it replaces field merges in blind form URLs with a unique key that is provided by the form editor. This makes sure that no personal details are included in the link, instead it uses Eloqua's native pre-population capabilities to pass the contact's personal details into the form. Another form enhancement applies to account based processing steps. This is an automatic change, which requires no user input. Eloqua will now pass the account id to forms that use Save to Account processing steps, so that the right account is updated by these steps. In the past, these processing steps haven't run consistently because Eloqua is frequently unable to identify the right account to update. As such, they are rarely used. Now, Eloqua will pre-populate the Account ID on all form submissions and use that to decide which account record gets updated by form processing steps. ### Security All these form changes follow the beta release of form spam protection in the last release. This introduces spam prevention for Eloqua forms, similar to the Akismet technology used by WordPress. When enabled, this ensures that spam bots are filtered from form submission data. Not all Eloqua forms suffer from bot attacks, but this is an essential capability for those that do. It can be disabled on forms that don’t suffer such issues, making sure that no form submissions are missed. Speaking of security, it is now much easier to see when SSL certificates expire in Eloqua. This information is now clearly displayed in a new certificate management screen. That UI is the first phase of a forthcoming enhancement which will automatically secure brand new domains, eventually introducing SSL by default to Eloqua. That will bring the platform into line with the ongoing trend towards secure websites that is currently being pushed by browser makers. ### Integrations Then there is this quarter's new Oracle integration. Last time it was account enrichment through Oracle DataFox. That application is Oracle's predictive scoring tool. Unlike similar products, DataFox is a sales focused scoring tool, which focuses on account and opportunity scoring. These scores can now be synced with Eloqua accounts, alongside the account firmographic information that is used to calculate those account scores. This time, it is Maxymiser which is being integrated with Eloqua in a new beta capability that has been released under controlled availability. This app is Oracle's web personalisation platform. Its core A/B testing capabilities can be data driven using audience data pulled from other Oracle applications. Eloqua is now one of these apps which can be a source of contact information for website A/B tests driven using Maxymiser. The new integration allows Eloqua users to sync contact data to Maxymiser. That's the main features in the latest in a series of light releases. The next release is promised to be much more comprehensive. In particular, native SMS capabilities have been teased for November's 21D update. That's something Eloqua users should be looking forward to. The Oracle Eloqua 21C Update is scheduled over the weekends of August 13th, 2021 and August 27th, 2021\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to Insight, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/21C/21C-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### How to Improve Email Metrics URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/how-to-improve-email-metrics/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:17:10.000Z Regardless of whether you’re getting open rates of 30% or open rates of 10%, there is always room to improve the performance of your email campaigns. There’s no single way of getting more opens and more clicks. Instead, many small changes can be combined to deliver the best results. To start with, it’s essential to choose the right metrics in your reports. The clickthrough and click-to-open rates should be number one priority. After all, your email campaigns are designed to drive engagement with your brand and your content. For the same reason, form conversions are critical for campaigns that include a form. Always key an eye on your bounceback rate. If your bounceback rate is more than 10%, then it’s probably time to clean your database. Then there’s the open rate. Email opens are important, but the technologies used to measure it are unreliable. They work better on Gmail or iOS than they do on Outlook or Android. The only reliable benchmark for open rates, is your company and the campaigns you sent in the past. Industry benchmarks rarely consider regional or industry variations in subscriber behaviour, as well as the different mix of email clients when sending to different types of email audience. ### Open Rates To improve open rates, pay special attention to the Sender Name, Subject Line and Preview Text of every email. Each has a different role to play: - The sender tells people who you are. If your customers don’t recognise it, they might delete the email without even looking at the subject line. - The subject line grabs their attention. Make it bold and strong, and ensure it leaves the recipient wanting to know more. Effective use of emojis or personalisation are a great way of making your email stand out from the crowd. - The preview text tells people what the email is about. It describes your offer, and what you want people to get out of reading the email. If the email is an event invitation, say so. If the email is a regular newsletter, make this clear. If the email promotes a piece of content, tease the asset and use a strong action verb such as read, watch or download to drive engagement. These three things work together to tell recipients what the email is about, and why it’s important to them. Make sure they tell a story. ### Clickthrough Rates Once contacts have opened your email, look at optimising your email content to improve clickthrough rates. Design is just as important as images or copy. People only skim read marketing emails, so the layout must be clean and simple. Separate different articles in a newsletter. Make sure the calls to action stand out, and clearly describe what they do. Never use click here. Perhaps the biggest difference can be made in the headline. Always include a text headline in your emails, even if you’ve also put copy in the banner. A lot of people don’t read banner text in marketing emails, even on emails they click or respond to. Instead, the headline is the first thing they look at when opening the email, so make it count. Images are still an important way of building your brand and describing the tone or content of your email, but don’t rely on them. Image blockers are still a feature of many popular email clients, including Outlook. Where you do use images, make sure you always link them to somewhere relevant. Banner images often get more clicks than the call to action buttons. As for copy, keep it short. Emails with 100-200 words work better than emails that extend to 500 words. Short copy doesn’t mean short sentences though. Engaging copy requires variety. Mix short, medium and long sentences together, then make sure the sentences flow and sound different when read. Your email is only a teaser for the call to action, think of it as an ad rather than as content in its own right. ## Personalisation The most significant improvements come from more personalised campaigns. Instead of sending the same newsletter to your entire database, use dynamic content to create multiple versions for different personas or different groups of customers. Even changing a few words in the subject line and email copy can increase clickthrough rates by 70%. For nurture emails, use more targeted segments. Only send content when it’s directly relevant to the contact and their role. Even then, make sure to carefully select the best day and time for each email. Many people read marketing emails as soon as they see them, so if you send the email when people are busy, you’ll get a much lower open rate. ## A/B Testing Constant experimentation and a robust process for testing every change is key to finding out what motivates your customers and what doesn’t. Continuous improvement is the name of the game. Past results should become a guide to future performance. Use A/B testing across all your campaigns to identify what improvements have the biggest effects. Create a second version of every email that is identical except for one small change. The change could be a different subject line, a different call to action or a slight tweak to the email layout. Then use the A/B Testing of your marketing automation platform in order to send each version of the email to a subset of your email segment. Finally, wait a few days and send the best performing version to the rest of the segment. Repeat this process for every campaign and over time, you’ll discover the most effective methods for improving email metrics and precisely what causes contacts to open and click your campaigns. The secret to successful email campaigns is in your email metrics. ### How to get started with B2B Omnichannel Campaigns URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/how-to-run-b2b-omnichannel-campaigns/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:17:37.000Z There is more to marketing than email campaigns. Building a marketing database requires you to reach out to contacts across social and advertising channels. Email alone will only touch a small proportion of your audience. Integrating those other channels allows you to get your message in front of far more people. However, designing and managing a cross-channel campaign can be complicated. It requires developing and creating messages across different tools in a way that builds a consistent journey. Fortunately, by combining marketing automation with your website, the challenge of cross-channel can be simplified. This combination can be used to automate cross-channel campaigns, particularly when combined with social nurture campaigns. ### Web First The centrepiece of any marketing automation campaign needs to be the website. Make sure there is a content hub or a central web page for your campaign message. That doesn't have to be complicated. A single web page with access to all campaign content should be enough. Personalise that web experience as much as possible, so contacts are clearly guided to the most relevant content for their situation. Ensure there is a contact form or a chatbot to capture leads. Chatbots can also be used to direct people to the right content for their immediate need. Finally, add an interactive experience, such as an assessment tool or a survey, to drive engagement and conversion. The use of interactive elements and personalisation allows your audience to guide themselves through the customer journey until they're ready to be passed to sales. ### Inbound Acquisition Your social and ad campaigns then become means to drive people to your campaign site. Promote the best top of funnel content through the best performing inbound channels. Focus each message on a specific piece of content. Link directly to that asset, rather than the page as whole. This ensures people actually watch or read the content rather than bouncing. Presenting ad or social clicks with multiple links can lead to confusion. Once the contact has consumed one asset, they will move naturally to the next one. Your most engaged contacts will binge consume multiple assets at one go. If they do that, push them through as leads to sales immediately. Look at webinars or content syndication as an additional channel for acquiring new prospects to feed the campaign. It's common to immediately pass registrations from these channels to sales, but that's too soon. Send them a follow-up email promoting additional content instead. Contacts acquired through these tactics often have little exposure to your brand or familiarity with your services. They may not be ready to buy from you yet, so keep them engaged with additional content until a pattern of interest emerges ### Outbound Retargeting For contacts that don't convert straight away, use email nurture or social retargeting to drive return visits. On LinkedIn or Facebook, create a website audience of people that visited your campaign site. Then use retargeting campaigns to place an ad in their social feed promoting the next piece of content in your campaign. For contacts that have marketing consent, create an email nurture promoting that same content instead. You want to develop an outbound campaign containing 4 touches that directs people back to an asset on the main campaign site. Make sure you don't send people content they've already consumed though. Always send people content they haven't seen before, and try to get more targeted as contacts progress through the campaign. Start with a general message, and narrow it down to a more targeted persona or interest based message in later touches. Then when a contact has engaged with enough content, pass them to sales for follow-up. Typically 3 to 5 touches should be enough, including engagements from other campaigns and events you may be running. ### Evolution Once you've built this framework once, it's easy to copy it and adjust it for future campaigns. That applies to both the web pages, the content and the email nurture stream. Evolve the journey or the layout for each campaign so that you're using data to identify the best ways to keep people engaged and eventually generate leads. ### Windows 11 and the Compatibility Question URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/windows-11-and-the-compatibility-question/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T18:00:02.000Z We should have seen the controversy coming. When Microsoft unexpectedly announced Windows 11 last week, there was a fair amount of surprise, but the initial reception was positive. The new UI brought consistency to a platform notorious for lacking it. There were several useful new features and an opening up of the long neglected Windows Store to any developer. Then people saw the minimum hardware requirements. Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility. Over the last few days, Windows 11 has become infamous for only supporting high-end PCs manufactured in the last four years. Not even Microsoft's flagship Surface Studio 2 supports the new OS, and that's a device that can currently be purchased brand new from the Microsoft Store for between £3500 and £5000\. Even if you wanted to upgrade to Windows 11 on day 1, there is a good chance your PC won't support it. ### Security First There are clear technical reasons for the strict system requirements. It's all down on security. Microsoft have long recommended that PCs include a TPM 2.0 chip to store encryption keys in hardware. Similarly, Windows 10 introduced Secure Boot and UEFI BIOS support to protect PCs from being hijacked by malware on startup. These have been upgraded from recommendations to mandates in the new OS. In doing so, Microsoft have made a conscious decision to cut off support for many PCs brought before Windows 10 was released, but it's one that security experts have been pushing for a long time. It's the decision to abandon support for CPUs released before 2018 that is causing the real controversy. PC makers have been told that their devices need to contain eighth-generation Intel core processors, second-generation AMD Ryzen processors or newer. That's an unusually strict cut off introduced because these CPUs contain hardware mitigations for the Spectre security flaws that made headlines in 2018\. For new PCs, such aggressive system requirements are fair. These components have been around for four years, so are cheap enough to include in low-end devices. The problem is that these minimum specifications have been extended to upgraded PCs, which is unprecedented for Microsoft. ### The Impossible Upgrade? One of the big reasons for the success of Windows 10 was that many existing PCs were automatically upgraded to it. The mass upgrade program was controversial at the time because of the often dubious tactics it used. Over the long term, it has definitely contributed to the widespread adoption and popularity of Windows 10\. As a result, Windows 8 has pretty much disappeared from general use, and Microsoft was able to end support for Windows 7 in 2019 with only minimal disruption. A similar mass upgrade program will be tried with Windows 11, but the inability of most PCs to even run the OS will severely limit its reach. Good luck trying to sunset support for Windows 10 in four years time, when most active devices don't even support the next version. Widely reported processor shortages will limit the ability of consumers and businesses to replace their computers even if they wanted to upgrade. Most don't. ### New Design There's still plenty of interesting changes in Windows 11 for those eager to make the switch. The centred Start Button made the headlines but is only a small part of a wider UI update. The Start menu has been totally redesigned to show recent documents alongside pinned apps. Snap groups provide a new way of organising applications on-screen and ensuring that related apps open and close together. Visually the changes between Windows 10 and 11 are striking. Transparency is very much in, while rounded corners are a key part of the new design language. The UI changes go deeper than previous versions of Windows, touching the built-in apps such as Paint and Notepad. They even extend to the desktop, which now hosts Android style widgets. ### New Apps Speaking of Android, a partnership with Amazon means that Windows now runs Android apps. That will significantly boost the declining market for Windows tablets and convertibles. Any app in the Amazon App Store is supported on Windows. This isn't as surprising as it sounds. Windows 10 has been able to run Linux apps for several years, and it's not difficult to extend that capability to run Android. The Android news is part of a wider refresh of the Windows Store, which will be backported to Windows 10\. Microsoft are dropping the strict developer requirements that hampered the store in the past. Going forward, it can host any kind of app, including major applications such as the Adobe Creative Suite. Developers can even distribute apps through the store using their own infrastructure, and by doing so will avoid giving Microsoft a cut of any sales made through the store. ### The Future? Then there is the news about Microsoft Teams. The consumer version of this popular collaboration tool is being integrated into Windows. It even takes up space on the taskbar, replacing Cortona and the rarely used People button in the system tray. This has led to some very pertinent questions about the future of Skype, which has been neglected by Microsoft ever since a botched redesign in 2016. Other analysts are asking similar questions about the long term future of Windows 11\. Microsoft has a history of alternating between good and bad versions of Windows. Windows 10 was popular and successful, so by this theory Windows 11 was always going to struggle with a bad reputation and poor sales. So far, this is true. Much like Windows Vista, the new OS contains many interesting ideas that can be polished over time, but questions over minimum requirements and hardware support will prevent it from succeeding in the marketplace. It's just as well that Windows 10 isn't going anywhere any time soon. ### How to Get Started with B2B Email Personalisation URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/get-started-b2b-email-personalisation/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:17:56.000Z Good personalisation doesn't have to be complicated. In fact, it can be quite simple. The goal of email personalisation is not to create a 1:1 email for every subscriber. That's as bad as no personalisation at all. Instead, the aim is to increase engagement by making the content more relevant to the needs and priorities of the recipient. For email campaigns, that can be as easy as tweaking the email copy to fit the audience. Even a few words here and there can make a drastic difference to campaign results. In a B2B context, all you need to know is a contact's job title, as well as some basic information about the size and industry of their company. You don't even need to know the company's customer status or purchase history, although having that background definitely helps. From that, you can create targeted content based on the contact's buying persona and their previous relationship with your organisation. Mix that with the information you have about each individual to send personalised campaigns that get results. Every marketing automation platform has features that allow you to quickly add personalisation to your emails. From merge tags to dynamic content, you're probably already familiar with the functionality needed to make email personalisation shine. The goal is to instead use those features in the most effective way, without complicating campaign delivery. To get started, here are five common approaches to email personalisation. ### 1\. Personalised Greetings Add a personalised greeting to each email you send. This increases engagement by showing that the email was intended for them. Most marketers use Dear First Name in emails, but including the person's name or campaign in the subject line can also be effective. Make sure your data is 100% accurate before doing this. If you get it wrong, the recipient might choose to unsubscribe instead. ### 2\. Include their Role or Industry Refer to the contact's industry in the subject line or email copy, making the content appear more relevant to the individual. This is particularly effective when used in the email body. Referencing the contact's specific persona in an email rather than using generic terminology will make a big difference to click-through rates. You only need to change a few words to make this work. ### 3\. Dynamic Images Change the email text and images to fit the contact's job title or company size more closely. Many enterprise decision makers will ignore content if it appears targeted at SMB audiences, while many SMB decision makers will ignore products that appear targeted at enterprise audiences. You don't even need to change the email content either, just changing the banner image can make a difference in click-through or conversion rates. ### 4\. Alternative CTAs Increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities by using dynamic content to change the call to actions in the email to fit the customer's subscriptions or purchase history. This is particularly effective when used in product emails to promote add-on modules or accessories. The same tactic can be used for secondary call to actions in newsletters to ensure that contacts are shown the most relevant articles. ### 5\. Change the Sender Build on existing personal relationships by sending email campaigns from account managers or a trusted salesperson. When done correctly, this can have a substantial impact on open rates. When personalising the sender, it's important to make sure that every contact will recognise the individual from whom you're sending the email otherwise you may see a reduction in open rates. Some approaches will be more effective for your audience than others, so use A/B testing to measure the impact of each approach on your campaigns. Your contact strategy should identify where you need to tailor content to the audience. Then use constant iteration and continuous testing to discover what works and what doesn't. So long as you have the contact data and the content, you can do what you want. Beware of diminishing returns though. If your personalisation is too targeted, you'll appear creepy to your audience. That's a sure fire way to collect unsubscribes and lose customers. As a general rule, stick to personalising only one or two items in each email. Within that boundary, the only real roadblock is scale and efficiency rather than ambition. The sky's the limit! ### Salesforce Pardot Summer 22 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/salesforce-pardot-summer-22-release-overview/ Last updated: 2021-05-31T07:29:59.000Z With the arrival of warm days and sunny skies, it's time for the Salesforce Summer release. The next two weeks will see the arrival of a whole swathe of new features across the Salesforce platform. It's not the blockbuster update that we saw with the spring release back in February. However, there's still plenty of interesting changes that benefit both admins and end users. From a Pardot perspective, the headline feature is undoubtedly Einstein Send Time Optimisation. This is a lightning experience feature integrated into the new email builder. As with similar features already available on other marketing automation platforms, Send Time Optimisation allows users to delegate decisions around email send times to the Salesforce AI engine. Pardot will choose the optimum send time for each contact based upon their previous activity history. Marketers can select a deadline by each all emails must be sent. The default for this option is 72 hours after the configured send time, although this can be reduced if necessary. Send Time Optimisation is a useful feature for many campaign emails. It doesn't work with everything, so the traditional send now and send later scheduling options still exist for emails that are time sensitive and must be sent at a particular date and time. This rarely applies to newsletters or nurture emails. Experience from other platforms shows that using Send Time Optimisation to send emails at the optimum time for your audience does improve open and click-through rates. As such, it's a feature well worth experimenting with in the coming weeks. ### ABM Features That's not the only AI feature making its way into Pardot this month. Einstein Key Account identification is also making its debut in a beta capability. This takes the guesswork out of target account selection for ABM campaigns by using an AI model to do the job. Accounts are graded using tiers between A and F. In effect, it works like an automated version of Pardot grading or profile fit scoring from other marketing automation platforms. As with the other Einstein scoring models, Key Account identification also includes an explanation of the factors considered when the grade was calculated on the account record. Another critical new feature for ABM programs is the rollout of Accounts as Campaign Members in both Salesforce and Pardot. This was made available as a public beta in the last release and is now being switched on for everyone. In doing so, it solves a critical feature gap for account level campaigns run through inbound channels, such as social or programmatic advertising. The new generation of personalised DM services such as Sendoso will also benefit from this feature. It means that accounts can be added directly as campaign members, even if they don't have any contacts associated with them. For the first time, that makes ROI reporting on ABM initiatives a realistic possibility in Salesforce. No doubt ABM and marketing automation platforms such as Demandbase will add support for this feature over time, but for now Pardot users get a headstart. ### Do Not Email Changes As exciting as all these changes are, the most important change for Pardot admins is the new marketability status settings. Pardot is gaining a new marketability section on the prospect record, which finally clarifies exactly when prospects can and cannot be emailed. This has long confused even experienced Pardot users, who struggle to understand the complex interplay between the Email Opt Out, Do Not Email and Pardot Hard Bounce fields. Understanding when Operational Emails will be sent has been a particular issue. The new settings section clears up the confusion by saying exactly when both operational emails and marketing emails can be sent to a prospect. These marketability changes are opt-in only for now. Admins have until the Winter release in October before they're automatically enabled for everyone. The delayed rollout is required because the changes impact how the Do Not Email and Email Opt Out fields actually work. These fields are no longer linked. In the past, an unsubscribe would set both fields. That is no longer the case. When the prospect unsubscribes, only the Email Opt Out field will be updated. The Do Not Email field will not be changed. This gives marketers total control over the Do Not Email field, meaning it can be used to suppress competitors or sensitive accounts that you don't want to email for internal reasons. You can even update the Do Not Email field from within Pardot using engagement studio or an automation rule, allowing you to temporarily override the Do Not Email status if you ever need to send a campaign to suppressed contacts. Additionally, it is now possible to easily reset both the Do Not Email and Email Opt Out fields from Salesforce should it be necessary to do so. That solves an age old challenge that even the strictest of companies run into eventually. There are compliance risks associated with this change, but it is a net benefit for Pardot, simplifying the admin experience and bringing it into line with competing marketing automation platforms. ### Admin Enhancements Also simplifying the admin experience is a new user role in Salesforce. An increasing number of Pardot features are now configured through Salesforce setup rather than in Pardot. This causes challenges in organisations where marketing is not allowed admin access to Salesforce. In the last release, a new Marketing Setup section was added to Salesforce, which grouped the relevant Pardot and Marketing Cloud configuration screens into one place. Now, a new Marketing Admin permission set in Salesforce will allow Salesforce admins to grant access to Marketing Setup, without giving access to the far more sensitive CRM setup screens. This will be sure to delight IT, so make them aware of the change. B2B Marketing Analytics users should take a look at Object Sync for Pardot, an existing beta that now reaches general availability. Object Sync is intended to speed up B2B Marketing Analytics by pushing all your Pardot data into the Tableau CRM platform that hosts B2BMA. You may know Tableau CRM better by its old name of Einstein Analytics, following its renaming earlier this year. This new feature gives a lot more control over which Pardot data is synced to Tableau CRM and how often it is synced. Pardot users with large amounts of data will benefit substantially from this functionality, while smaller users won't see any noticeable impact. ### Template Changes Elsewhere in the Salesforce platform, a new Salesforce CMS option will benefit Pardot users. The new lightning email editor requires Salesforce CMS to be enabled. That's because all assets and images used by the editor are stored in the CMS rather than in Pardot. Some Pardot users have held off on enabling the lightning email editor for this reason. However, it is now much easier to enable Salesforce CMS because the requirement to configure a custom domain has been removed. Salesforce CMS can be configured to use a Salesforce branded domain instead, although I would still recommend using a custom domain instead where possible. There are minor deliverability and security benefits to using a branded domain for hosting images and files. Finally, users of dynamic content will be pleased to see a minor UI enhancement to the list views. The asset ID for each dynamic content section will be displayed when viewing the list of dynamic content in Pardot. This makes it much easier to add dynamic content into templates, and makes it possible to check which section your merge tags are referencing prior to send. This will be sure to cut down on send errors. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm&type=5&release=231). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### The Role of CDPs in B2B Marketing URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/role-of-cdps-in-b2b-marketing/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:18:12.000Z Creating a comprehensive view of all customer data is hard. It's a challenge that marketers have struggled with for years, even as data volumes have exploded. At the same time, there has been a substantial increase in the number of applications containing small pieces of customer data. Many solutions have been proposed to bring all that information together into a single customer view. None have ever managed to achieve it, but several new technologies intend to make data integration easier for B2B marketing teams of all sizes. For B2C marketers, there is a clear path to building a single customer view. Customer Data Platforms (CDP) are designed to be the master record of every contact, every purchase and every marketing activity data for the entire customer base. In practice, the complexities of data architecture and system integration mean that the reality doesn't quite meet the vision. However, CDPs are used in B2C to orchestrate complex omni-channel campaigns using buyer insights obtained from multiple sources. There have been efforts to adapt the CDP model for B2B, but these been held back by some fundamental differences between the types of data needed for B2B and B2C marketing. These have required a reassessment of where CDPs fit in the tech stack and their overall purpose in a B2B marketing organisation. ### CRM First At the heart of any B2B enterprise is the CRM system. CRM systems do have a role in some B2C sales processes, but in general they're much less important due to shorter sales cycles and the transactional nature of most consumer purchases. They're not the core sales platform for businesses that primarily sell through e-commerce or retail. By contrast, the CRM system is where B2B organisations manage the sales pipeline, and where they record the human relationships that drive so much corporate spending. No CDP will ever displace that. Instead, any new technology needs to optimise the kinds of information available in the CRM system so that it contains more of the customer activity that interests sales and less of the activity that doesn't. Sales simply don't want to know about the low value web and email activity that goes into nurturing prospects until they're ready to buy. On the flip side, there's the regular meetings and offline activity that goes into the typical enterprise sales effort, none of which holds any value for marketing segmentation or targeting. Marketing needs to know that there is sales activity in a particular lead or account, as well as the funnel stage of the deal, but not the details of the conversation. ### Account First Then there is the biggest difference between B2B and B2C: the account itself. Data platforms designed for B2B organisations need to be account-centric. It is not enough to bolt on an account layer to a fundamentally contact-centric database. Anyone who has tried to run ABM out of the leading marketing automation platforms can testify to that. Sales have always been structured around the account rather than the contact, and increasingly marketing is too. This means putting the account hierarchy at the heart of the marketing database. Contacts and leads should hang off this hierarchy, with their activity being summarised and aggregated by account. Customer profiles start at the account level, with different account segments then being sub-divided into contact audiences based on information such as job title, interest or engagement. ### Master Data Management Traditional data platforms have rarely been able to achieve this multi-level view of the buyer. Many enterprises have invested in Master Data Management (MDM) platforms to ensure there is a unified view of account data in their organisation. That's a necessary first step in combining the disparate sales, marketing, operations and finance systems that each hold a small piece of the customer profile. In smaller organisations, it's much easier to push all that data into the CRM system and just use Salesforce, HubSpot or Dynamics as the single customer view. However, this view rarely extends to include marketing engagement, just account and contact profiles. Where MDM and CRM fall down is in their view of unknown web visitors. Building profiles of anonymous cookie pools and then combining that with customer profile data is a core feature of CDPs derived from their roots in B2C marketing. In doing so, they allow cross-channel marketing campaigns to be orchestrated across both known and unknown visitor channels. That's not a use case that interests anyone outside of marketing. Even in B2B marketing there are fundamental limitations in this approach that need to be understood in order to prove the undoubted value of CDPs to B2B marketers. Sales, operations and finance all need to know who the customer is before engaging with them. Too many interactions happen in person, even in the era of digital selling. These touchpoints need to be mapped into the customer journey. They also need to be mapped to accounts, and into the account hierarchy and account segments that are already defined in CRM. That account structure is shared between sales and marketing, as is the contact profile. As such, it does not make sense to manage contact or account data in a CDP system that is mostly intended for marketing use only. Particularly given that Sales probably own the account record to being with. ### Digital First CDPs still have a role in building digital engagement, especially during the early phases of the buyer journey, where the prospect is still just an anonymous web visitor. However, their role is subordinate to that of the CRM system. They ingest account and contact profiles managed elsewhere, then combine it with activity history and visitor profiles to build a unified view of every prospect from a marketing perspective. This allows them to create digital audiences for use across the tech stack. Some of these audiences may even be synced into the CRM system for telemarketing or sales follow-up. However, other types of audiences will need input from sales. This is particularly true for ABM campaigns, where target account lists still tend to be manually selected based on an agreement between sales and marketing. These audiences may be pushed into the CDP or into marketing automation but are ultimately managed from the CRM system. As such, there can be no single place to build marketing segmentation. Nor can there be a single place where all data is managed except in the very smallest of businesses. Accounts, contacts and activity should all be managed separately in systems that best fit that specific data type and then combined into a single place for review and analysis. CDPs can be the solution to that problem, but so far they've not managed to achieve a user friendly customer view for a general marketing audience. Instead, they're more intended to be a data management platform for developers or data analysts. It's important, therefore, to be clear about the specific role of CDPs, MDM and CRM in your organisation's tech stack. Ensure every tool has a clear purpose and that there is a system of record for every data point. Then make sure those data points are made available in every platform that needs that data. This is the first step to cutting through the complexity of big data and harnessing it into an engine that can be used to grow your business. Wherever it happens, data management is always an ongoing process. ### Marketo Engage May '21 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-engage-may-21-release-overview/ Last updated: 2021-05-17T17:38:50.000Z It's the small things that matter the most. The return of drag and drop in the folder tree was heartedly welcomed by Marketo users last month. Accompanying this was an unexpected bonus: coloured icons in the folder tree. When the new folder tree was launched last year, the program, asset and folder icons were changed to black and white in line with other Adobe products. This made it hard to distinguish program types and program status. The re-introduction of drag and drop was announced at the time, but the icon colour change was not. Thus the surprise and delight when the refreshed icons greeted the most recent wave of Marketo enterprise clients migrated to the new UI. These updates are all part of the reskinning of the Marketo Engage platform to fit into the wider Adobe Experience Cloud. That is an ongoing process. Subsequent releases this year will see additional updates to the UI, introducing many of the features already found in Marketo Sky to the wider user base. Among those Sky features making the cut are global search and advanced tree filters, both of which are in this week's release. That's not to say the new Adobe UI is the same as Marketo Sky. It's not, but from what we've seen so far, it takes a lot of inspiration from the experimental Marketo UX first announced in 2018. ### Incoming Perhaps the biggest UX change to Marketo will arrive this summer. Marketo's login system is transitioning over to use Adobe IDs, allowing Marketo to use the same logins as AEM, Adobe Analytics and the rest of the Adobe product family. It's a very disruptive change. One that was expected to happen eventually but is perhaps happening sooner than expected. The shift to Adobe ID sign-ins will be for new Marketo customers only at first, with existing customers being required to transition over gradually throughout the next 18 months. This does mean that Marketo access will now be managed from the Adobe Admin Console, which many Marketo admins won't have access to today. There is plenty of upside to the hassle of UI changes and new logins. Last week's Adobe Summit brought plenty of teasers for future releases. Integration with the newly announced B2B Adobe Experience Platform stole the show, which promises to deliver a unified view of your account and contact universe. That data can then be used to segment and target campaigns in any Adobe Experience Cloud application and beyond. Marketo is now one of those apps, and the new platform will also deliver improved audience sync with other Adobe apps. The existing audience sync relies on cookie matching, so it typically only matches a small part of the typical Marketo list with the app from which it's integrated. ### Execute Campaign More immediately is this week's release. It's the largest release for some time, including many new features for the base Marketo platform. The most significant change is the new Execute Campaign flow action for smart campaigns. This allows smart campaigns to add people to other smart campaigns. In practice, Marketo users will be able to build nested or modular campaigns that can be reused across a series of flows. The existing Request Campaign flow action already does this, but with one crucial difference. When Request Campaign is used, contacts continue flowing through the existing smart campaign at the same as they flow through the requested campaign. The Execute Campaign flow step pauses people in the original campaign until they finish flowing through the executed campaign. They only resume their journey through the initial campaign after they've finished with the executed campaign. There are definite use cases for data normalisation here, in situations where people need to have their data cleaned before they're scored or routed to CRM. Lead routing is another use case for customers who manage this in Marketo. Architecting such flows to run in order has been tricky in the past, but this makes it much more manageable. You no longer need to use wait steps or rely on hope and pray to get smart campaigns to run in the correct order. ### Account Smart Lists For ABM users, account smart lists are now in general availability. This significantly improves the usefulness of the ABM module by allowing you to run account based workflows precisely as you would lead based campaigns. Account smart lists can be built using the full range of account filters, as well as the activity and attributes of any people linked to the account. Using this capability, it is possible to create dynamic target account lists or run cross-channel ABM campaigns directly from Marketo. Account based sales alerts, ABM nurture campaigns or integration with LinkedIn account audiences are all available using this capability. Adobe have talked a lot about account based experiences recently, but only now Marketo can deliver them, allowing the platform to compete more directly with dedicated ABM vendors such as Demandbase. ### Bot Protection Forms are receiving a boost too, with the arrival of improved spam protection. This is based on improved bot detection and stronger server-side validation of form submissions. The validation changes have blocked some well-used but unsupported methods of integrating external forms with Marketo, namely posting a third-party form directly to the Marketo forms endpoint. Instead, form embeds or the official forms API must be used by developers when posting website forms to Marketo. A communication about this change went out to all Marketo users at the beginning of the year to give users time to update their forms to use the supported methods. The improved bot detection also benefits reporting. Email security packages often validate all links in incoming emails for security or phishing threats. These opens and clicks can be detected by ESPs as real click-throughs unless specifically filtered out. Marketo hasn't done a good job of this in the past, but that changes this week. Bot clicks can now be excluded from email performance reports using a new admin setting, ensuring more accurate campaign results for everyone. This applies to MSI emails as well as regular marketing and operational emails. An additional security improvement comes in the form of sensitive data fields. This new setting allows admins to block form pre-fill for potentially sensitive person or company fields on forms. Data in fields marked this way can't then be exposed on landing pages. This will be most commonly used to protect PII information in companies with strict security requirements. ### Lead Updates Then there's the vast array of API updates affecting the bulk APIs in particular. It is now possible to export custom object records using the bulk API, while the bulk lead API has been improved. There's also a new program members API, which allows you to create, update and export program members in bulk. An enhanced metadata API allows fields to be created by the API. While nested event programs can now be created by the API, correcting a previous inconsistency. Finally, it is now possible to search for leads by ID in Marketo. A frustrating oversight with a workaround that is no longer needed. When viewing a lead, it is now possible to run single flow actions from the lead details screen. Enhancing a useful but oft-forgotten function and exposing it to a wider audience. That's a general trend in this release. Long may it continue. These are not the only updates coming this month. There are enhancements to Bizible and the Microsoft Dynamics sync too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/May+'21) on Marketo Docs. ### Finding the Balance: Effective B2B Personalisation URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/effective-b2b-personalisation/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:18:27.000Z Personalisation has been a top marketing trend for several years. The idea is simple. You'll get higher responses rates and more leads if you tailor your content and campaigns to each individual rather than sending a generic message to everyone. Making good personalisation a reality is more complicated because it requires you to understand the business needs and motivations of every contact in your marketing database. Successful personalisation is about demonstrating how to solve each contact's unique challenges, as well as positioning your products and services to meet these requirements. Simple personalisation often works the best. It's easy to go too far. There is a balance to be struck between personalisation and privacy. If you only use personalisation to show contact's the data you've collected about them, then you will lose customers faster than you'll gain them. Effective personalisation aims to help customers by guiding them to information that makes their work quicker and easier. Over time this builds trust and demonstrates that your organisation is the right partner to solve your prospect's business challenges. ### Focus on Content Good personalisation doesn't have to be complicated. In a B2B context, all you need to know is a contact's job title, as well as some basic information about the size and industry of their company. You don't even need to know the company's customer status or purchase history, although having that background definitely helps. From that, you can create targeted content based on the contact's buying persona and their previous relationship with your organisation. Mix that with the information you have about each individual to send personalised campaigns that get results. Every marketing automation platform has features that allow you to quickly add personalisation to your emails. Start by creating a reusable dynamic content section for salutations and names in subject lines. Then work out where you have sufficient data to accurately personalise some sections of your content. In terms of content, the right approach will vary by brand and segment. It’s easy to focus too much on dynamic content and field merges, and overlook far more meaningful differences such as adapting the tone and language of your content to the personas or industries you’re targeting. Some roles and organisations are more formal than others. It’s generally best practice to create a separate campaign stream for senior decision makers, because content aimed at this audience needs a different focus. In many situations, dynamic content is enough to bridge the gap, but in other cases different content is required. There can be inefficiencies created by too much dynamic content in an email, as well as too little. ### The Right Database Personalisation is only effective if you have the right information about your prospects. When managing your marketing database, your top priority should be to properly categorise the job titles of your contacts. Make sure that each record has the correct role and seniority so that audiences can be segmented as required. Implementing job title normalisation workflows in your Marketing Automation and CRM is an essential component of any personalisation strategy. That sounds like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. [CRMT Digital](https://www.crmtdigital.com/what-we-do/data-analytics/) have a lot of experience in data normalisation and can help you get started. Using external data sources to pull in firmographic data about your accounts is also necessary, particularly if you're running an ABM strategy. For smaller databases, asking an intern to manually update account profiles from LinkedIn is generally sufficient to get the data you need. At scale, data purchases from specialist data vendors may be required, but be careful. Data sources can vary wildly in quality. Even the best suppliers, such as D&B, have gaps in their database, particularly when it comes to SMB audiences. Your contact strategy should identify where you need to tailor content to the audience. Then map out the best ways to identify the relevant audiences in your database and beyond, as well as the most efficient ways of personalising campaigns and content to that audience. Some approaches will be more effective for your audience than others, so use A/B testing to measure the impact of each approach to personalisation on your campaigns. Then use constant iteration and continuous testing to discover what works and what doesn't. When it comes to personalisation, the only real limit is scale and efficiencies rather than ambition. The sky's the limit! ### After the Emergency: Remote Working URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/after-the-emergency-remote-working/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:56:41.000Z At the start of the pandemic, it was widely predicted that working from home would become the new normal. It was suggested that office workers would be much more productive if they didn't have to spend hours in traffic on the daily commute. The last twelve months have borne that out. Many have enjoyed the advantages of full time remote working, but employers have never been quite as happy with the situation. Now they're preparing to bring their staff back into the office. Last week, Google became the first major technology firm to tell employees that they would be returning to the office full time after the pandemic. Remote working will be limited to 14 days per year unless line managers agree otherwise. Their peers in Silicon Valley have been moving in the opposite direction. Twitter and Facebook both intend for home working to become permanent. So too does accountancy giant PwC who announced a new flexible working policy days before the Google announcement. In truth, those initial predictions of permanent home working for all reflected the bias of the people making them. Plenty of media firms have been fully remote for years. A significant number of online publications don't have a physical office at all, using freelancers to supplement a geographically dispersed management team. Journalists can work from anywhere and frequently need to take advantage of that when on location. All they need is a basic web connection. Few other office workers are quite so lucky. ### Cultural Concerns From an employers perspective, there are three main challenges with remote working: training, team building and company culture. The last of these is particularly important to Google, an organisation which is famously proud of its open and flexible traditions, that aim to encourage creativity among developers. All new hires have to go through an intense onboarding program intended to build loyalty and foster the required culture among staff. A few months ago Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, spoke of the challenges of building such a strong culture while working remotely. It's no coincidence that he's eager to get his team back into their Mountain View headquarters. Amazon are following Google's lead, announcing a return to an office-centric culture this weekend. New CEO, Andy Jassy, has previously cited problems with collaboration and brainstorming as the justification for the move. The online retail giant has many unique work patterns that aren't seen elsewhere, particularly when it comes to meetings. It's likely these are contributing to the dislike for remote working among Jassy, Jeff Bezos and their leadership team. Such opinions are not necessarily shared by Amazon employees further down the corporate ladder, if online reaction to the announcement is to be believed. ### Hybrid Working One tech giant taking a different approach is Microsoft, who are adopting a hybrid approach to office working. Employees will be allowed to divide their time between home and the office, although they are expected to spend more time working in the office than outside of it. IBM and Apple have also hinted that they're thinking along similar lines. All three companies have more traditional cultures than other technology firms, reflecting their relative longevity. Here it is training and mentorship that is driving a return to the office, not culture. Junior employees need to be taught the skills necessary to succeed, and that's much easier when mentor and mentee are in the same room. Training programs don't require staff to be together full time, but regular contact is valuable. Goldman Sachs have also used staff training as an excuse to get their investment bankers back to their trading desks on Wall Street. Most knowledge workers recognise the need to return to the office part time at some point, but there is a big difference between employers and employees on what that means. Many tech workers want their roles to be predominantly home based, with weekly trips to the office for variety or meetings. Many bosses what their teams to be mostly office based, but with greater flexibility around remote working than before the pandemic. The disconnect surrounding staff expectations extends to the political arena. UK Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, recently cited staff retention as a reason to return to the office in a widely panned interview. There are definitely people who want to return to the office full-time, but they're not a majority. ### Balance A balance will need to be found, and one which takes into account individual circumstances. Different working patterns will likelybecome normal even within the same team. There are plenty of organisations that make this work already. Hybrid working has been around for years, and the spread of work from home Fridays made it more popular even before the pandemic. People have become used to the freedom that remote working allows, and won't surrender it lightly. Flexibility around working arrangements will become a selling point for businesses looking to attract the best talent. Those organisations that can best meet staff expectations will have an advantage in staff retention and recruitment. That's one area where small businesses and start-ups might have an advantage over their larger peers. It's much easier to remotely build a team in a small organisation than in a larger one. The challenge with the current situation, is the lack of flexibility caused by lockdowns and stay at home orders. Replacing one rigid work pattern with another one won't be popular. ### Downtime versus Security URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/downtime-versus-security/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:58:29.000Z Software vulnerabilities are a fact of life for both developers and IT admins. Barely a week goes by without some kind of security update for a high profile application or operating system. Patching is a constant cycle that is frequently automated at an enterprise level. Microsoft release security fixes for Windows and Office monthly, as do Chrome and Firefox. Rolling out those patches quickly and speedily can be challenging when security concerns have to be balanced against compatibility testing and the risk of downtime. All too often, those patching schedules are dictated by the severity of the threat and the risk of leaving a system unpatched for an extended period of time. Security experts always advise users to apply software updates as soon as possible after release. IT standards such as ISO 27001 require this before organisations can be certified. Yet, this doesn't always happen, particularly in smaller shops which don't the resources to manage complex applications properly. Management in these same companies rarely appreciates the risks associated with delaying security updates longer than strictly necessary. ### Day Zero In early 2021, a high profile zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft Exchange Server put those risks into the spotlight. Zero-day vulnerabilities are always dangerous. The term refers to security threats that are actively being exploited by hackers at the time the patch is released. That only applies to a small proportion of the many updates released by developers, but it's always big news whenever one is discovered in a widely used application. It then becomes a race against time to apply the relevant update before you're hacked. Not all zero-days are actually critical for every software end user. Some zero-days are difficult to exploit, some only have a very limited impact, while others only apply to certain configurations. That was emphatically not the case for the Microsoft Exchange vulnerability that the Hafnium hacking collective exploited over the past few months. This threat was unusually severe because the flaw in Exchange was easy to exploit and could lead to the entire server being compromised. It has already been used to install ransomware and steal confidential data. The worst part of the Hafnium threat, though, was that multiple hacking groups were widely exploiting it prior to the eventual patch being released. It has been suggested that a Microsoft partner leaked a Microsoft developed proof of concept exploit kit intended prior to public disclosure of the vulnerability. This implies a level of coordination between the security community and hackers that is disturbing, although one possible in a nation state led hacking campaign. As a result, Hafnium became headline news due to the number of companies being breached compared to past Exchange vulnerabilities. ### Known Consequences Given the circumstances, it was entirely foreseeable that any delay in patching the Hafnium vulnerability would lead to Exchange installs being hacked. Yet, thousands of IT admins did precisely that. Many servers were left unpatched for days with only one result. It is estimated that 250,000 servers fell victim to the attack. All to avoid a few minutes of downtime for the corporate email server. It is far easier to prevent a hack by installing a security update than it is to clean up a breach once discovered. Hafnium installed backdoors on the infected servers, which other groups are actively exploiting to install ransomware. Removing these backdoors can be complicated, often involving input from specialist security experts. For this reason, the best practice is to wipe the infected server and start again. That's not always possible with something as mission critical as an email server. Due to the scale of this particular problem, an automated clean-up tool for Hafnium has been released through the Microsoft Defender antivirus tool built in to Windows. Too late for the compromised Exchange users. ### Known Alternatives Perhaps the easiest way to avoid being breached by Hafnium is to follow another common security recommendation. Don't run your own email server unless you're large enough to have a dedicated email security team to manage it. Microsoft Exchange is a complicated piece of software that many IT managers don't really understand. That was true when I managed Exchange 2003 over a decade ago, but the problem has become worse since then. Email is a major threat vector for phishing, viruses and ransomware, requiring a suite of specialist security tools and hands-on monitoring. As an internet facing service that has to be available 24/7, email servers are constantly being targeted by hackers. As such, ensuring they're configured correctly is essential. Yet too many SMB Exchange admins don't even know how to configure the application properly, or don't have the resources to build in redundancy and failover servers to avoid downtime. There is a reason, why many organisations in high security industries such as Government or Finance now adopt a cloud-first approach. They know that the major cloud players are far more secure than their self-hosted servers will ever be. This month, their peers learned the same lesson. ### Google and the Cookie Crunch URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/google-cookie-crunch/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:46:27.000Z For decades, third party cookies have driven web tracking. Those small text files on your computer were used by website owners to login their users, by marketers to track contact activity, and by ad networks to build audience profiles for their customers. Not any more. Last year, Google announced a plan to kill tracking cookies in 2022\. Last week, they outlined the technology that is going to replace them. Third party cookies have long been controversial. Apple and Mozilla both ban third-party cookies in their browsers. Ad blockers target them too. That's because they're mostly used for cross-site web tracking. When pages set a cookie, they tell the browser what website it belongs to. Each site is supposed to only have access to their cookies, but in practice third party tracking scripts allow tracking cookies to be shared across the entire web. This behaviour enables Facebook to target ads based on visits to any page with a like button. Now Google is phasing out third-party tracking cookies as part of a scheme called "Privacy Sandbox". Nor are they replacing them with the obvious alternative. Whenever people browse the web a huge amount of detail about your browser is sent to website owners. All this information is supposed to serve you the right version of the page, but is instead leveraged by ad networks to uniquely identify every device on the web. This practice is called Browser Fingerprinting, and is currently used to work around existing ad blockers, but Google are going to crack down on fingerprinting too. That's significant for consumers because there is no way to block sites from collecting browser fingerprints. ### Offline Tracking Instead, Google will shift the creation and storage of audience profiles into the browser. Chrome will use machine learning to build a picture of your interests based upon the pages you visit. That already happens today. However, this profile will no longer be stored on Google's servers. It will remain on your device, inaccessible to anyone else. The only thing sent back to HQ will be the number of users tagged with a particular interest. Even that's only collected so that Google Ads customers know which audiences are large enough to be viable for campaigns. As a result, the decision about which ads to serve on which page will be made in the browser. That has to happen because the ad network doesn't have access to your audience profile. They have to ask the browser whether you're a member of a pre-defined interest group or audience segment. If the browser says yes, then the digital auction process used to match ads to ad space will be run on your device as you load the page. ### Flocks and Cohorts The technology powering all this is called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC). This fancy name refers to the algorithm used to determine your interests based upon the sites you visit. It uses cohort analysis to aggregate your browsing history into a set of topics available for advertisers to personalise ads. Your combination of interests is given a Cohort ID which is, in theory, shared with thousands of other people worldwide. This Cohort ID is the only thing advertisers have access to. In order to be available for targeting, each cohort must have a minimum number of users. The main problem with this proposal is that it hands control over audience segmentation to Google. If the browser is responsible for calculating your cohort and deciding your interests, then the worlds most popular browser gets to determine what segments are viable and which segments are too small. A related proposal called FLEDGE is currently being developed to solve this problem. FLEDGE will allow advertiser defined interest groups to be generated and stored by the browser. The most relevant use case for this is retargeting, as it enables new interest groups to be created in real-time for displaying specific ads based upon visits to particular URLs. More importantly, it ensures that the likes of Criteo, Magnite and NextRoll can develop and run their own ad networks independently of any browser maker. As a result, there is widespread industry backing for all the privacy sandbox technologies. FLoC and FLEDGE will be used by many ad networks, and not just by Google. That's an important consideration for a company undergoing anti-trust investigations in other areas of their business. ### Conversion Tracking The proposals don't just stop at the point of ad placement. They cover reporting and conversion tracking too. Ad networks use third-party cookies to measure conversions as well as to build audience profiles. They're the only way to link the original ad on the publisher's site with the conversion pixel on the ad buyer's checkout page. A new API has been developed to eliminate this problem. When an ad is clicked, a unique id identifying the ad will be stored in the browser. When a visitor reaches the goal page, the conversion pixel looks for this identifier and flags it as converted before sending it back to the ad server so the conversion can be logged in reporting. This unique ad id is further randomised so that it can't be used to detect the individual. This randomisation doesn't affect the accuracy of the click and conversion statistics presented to the advertiser, only the ability to build detailed audience profiles based on ad click data. The downside of this new conversion tracking technology is that it locks advertisers into the reporting tools from their ad networks. Those reports will be the only way media buyers can measure the success of their campaigns, as third parties won't have access to the tracking or conversion data needed to compile reports. That's great for ad networks and media agencies, but will require adtech vendors to better integrate their reporting tools with the wider martech and BI tech stack. Many marketers struggle with end to end reporting because they can't link their media reports with their funnel reports to get a holistic picture of campaign performance. ### Privacy by Design For consumers, Google's proposals are a big win. For starters, it closes a major security loophole in the design of the web that has been used to hack websites and serve malware. Ad networks will no longer be able to identify individual users, but few advertisers were interested in doing so anyway. Advertising is a volume game. The individual only becomes important once they've converted, by which point you know who they are anyway. Now that reality is being baked into the foundations of adtech. Advertising segments won't be quite as detailed as they once were, but increased accuracy for the remaining segments will compensate for this deficiency. That's a net positive because too much personalisation is bad for consumers and worse for advertisers. Whether the privacy sandbox will actually increase trust in personalised advertising is an open question. Many people are opposed to the very concept, but it will make a difference to some. Such variations could make a big difference to the bottom line of advertisers. ### Oracle Eloqua 21A Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-21a-release-overview/ Last updated: 2021-02-22T08:29:59.000Z It's update time for Eloqua over the next two weeks. The arrival of the 21A release brings further extensions to the archiving feature, more AI features and enhancements to the Salesforce integration app. For starters, the new Oracle Redwood UI seen on the Eloqua home page has been extended to the asset launchpads and the most commonly used dashboards. Don't expect a bumper set of feature updates this month though, because the Eloqua product team are more focused on the ongoing OCI migration. Oracle are in the process of moving the Eloqua application out of the existing data centres and on to Oracle Cloud. The Australia based Pod 7 made the switch late last year, but subsequent migrations have been delayed by unspecified technical issues. The aim of the OCI migration is to make Eloqua easier to manage for Oracle, and is part of a broader project to deploy all of Oracle's cloud applications on their cloud hosting platform. There's no direct user facing benefit to the project, but it should indirectly make the platform faster and more reliable, as well as easier to maintain and update. The transition to OCI hosting should be a smooth one for most Eloqua customers. The application IP addresses will change, which may impact email whitelists, CRM login restrictions and custom integrations. You should also check the DNS records of any Eloqua microsites, bounceback domains or application domains. The DNS records required by Eloqua for web traffic have changed several times over the years and many longstanding customers may not be using the latest instance specific versions. These actions should be carried out sooner rather than later, as the IP addresses for Oracle developed Eloqua Apps will change when they're migrated to OCI in March. The CX Sales Integration and Salesforce integration Apps are both affected by this change. ### Archiving The headline feature in this release is the ability to archive folders. This follows the re-introduction of archiving of forms and emails last summer. Currently, only folders in the forms and emails areas of the application can be archived. Now folders can be archived too, using a process that works the same way as it does for assets. Furthermore, archiving folders has the effect of archiving the forms or emails contained in the folder. Unlike asset archiving, folder archiving is a controlled availability feature that needs to be requested through support. This restricted availability will likely change over time and the feature will eventually become generally accessible. One feature already making the switch from controlled availability to general availability, is the ability to disable form submissions for specific forms. After this release, an 'Allow Form Submissions' toggle will be added to the form editor giving Eloqua users the ability to block all submissions on old or inactive forms. When this option is enabled, anybody who tries to complete the disabled form will receive an error message and the form submission will be rejected. This provides an easy way to take registration forms for oversubscribed events offline and has the security benefit of preventing spam attacks on any old forms floating around the web. On the landing page side, a fix images option is being added to the asset editors. Chrome recently stopped loading non-secure images on secure pages, which broke some landing pages. Eloqua users can fix this problem by editing the affected page, and clicking a link that automatically updates the URL of the affected images from http to https. This only works for Eloqua hosted images, but does apply to both email and landing page editors. ### Salesforce Integration There are a whole swath of enhancements to the Salesforce Integration App. This has now fully replaced the old native integration, which is no longer supported but continues to be enabled for those Eloqua customers who were already using it. Many of those updates are intended to bring the app up to parity with the native integration. This includes the ability to use Salesforce IDs stored in a contact field in CDO action steps, more reliable address syncing and the ability to write Salesforce Unique IDs back to a contact field after update action steps. It is now possible to use Advanced Edit Mode to concatenate multiple Eloqua contact fields into a single Salesforce reference, currency or double type field. There are several enhancements to campaign response and campaign member integrations, which make syncing campaign responses to Salesforce easier and more reliable. The most significant update to the Salesforce Integration comes in the form of filters to the marketing activity exports. Eloqua has long had the ability to create activities in Salesforce whenever a contact interacts with an Eloqua email, landing page or form. This provides Sales with visibility of the activity, and gives an opportunity to call them if they're already engaged with that contact. However, it's never been possible to filter the activities integration to specific contacts, only to specified activity types. Eloqua attempts to create a Salesforce activity for the desired marketing engagement types, regardless of whether the contact exists in Salesforce or not. This generates lots of unnecessary integration errors and API usage. A new controlled availability feature changes that, allowing Eloqua users to filter the activities integration using 5 contact filters. As such, it will now be possible to use the activities integrations in Eloqua instances that are integrated with multiple Salesforce instances for the first time. That was never possible with the old native integration. ### Advanced Intelligence Last year saw the release of the new Eloqua Advanced Intelligence add-on, this is Oracle's attempt to add AI capabilities to Eloqua. It includes the send time optimisation features piloted last year, as well as subject line optimisation, account engagement scoring and contact fatigue analysis. This release substantially expands the scope of contact fatigue analysis. Until now, fatigue analysis was only available as a segment filter criteria. It could be used to filter out customers who were receiving too many emails from campaigns, this was calculated automatically using their activity history. That same fatigue analysis condition can be now be used as a decision step on campaign canvas, allowing marketers to match nurture cadences to the contacts ability to engage with the content. Automatically slow down or accelerate nurture flows based upon the AI generated fatigue level, rather than relying on manual communication limit filters. That same information is also available in a new dashboard, which shows overall contact fatigue level and email performance by fatigue level. In a similar vein, send time optimisation has been updated to automatically reschedule AI enabled emails to the next best time, if another email is manually scheduled for the same time. Previously, there is a fixed delay period built into send time optimisation, after which the AI enabled email campaign was sent. This could lead to emails being sent at undesirable times, thus defeating the point of the send time optimisation feature in the first place. The Oracle Eloqua 21A Update is scheduled over two weekends starting February 26th, 2021\. Although, Pod 6 got it early on February 12th, 2021\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as a change to insight, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/21A/21A-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Salesforce Pardot Spring '21 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/salesforce-pardot-spring-21-release-overview/ Last updated: 2021-02-08T08:29:59.000Z After a disrupted 2020, the Salesforce release schedule gets back on track this month. The roll-out of the Spring 21 release is now under way, with some momentous changes to Pardot. The core Salesforce platform has not been ignored either. Among the usual avalanche of new features are useful user experience tweaks that both admins and end users will appreciate. Pardot users will already be aware of the biggest change: the end of Pardot only logins. Spring 21 marks a significant milestone on the road to integrating Pardot into the broader Salesforce platform. From next week, it will only be possible to login to Pardot through Salesforce, using a set of Salesforce login details. This has been a disruptive change for many Pardot customers, but one which will ultimately benefit the combined Salesforce and Pardot platform in the long run. Yet, the end of Pardot's login system is not the only significant update to Salesforce login processes and the Salesforce Identity platform this month. Multi-Factor Authentication will become a mandatory feature for all Salesforce customers from 1st February 2022\. After that date, all Salesforce users will need to verify every login using an authenticator app, verification code or security key. That's not an unusual requirement among enterprise software providers, but will be equally as disruptive for many, particularly those using shared logins or legacy integrations. ### Campaign Members Perhaps the most interesting update in this release is a beta. Campaign Members are central to attribution and RoI reporting in both Salesforce and Pardot, but ABM programs have been limited by the fact that only leads and contacts can be added to campaigns. No more. It is now possible to add accounts as members of a Salesforce campaign. This should make a big difference when reporting on many different tactics commonly used across both ABM and demand generation programs, particularly digital advertising channels. All the existing ways of adding campaign members are supported, as are all the existing options for reporting on campaign membership in Salesforce. ### First-Party Tracking In terms of Pardot features, the general availability of first-party tracking is both notable and long overdue. Browsers have started aggressively blocking the third-party cookies used by Pardot's existing web tracking functionality, so users are urged to upgrade sooner rather than later. When enabled, Pardot will now use your existing tracker domains for web tracking, as well as for vanity URLs and hosting landing pages. That will allow much more web activity to be tracked by Pardot, assuming those domains are subdomains of your main website. The roll-out of first-party tracking does require you to update the Pardot tracking scripts on your website, and it also changes the way web tracking handles campaign association. Instead of having a different tracking script for every campaign, there is now a different version of the tracking script for every domain. You can then set a default Pardot campaign for new visitors to every domain. That reduces the flexibility of Pardot's web tracking slightly, but in a way that will affect few Pardot customers. ### Two-Click Unsubscribe Also on the long overdue list, is two-click unsubscribe. All emails sent from Pardot must include either an unsubscribe link or an email preference link. That requirement exists for good reason, but the unsubscribe link has always suffered from a major flaw: it's single click. Clicking the unsubscribe link is an immediate opt-out, no questions asked. Sure, there's an option to resubscribe on the confirmation page, but that assumes prospects actually see the page to begin with. If an email security scanner clicks the link, then the prospect will be opted out without their knowledge or consent. In an era of strong data protection laws, any such accidental unsubscribes are devastating for both marketer and prospect. This is not a theoretical risk either, there are a growing number of companies using email security scanners and they do show up in click and unsubscribe reports. ### Business Units Pardot customers that use the business units feature to sync one Salesforce instance to multiple Pardot instances will be looking forward to this release. It is now possible to safely sync Salesforce leads or contacts to multiple business units. The importance of this change cannot be understated. Many enterprise users require the kind of data segregation that business units is intended to solve, but those companies often share contacts even in the most segregated of organisations. All Salesforce have done is block the sync of Pardot package fields from syncing to the wrong Pardot instance, but that opens up much more flexibility for enterprises that need to use business units. You will need to re-configure your marketing data sharing rules to take advantage of the update. Also affecting business units is the ability to report on campaigns by business unit. A new business unit field has been added to the campaign object which records which Pardot instance the campaign is synced with. That eliminates the need for another workaround in environments with multiple Pardot instances. Additionally, it is no longer possible for the Company name setting in Pardot to be different from the Business Unit name for that instance in Salesforce. If the two settings are ever in conflict, then the Business Unit name in Salesforce settings is updated to match the value in Pardot. This generally only affects admins, but does eliminate a potential source of confusion. ### Platform Updates In terms of changes to the core Salesforce Platform, the most welcome feature is the return of manual record sharing. A sharing button is now available for the core Sales objects in lightning as well as any custom objects. As with the equivalent feature in the classic experience, users can share individual records or lists of records with additional users and groups. That will make the lives of many admins in high security organisations much easier. Einstein Opportunity is now available to everybody. Previously, organisations needed to have a minimum number of opportunities before it could be activated. That limit has been made redundant by the arrival of global scoring models. Salesforce customers who don't have enough opportunities to meet the threshold can enable a global model, and then switch to a custom model after winning 200 deals and losing 200 deals. Also on opportunities, it's now possible to add custom relationships to Opportunity Product records. This is a long-standing feature request which will benefit many organisations. Finally, the latest version of the Pardot API reaches general availability. This is a big deal for many reasons, not least because there are different versions of the existing API depending on whether your instance allows multiple contacts with the same email address or not. API v5 also significantly modernises the syntax and enables asynchronous methods, both of which are important to developers, particularly if they also use the Sales Cloud APIs. Most important of all, the new version opens up the API to far more areas of Pardot with an ambitious roadmap of new endpoints awaiting future releases. If those promises are delivered, Pardot is about to get a lot more flexible. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=release-notes.salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm&type=5&release=230). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### 2021: Digital Marketing in the New Normal URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/2021-digital-marketing-and-the-new-normal/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:18:40.000Z After a challenging 12 months, 2021 is the year in which the digital business model becomes the new normal. Balancing this with previously successful in-person strategies will become important later in the year. First, marketers need to overcome the operational challenges that prevent the digital approach from reaching its maximum potential. There are still significant barriers in terms of data, technology and process that need to be solved. ### Digital Optimisation In 2020, the pandemic exposed weaknesses in digital programs that could be ignored in better times. Too many marketers simply weren't generating enough leads from digital channels. Events were relied upon to fill gaps in the funnel, while telemarketing was used as an alternative to lead nurturing. Such shortcuts were no longer possible in a world dominated by remote working, and digital programs were restructured to fill the gap. Use of webinars, content syndication and social campaigns have exploded during the last few quarters. Finding the right channels and content to keep those leads engaged until they're ready to buy has been more of a challenge and will be a focus area in 2021. ### Sales Enablement Sales processes have changed significantly during the pandemic and will continue to do so now that digital selling is embedded across the board. Digital selling changes what sales need to know about their customers. Marketing are being asked to up their Sales Enablement game, by providing more information about leads and how they qualified, as well as creating additional collateral to support the sales effort in a virtual environment. Those that don’t will struggle to convert opportunities as quickly as they would before the pandemic. ### Tech Stack Consolidation The pandemic accelerated digital transformation, leading to five years of digitisation taking place within a few months. This put strain on digital infrastructure across all sectors. At the same time, the switch to digital campaigns has caused marketers to reassess what functionality they require from their technology stacks. These ambitions do not necessarily require new technology. Updating the existing tech stack to work together more closely while taking advantage of unused capabilities within those platforms is sufficient in many cases. ### Data Management The biggest area of new technology investment at the moment is in data management. Marketing operations are looking to consolidate customer data and the processes needed to manage that data into one enterprise wide database so that it can be combined into a single customer view for more effective use across both marketing and sales. As part of that, the use of machine learning to organise the disparate sources of data has become an essential part of the marketing operations toolkit. There is now too much data for such processes to be done manually. ### Data Improvement Much of the data currently in marketing databases is either out of date, of dubious quality or simply isn't usable due to gaps in contact and account profiles. That's not a new problem, but the drive to replace generic content with personalised experiences makes data accuracy far more important than previously. Data quality is limiting the ability of marketing teams to run effective campaigns in a way that it wasn't two years ago. This will require marketing and sales teams to come together and agree what information they need about customers and prospects, so that operations teams can decide the best way of acquiring it. ### Events Event organisers are planning their post-Easter schedules, but international travel restrictions will still be in place throughout the year, limiting the ability to organise larger events. As such, events will need to be live-streamed for remote audiences unable or unwilling to attend in person. The most successful events will be those that reach both virtual and in-person audiences, allowing interaction and two-way communication between audiences and exhibitors regardless of location. 2021 promises to be a return to normality. Spring will see a re-awakening for these sectors of the economy most affected by the pandemic. However, the new normal will not be the same as the old normal. The new digital ways of working and the old in-person methods will continue to co-exist. The most successful marketers in 2021, will be those best able to combine them. Want more detail and additional predictions? An extended version of this article first appeared on the CRMT Digital blog at ### Marketo Engage: New Year, New UI URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-engage-new-year-new-ui/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T16:11:33.000Z In the years since Marketo's acquisition, there has been little sign of Adobe's presence in the Marketo platform itself. Several Adobe integrations have been released to varying degrees of publicity, but their adoption has been limited. That is now changing. Last quarter, Adobe finally started the roll-out of the Marketo Next-Generation User Experience. This new UI combines the much hyped Marketo Sky Beta UX with the broader Adobe Experience Cloud look and feel. Sky never saw wide adoption because the benefits of the new experience never outweighed the training costs of learning a new user interface. It's a common problem for new UIs, and the reason successful UI changes are always mandatory despite the significant user backlash this generates. If you give people a choice, they'd rather stick with the workflow they know unless the benefits of the new approach are overwhelming. Salesforce suffered from the same problem during their transition to lightning, and eventually forced their customers to migrate despite initially not wanting to do so. One significant barrier to adoption with the new Marketo UX has caused considerable push back from the user community: drag and drop in the folder tree. This is an essential feature missing from the new UX. An enhanced move capability is being touted as an alternative but isn't quite making the grade for users. The folder tree is a common UX paradigm across the entire Adobe product portfolio, but none of these other apps rely on drag and drop in quite the same way that Marketo does. In Marketo, it's the only way to keep assets organised in programs, and without it, the entire folder structure quickly descends into unmanageable chaos. Platforms such as AEM and Adobe Analytics don't need drag and drop as much, because of the nature of those applications. In Marketo they do. Adobe are committed to adding drag and drop capabilities back into Marketo in the next few months, but have decided to proceed with the roll-out of the new user experience without it. That's a mistake in my view, but not a major one. There are substantial benefits to the new UI. The replacement of the global menu with a top navigation modelled on other Adobe applications is an obvious one. Many of the Marketo Sky exclusive new features will be added to the new UX, bringing them to the wider audience of Marketo Classic users for the first time. This includes Smart Campaign priority, mass select on the asset screens and folder tree filters. A much improved global search is a welcome addition too. The enhanced search capability includes the ability to search design studio and marketing activities simultaneously, as well as the option to filter search results. The core Marketo product screens are being updated to a layout and design much closer to Sky than the existing Marketo UI. This is not a reskin of Sky though. As such, many of the existing options are more prominent rather than being hidden in overview or setup screens. As with any UI change, there will be a period of adjustment, particularly given the new tree and top navigation cannot be disabled. It will be possible to toggle between the new and existing program and asset screens though, as and when they're rolled out. The roll-out is a gradual one, with instances and individual product screens being updated at different times. Many Marketo users will have the new tree already, with enterprise customers that use workspaces seeing the update after the forthcoming January release. ### URL Changes One side effect of the new UI is that Marketo application URLs are changing. Much as with Sky, they no longer show your pod. Instead, they only show your Munchkin ID. The asset id will continue to be displayed. This URL change will soon be extended to cover public vanity URLs for landing pages, file and images in instances that don't use branded domains. This could affect prospects and customers visiting Marketo landing pages or filling in Marketo forms. From April, any URLs for forms, landing pages or images loaded over marketo.com domains will be changing to instance specific URLs (e.g. the default domain of files hosted in Marketo will change from app-sj01.marketo.com to 123-ABC-456.mktoweb.com). Assets, files and images served over customer branded domains aren't affected. For landing pages, this only impacts the small percentage of Marketo customers that haven't configured a landing page domain in their instance. For forms, files and images, this could affect many more customers, as Marketo occasionally uses the default domain where SSL is required. After the April release, it will be worth checking websites and external landing pages for any references to Marketo domains and updating them as needed. The existing Marketo branded URLs will continue to work for a year after the change goes live, so there is time. ### Forms 1.0 Occurring much sooner is the deprecation of Marketo Forms 1.0\. This is the old forms editor replaced in 2014\. The ability to create or edit forms in the 1.0 editor was removed years ago. However, any live forms created in Marketo Forms 1.0 will stop working in May 2021\. Anyone whose Marketo instance was provisioned before 2014 should double-check that all their active forms were created using the current Forms 2.0 editor. This update also affects newer Marketo customers, who create custom form layouts for Marketo forms rather than using the Marketo form embed code. The ability to post non-Marketo forms to the Marketo Form Endpoints is being disabled, in order to protect against bot attacks and phishing scams. Such behaviour has never been supported, but developers have sometimes used this approach for complex web forms anyway. A new forms API is being released in January that allows non-Marketo forms to be posted to Marketo. Marketo customers who post non-Marketo forms to Marketo should check their integrations use a supported method such as the new API or the existing push API. Customers using the Marketo form embed code are not affected by this change unless those forms were created in Forms 1.0 before 2014. ### Change Management Finally, anyone using MSI in Salesforce should check that they've got the latest version installed. A security update means that old versions of MSI will stop working next week. There are clear reasons for all these updates, and they will benefit the Marketo platform in the long-term. However, any change is disruptive in the short-term. These are significant milestones for Marketo and their customers, but the biggest of all may be overlooked by users. The new UI includes the oft-ignored Marketo Engage product name in the application for the first time. There's no indication that the Marketo brand is going away, but don't be shocked if it does happen eventually. ### How often do you update Lead Scoring? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/how-often-update-lead-scoring/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:18:54.000Z Few marketers get lead scoring right the first time. It requires sales and marketing to agree on what a good lead actually looks like and exactly when it should be sent to sales, and that's just the easy bit. The complicated part is converting the lead definition you agreed with sales into a lead scoring model suitable for marketing automation or a data platform. The small number of contact and CDO fields available for profile scoring don't easily fit your ideal customer profile, and it's difficult to decide which of the many types of contact activity available for engagement scoring really mean that your prospects are ready to speak to sales. Creating a lead scoring model can be a challenge, but improving an existing lead scoring model is relatively easy once it is live and producing leads for your sales team to follow-up. ## Data Driven Scoring Optimising a lead scoring model is all about looking at the leads your marketing team is generating. Compare the ones that sales accepted and progressed to an opportunity against the ones that sales rejected. Look at the good leads generated by both sales and marketing. Are there any differences in their account details or their job titles compared to the ones that were ignored, rejected or disqualified. Look at the engagement history of your good leads and map it out on a timeline. What types of campaigns and what marketing channels did they interact with? How many campaigns did they respond to before they were sent to Sales? Look for trends where lots of good leads have the same profile or the same type of activity. Increase the weighting of your scoring model for those things, and remove any contact profiles or activities only seen when looking at the history of rejected leads. Any marketer or data analyst can analyse the results of a lead scoring model this way if given the right information. Thankfully, everything you need is available through reports in marketing automation or the CRM system. Repurpose the data you compile for ROI reports and use it to track the success of your lead scoring models. You probably already have dashboards that map the funnel and measure campaign performance, be that through a dedicated attribution tool such as Bizible or a general purpose BI tool such as Tableau, Domo or Power BI. Filter these dashboards down to leads that actually progressed to become customers and adjust the timeframe back to the point in time they became an MQL. This will give you a picture of the profile and activity that are lead generating, as opposed to those that impact other points in the funnel. It may be very different from the broader picture you're used to seeing. ### Strategy Driven Scoring Given all the data available to do it, Lead scoring should be reviewed regularly but rarely is. The best practice is to review it every six months, allowing the model to be updated to account for changes in the marketing mix. For instance, many lead scoring models place a heavy emphasis on in-person events. That's generally a good thing, as events are frequently a good source of leads. However, with the global event calendar cancelled due to Covid-19, it might be a good idea to adjust the model to account for replacement activities. Not many organisations have done this, and are instead having to deal with a drop in lead volumes far greater than would otherwise be expected. In the same vein, any changes to personas or target segments should lead to a review of lead scoring. If the people you're talking to change then the processes that drive the end to end lead funnel needs to be updated to account for this. Any good marketing leader will update audience definitions to fit changing business strategies or new products and services. Campaigns are adjusted to reach these new prospects. Yet, marketing operations tend to focus on the urgent task of filling in gaps in the marketing database at the expense of structural changes needed to make the new strategy prosper. Lead scoring is one component of this, but far from the only one. ### AI Driven Scoring Increasingly, AI is being used to fill in these gaps. It reduces the need to manage lead scoring by making it self adjusting, particularly on the engagement side. Predictive lead scoring has been a mainstay at the most advanced enterprise organisations for nearly a decade. Salesforce are leading the effort to democratise this with their Einstein Lead Scoring offering. AI scoring models have not always been successful though. I've seen several organisations adopt the likes of Mintigo and Lattice only to throw them out a few years later because the additional leads generated didn't pay for the cost of the technology. It was no coincidence that both companies were brought by broader data or technology vendors last year. AI is now a feature rather than a standalone product. If you have access to predictive data from 6sense, Lattice, Anaplan or elsewhere, then it should definitely be one component of your scoring model. It doesn't replace the entire model though. AI still has a long way to go ### Salesforce Pardot Summer 20 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/salesforce-summer-20-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:13:51.000Z Two months later than initially scheduled, Salesforce are finally rolling out their Summer release this month. For once, the release name actually matches the meteorological season. The delay hasn't affected the contents of the release, as it was already in preview when Covid-19 started sweeping the world back in March. As always, there's a lot packed into the release, but it is a relatively light one from a sales cloud perspective. The headline feature is the new work.com service announced last month, which is pitched as a set of resources to help businesses reopening after coronavirus enforced shutdowns. Extending beyond Covid-19 response playbooks and expert articles, work.com's shift management and employee wellness tools push the boundaries of its stated goals into day-to-day operations. The platform's contact tracing app does fit the core objectives more closely, and is being used by state governments as well as by enterprise. For those organisations who carried on operating during the pandemic, the new release offers some productivity enhancements for Sales Cloud. Unless you're using the Kanban opportunity board, split view for lists will probably become the most used feature in this release. This enhances the basic list view, by allowing users to open records while still keeping the initial list visible in a separate navigation pane. This saves plenty of time and clicks when making updates to a list of lead or contact records, and is a familiar experience in other platforms. ### More Customisation Longer-term, the beta release of dynamic forms will be the most important feature rolled out this month. The announcement of this major enhancement to page layouts was the highlight of last year's Dreamforce for many Salesforce administrators. For now, only a select group of preview customers will see the benefit. Dynamic forms simplifies the creation of page layouts using lightning pages by granting additional flexibility to where fields can be placed on the page. These capabilities can be combined with enhanced field visibility rules that allow specific fields and entire layout sections to be hidden based on field values. In effect, it will enable admins to consolidate their page layouts into a single dynamic view that changes upon record type or status, simplifying maintenance of user views. Given that this is a beta feature, there are plenty of downsides to the new capability. The most severe of which is that dynamic forms are only restricted to custom objects for now. Expect the feature gaps to be closed as the functionality nears generally availability over the next few releases. Administrators and platform developers will also benefit from a set of significant enhancements to flow builder, turning this tool into a visual workflow engine capable of replacing both Apex or Process Builder. The ability to execute flows after record changes or system events allows code-free creation of complex record update triggers that simply aren't possible in the simplified Process Builder environment. This can include conditional updates, as well as cascaded updates that call other applications or update other records. The ability of flows to bypass user permissions when needed will also enhance the usefulness of flow builder, while simplified lookup value sharing and automatic variable handling make flow builder accessible to a wider audience. Finally, new debugging capabilities make flows simpler to test by introducing automatic rollback when flows fail. Flow builder will rarely be the first choice for automation in Salesforce, but these updates make it much more useful when other workflow options too complex or not powerful enough for the job. ### Pardot After a very light June release, there's a lot more coming to Pardot this month. The big news is the ability for long-time Pardot users to upgrade the Salesforce connector to last year's new v2 connector. Until now, Pardot users were stuck with whatever connector version their instance was first provisioned with. This is an irreversible process, which prevents the connector from ever being removed from Salesforce after the upgrade. The benefits come from the ability to use business units, the ability to pause the connector, as well as modified data sharing behaviour and an integration user that doesn't require a Salesforce license. The downside is that there is much less flexibility in controlling the permissions Pardot has in Salesforce. In general, most Pardot users would benefit from upgrading their Salesforce connector version but should apply caution before proceeding with such a major change. The new connector is part of an ongoing merger between Pardot and Sales Cloud that can be seen in other aspects of this months release. It is now possible to manage Pardot users from within Salesforce. This is not an either/or change. Admins can choose to manage synced users from either Salesforce or from Pardot, but not from both. As such, it requires careful planning to make sure that user profiles are correct in Pardot before switching to managing Pardot users from Salesforce. Similarly, the ability to add leads or contacts to a Pardot list has been enhanced with the addition of two new buttons that can be added to any Salesforce page layout. There are separate buttons for adding contacts to a basic Pardot list and for adding contacts to Engagement Studio lists. The primary use case for this is to incentivise Sales to add their leads to nurture or sales enablement campaigns run out of Pardot. Away from Salesforce, there is a beta for first-party tracking cookies, finally bringing Pardot in line with other marketing automation platforms that have offered this feature for years. Browsers are heavily restricting the use of third-party cookies, which have traditionally been used by marketing technologies to track web activity and link it back to contact profiles. First party cookies overcome this restriction but are tied to a single domain them which limit their ability to track users across multiple sites. That's a pretty substantial restriction for the many organisations run more than one website, but on forced on them by Apple, Mozilla and Google. ### B2B Marketing Analytics A couple of significant enhancements to B2B Marketing Analytics land this month, to coincide with the sunsetting of the original version of marketing analytics. These are part of the AI-enhanced B2B Marketing Analytics Plus module that requires an Enterprise version of Salesforce. The Marketing Campaign Intelligence app allows marketers to view Salesforce campaign information and Pardot campaign information on side-by-side dashboards. The dashboards can then be filtered by accounts, segments and audience type to reveal cross-campaign trends that are often missed by the more common campaign-specific reporting. The Salesforce Einstein AI then offers recommendations and trend analysis right on the dashboards, to highlight the most important information. Einstein AI can also be used to automatically calculate campaign attribution following this release. This automates the creation of custom campaign influence data on opportunities, based upon the campaign response history of contacts linked to the opportunity. In effect, it makes the custom campaign influence feature of Salesforce useful instead of relying on sales to manually add opportunities to campaigns. The end result is a heavily upgraded multi-touch campaign attribution dashboard in B2B Marketing Analytics that automatically calculates the impact of campaigns based upon the number and type of campaign responses linked to opportunities. Finally, the process for implementing B2B Marketing Analytics has been simplified. Customers with customised Salesforce permission models have often struggled to get data into the tool for the dashboards to work correctly. The simplified setup process automates much of that work and highlights where changes need to be made. Combined with a streamlined dataset builder for B2B Marketing Analytics Plus, this should make the dashboards much easier to create and maintain. ### After Intel: The Next Computing Revolution? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/after-intel/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:55:47.000Z Apple's culture of secrecy rarely stops the rumours, and the topic of ARM-based Macs has attracted plenty of discussion within technology circles over the years. For many geeks, it was an interesting thought experiment. Last week, that thought experiment become a reality as Apple announced the transition of their entire Mac product line from Intel x86 processors to ARM-based Apple Silicon. This change will take two years, after which Macs will use upgraded versions of the A series processors currently used by iPhones and iPads. It was a big moment with enormous consequences for the entire industry, even if everyone knew it was coming. When the first Apple developed processors debuted in 2010's iPhone 4, there was speculation that the tech giant's long-term aim was to see Apple processors inside their entire product line from the smallest iPod to the most powerful Mac Pro. The question was if such a thing would ever be possible, such was the capability gap between the Intel processors that power PCs and the ARM processors that power phones. More recent iPhones have answered that question. Technology has advanced a long way over the last decade, and the capability gap has closed dramatically, turning the latest iPhone into a computing powerhouse capable of out-performing some low-end PCs. In 2020, no one doubts that Apple can develop a CPU capable of powering a Macbook or a Macbook Air. Indeed, Apple processors would probably make such devices faster by removing many of the thermal constraints placed on these devices in order to stop their existing Intel processors overheating. The big question is whether the same processors will be able to scale to the high-end Macbook Pros, let alone the Mac Pro workstations widely used for movie and music production in the creative industries. ARM-based processors developed by other companies are now being used to power servers and supercomputers, so in theory, Apple processors should be able to scale across their entire product line. Although, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll adapt to desktop use cases particularly when it comes to graphics performance in workstations. We'll find out more when the next Macbook Pro is released in October. ### Customer Churn? There is little doubt that Apple will lose some loyal Mac customers because of the switch to in-house processors. Every major Mac announcement over the past decade has been accompanied by cries of betrayal from the high-end professional users that once formed the core of Apple's customer base. This one is no different because there are software implications as well as hardware implications. Software developed for Intel Macs will need to be recompiled for ARM Macs, as the two types of processors aren't compatible with each other on a hardware level because they use different instruction sets. A translation layer called Rosetta 2 has been built into macOS to abstract this problem away from users, allowing software developed for Intel to run on new Macs. This should work well for most people because Apple have plenty of previous experience in this area from previous hardware transitions. There is one group of Mac fans who will be left behind though: Windows users. The Rosetta 2 transition layer doesn't work for other OSes or software run in virtualisation. As such, the new Macs won't support Bootcamp and Parallels won't be able to run Windows or Windows software. That is a declining share of Apple's userbase but will affect some business users. The same compatibility challenge impacts open source developers too; a group who almost exclusively use Macs because of the similarities between Linux and the Unix internals of macOS. x86 versions of Linux won't run on the new Macs, although Parallels will still support ARM versions of Linux. There may be a hit to Apple's mindshare as the widespread use of Macs in tech firms is due, in large part, to their advantages when it comes to coding open source software. Some developers will be left with no choice but to switch to Linux or Windows, simply to continue working. ### Windows on ARM? Future updates to Windows may resolve this incompatibility issue, as an ARM version of Windows has existed since 2012\. Microsoft's Surface Pro X already runs it. However, Windows for ARM is markedly inferior to the regular version. It doesn't run 64-bit software, a feature gap that Microsoft recently promised to fix, and has compatibility issues with some 32-bit software. These software issues may never be entirely fixed, because of the sheer amount of legacy code and backwards compatibility support built-into Windows that can't be ported over to the ARM version. But at some point, Windows for ARM will become good enough to run the majority of everyday software without issue. No only then it will be ready for installation on Macs, but also on a new generation of Windows PCs. That day might come sooner than we think. At the moment, inadequate hardware is a far bigger barrier to the adoption of ARM-based PCs than the limitations of Windows. Apple processors have a substantial performance advantage over the ARM processors made by Qualcomm, Samsung and others for Android devices. That means Apple can release viable ARM-based Macs now, while PC manufacturers will need to wait until 12 months until their suppliers are capable of shipping ARM processors that can match an Intel or AMD CPU. Given the current state of Windows that's not a problem. ARM-based laptops should have a battery life advantage over ones with Intel processors, but high-end performance may still be limited in the medium term. In the meantime, it gives Microsoft breathing space to get their OS ready. ### The End for Intel? It also gives an already struggling Intel space to find a response. It's been a bad few years for the dominant force in desktop computing. A series of security flaws has seriously harmed the reputation of a company already struggling to keep up with their competitors. Their decades long dominance was built on massive advantages in manufacturing processes, that allowed them to compensate for serious thermal inefficiencies in their designs by building much smaller processors than their rivals. That process advantage has now disappeared, meaning that their rivals are now building much smaller processors as well as much more efficient ones. They've instead focused on increasing performance to compensate, helping them in the data centre market but allowing AMD to catch them in the PC market. Intel-powered PCs no longer have an advantage over AMD powered processors except at the very high end, while ongoing supply constraints have limited seriously harmed their relationship with PC manufacturers by limiting how many devices that Lenovo, Dell & HP can sell. It's no wonder then that Apple have taken the opportunity to jump ship and sell ARM-powered computers. As always in the technology industry, they're not the first to do it, but they will be the first to make it work. In time, expect the rest of the industry to follow at least for low-end devices and thin laptops. There are still plenty of segments of the computing market where ARM-based PCs won't be viable for many years, so Intel still have a big market available to them but then so did IBM for a long time. IBM once dominated the high-end computer and data centre markets, until competing technologies gradually eroded their marketshare to the point that they now only sell servers to a declining number of large organisations that handle exceptionally high numbers of transactions per second. They're essential to the world's financial markets, but their hardware is seen as a legacy hardware technology with no relevance to the wider industry. There is a serious risk that Intel could follow that same path. Struggling tech giants are frequently labelled as the next IBM. The real question is who are the next Intel? ### Demandbase and Engagio: An ABM Tech Stack? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/demandbase-and-engagio/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:46:13.000Z Consolidation has been an ongoing theme in the marketing technology sector for two years now, ever since Adobe kicked off a wave of mergers and acquisitions with its 2018 purchases of Marketo and Magento. After a wave of deals in 2019, Coronavirus brought a halt to proceedings. Now vendor consolidation is back in the limelight after last week's news that Demandbase are buying Engagio. That announcement came completely out of the blue, but heralds a new wave of deals in the ABM space that industry watchers have been expecting for a while. ### The Technology Gap B2B marketers have been investing in Account Based Marketing for years now. Some organisations have mature ABM programs, while others have struggled to progress out of the pilot stages. Regardless of success or maturity, there are many challenges to building a successful ABM program. Technology has been one of the biggest. The traditional marketing landscape is very lead-centric. Marketing automation vendors have talked about ABM extensively, but don't really offer a solution unless you buy expensive add-ons. Instead, new technologies such as Engagio have arisen to meet the account-centric marketing challenge, while existing vendors such as Demandbase pivoted their products to fit the ABM paradigm. When added together, there is a lot of technology out there to solve the problem of ABM, but none of it offers a complete solution. For the last couple of years, Demandbase and Engagio have both pitched themselves as the end-to-end ABM solution. However, neither have lived up to the billing. There are significant gaps in both products that have necessitated buying additional technology to deliver a complete ABM program. Indeed, 30 organisations already use both Engagio and Demandbase despite them previously being seen as direct competitors. Now they are part of the same stable, and together they claim to finally deliver that promised end-to-end ABM tech stack, this time for real. It's not a totally baseless claim. The two technologies complement each other far more than they overlap. ### Better Together Demandbase are strong in data and personalisation, which is to be expected given their background in account-based visitor profiling and web personalisation. They've built out their platform over the years by adding robust connectors to advertising networks and CRM systems, as well as an intent data offering. However, their claim to be a full ABM solution relied heavily on these integrations as well as marketing automation to fill in the gaps in their platform. That's never really been enough for many marketing departments, particularly given the challenge many have experienced in building an account based view of the funnel. Engagio is one of the few vendors out there who can claim to have solved the account based reporting challenge. Their strength in analytics, data management and multi-channel orchestration fits pretty well with the weaknesses of Demandbase. Originally founded by two veterans of Marketo, this heritage shows in their UI and the general approach to ABM. The platform captures all account-level information from the wider sales and marketing technology stack, aggregating it to present a complete view of each account and where they are in the funnel. This data can be then be used to launch campaigns to known and unknown contacts at target accounts across inbound and outbound channels. ### The Next Challenge As such, buying Engagio allows Demandbase to break free of their dependency on Marketing Automation and CRM systems for first-party data management and outbound orchestration. The fact they get Engagio CEO, Jon Miller, as their new Chief Product Officer and Engagio CTO, Brian Babcock, as their new CTO shouldn't be underestimated either. Miller, in particular, is a hugely influential voice as one of the key thought leaders behind the ABM movement. His aim has always been to build an account-based equivalent to Marketo, and it is clear he expects this new combination to do precisely that. It solves Engagio's weaknesses at the top of the funnel across both advertising and web channels, as well as providing a source of third-party account and intent data to complement the existing customer provided dataset already captured by Engagio. Instead, it allows the combined entity to focus on the next big ABM challenge identified by Miller: the age old challenge of Sales and Marketing Alignment. ### Marketo June '20 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-june-20-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:17:09.000Z It feels like a long time since the last Marketo release. Mid February brought new APIs and new features to the Microsoft Dynamics integration but little else. Last weekend brought a much bigger release with multiple game changing features, but also more APIs and yet more enhancements to the Microsoft Dynamics integration. As always with Marketo, some of those new features are paid add-ons, but the biggest changes are available to everyone. ### Program Member Custom Fields New features are often described by vendors as revolutionary or game changing, but rarely are. The addition of Program Member Custom Fields is one feature that lives up that billing. It enables the storage of campaign specific information at the program level in Marketo. This can include session details, asset download information or source tracking information. All this data is typically campaign specific and is generally captured through form submits and reported on at a per campaign basis. Handling campaign specific contact data has been difficult in the past because Marketo can only store form responses at the person level. If someone registers for two events in the same day, then much of the tracking or session information from the first event is lost because the person fields for these details get overwritten after the second event registration and for all subsequent campaign responses. This makes reporting much more difficult, particularly for information that isn't synced downstream to CRM or sent to event organisers using email alerts or third-party integrations. Storing the same tracking or event information at the program level solves this problem, but is not without limitations. Program member fields only make sense in the context of a program, so adding them to Design Studio forms isn't possible at the moment. Also, you can't define different fields for each program. The new update allows the creation of 20 fields at the system level that are available to any program to store data related to that specific program. Neither of these are serious limitations and can be solved with easy workarounds. The most important thing is that data stored in Program Member fields can be used in the same ways as other fields by local assets, local forms, Smart Campaigns, list uploads or through the API. ### Adobe Integration Marketo's integration with the rest of the Adobe portfolio reaches another milestone in this release, with the ability to sync static lists to the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud. The primary use case here is the syncing of Marketo lead lists to audiences in Adobe Audience Manager for retargeting in ad campaigns. However, syncing Marketo lists with Ad Cloud, AEM and Target are all supported too, as is a direct connection with Adobe's Platform CDP that underlies their entire Cloud portfolio. An Adobe Analytics sync is also possible using Analytics' integration with Audience Manager as an intermediary. There are a variety of use cases for this functionality based around Marketo's ability to orchestrate B2B multi-channel campaigns. The most used will be retargeting form submissions or outbound campaign responses through digital advertising. The Target integration means that lead status or other contact details stored in Marketo can be used to define segments for web personalisation, whereas the Analytics integration allows email opens or clicks to be sent to Analytics for reporting purposes. All this requires cookie matching to work, specifically matching Marketo's Munchkin tracking cookies to Adobe's ECID cookie. This means that Marketo can only sync known leads that have visited a webpage tracked by both Adobe and Marketo. That's not unusual in the context of AdTech integrations but does limit the scope of the integration to the minority of the Marketo database that have recent web activity tracked by Munchkin. As such, expect the size of the Audience Manager list to be substantially smaller than the Marketo original. Secondly, Marketo can only sync static lists as per other advertising integrations. Smart lists can not be synced by this integration. ### Predictive Audiences Another long promised Adobe integration also finally sees the limelight. AI is an important differentiator for Adobe, as they have been at the forefront of the move to add AI capabilities to marketing technology. A whole host of Adobe Sensei branded AI features for Marketo are expected over the next 12 months. The first of these to be released is Predictive Audiences, which uses lookalike matching to build email invite lists for event campaigns, thus allowing marketers to meet event registration targets when they're otherwise struggling to do so. As such, it is heavily linked to last year's event goal features that are only available on the most expensive subscription tiers. This feature is similarly restricted to the same group of customers. Predictive Audiences identifies people in the Marketo database who match the profile of people who attended or registered for similar events in the past. These contacts can then be added to a Smart List for inclusion in the next event invite. As with most AI features, the effectiveness of this capability will vary according to the number of event campaigns run through Marketo as well as how much this feature is used. It is an interesting capability though, but the real benefits of Adobe's Sensei AI offering will land in future updates. ### Dynamics Integration Microsoft Dynamics users have long complained that they have far fewer integration options than Marketo customers using Salesforce. Until this year, there were 7 Salesforce sync actions for Marketo Smart Campaigns compared to 1 Microsoft sync action. February saw the Change Owner flow step being introduced to the Dynamics integration, finally allowing Marketo to reassign lead records. The much more widely used Create Task step has been introduced in this release, allowing Marketo to create activities for lead or account owners to follow-up contact requests or other high priority form submissions. This substantially equalises the two integrations with Campaign integration now being the obvious feature gap. Campaigns work a little differently in Dynamics compared to Salesforce, but there is no reason why a future Marketo release won't see full campaign response integration between Dynamics and Marketo, just as exists right now for Salesforce. These are not the only updates coming this month. There are enhancements to Bizible and Sales Insight too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+June+%2720) on Marketo Docs. ### Oracle Eloqua 20B Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-20b-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:18:19.000Z Time waits for no man, and neither does Oracle's release schedule. Even in the middle of a global pandemic, the Eloqua 20B release hits customer instances over the next two weeks, starting with PODs 1 and 2 this weekend. It's not a small release either, containing several significant upgrades to the design editors and asset management across emails, landing pages and forms. There's not a tremendous amount of depth to the release beyond the headline features, but the return of form archiving is applicable even to users who continue to use the HTML editors to create emails and landing pages. ### Archiving Archiving was widely used in Eloqua 9 but was dropped from Eloqua 10 when it was launched a decade ago. This was not the only feature that was lost during the transition from the old platform to the new, but it is probably the only one which is still missed by long-time Eloqua users. Now it is coming back, with Oracle announcing that it will find its way to the rest of the Eloqua platform over the next few quarters. To be fair, it has still lingered in some areas of the platform such as program builder that still use the old Eloqua 9 UI even after the transition to Eloqua 10. For now, only forms can be archived. This hides them from the UI, even if searched for. Users can find archived assets if they really want to as there is a separate asset chooser for archived forms on the forms launchpad that supports search and has all the usual filters and views. Archived forms can still receive form submissions and can continue to be served to visitors on landing pages or website pages. Archiving doesn't impact reporting either, as archived assets still appear in most reports. It does prevent forms from being edited, copied or renaming which opens up an additional use case for archiving beyond that of cleaning up a busy instance with many old forms. The fact that archived forms continue to work, but can't be edited means that they can be used to hide important forms that shouldn't be touched even by admin users. Permissions can control access for standard users, but admins should always have full access to everything. ### Block Library The other major addition to the asset management experience only affects the design editors. It's a big one though, as it significantly enhances Eloqua's ability to create modular templates. The new design editors have always been modular, but the ability to copy and reuse modules has been constrained by the editor UI. Layouts in a template can be duplicated, but they can't re-added to a template once removed nor can they be shared across templates. The new content block library means that these two missing capabilities are now possible. Layouts created in one email or landing page can be converted into content blocks and added to the library for use in any other email or landing page. Each block can contain multiple orange-outlined layout sections, meaning that complex layouts such as a 3 column section with a header and a footer can be converted into a single block and shared across assets. It's even possible to create a content block that can be used by both emails and landing pages. It's strongly recommended that the block library is only used for template modules, rather than for sharing specific content across emails. The UI for finding and adding content blocks to assets is only designed to handle a small block library. Oracle's recommendation is to keep the block library below 50 assets. In this respect, it does not replace Eloqua's shared content capability. Use it share specific combinations of blocks with custom styling that users can drop into their campaigns before inserting their content. In doing so, it ensures that marketers don't have to mess around with the occasionally fiddly task of adjusting column layouts in the editor while giving admins guarantees that all Eloqua emails will be built according to corporate templates and brand guidelines. ### Design Editor Upgrades To accompany the new block library, the options panel in both the email and landing page design editors has been given a refresh. The list of available content sections appears in a list view rather than as a grid. The landing page editor gains a new content type as well. There is a dedicated video option that makes it easier to embed YouTube and Vimeo videos into pages. It's always been possible to add videos using the embed or custom code options, but this makes it easier particularly when dealing with responsive videos that would otherwise need custom CSS to adjust the size of the content on different devices. YouTube video embeds are not natively responsive. There is a new, and very important, feature for both asset design editors that similarly helps in making it easier to create truly responsive experiences. The inability to adjust the content of Eloqua email and landing pages when displayed on mobile has long limited the type of designs that it is possible to create in the editors. Banner images are a common feature that web design best practice suggests should be adjusted or removed for mobile screen resolutions, as are some types of decorative elements. Yet until now, Eloqua has not made it possible to hide specific pieces of email or landing page content on mobile. There is now a 'hide on desktop' and 'hide on mobile' option in the editor that is available in the content section settings for each cell added to an asset. For now, this is a controlled availability feature, but expect it to be released more broadly in the near future similar to how the previously restricted ability export the HTML of emails and landing pages created in the design editor has been made generally available in this release. Finally, the new CRM Integration apps have both received major upgrades. The Oracle Sales Cloud app gains the ability to import Campaign Members from the CRM system into Eloqua. This is something many customers have long wanted, and I've replicated the same functionality using a custom object more than once. The Salesforce app regains the ability to change the email address of existing Eloqua contacts. This is a feature of the native integration that was lost on the transition to the new app. It works better on paper than in practice, because of Eloqua's requirement for email addresses to be unique. If the new email address is already linked to a different Eloqua contact, then the change of email address fails. Although it is a useful ability for the platform with many use cases. The Oracle Eloqua 20B Update is scheduled over two weekends starting May 15th, 2020\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as changes to Insight, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/20B/20B-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Transparency vs Technology: Lead Discovery URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/transparency-technology-lead-discovery/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:19:06.000Z For many marketers, getting Sales to follow up on new MQLs can be as challenging as generating them in the first place. Marketing controlled tele-qualification has been introduced to fill in the gap, with god results. Whichever way you do it, complaints about lead quality can often ensure. There are many reasons for this. For starters, it is vital to ensure the rep making the call has enough information to follow up any initial interest. This is why Sales alignment has become an increasingly important part of any marketing department's responsibilities. Sales and Marketing alignment covers a wide range of requirements across the full scope of the funnel. All of which are essential to driving increased conversion rates. The specific responsibilities of marketing will vary by organisation, as Sales Operations will have solutions in the same area too. Strong coordination and alignment with Sales is a requirement for any successful marketing team. ### Enablement It all starts by making sure that Sales are briefed on all campaigns that marketing is running, the key value proposition behind the campaign, as well as the best follow up options. Producing sales guides for inside sales and campaign specific call scripts for tele-qualification are long established practices. The most successful marketing teams go beyond this to provide a full campaign kit with follow up collateral to support that all important first conversation. The practice of providing lead nurture campaigns for sales rejected leads is long established, but needs to be automated. Pipeline acceleration nurtures for Sales accepted leads generally have a far lower take up. It takes a lot of time and trust before reps are comfortable with marketing comms being sent to prospects with whom they're in active conversations. Sales automation tools have solved this problem by publishing multi-channel campaign playbooks for ISRs to use when communicating for their hottest prospects. Marketing has a lot to contribute when writing Sales playbooks, in terms of content, collateral and user experience expertise. However, they need to respect departmental boundaries when it comes to providing the tools and platforms that Sales use to execute those playbooks. ISRs won't adopt sales toolkits or playbooks unless they have full control over the timing and messages being sent to their contacts in their name. There have been plenty of sales deals over the years that were jeopardised by ill advised or badly timed interventions from someone else in the business, so concerns over control are not entirely overblown. ### Context Of course, the biggest barrier to any adoption of sales playbooks and enablement collateral has always been ease of use. Sales have a well deserved reputation for ignoring anything that doesn't directly help them close deals. Adoption of CRM systems has long been a challenge for many organisations. Salesforce or Dynamics are seen as little more than admin for many reps. Without strong incentives to keep opportunity data in CRM up to date, they rarely bother unless corporate culture encourages it. Consequently, the traditional marketing automation approach of building sales enablement tools into the CRM system has always had mixed results. Marketing engagement dashboards such as Eloqua Profiler or Marketo Sales Insight have been widely used, because contact information and activity history is something that Sales look for in Salesforce or Dynamics to begin with. The main problem with such marketing activity history lists is the lack of context around what solutions or products each email or campaign relates and what the appropriate sales follow up actions actually are. This is often resolved by creating tasks or new lead records when leads qualify for Sales or LDR follow up. ### Discovery The missing piece of any alignment effort is often lead discovery, particularly in an ABM context. New leads are the one thing Sales want the most from marketing, yet efforts in this area tend to be restricted to heavily curated lead queues. The leading organisations control lead routing careful with complex assignment rules that feed leads into the most relevant reps ranked by lead score. Usage of co-dynamic lead scores, allows both an urgency and a profile fit score to the rep to be displayed to the rep. This can work well in new business scenarios where reps are assigned to hundreds or thousands of accounts, so need automation to determine which ones to call next. Higher up the value chain, this approach breaks down because the rep will have more detailed knowledge of each lead and account than any marketing platform or CRM database. For this reason, a more rounded approach to lead discovery is required, especially when it comes to large accounts. Tools such as 6Sense use external data and machine learning to not only rank accounts by the level of engagement but also to provide the keywords that contacts in the account are searching for. Their predictive data feeds into marketing automation and CRM for use in routing, segmentation and scoring. CRMT's award-winning [Sales Insight Engine](https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en-gb/resources/b2b-case-studies/awards-case-study-find-out-how-crmt-won-out-best-use-martech-sales) offering takes this one stage further by aggregating all marketing and sales activity across the business into an ABM dashboard for each ISR. This dashboard not only scores each account's activity relative to other accounts but also provides the full context around what campaigns, assets and topics each account has engaged with. In this way, Sales are offered a visual ranking of their most active accounts, but can also explore the accounts and identify the sales triggers and lead actions most relevant to them. Plenty of companies have tried to solve the lead discovery challenge, particularly in the context of ABM. AI and Machine Learning has become an increasingly important part of any solution space over recent decades. However, visibility and transparency often suffer when AI is used exclusively. If Sales don't trust the algorithm or marketing team feeding them leads they will ignore them. Giving Sales the tools to make their own qualification decisions is just as important, but tends to be forgotten in a rush to implement a purely technology based solution. Businesses rely on human judgement to close deals, but marketing and sales need to work together to deliver the tools needed for sales reps to use that judgement. ### Virtual Innovation at Adobe Summit URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/digital-innovation-at-adobe-summit/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:45:52.000Z The current Coronavirus pandemic has decimated the spring events calendar. Widespread social distancing measures led to the cancellation of many physical events before government enforced lockdowns forced the cancellation of their online replacements. Oracle, Google and Cisco have all scrapped virtual events after stay at home orders made it impossible to record them from a studio. The travel restrictions haven't deterred Adobe, who launched their first digital Adobe Summit last week. With recording studios out-of-bounds, they hosted it entirely from the homes of their senior executives. The planned keynotes and over 100 breakout sessions have been made available for free on the event site, covering the entire experience cloud portfolio. Watching it is a surreal experience in many ways, precisely because it has been recorded from the desks and hallways of the speakers, just like a regular video conference. ### Digital-First Economy Seeing the makers of Photoshop and Premiere launch a homemade virtual event underlines the strangeness of the current situation. There was nothing unusual about the content though. Customer Experience Management and Digital Transformation were the themes of the event, while AI was pitched as the means to deliver them. A lot of emphasis was placed on digital disruption and making the most of difficult times. An economic downturn has looked on the cards for some time but was narrowly averted last year. Not so now. Some retail and leisure businesses are already using the pandemic as an opportunity to restructure. Many companies won't receive the support they need to survive the next few months, despite the best efforts of governments. The winners will be those companies, such as Zoom, who are best placed to benefit from the lockdown enforced pivot to the digital economy. In sectors such as health care and retail, the shift to digital-first business models will survive long start the pandemic has ended. To measure this shift, Adobe announced the digital economy index, a new economic metric that measures the prices and purchasing patterns of online goods across major economies, including the US and UK. This complements the existing offline indices used to measure inflation in the broader economy. The data will then be used by governments and central banks to fill gaps in existing inflation measures, thereby aiding policy making. ### An Evolving Playbook Consumers and businesses need similar support to assist in their decision making. To guide organisations through this rapidly evolving digital landscape, Adobe launched their CX Playbook at the Summit. The playbook is a personalised self-assessment tool, which generates a list of business priorities and the strategy needed to achieve them. Naturally, Adobe solutions play a big part in the recommendations but there is a lot of good content in the final report. In particular, it focuses on the data, people and processes that need to be put in place to make the most of Adobe solutions. This is often overlooked by both vendors and marketers until it becomes a problem. Getting ahead of these things when business is quiet, can lead to significant benefits down the line. From a B2B perspective, there was plenty of talk about changing operating models and taking advantage of difficult times. Disruption forces firms out of their comfort zone. Business as usual is no longer possible, requiring new solutions to existing challenges and new ideas to face new challenges. With many customers closing their doors temporarily and others going out of business entirely, times are tough. Adapting to totally different customer needs and adopting new technologies is Adobe's answer to the challenging environment for B2B firms. ### Intelligent Services For Adobe, AI plays a big part in any solution. They place a lot of emphasis on their Sensei AI framework, describing it as a service layer which sits underneath their entire portfolio. There were several major AI announcements at the Summit, the most interesting of which is the upcoming Leads AI. This is their entry into predictive lead scoring space, but also extends that capability into lead routing. The pitch is that AI will ensure leads are always sales ready and are routed to the right sales rep. In doing so, it extends predictive scoring beyond its traditional scope. Leads AI is one of 5 new intelligent services that sit underneath the entire Adobe Stack. The others cover the full range of audience segmentation, content selection, journey orchestration and campaign attribution requirements that marketers often struggle to scale. They provide the bridge between the Adobe Experience Platform CDP and the individual applications and marketing channels that sit within the Adobe Experience Cloud. There is a clear desire to shift much of the data management and omni channel execution within the Adobe portfolio into Experience Platform, and out of the individual applications. Marketo Engage is not exempt from this, but is still in the early stages of integration with the broader Experience Cloud. ### Marketo Engage Adobe have a clear vision for Marketo Engage as the hub for B2B cross channel campaigns. Adobe refer to this as Account Based Experiences, and consider them separate from B2B ecommerce business models run from AEM and Campaign. Cross channel lead nurtures have been a key part of the Marketo pitch for months, and have been extended with enhanced AEM and Ad Cloud integrations. Faster email sends are being rolled out, as well as additional AI capabilities through predictive event audiences and adaptive ABM. Deeper alignment with Microsoft was expected to be a major benefit for Marketo after they were brought by Adobe. We are starting to see some of the benefits in terms of an enhanced Dynamics integration. The first fruits of that were included in the last Marketo release, but long overdue parity with the Salesforce Integration has been promised. Both CRM integrations will benefit from enhanced Sales Insight (MSI) dashboards. The campaign feed from Sales Engage will make its way into Sales Insight, showing the leads that last responded to campaigns. An additional tab has been added to the Lead and Contact view within MSI. This shows activity in a timeline view, as well as related activities by other contacts at the same account. It also shows upcoming campaigns and scheduled email sends for the first time, as Sales can react appropriately ahead of time. ### Digital Transformation Sales enablement is an increasingly important part of marketing's responsibility. It can also be one of the most contentious. Strong relationships between marketing and sales can make or break campaigns, particularly with much of the regular marketing calendar cancelled or delayed. So it is good to see Adobe incorporating it into their product roadmap and Account Based Experiences pitch. With budgets constrained by lockdowns, marketing will need to work closely with other areas of the business to generate revenue and prove value. An interconnected digital business needs marketing and sales to jointly deliver revenue, marketing and IT to jointly build the digital platforms that power the customer experience, and Marketing and Finance to jointly report on the business impact of these initiatives on the bottom line. All of these are essential frameworks within Adobe's Data Driven Operating Model, that can act as an inspiration for everyone else. Adapting to a changing is a challenge, using robust data foundations and a world class customer experience makes it much easier. ### Quality over Quantity: Identifying Leads URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/quality-over-quantity/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:19:21.000Z High quality leads are the lifeblood of any B2B marketing department. Collecting them is the ultimate objective of many marketing campaigns. Brand, customer experience and pipeline acceleration campaigns may have become more important in recent years, but lead generation is ultimately how most CMOs are measured. The shift in typical KPIs from quantitative targets based around lead volumes to revenue targets hasn't changed this. Instead, it has brought the oft neglected topic of lead quality to the top of the priority list. Identifying what a good lead looks like is no easy task. The obvious people to ask are in Sales. They're the ones receiving the leads and converting them into closed deals after all. However, there is an inherent risk in this approach. The leads that Sales often want aren't the ones they actually need to meet their targets. Senior decision makers at large enterprise accounts are a glamorous target for ambitious sales reps, but they're probably not the deals they're actually working on day to day. Getting Sales to provide an accurate description of the long tail of small accounts can be a challenge. They may not even have a good picture themselves depending on the business model. Even when Sales do provide an accurate profile for the best accounts and most relevant personas, the discussion ends up focusing on the wrong metrics. Most reps are laser focused on achieving their quarterly targets, so care primarily about readiness to buy. Long term relationship building does matter but tends to be a secondary objective. Consequently, Sales care more about the BANT metrics than the profile attributes of the leads they receive from marketing. This is a particular issue in hardware businesses such as PCs, servers or engineering equipment. Most companies in the target market will need to buy at some point, the problem is identifying when. Readiness to buy is critical to any sales effort, but can only be reliably determined by talking to the prospect. ### Target Accounts For that reason, the most successful target account identification projects start with a data analysis of won opportunities. This ensures that decisions are made using the full range of customers rather than just the most visible and obvious verticals and market segments. Try to be as granular as possible in this, even to the level of exact locations, company sizes and SIC codes. The SIC industry classification system has its issues when it comes to grouping companies by their primary business, but it is better than nothing. If you can get relevant install base data all the better, but such information is rarely reliable unless you're in the software business. For technology companies, there is a lot of mileage in building a picture of typical tech stacks at your customers and then using that to identify customers with similar system architectures. ### Detailed Personas Identifying key buyer personas within an account is a lot more complicated because there is generally less data surrounding it. In theory, it is possible to analyse contacts linked to opportunities but such relationships are rarely mapped in a CRM system. The admin cost of doing so generally outweighs the benefit. Sales will have some idea, but typically they only speak to the key decision makers rather than the entire purchasing committee. As such, customer interviews are absolutely essential in identifying a wide range of personas. No other method can give you the full picture. In practice, the task of mapping B2B buyer personas into a marketing database tends to focus exclusively on job title. The other attributes of a persona tend to be ignored when assigning personas to leads, and are instead used more strategically to guide campaign planning and content production. Job title is incredibly important, but the actual meaning of a particular role varies significantly by organisation. Different firms make decisions at different levels depending on the org chart and company culture. Such factors are frequently ignored until an individual is judged ready to engage in the sales process. ### Relevant Engagement There is also no guarantee that the individual needs and business pressures written into the persona description actually exist within a particular account. Every company is different, and even direct competitors can have vastly different levels of openness to a specific solution or business paradigm. Before passing leads to Sales, it is vital to validate that a genuine interest in relevant products or services actually exists. There needs to be a minimum level of engagement with content related to a particular solution area, preferably over an extended period of time. No amount of telemarketing can create interest where there is none. A lead probably isn't ready to be called, if it's not clear what their core business needs are after a review of their profile and engagement history. There may still be gaps in the data that need to be filled in, but a well trained lead development rep should know which campaign or solution-specific call script they need to use when calling a lead. Their job is to identify whether the prospect's digital interactions with a brand actually translate into actual buying intent, and if not when the lead will be ready to buy. In doing so, they are the bridge to Sales, gathering the BANT information needed for Sales to start working an opportunity. They are not an alternative to high quality leads. ### Fully Remote: The Culture of Virtual Meetings URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/fully-remote-the-culture-of-meetings/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:54:40.000Z In every disaster there is an opportunity. As Covid-19 rampages across Europe and North America, schools are shutting and workplaces lie empty. My own place of employment is no exception. The highlight of my past week was the company-wide email sent on Wednesday announcing a temporary mandatory work from home policy. Commuting by public transport over the past few weeks has been an extremely stressful experience for me, as opposed to the typical relaxing wind-up and wind-down. Simply getting into the office now feels like a significant risk. Pandemics are not good for anyone, but there is definitely a silver lining for video conferencing firms. Zoom's share price has increased over the last month, bucking historically high falls on the New York Stock Exchange. Microsoft Teams usage has gone up 500% in China since January. As more of Europe gets locked down those numbers are only going to increase. For the next couple of months, remote working will be the norm. ### Distributed Workforce Not everyone can work from home. Doctors, teachers and front line workers can't. Most office based workers can though, and quite a few already do at least occasionally. Consequently, the transition to remote working isn't that disruptive for most businesses. Virtual meetings are hardly a new concept. Any multinational organisation will be holding tens or hundreds of conference calls daily. That bias towards virtual meetings extends to smaller businesses too. Most of my client interaction is through GotoMeeting, Zoom or Skype. There are quite a few clients that I have never met in person. Heck, there are some CRMT employees that I've never met in person even though I interviewed them over Skype as part of the recruitment process. It is far from unusual to encounter EMEA marketing teams distributed across the continent, with team members based in many different offices. Some of those people will work from home on a semi-regular basis because the people they deal with most regularly aren't in the same country let alone the same office. There is no reason why these people couldn't work from home all the time. ### Cultural Resistance The bigger impact will be the minority of businesses which strongly discourage remote working. Typically, these are organisations with a culture of presenteeism or with a strong preference for face to face meetings. The former is generally a bad thing but is quite common in some non-European countries. Sweeping it away will be a net benefit of the current crisis. As for face to face meetings, they generally are more productive than virtual meetings. Humans are social creatures after all. People are typically far more open when discussing an issue face to face, although that can lead to diversions and off-topic interaction. Audio only communication cuts out the non verbal cues that are so important in building relationships and getting a genuine two way dialogue going. Instead, it leads to a more curtailed discussion and a lot less willingness to speak out. As such, more considered decisions are made when issues are discussed in person. ### The Visual Medium Video conferencing is often touted as the solution to this problem, and it definitely does help. The problem is getting everyone to use it consistently. Video conferencing quickly breaks down when more than one person switches off their camera, which can happen without constant reinforcement. That requires a company culture built on openness and video conferencing. There are plenty of companies in Silicon Valley do have a strong culture of always using webcams on conference calls. Even more don't, particularly in Europe where shyness and introversion are more common. Remote workers frequently find video conferencing inconvenient because it exposes some of the more casual habits inherent in working from home, such as not dressing for a work environment. In a world where remote working is going to be the norm for the next three to four months, those concerns no longer matter. It can be very hard to adjust to remote working and the people doing it for the first time will see their productivity drop temporarily. The ability of video conferencing to develop inter-personal relationships and the enforced professionalism it demands are definite advantages. Company cultures are going to have to change to fit the norm of remote working, and once set those cultures aren't all going to go back to what they were. That will have implications far beyond the way meetings are conducted. For now, physical health and economic survival is the priority. No one cares much about cultural matters. ### Waking Up Your Database URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/wake-up-re-engagement/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:19:33.000Z You call them, but they don't answer. You email them, but they don't open. You direct mail them, but they don't reply. Inactive contacts make up a large chunk of most mailing lists. It doesn't matter how you got their details, whether you collected an explicit opt in, gathered customer details from other departments or brought cold leads from a list broker. Some people simply don't respond to campaigns. Inactive contacts make up the majority of most marketing databases. However, a lack of engagement with outbound campaigns does not necessarily indicate a lack of interest in your products or services. The reasons why contacts don't engage with your campaigns can be plentiful and aren't necessarily related to the quality of your campaigns or the relevance of your message. First, there are the technical aspects of measuring engagement. Most analytics packages or marketing automation platforms rely on cookies to tie web visits back to individuals. If your audience are running ad blockers, then you won't be recording web activity in those tools. Browsers have started adding additional technical restrictions around cookies too, such as blocking insecure access to cookies in Chrome or expiring cookies for sites that haven't been visited recently in Safari. All that's even before the legal issues around tracking web activity back to a named individual are considered. The existence of anti-tracking technologies means that your supposedly inactive contacts may actually be regular visitors to your website. If they've blocked cookies, then there's no way for you to know whether they've visited or who they truly are. It's not just web visits that are affected by ad blockers. Many security conscious people refuse to click on email links. Anti-phishing training teaches office workers not to click links unless they know where they go. That affects marketing emails too, given that most email marketing platforms disguise or redirect email links for tracking purposes. This can lead to recipients googling the CTA and clicks not being detected. The only measure of engagement that can be widely assumed to be accurate is form fills, but then many contacts go out of their way to avoid filling in forms too. As such, it is important to avoid just blanket deleting contacts who aren't engaged without first asking them if they're interested in staying in your database. Most won't respond, but a few will. That's important in an era where contact acquisition is becoming increasingly difficult. Thus re-engagement campaigns are the order of the day, particularly for technical or security conscious audiences. When designing re-engagement campaigns, it is important to remember the primary objective of the campaign is to drive form submissions. Ideally, this should include an opt in checkbox, even when using legitimate interest as the basis for all marketing communication. However, the opt in message should not be the primary focus of the campaign. A pure subscription message will rarely get a response unless your recipients are already secretly engaged. A different value proposition is needed. Too many opt-in campaigns fail because the messaging is pitched to an audience of engaged prospects that have been interacting with your content. You're actually targeting cold prospects that have been deleting your messages without reading them. A catchy subject line should get people with an interest in your brand to open the email, but getting that vital click-through requires a concrete example of what contacts will get from engaging with your organisation, even if they're not in a position to buy from you at this point in time. They might be ready to buy in future, so keeping them in your database engaging them with nurture content will deliver results down the line. Treat re-engagement as more of a brand campaign. Lead on your brand proposition and the value of your content to your audience. As such, the content and offers do need to be kept to a high level, and the goal of the campaign needs to be clear to the recipient. Linking on an actual asset or event can be risky due to GDPR restrictions on the collection of opt-ins. Opt-ins can't be incentivised, so any offer promoted in an opt-in email needs to be accessible to people who don't want to opt-in as well as those that do opt-in. When linking to subscription pages or preference centres make it clear whether preferences need to be submitted for the opt-in to count. It's normally best to use a dedicated form for opt-in CTAs rather than a generic preference centre. Such an approach makes the user experience much clearer and removes unwanted distractions such as profile updates or unsubscribe options. Keep the form simple. Limit it to just the information you actually need to email someone. There's no need to collect name or company details, given you probably already have them and they're not needed until the point of lead generation anyway. These are existing contacts after all. In most situations, the information needed to email someone will include topic or interest fields relating to an organisation's lines of business. Generally, determining product or solution interest for segmentation purposes is quite difficult. The point of opt-in is an exception because that's when contacts expect to be asked for such information. Don't go overboard though. Many organisations collect communication preferences they don't actually use. Focus on a small number of interests or communication streams that are regularly sent emails. Explain what they are, the type of content that will be sent, and how often emails will be received. Then give people the option of not choosing a stream, because most people won't want to make a choice. That's a good thing. You want to send them everything anyway. ### The List Churn Challenge URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-list-churn-challenge/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:19:44.000Z Contact acquisition has become increasingly difficult in recent years. A succession of data protection laws and privacy scandals has made people much more wary of handing over their personal details to businesses than they used to be. Building a marketing database through organic form fills has always been hard, but the opt-in and consent requirements introduced in GDPR have made it much harder. Form fills don't automatically result in a marketable contact these days. ### No More Lists The data protection laws impacting form conversion rates are also causing serious problems for data brokers. GDPR has made buying contact data an impossibility in EMEA. The same is now true in North America, with CCPA heavily regulating the sale and transfer of personal data to third parties since the start of the year. This isn't really a bad thing, because the business models of list brokers rarely worked well anyway. List quality was frequently poor; filled with contacts who had changed moved on years ago. The average purchased list has a 10%+ bounceback rate, with many ESPs banning their use to due to the resulting impact on deliverability. One extreme example is Pardot, who will suspend accounts and ban customers just for uploading a brought-in list into their platform. As such, many organisations are instead focusing on making the most of the contacts they've already got. This typically leads to increased personalisation, with marketers promoting the latest offers and hottest content to engaged subscribers. Everyone else gets the same generic message over and over until they eventually unsubscribe or bounceback. ### The Career Challenge List churn is a big issue in B2B and always has been. That's not a reflection on the success or otherwise of individual campaigns. Career changes mean that the typical B2B audience is continuously evolving. When people move up the corporate ladder, their professional interests change. A CMO has a very different focus from a field marketer, a CFO has very different priorities from a payroll clerk. As such, they will follow different brands and subscribe to different types of marketing communication. That's even before the impact of people moving between companies is considered. Many IT managers loyally buy laptops from one brand and will continue to do so across every job they hold. That gains you a new customer and a new subscriber if they move somewhere that previously brought from a competitor. It's just as easy to lose customers when they hire your competitor's brand advocates in senior roles. In such situations, engaging with the new hire on day one is critical. To do that, you need the data for it. ### Staying Current The average marketing database rarely keeps up with your contact's changing roles. Typically, updating the CRM system with career moves and new hires is the responsibility of Sales. As such, it doesn't always happen. Some data enrichment vendors, such as Cognism, have the ability to alert you of new hires at key accounts or update the company and job title information for existing contacts. LinkedIn Sales Navigator has the same capability but suffers from the fact that these alerts rarely make it anywhere near the marketing database. Increasingly, LinkedIn are acting as a data broker themselves by allowing Sales reps to add the details of their LinkedIn connections directly into the CRM system using their Salesforce and Dynamics plugins. Few Ops teams are taking full advantage of such technology. LinkedIn and competing platforms have substantially increased the accuracy of data vendors willing to rely on technology to fill the gaps inherent in previous data collection methods. Many data brokers use LinkedIn as a data source alongside other publicly available sources to build their databases. This is easier in some markets than others. Many European countries have plenty of good free data sources for company data, which can include the details of board members or senior executives. ### Enrichment Technology is also giving more ways to validate purchased newly acquired contacts than existed previously. Data enrichment is now big business, with D&B and others placing much more emphasis on selling directly to enterprises than in the past. Social re-targeting provides a channel for reaching out to newly purchased contacts without needing to add them to a marketing database or contact them using the email or telephone channels affected by GDPR restrictions. ABM has placed a renewed emphasis on account based segmentation for campaign segmentation, even in scenarios where the key decision makers in accounts are present in your database. As any Lead Development rep will tell you, calling out on cold data rarely works. That's true even for content syndication leads that have engaged with a piece of high value content. There needs to be a clear pattern of engagement over time or a specific event that indicates immediate interest. Lead nurturing and lead scoring were specifically created to be the engines that generated that continuous engagement, and have delivered on that promise over time. The untapped potential is in identifying points in a career where decision makers are evaluating their options and are open to change. Recognising those moments requires aggregating many different signals from across many different platforms and technologies. Intent data is one solution to this problem, but it's not the only one. It can be done on the contact level too. AI allows data scientists to collect large volumes of information themselves and then interpret it using an impartial data model. Few enterprise marketing teams have the scale or expertise to build this in-house. That interpretation is best left to the forward thinking data vendors moving into this space. ### Searching for Bad Press? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/searching-for-bad-press/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:54:21.000Z Microsoft made a major u-turn last week; pulling the launch of a controversial new addition to Office just days before release. The product in question was a planned Google Chrome extension intended to integrate the newish Microsoft Search service into the Chrome address bar. In doing so, Office 365 users would gain the ability to search for Outlook emails, teams message and SharePoint documents directly from Chrome. Sounds useful, even if it's not something that I'd take advantage of regularly. Alas, the convenience of being able to search for Office documents directly from the browser has a significant downside. Microsoft Search is an extension to the Bing search engine. To use Microsoft Search, you have to use Bing. As such, Microsoft's planned update didn't actually do anything apart from forcibly set Bing as the default search engine in Chrome. Worse, it somehow blocks users from changing their search engine back to Chrome again. ### Customer Last? Naturally, nobody was happy. The announcement of the new extension generated large amounts of negative press across a broad spectrum of technology websites and publications. The phrase browser hijacking was used repeatedly. Given that the extension was apparently going to be installed and activated automatically, this level of criticism is totally deserved. Stressed Office Workers would have found their web searches redirected to Bing with no explanation and no way to fix the situation. Not a happy recipe for anyone. Fortunately, sanity has prevailed. Microsoft backtracked on the 11th February, three weeks after the extension was announced. It will still be released, but later than intended and on an opt-in basis. Admins have to enable the extension through Office 365 after which it will only be pushed to corporate owned devices. It will not be possible to install it on personal devices. Finally, users can change their default search engine after the extension is installed. ### Marketing First? So, all is well. Microsoft have developed a browser extension that nobody will use. No doubt, it will eventually be killed off due to low adoption. Fortunately, browser extensions like this are relatively easy to develop. It's unlikely that much money has been invested in its creation. Even so, some tech journalists are asking how Microsoft Executives even allowed this situation to develop. Why did no one spot the potential backlash and warn against it? Automatically changing user defaults has got Microsoft into serious hot water in the past. The answer is, of course, that they knew exactly what would happen. In fact, they were probably counting on a tsunami of negative press. All press is good press if it relates to a product that few have heard of and nobody uses. As a direct result of the controversy, Microsoft Search is a lot more widely known that it was before. I'm guessing that someone has started using the product after hearing about it through a news article on this very topic. Last week's climb down and the associated product changes were probably planned well in advance. There is, of course, some damage to the Microsoft brand as a result of all this, but not much. For one thing, they already have a track record for announcing controversial product changes and then backtracking. Some of those incidents were no doubt unintentional, such as all the talk surrounding Windows 10's privacy settings at launch. More recent incidents give the impression of a company making dubious announcements just to get a reaction. Such a tactic wouldn't be possible for a smaller or less diversified company. The brand damage would outweigh the product awareness benefits, but Microsoft are so entrenched that the occasional misstep won't change people's opinions. ### The Mountain View It is notable that the company most affected by the entire affair has said absolutely nothing about it. There have not been any statements from Google about Microsoft's new browser extension, even though it directly undermines the core reason for Chrome's mere existence. Chrome's entire purpose is to drive web traffic and user profile data to Google. The search engine giant were worried about being blocked by Apple and Microsoft at the Operating System level, so wanted to control the entire web experience using their own browser. Being blocked from said browser by Microsoft Office is unlikely to go down well at Google's Silicon Valley headquarters. It is vanishingly unlikely that Google would ever allow Microsoft to forcibly change the default search engine in Chrome. Particularly given that search advertising is by far their largest revenue stream. None of the major browsers allow extensions to be automatically installed these days. Even Adobe are blocked from doing so with their once ubiquitous Flash and Reader plugins. Microsoft probably couldn't install a browser extension that automatically changes Chrome's defaults even if they wanted to. And if they did manage to do so using some backdoor in Windows, Google would be able to block them by blacklisting the extension. Quite why they didn't say so is a mystery. ### Oracle Eloqua 20A Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-20a-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:28:08.000Z Oracle have a special present this Valentines Day for Eloqua customers on Pod 1: the first release of 2020\. Eloqua 20A hits customer instances over the next two weeks with many new features and a notable deprecation. Marketers in love with ABM will particularly appreciate the benefits of this release. ### End of an Era First, the good news. Insight no longer requires Adobe Flash to run reports. Not before time. Flash is being killed off by Adobe at the end of the year, and browser vendors disabled it by default years ago. As a Firefox user, having to switch browsers and manually enable Flash just to run a report was a major annoyance. I mostly worked around the issue by previewing reports in the analysis editor, but that isn't always possible. Flash has definitely limited my use of the Oracle BI Insight compared to the classic version. The not so good is that 20A also removes the ability to create forms in the classic form editor. Most Eloqua customers should have updated their landing page templates to work with the new responsive forms by now. However, there are still plenty of forms created in the Classic Editor, but as of this release, it will no longer be possible to copy them. Opening the forms and using the Save As option will work because this converts them to the new format. Copying them in the asset browser does not. If your form templates were created in the old editor, you should recreate them in the new one as soon as possible using the Save As method. Fortunately, you can still edit existing forms created in the original form editor and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. ### CRM Integration That's the only feature removal in this release, but Oracle recently announced that they're removing the native Salesforce integration this time next year. Users have 12 months to migrate to the new Salesforce Integration app released last year. That's not a lot of time for such an important part of the typical Eloqua setup. In the meantime, the Salesforce Integration app contains to get updates. There have been changes to the default mappings for the marketing activity exports, and to the configuration UI. The error handling for failing Salesforce Imports has been changed. If an import fails multiple times in a row, then it will be automatically stopped. This is a positive change, but worth knowing about when managing troublesome Salesforce configurations. The field used to store the Salesforce User ID on the Eloqua User record has changed. A new field called Salesforce Username will be used for this purpose, allowing Salesforce and Oracle Sales Cloud integrations to run side by side. A similar update has been made to the Sales Cloud integration. ### Account Reporting The bulk of the release is devoted to ABM reporting. An Account Engagement Activity dashboard is being added to the native dashboard options, providing an account level roll-up for all the campaign responses and contact activity at each account. This is the first time that Oracle have added such a view to Eloqua. In the past, reporting on activities by account has required creating custom Insight reports. Few people bothered due to the limitations of the Insight data model, preferring to use external ABM platforms for account level reporting instead. In order to build this new dashboard, Oracle have made some serious enhancements to the account level data available in Insight. A full set of Account Activity metrics has been added, which links all the existing performance metrics to the account as well as the contact level. Several additional out of the box reports have been added to Insight using this new information, including a Top Engaged Accounts report. The even better news is that this report drills down to the contact level, showing the most active individuals at each account. Sales will love all this additional information, assuming you're not giving it to them already. ### Import and Export There are a lot of new controlled availability features in this release, including some previously delayed integrations with the rest of the Oracle Marketing Cloud portfolio. Account scoring using the Datafox predictive opportunity scoring app has made this release after narrowly missing the last one. The integration with the Oracle Infinity Web analytics platform has been enhanced with more information on Eloqua activities tracked using Infinity. There is now a cloud feeder from Infinity Action Center, allowing remarketing lists created in Infinity to be pushed into Eloqua campaigns for outbound targeting through email or third party apps. Campaign Member integration is now available for the Sales Cloud integration allowing campaign associations created in Oracle's CRM by Sales to be synced into Eloqua for use in segments and reports. Admins can now upload full address details to the user record. This information is used for email signatures when sending emails using signature rules. The most interesting beta feature for most Eloqua users will be the new Email and Landing Page export capability. It is now possible for marketers to download the HTML of assets created in the design editor. The downloaded HTML can then be shared with third parties for sending through other platforms. Copying and pasting Source Editor emails into an external app has been simple enough. Nevertheless, there has never been any way of accessing the underlying HTML for emails created in the WYSIWYG. The new export option changes things. You still can't edit the HTML of a design editor email in Eloqua, but at least you can download it and upload it to Gmail or another marketing automation system. Finally, look out for a change to the design of Eloqua notification emails. These are getting a visual refresh, which should also make them more mobile friendly. The Oracle Eloqua 20A Update is scheduled over two weekends starting February 14th, 2020\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as a change to list unsubscribe behaviour, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/20A/20A-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Salesforce Pardot Spring '20 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/salesforce-pardot-spring-20-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:29:04.000Z Spring always comes early in the Salesforce ecosystem. 2020 is no exception. After a month of pre-release previews, the Salesforce Spring release lands over the next few weeks. It's a relatively quiet one with no headline grabbing new features, but there are plenty of productivity enhancing changes. ### Productivity Enhancements The most useful of these is the ability to assign tasks to queues. Tasks are frequently used to enforce SLAs and notify account owners of new leads that need to be followed up at their accounts. Some organisations even use them to inform LDRs of new MQLs to call. That latter use case can now be expanded with task queues, which work in the same way as lead queues. Any campaign follow up activities for contacts without a defined owner can be added to a queue for anyone to pick up and action. The ability to pre-populate new records from parameters in the link will have many uses. This is a feature that existed in classic Salesforce and is now making its way to Lightning. In doing so, Salesforce admins can now create custom buttons within the application or dedicated links outside the app to create new leads, opportunities or activities with required fields that Sales always miss. As such, marketers can make sure important source or campaign details are always correctly populated. ### Einstein Everywhere The nearest thing to a headline feature is Einstein Voice Assistant, which is Salesforce's answer to Alexa or Siri. As with Amazon's famous virtual assistant, Einstein Voice includes the ability to create custom skills. Admins configure these custom skills for Sales reps to use while out on the road. This ensures that records created or updated by voice are including the most important information for your business. Salesforce is highly configurable, and few customers exclusively use the default fields. The emphasis on custom skills for the virtual assistant continues this trend. Unusually, the new virtual assistant is available to almost everyone. Any business using any Einstein product can take advantage of the new app. AI enhancements feature heavily throughout the release, including in the expansion of another Einstein feature. Einstein Opportunity Scoring is now available to everyone. This feature works in the same way as Einstein's predictive lead scoring features. It just needs to be switched on, assuming you have sufficient data volumes for the scores to be useful. The scores are displayed as a percentage, in effect acting as an automatically calculated probability to close figure. Alongside the percentage, Einstein will also highlight how the score is calculated listing the key positives and negatives affecting the likelihood to win the deal. ### Einstein meets Pardot Equivalent enhancements will make their way to Einstein Lead Scoring in Pardot after this release. In January, the AI powered Einstein behaviour scoring was made available to Pardot-only prospects. Previously, it had required leads and contacts to be in Salesforce before scores could show in Pardot. That has now changed, and all Pardot prospects now have a predictive lead score. Scores are much more useful too because they can be used in engagement studio and in automation rules for segmentation and campaign decisions. Greater detail into how scores are derived is offered through a new dashboard in B2B Marketing Analytics. This dashboard shows the weightings used by Salesforce's AI to score leads, broken down by activity type and the top performing assets. Users can then drill down into the contacts who have performed the most successful activities. Also coming to B2B Marketing Analytics is an Einstein powered ABM dashboard. This dashboard will only be offered on a pilot basis to select customers initially, but shows an account based funnel as well as top accounts. Eventually, it will be extended to offer predictive analysis on the best tactics and strategies to progress ABM target accounts down the funnel. The existing campaign engagement dashboards also get an ABM makeover, with an additional graph showing the top accounts for each campaign. In addition, Pardot can now link accounts with campaigns by adding a related list to the Salesforce campaign record showing accounts that responded to a campaign. These are small steps that make ABM through Pardot viable for the first time. ### HML Landing Pages January saw a much bigger step forward for landing pages and forms in Pardot. Over the summer, the syntax used to code merge tags in emails changed from the existing PML to HML (Handlebars Merge Language). This rather arcane switch opened up a number of new capabilities in the email editor, including Snippets, which are sections of content that can be reused across emails. The transition to HML / Handlebars has now been extended to forms and landing pages. I covered the advantages of HML over PML in my Winter Release Overview. In short, it's a big deal and admins are advised to migrate their instances to it as soon as possible. Handlebars enabled landing pages now support adding Snippets and Dynamic Content through the UI for the first time, allowing content to be shared across landing pages. In practice, dynamic content has always worked if added through code. HML adds a UI that makes dynamic content much easier to add and edit. Another benefit of HML relates to the recently released resubscribe feature on forms. The feature allows opted-out prospects to opt themselves back in when they submit a form by triggering a resubscribe email to their mailbox. Unfortunately, the message on the form is hardcoded, and can't be edited or translated... until now. It is now totally editable on a form by form basis, and can be switched off if necessary. ### Pardot Improvements Finally, there are two smaller updates in the January release worth calling out. The first is a new export API for visitor activity that will come in useful for data warehousing scenarios. This new API removes the limits on the existing methods for exporting activity data from Pardot, allowing as much data as possible to be retrieved for analysis and archiving. Secondly, there is a change in policy regarding dedicated IPs. The Advanced or Ultimate editions of Pardot have always included a dedicated IP for sending email campaigns. This is great for high volume senders because it gives them full control of their deliverability. It's not so good for low volume senders, because ISPs penalise IP addresses which send less than 100,000 emails per month. Consequently, Pardot Advanced customers are no longer required to use their dedicated IP and can choose to send their email campaigns from the shared IP pool. Pardot customers sending less than 100,000 emails per month should make sure they're using the shared IP pool. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring20/release-notes/salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### A Question of Reputation URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/question-of-reputation/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:19:58.000Z It's the one factor that can instantly make or break any email campaign. Everyone knows that it's important. After all, people will only open and click emails they see. Yet, testing email deliverability is surprisingly difficult. There are plenty of tools out there that claim to test the inbox placement of email campaigns, but few of them are reliable. Most marketers follow a few basic guidelines for getting an email campaign into the inbox but are fully aware that there is a lot more to deliverability than that. The algorithms that separate good emails from junk emails are incredibly complicated, being ultimately based on a set of highly technical industry standards. Much like SEO, only the people who control the algorithms know exactly what is in them. We have a vague idea of what spam filters look for because security firms tell us enough to get normal corporate and personal email delivered. Much of the guidance they publish is around DNS settings and email server configuration. The DNS configuration still applies when setting up an ESP or Marketing Automation platform, and also when changing the domains you use to send emails. As if this wasn't complicated enough, every email actually has two from addresses. The one you see and the one the server sees are different. The server address is variously called the bounceback address, the envelope address or return-path address. It is the email address of the server that sent the email. Most high-end ESPs and Marketing Automation Platforms allow you to brand this address to enhance deliverability. This is not the same as the email address you see in your mail client. Most marketing platforms allow you to send the email from pretty much any email address. You can easily send an email from your CEO's email address using any ESP. This doesn't mean that the email is literally sent from your CEO's mailbox. Instead, the server uses its own mailbox and its own email address which typically don't change from campaign to campaign. There is a reason for that. Deliverability is mostly about the reputation of your email server. ESPs judge this based on the reputation of the server's email domain and of the server's IP address. The various DNS records that you create for every email domain are about proving your identity to receiving servers. There are three types of DNS record used for email deliverability: - SPF: which is simply a list of servers permitted to send email from a domain. Strictly speaking, this is only used to verify the server address, but in practice, the from address you see is checked too. - DKIM: which is about proving the email came from your server. DKIM digitally signs emails with an encryption key that is published to DNS for verification. - DMARC: which is about proving the server address and the standard from address match. This is a newer standard designed to prevent phishing emails. None of these will fix a bad sender reputation or remove you from blacklists. Not having them is a red flag which does increase your chances of going to spam or quarantine folders. The only way to get a good sender reputation is not to act in the same way as a spammer. Reputation is the big thing in deliverability but ultimately boils down to the types of emails you send, the frequency you send them, and who is receiving them. Of these three factors, content is the least important but also the best understood. A good balance of text to images, strong copy, and legible text go a long way to keeping you off blacklists. Don't ignore the human factor though. It is not just algorithms that determine spammy content. Human spam complaints are vastly more important. A spam complaint can you see you blacklisted instantly. The best way to avoid spam complaints is through good data hygiene. This also avoids the other automatic blacklist trigger: spam traps. Spam traps are old and unused email addresses that the blacklist companies have taken over for spam monitoring. As they are old accounts, the theory goes that no legitimate sender should be sending real emails to them. Only spammers send to any old account. Legitimate senders are supposed to stop sending after the email bounces a couple of times. You should update your lists accordingly because most marketing automation platforms don't automatically block contacts that bounce repeatedly. In a similar vein, remove contacts who don't respond for more than a year from your distribution lists. Inactivity can be an indicator that someone has left, so don't keep old sending to opt-ins forever. A clear data archiving strategy can solve many issues, including poor deliverability. Finally, there is the issue of how often you send emails. This is the most difficult factor to control but is still incredibly important. Most email servers follow a predictable sending pattern with consistent volumes of emails being sent over a monthly or quarterly basis. Any peaks and troughs follow a regular pattern. This is true for marketing email as well as for business email. Wild swings in the number and frequency of emails sent are typically associated with spammers. As such, email security vendors monitor the activity of each email server closely. Strange behaviour is often a cause for detailed investigation and potential blacklisting. Most ESPs manage their sender reputation very carefully paying close attention to blacklists and sending volumes. Larger senders typically have a dedicated IP. There are advantages to this, as it prevents you from being blocked by someone else's bad behaviour. The downside is that a dedicated IP requires monitoring and management. Reputation needs to be protected, blacklists need to be monitored, and campaign schedules need to be monitored to avoid irregular spikes in activity. Unfortunately, Marketing Operations teams typically don't do all this, even when they are expected to, meaning that deliverability only gets discussed when something goes wrong. ### The Fragmentation of Content Management URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/fragmentation-of-content-management/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:44:27.000Z There was a time were when developing a website started with deciding between WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. These three content management systems dominated the CMS market for over a decade, but in the last couple of years, the situation has been changing. There are no longer three major CMSs. Instead there is only one. WordPress is ubiquitous, now powering over a third of the web. ### WordPress Everywhere WordPress is sweeping all before it in the market for small business websites. Everyone knows how to develop a website using it. Editing content with it is straightforward for non-technical users, particularly after the release of their new Gutenberg content editor. That is not true for many of the other technologies used to build websites. As such, its popularity has become self-perpetuating, with many developers using it because it is free and popular. Many Web agencies have standardised on it because it's easier to find WordPress experience than any other CMS skills. Whatever you are trying to do in WordPress, someone has done it before. Meanwhile, their former rivals are in deep decline. The number of sites powered by Drupal and Joomla has dropped by over 20% in the last three years. Many businesses are switching away from them in record numbers, but not normally towards WordPress. In the enterprise space, Adobe Experience Manager is exploding in popularity because of it's flexibility and scalability. Adobe's backing gives it a degree of credibility that an open source technology such as Drupal is lacking. Many enterprise websites are now developed entirely in-house, which gives a major advantage to CMSs that have the backing of an enterprise sales team and commercial support contracts. ### Decline of the Old Guard Underlying the diverging fortunes of these content management systems is their contrasting origins. WordPress is still at heart a blogging engine. A lot of effort has been put into expanding its feature set for other types of sites, but blog posts and web pages still form the core of the platform. Other types of content must be managed using plugins. That makes it more approachable for non-technical users, who find dealing with templated content built using content types more difficult. This is because what users enter into the CMS doesn't translate directly to the front-end presentation, which makes planning the impact of updates more difficult to visualise. Drupal does not divide content this way. Everything in Drupal is a node, and page or article nodes are no more privileged than any other type of content. This is great for sites with a lot of highly structured content, such as media catalogues or retail stores because the system automatically generates a page for every catalogue item. When combined with a product catalogue automatically synced from an ERP or inventory management application, you get a fully automated online store. Until recently, Drupal worked less well for modular sites with generic content across a small number of pages. The editing experience for blog articles and standard pages was inferior to competing platforms, including WordPress. This has changed with the new Layout Builder module but there is a lot of legacy content to overcome before existing sites can implement it. ### More Options It's not just WordPress which is eating the market share of Drupal. At a smaller scale, the big boys are facing competition from a wide variety of specialist tools for building websites. Dedicated eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify, now power many smaller online retail stores. This has impacted Drupal and Joomla in particular. Low code site builders such as Squarespace and Wix are competing with WordPress among personal sites and microbusinesses. Web applications increasingly don't use a CMS at all, instead of relying on Javascript frameworks such as Angular or React. All this complicates decisions about CMS selection and about how to architect websites. The need to integrate the web into the broader marketing technology stack adds to the confusion. Not every CMS integrates with every type of platform. You'll struggle to integrate Squarespace with Eloqua for instance, unless you have a developer who can code a custom integration. Those two tools are developed for completely different audiences. The starting point for any website project always needs to be content. Specifically, what types of content you are trying to publish, and who needs to be updating it. If you're only publishing static web pages that don't need to be updated regularly, then you may not need a CMS at all. Static Site Generators such as Hugo or Jekyll can be used to simplify the process of developing a static site built in straight HTML. An enterprise with large amounts of disparate content types in multiple languages will need to start by looking at Drupal or AEM. All too often, digital teams make decisions about the CMS or publishing platform before they've decided on the content. There are generally solid business reasons, but they almost always regret it. ### Marketo January '20 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-engage-january-20-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:33:05.000Z A month later than initially advertised, comes the first Marketo release of the year. In late November, the Marketo release schedule was changed to align with the monthly cadence of the broader Adobe Experience Cloud. This caused a delay to the pre-Christmas Winter 20 release. In practice, Marketo have operated on a monthly release cadence since the release of the new Sky UX in Spring 2018\. Updates to the core platform are made quarterly, but Bizible, Sales Connect and Sky have all been on monthly release cycles for a long time. The new Adobe aligned release schedule doesn't change that. ### AEM Asset Integration Coinciding with the change is the general release of the long awaited integration between Marketo and Adobe Experience Manager. First announced at last year's Adobe Summit, the new AEM connector allows users to pull images and media files from the AEM Asset library directly into Marketo emails and landing pages. The selected images will remain stored in AEM, ensuring that any update to the original image or file in AEM is automatically reflected in the Marketo version. Aside from the advantages of only having one media library rather than two, integrating the AEM Asset library makes it much easier to find images and files from Marketo. AEM is a fully blown digital asset management platform, including metadata support, tagging and advanced content search; making it possible to easily find images related to a specific topic. That's impossible in Marketo because the only information you have to look for is the file name and folder location, neither of which is typically standardised. All this is before the impact of AEM's asset lifecycle and workflow capabilities are considered, given that ownership of these features usually sits in a different team from marketing automation. Both Sky and Classic users get to benefit from the new AEM Asset Integration. However, Sky users get an additional benefit: basic image editing. Sky users can take advantage of AEM's native image editing tools directly within Marketo. The capabilities of these tools are limited but do stretch to basic image enhancement, cropping and text editing. In other words, they're powerful enough to allow the creation of an email banner from an image template stored in AEM. That's actually a big advantage for Marketo Sky over the classic UI. ### Microsoft Integration There are two other integration enhancements in the new release, both relating to products owned by Adobe's best buddies at Microsoft. Firstly, there is an enhancement to the Dynamics integration. The "Sync Person to Microsoft Flow" step now works in real-time. This may sound like a big deal, but it's really not. The integration has always been close enough to real-time that in most circumstances it's indistinguishable. In fact, most Marketo users are unaware that it's not an immediate sync. Leads and contacts are synced every 5 minutes in both directions. The same is true for Salesforce. The difference lies with the integration flow steps in Smart Campaigns. There are more of them in the Salesforce sync, and they work immediately, bypassing the 5 minute schedule. Now, the Sync to Dynamics flow step functions in the same way. Still no sign of the missing activity or campaign integration steps for Dynamics users though. The other Microsoft integration getting attention is the LinkedIn one. LinkedIn have put a lot of effort into enhancing their native Lead Gen Forms since their launch a few years ago. Marketo haven't always been particularly quick at adding the additional capabilities into the LaunchPoint connector that pulls in leads from LinkedIn forms. We are only now getting the ability to add hidden fields and consent fields to the integration, as well as the ability to pull in test leads. Some of these features are newer than others, but hidden fields were introduced to LinkedIn forms a long time ago and have important use cases related to lead sources and campaign attribution among other things. ### Account Discovery There is an interesting new beta in the Account Profiling add-on for the ABM module. The Account Discovery feature adds potential new target accounts that fit your ideal customer profile to Marketo, creating new account records for these companies. Alongside these new account records are the relevant profile fields and intent information needed to segment them properly. Account Discovery uses lookalike matching to identify companies that are a good match using the Mintigo powered AI model that underlies Marketo Account Profiling. The current capabilities handle identifying the best accounts currently in your database, the new features are used to identify accounts that don't already exist in either your lead or account database. This is hardly a unique capability. Predictive data tools and ABM platforms have been able to do the same thing for some time. It's not been seen in the contact-centric world of marketing automation though. Marketo have long intended to turn their platform into a true ABM solution, with the ability to build, segment and target account audiences even when there are no contacts in the Marketo database. This gives Marketo a significant advantage over their direct competitors. Although at the time of writing these Marketo ABM tools still fall short of a dedicated platform such as Engagio or Demandbase. They lack some of the flexibility and automation options of the leading ABM platforms. ### Sales Insight Developers will be interested in the new Email Template Dependencies API, which returns a list of emails created from a specific template. This information is already visible through the UI, but not programmatically. Enterprise customers will be pleased to hear of enhancements to cross-instance navigation. The existing instance switcher menu works but is very basic and not many people know about it. If you have multiple Marketo Instances, ask Support to link them together and unify the logins. There are restrictions on this capability, though depending on how you sign-in to Marketo. Finally, Sales Insight gets a UI refresh and is now being made available in the Salesforce 1 mobile app. It will also integrate with the new Salesforce Lightning Bulk Actions feature, allowing Sales users to add multiple leads or contacts to a Marketo campaign. Additionally, this opens up the possibility of sending Sales Insight email templates to up to 200 recipients in bulk through Marketo's Salesforce plugin. It is well worth making Sales aware of these changes. These are not the only updates coming this month. There are enhancements to Bizible too For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Jan+%2720) on Marketo Docs. ### Windows 7: The Revolutionary Evolution URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/windows-7-revolutionary-evolution/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:54:07.000Z Next week is a major milestone in the history of computing. On Tuesday, Windows 7 reaches end of life. Microsoft will stop releasing security updates and pull virtually all customer support for the ageing Operating System that once dominated the PC landscape. It's been just over a decade since the release of the most successful version of the famous operating system. Much has changed in that time, not least within Windows itself. It's easy to overestimate the impact that Windows 7 had. It was not a revolutionary product. Many of its best ideas had their roots in the oft-ignored and much maligned Windows Vista. What it did do was fix the performance issues that bedevilled its predecessor and added an extra layer of polish that was sorely needed. Fortunately, that's all businesses and consumers wanted. ### The Failed Revolutionary Microsoft have twice attempted to revolutionise Windows in the past twenty years. Both projects failed. The first attempt never made it to market. Windows Longhorn was supposed to totally change the way people used computers forever, but instead became an expensive mess that could never be finished. It was cancelled after 3 years of development due to scope creep with the surviving components refactored into Windows Vista, but many of Longhorn's issues continued into the final release. The entire affair traumatised Microsoft for years and has been blamed for their subsequent failures in the mobile market. At least Windows 8 made it to market, even if it was widely shunned by consumers because of a strange mix of desktop and mobile user interfaces. The OS was intended to be Microsoft's entry into the tablet market but suffered from the same problems that have also held back Android tablets: lack of apps and lack of a unique selling point. Subsequent Windows releases have rolled back many of the biggest innovations that accompanied Windows 8, killing off Microsoft's mobile ambitions in the process. ### Evolving Consistency Instead, it is the current version of Windows that has stolen the desktop computing crown. Windows 10 was very much an evolutionary release as well, despite the controversy surrounding telemetry and privacy settings that surrounded the first few years of the OS. The basic user experience of Windows 10 is very similar to Windows 7\. It's only when you delve into the settings screens and the internals that pronounced differences emerge. The same was broadly true of the jump from Windows XP to Windows 7\. Microsoft completely changed control panel and much of Windows' inner workings, but many less sophisticated users made the jump easily and carried on using their PCs exactly as they did before. It was only much later that the UX innovations in the newer versions were adopted by the masses. If you look at how the average PC user opens files and launches applications compared to a decade ago then much has changed. App shortcuts have migrated to the taskbar from the desktop, start menu search is an accepted way of finding stuff, and browsers are central to the PC experience. None of that was true when Windows 7 was launched in late 2009\. The Programs menu and desktop shortcuts ruled. Now barely anyone uses the former and there are a lot less of the latter. That's not a change anyone consciously made, it just happened over time as people explored new ways of doing things. Pinned taskbar shortcuts and Start Search are Windows 7 and Windows Vista innovations that got adopted gradually over the span of a couple of years, thanks to the help of a few gratuitously placed defaults. ### Under the Hood At launch, the initial benefits of both Windows 7 and Windows 10 were in the areas users didn't see every day. 7 was the first popular version of Windows to be secure by design. 10 was the first popular version of Windows to be cloud-native by design. At the user level, this manifested as User Account Control security notifications in 7 and login using Microsoft Accounts in 10\. Underlying all this was far reaching changes to the deepest levels of the operating system. These changes needed to be made for Windows to remain relevant in the modern computing landscape, but weren't going to sell computers on their own. In some quarters these necessary low-level architectural changes were resisted, as they came with significant downsides. Cloud integrations have privacy costs that don't always measure up to the user-facing benefits. They also make working offline much harder. The security features of Windows 7 broke applications, introduced friction for non-technical users and blocked customisation options that technical users took for granted in earlier versions. These were minor grumbles in the grand scheme of things. Windows 7 was genuinely popular among both technical and non-technical users, but a small portion of the user base refused to upgrade and ultimately moved to competing platforms. The same has happened with Windows 10. ### Paying for Change Perhaps the biggest change of all since Windows 7 is in Microsoft's business model. Making money from a mature computing platform is a challenge that many technology firms have grappled with over the past decade. People don't pay for software upgrades unless they can contain user-facing features they actually care about. It's been decades since any desktop PC software update actually managed to meet that threshold among the broad mass of non-technical users. Yet, software needs to be regularly updated to cope with changing hardware, external security threats and new ways of working. What's more, the development effort required to make those updates needs to be funded. Until recently, software was still mostly sold as a boxed product. Consumers mostly paid for major updates when they upgraded their PC or encountered limitations that were fixed by a newer version. In 2020, the very concept of a boxed software product seems antiquated. In 2009, it was the norm. Apple only stopped charging for new macOS versions in 2013, until then users had to buy them in exactly the same Windows users did. Microsoft stopped charging for Windows feature upgrades with the release of Windows 10 in 2015. It's easier for a device vendor such as Apple to sell you a software upgrade based on hardware benefits. The newer software you're getting is a nice bonus for the consumer. An application vendor such as Adobe can move to a subscription model, so long as their products are better than the Open Source alternatives. Google fund Android development using in-app advertising. Accompanying all these business models are free annual software updates that deliver the latest user-facing features as well as any necessary internal system changes. ### Vendor Driven Change This move to subscription software and ad-supported software was not driven by consumers. Vendors forced the change in order to generate steadier and more predictable revenue streams. The old model worked well for consumers who simply didn't update, but led to extreme variations in quarterly profits for technology firms depending on the release cycles of new products. Adobe's switch to a subscription model was very controversial at the time. Google are still struggling to persuade Android customers and device makers to update their phones to the latest versions. It was actually easier for Microsoft to make the switch than most because traditional retail sales have always been a small part of overall sales. Most Windows revenues came from sales of new PCs or from subscriptions to the enterprise version. The net impact of this is that next week's Windows 7 End of Life event will be the last of its kind. Windows 10 updates are now free and are eventually forced on users automatically if they don't update. It is possible to block updates if you really want to. Only geeks and businesses actually bother. Even then, both groups are well aware of the security and compatibility reasons why updates are necessary. They eventually make the jump, but only when they're ready to do so. Adjusting to the new world of continuous updates has been a challenge for everybody, but most have now made it. Software End of Life is now a fact of life. ### 2020: The Age of Complexity URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/2020-the-age-of-complexity/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:20:11.000Z Eighteen months ago, new data protection laws and ad blocking techniques decimated databases. Marketers have spent the time since trying to fill that data gap only to realise that all the information they need to run successful campaigns is already available in their business. Inbound tactics don't require personal data to get results, while more personalised outbound communications can compensate for lower data volumes. ### Full Stack Integration Making this approach work in practice requires much better data management capabilities than has existed previously. All parts of the business need to feed their data into a central customer data platform that can be used by both marketing and sales. Such a platform should cover not just profile information but engagement history and prospect activity collected from web analytics and the wide array of marketing channels and technologies in use across the entire customer journey. Bringing all this data together opens up new segmentation options for marketing, new reporting metrics for the c suite and greater visibility into the hottest and most active accounts for Sales. Unfortunately, the existing marketing technology stack simply can't cope with the complex data management requirements required to organise such a vast array of data sources at scale. Best in class data normalisation, data deduplication and data enrichment capabilities are necessary to make this entire approach work. Marketing Automation and CRM are good at what they do but are designed for specific marketing and sales use cases. An array of database technologies such as CDPs and MDM are being pitched as the answer to this data challenge, but in many cases existing data warehouse or BI tools can fill the gap. ### Cloud Portfolio Integration Taking advantage of new data platforms requires a concerted effort to get the entire tech stack working in harmony. There is no other way to execute personalised cross-channel experiences at scale. Too many point solutions still don't integrate with Eloqua or Marketo, let alone BI or CDPs. As the year progresses, this will change. Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe are making major investments in integrating every aspect of their marketing cloud portfolios. All too often the integrated technology stacks pitched by the largest vendors turn out to be integrated only on paper. Third party solutions or development resource is needed to close the gaps between two products sold as part of the same deal. It is no coincidence that Adobe and Oracle spent most of 2019 trying to pitch their brand new CDP products at every opportunity. These new CDPs are the backbone of vendor efforts to finally offer a fully integrated product portfolio. Individual enterprises may find other solutions, but 2020 will be the year that the hype surrounding Customer Data Platforms turns into reality, with CDP implementation projects going live among early adopters leading to real world results and best practices. In turn, this will create a blueprint for CDP vendors and their customers to follow. ### Operational Alignment There is a dark side to the increasingly sophisticated network of integrated platforms and digital marketing tools. While it does enable new multi-channel orchestration opportunities and personalised content experiences, marketing can no longer operate alone. The price for tapping into the web of business relationships, customer touchpoints and internal knowledge owned by other stakeholders is a loss of control. Marketing is increasingly responsible for all digital interactions of the customer lifecycle but needs to be deferential to the business outcomes that other departments need from each engagement. This has long been recognised in the context of Account Based Marketing. It is no coincidence that a renewed focus on sales and marketing alignment arose at the same time that ABM hit the mainstream. If marketing is going to focus heavily on a set of individually selected target accounts, then those accounts need to be attractive to Sales. The messaging provided to those target accounts needs to be consistent across marketing and sales channels, particularly if marketing will continue to interact with accounts after Sales have established a relationship. As a result, sales enablement has become a significantly more important part of every marketer's day to day. Sales enablement is no longer just about briefing reps on the latest campaigns. Sales are demanding a lot more visibility from marketing about what their accounts are doing online, as well as greater context surrounding the assets and website pages that prospects are viewing. In short, they want to be fully informed about recent marketing engagements before they pick up the phone. That's because marketing activity provides a good excuse to call increasingly time-poor decision makers in key accounts. In return, marketing are asking for more sales engagement with campaigns including increased involvement in campaign audience selection, a proactive approach to inviting customers to events and broader adoption of sales campaign kits that extend the lifecycle of campaigns beyond the point a lead reaches MQL. ### Revenue Alignment Then there is the age old argument about following up leads in a timely manner. These still dog many organisations. Strict SLAs have become an industry standard, assisted in part by the use of marketing run tele-qualification teams in markets where the jump from engaged prospect to active sales lead can't be assumed using lead scoring alone. The patchy adoption of CRM among Sales teams is improving too. Allowing for greater visibility surrounding two of marketing's other big complaints about Sales: lack of insight into which MQLs actually resulted in an opportunity and more information about why rejected leads were not followed up. Both of these issues have major impacts on the ability of marketing to report on campaign outcomes. One much discussed solution to eliminate any lingering alignment issues and the resulting reporting challenges is simply to place Sales and Marketing under the same leadership. This is common in SMB where Marketing isn't big enough to justify a separate seat in the boardroom. At an enterprise level, such a merger typically only affects the Sales Operations and Marketing Operations teams. Whilst it is talked about increasingly frequently, the trend towards a combined Revenue Operations team is more common in theory than in practice because of the corporate politics involved. It can work in businesses where there is already strong alignment between marketing and sales. Otherwise, the combined team ends up the scapegoat of both team's problems, stuck in the middle of arguments about Lead SLAs and campaign attribution figures. 2020 will see more marketing operations teams merged with their Sales counterparts. Far more common will be a closer working relationship, even without the re-org that a full-on merger would entail. The learnings from those businesses which have gone down the Revenue Operations route will be used to establish that relationship. A single cross-functional view of the entire funnel and shared reporting dashboards will go from best practice to industry standard. Shared ownership of contact data will become increasingly important too so that businesses are no longer powerless to fix data quality issues where it impacts sales reach and marketing campaign performance. ### A New Stakeholder IT is now taking a role here too, after having been sidelined from the marketing technology stack for so long. 2018's wave of GDPR compliance projects accelerated the trend for bringing IT back into the management of marketing automation and downstream systems. In most boardrooms, GDPR was initially seen as an IT concern with the processes and systems for managing consent and data subject rights placed outside of marketing's control. That changed over time, creating a need to ensure marketing integrated with the wider business processes surrounding GDPR. The net result of this collaboration was more trust and a better working relationship than had existed previously. IT leaders now have a better understanding of the needs of marketing, and Marketing leaders now believe that IT aren't out to completely sideline them from their own tech stack. Over the last few years, IT departments have become much more willing to allow technology to fall outside their direct control. They still want visibility of what technologies exist in the business, what they do, and how they are managed. However, day to day control is less important so long as technical risks are mitigated, and compliance obligations are respected. In return, marketing is now able to tap into the technical expertise and development resources within IT much more readily than before. That is fortunate because marketing technology architectures are much more complicated than they used to be. Many marketing operations teams are struggling with the data and integration challenges that are being placed on them. Alas, the trend to complexity is not going away. In 2020, it will get worse rather than better. ### Continuous Evolution: Closing the Capability Gap URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/continuous-evolution-closing-the-capability-gap/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:43:57.000Z As the year winds down to a close, attention inevitably turns to planning for the next one. This is true even for businesses whose financial year does not follow the calendar year. By now, much of that planning will already have been completed. Most people start planning for the next year a quarter in advance. Among enterprise marketing teams, the latter half of Q4 is typically more concerned with what will happen next year than what will happen during the current one. The annual planning and budgeting cycle gives organisations a chance to reassess their entire go to market strategy in-line with the latest business plan and corporate priorities trickling down from the boardroom. Fundamental changes in product & packaging, pricing models and customer experience will often result from those discussions, during which marketing is a key stakeholder. It usually falls upon the CMO to take the customer's perspective in such conversations. Then there are the numbers which really matter. Just as with everyone else, marketing will have objectives to meet. That could be a revenue target, a lead target or something else entirely. Whatever the goal is, the primary focus of planning is deciding how to meet it, all while also achieving the softer business strategy objectives that need to be considered. Budgets, calendars and personal development plans are all aligned to that one overarching goal that has been decided at the very top of the corporate hierarchy. At least that's the theory. In practice, it's never that simple. The world is a complicated place and compromises need to be made. Corporate politics comes into play. The needs of other departments and stakeholders need to be considered. Short term pressures can distract from the long term plan. Market shifts and external events can throw even the best laid plans out of the window. ### Constant Change Yet in the current environment, organisations of all stripes are finding that a shortage of the right people with the right skills is the biggest barrier to achieving their business objectives. Over the past decade, marketing has become an incredibly complicated discipline with an expanding number of variables to consider, major changes in customer behaviour to cope with, and a rapidly evolving industry landscape driven by an explosion in new technologies. Change is hard and in recent years, marketers have had to cope with a lot of it. In many areas of the discipline, even the bleeding edge trends of a few years ago are now obsolete. Tactics are continually evolving to adapt to new consumer habits. Design trends have changed several times to fit new platforms and new form factors. New solutions are being devised to solve existing challenges, and new buzzwords are being invented to explain old trends. Constant learning is the key to improving campaign results. Without it, you are at serious risk of being left behind. This is true in any walk of life, but particularly in the quickly evolving world of digital marketing. ### Finding Skills In a recent Gartner survey of CMOs, addressing skill shortages topped the list of challenges that marketing leaders are looking to address in 2020\. Marketing is a lot more technical than it used to be, thanks to the increasing importance of technology and data in the average marketer's day to day work. What's more, many businesses know that they can do more with the resources they have already. Which is true, but only if you have the people that know what to do with those resources, be that content resources, creative resources, data resources or a sophisticated technology stack. Not all marketers will be experts in every aspect of modern marketing, nor should they be. The critical thing is to make sure that everyone knows what the art of the possible actually is, and what the advantages and disadvantages of each approach are. Informed decisions can then be made accordingly. It's well understood that the marketing mix needs to vary according to the realities of each business. The fact that data collection requirements and the technology stack need to fit the business model too is often less well understood. ### Adapting to the Business The data collected about a B2C customer is vastly different from the data businesses collect about B2B customers. Scale is the biggest difference, but the lack of an account layer in B2C also matters. Different types of interaction and engagement history are required too. B2B is still centred around personal relationships and the named individual, in a way that B2C marketers only dream about. B2C marketers are only trying to fake a personalised approach because there is rarely any 1:1 real interaction between brand and customer. Whereas in a B2B model, genuine personalisation is expected because someone at your business probably has a direct personal relationship with multiple individuals at the customer. That needs to carry through into the digital environment. These differences require a totally different technology stack. I've seen many transactional B2C brands fail with marketing automation because the data structure of the typical MAP did not allow effective B2C personalisation and segmentation. Similarly, I've seen Adobe Campaign fail in many B2B brands because of the lack of lead management capabilities in what is still at heart an ESP platform. Other B2B brands have made a success of Adobe Campaign by shifting the lead management and sales enablement capabilities of the marketing tech stack into the CRM Platform or MDM. There are multiple solutions to every problem. All that matters is understanding what capabilities you have available in your business and then learning how to make the most of them. The actual execution and implementation can be left to specialists if you have them available. If you don't then find someone to be that specialist, either upskilling an existing team member or through recruiting external resource. Until that's done, there is little point in attempting to filling capability gaps with new technologies. Technology is only useful if you know how to use it. ### The Content Personalisation Snap URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/content-personalisation-snap/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:43:38.000Z Last week, Uberflip announced the acquisition of SnapApp. One of the Industry's hottest content marketing platforms brought in a well-known tool to create interactive content experiences. The deal may be a small one but is an interesting indicator of the direction that content marketing is heading. Buyers are suffering from content overload and are looking for better quality information and engaging marketing experiences rather than just any old white paper. In the world of content marketing, less has finally become more. SnapApp is a cool product, but as with many other point solutions, it has suffered from the 'Any good developer could do this themselves' syndrome. The app is used to create interactive reports and infographics, adding animations and quizzes to otherwise static PDFs and web pages. The benefit is that it saves on the otherwise very expensive cost of employing a Web developer to write the very complex code to do the same thing manually. In recent years though the focus of the app has shifted towards embedded surveys and quizzes, enabling a low friction method of data collection that integrates directly into marketing automation and CRM. The goal of the app is to collect the interest and need data required to drive web personalisation through interactive content experiences that even the most jaded of buyers might be willing to engage with. At first glance, it is not immediately obvious how the app fits into Uberflip. SnapApp is about content creation, whereas Uberflip is about content publishing. After starting out as a tool to embed PDFs in Web pages, they have become a platform for creating content hubs quickly and easily. Uberflip is a lot more customisable than its competitors but suffers from limitations in relation to the kind of content that can be included on a Uberflip Hub. Much like their competitors, ease of use, built-in personalisation and full-stack integration are the primary advantages of a content hub platform compared to a traditional website resource centre. Lack of flexibility is the disadvantage, although this applies in different ways to Uberflip compared to its competitors. For their new owners, SnapApp is a personalisation play. Uberflip has an AI based recommendation engine backed by Intent data from Bombora to provide an Account level overview. This is not as prominent or configurable as competing platforms. This deal goes some way to addressing this. Survey responses from SnapApp add an additional contact-centric layer to this personalisation engine to complement the existing Uberflip forms capabilities. Traditional forms have low completion rates and a high barrier to conversion simply due to length and the requirement to provide personal details. A survey question embedded as a tile in a content hub or website is much less likely to encounter such resistance, particularly if users aren't asked to hand over contact details for the privilege. Such polls always have a high response rate. Ad-hoc surveys have a further marketing benefit, in that they can be treated in the same way as any web poll. They're not scientific and can't be considered as market research, but do have some benefit to both marketing and sales. Factoids are always a great attention grabber as a headline for marketing collateral, as well as a teaser in Sales conversations. Past experiences and campaign results show how valuable such numbers can be. The most significant benefit for marketers of SnapApp style surveys is not just in this old fashioned content. It's in personalising other content, including which content is presented to contacts when browsing a campaign page or content hub. This fits the trend towards recommended content and bespoke experiences, but the danger is that this goes too far. Recommendation engines are typically developed based off popular content and user journey modelling. This is fine if the recommendation engine has an initial interest upon which to recommend further content. If there isn't, then all new prospects see is a list of the most popular content which may not be in way relevant to the visitor. There have been stories of inaccurate web personalisation technologies killing potential deals in the past. Asking user's their preferences directly avoids this problem. Topic and interest based content navigation still have their place, and this deal helps with that. ### Dreaming of a Single Truth URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/dreaming-of-a-single-truth/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:43:19.000Z It was Dreamforce last week. Salesforce's annual mega conference dominated San Francisco in the build up to thanksgiving. Amidst all the celebrity guests, talk of philanthropy, and doubling annual revenue, the main topic of conversation was integration and data unification. Salesforce has long led the industry, promoting the latest trends months or years before anyone else. This time feels different. A lot of good stuff was announced at the show, but none of it was totally new. Salesforce are facing the same problems as everyone else, and are using broadly the same solution to solve them. The main topics and announcements from the show were much the same as the Adobe and Oracle conferences in the spring. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing was Salesforce's willingness to announce alliances and integrations with their competitors. Over the last few years, it has often felt as though the company has gone out of the way to block integrations between the Salesforce Cloud and competing ecosystems. There is a thriving developer ecosystem, but it all puts Sales Cloud at the heart of the enterprise technology stack. Anything that threatens that position has been blocked. Integrations with Microsoft and Adobe have been dialled back where possible. ### Friends and Allies At Dreamforce that changed. The Orwellian sounding Customer 360 Truth was the big announcement, and single source of truth was the big buzz phrase. The Sales objective is to use last year's Mulesoft acquisition to bring in all the enterprise data not already stored in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's not surprising really: Salesforce have a CDP to promote, and in that area they're behind the curve. Oracle and Adobe both launched their CDPs back in the spring. At the heart of this strategy is the Cloud Information Model (CIM), a multi-cloud, cross-platform data structure that standardises the way apps use and store data so that it can be accessed and updated by other applications without problems. The goal of CIM is to break down data silos and make it easier to integrate applications. Naturally, the foundation of the CIM is Salesforce and it's Mulesoft powered integration cloud in particular. Enhancing interoperability of cloud applications is a long overdue goal. Many apps make it very difficult to access the data they contain from other systems, which causes major fragmentation challenges in every business. Efforts to simplify shifting data between apps will make data-driven reporting and decision making much easier, but only if apps actually adopt the standard. The omens on that one don't look good. Microsoft, Adobe and SAP already have a competing initiative called the Open Data Initiative (ODI) which does much the same thing and has much the same goals. The CIM has Amazon on-board, which is significant but doesn't address the fact that two competing data interoperability standards do not actually do anything to address the underlying problem they're trying to solve. The Salesforce version is open source, which will increase adoption but probably not to the level where it becomes an industry standard. ### The New Platform In the meantime, the CIM has become the foundation for Salesforce's new CDP. The brand new Customer 360 platform gained some new capabilities at this conference that help expand its feature set beyond the limited scope of last year's unveiling. Smartly, Salesforce have chosen to separately brand each aspect of the product's capability which will help enormously in selling the new platform to customers. There is still a fair amount of confusion surrounding what CDPs are and what they do that can be alleviated by splitting out the product feature set. Not all of Customer 360's pillars are new though, Salesforce Identity has been brought into the new platform. As have many of the company's investments in no-code app creation, blockchain and AI. In effect, the Salesforce platform portfolio has been rebranded as the Customer 360 Platform. The new stuff is all part of Customer 360 Truth, which covers the single customer view capabilities announced last year as well as the new CDP. Truth has three pillars: Data Manager, Audience and Identity for Customers. The first two pillars map closely to the capabilities of competing products. Integrating Identity into Truth is new though, allowing customers to login into CIM and Salesforce apps using their social media profiles. The most obvious use case for this is Salesforce Communities, but customer-facing Business apps built on top of the Salesforce platform will benefit too. Microsoft, Google and others have competing identity management solutions as part of their cloud portfolios, but no-one has integrated those capabilities into a CDP. ### A New Take Identity is not the only differentiator for Customer 360 Truth. Typically, CDPs are designed to be used by developers and data analysts. Many of the market leaders are intended to be accessed by code through developer APIs, rather than using a user interface. Salesforce have rejected this approach, which is not surprising given their No Code heritage. As such, Salesforce have been able to get marketers and journalists to understand the purpose of their CDP far more easily than competitors. In this area, the demos do look impressive. The main two pillars of Customer 360 Truth are easy to understand. Data Manager is the integration layer of the CDP, ingesting all your customer data from across the business into a single, unified customer profile. The integration technologies acquired from Mulesoft have been leveraged to simplify and enhance the many integrations required as well as in unifying any conflicting data sources. The resulting customer profiles are then viewed and utilised using the Audiences module of Customer 360 Truth. The primary purpose of a CDP is to build marketing audiences from the aggregated profile and activity information collected from the various data sources feeding the database. Audiences does this. The resulting groups of contacts can then be streamed into any integrated application as well as the rest of the Salesforce Cloud portfolio for downstream execution, for example, they can be added as telemarketing campaign members in Sales Cloud or to an email list in Pardot. In this respect, Salesforce have not announced anything new or revolutionary. If anything, they're behind the curve. Customer 360 Truth won't launch until 2020, whereas most of their competitors already have a product in market. For companies already deeply embedded in the Salesforce ecosystem, there is enough differentiation wait for Truth rather than evaluate existing CDP offerings. Where Salesforce have made a real difference is the messaging. They've been able to explain the purpose and functions of a CDP for B2B in a way that I've not seen any other vendor do. In part, this is because they're targeting the product at a far less technical audience than many other CDP vendors. That in itself is valuable. CDPs are a big deal that solves some marketers' biggest challenges, so it's about time Salesforce get into the act. If they're going to meet their ambitious revenue expansion targets, they need Customer 360 to be a success. ### Oracle Eloqua 19D Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-19d-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:41:41.000Z It's almost time for the last Eloqua release of the year. The 19D release was supposed to roll out to pods 1 and 2 this weekend, but the update was delayed a week ago due to last minute bugs. This leaves pod 3 and 4 customers on the front line of any issues that may arise when the update finally lands in their instances next weekend. Customers on POD 1 and 2 will instead get the update on the 7th December, two full weeks after the other data centres. ### DataFox In a user facing sense, the release is a light one, even though it addresses a couple of major pain points for Eloqua customers and introduces another of the Oracle Marketing Cloud platform integrations heavily trailed at Modern CX earlier this year. That integration is with DataFox, a predictive data platform for Sales that Oracle acquired last October. DataFox offers two capabilities for B2B that are not available elsewhere in the Oracle portfolio, namely account scoring and B2B account segmentation. Designed initially to prioritise leads for Sales and to source new opportunities, DataFox primarily integrates with CRM platforms but is now being turned towards Marketing use cases through a new integration with Eloqua. This provides a native alternative to capabilities frequently provided by cross-platform vendors such as D&B or Mintigo. ### Assets The most welcome enhancement for Eloqua users is the ability to replace images and files. This capability has technically existed for a while but has never worked as users would want. There is a buried replace image button in the Eloqua UI, but it frequently doesn't work and will take 24 hours to work in scenarios where it does. Now it has been significantly enhanced so that both files and images can be completely replaced, even if filenames are different. The process will be a lot quicker too, taking a couple of hours rather than a couple of days. As such, Oracle will for the first time support the ability to replace images and files. The enhanced asset browser introduced on the email launchpad in the last release has now made its way to the landing page and form areas of Eloqua. This functionality significantly upgrades the search functionality by adding filtering capabilities to search results. A side effect of this is that the widely used 'Recently Modified' and 'Recently Accessed by Me' asset views are removed and replaced by built-in search filters. This will become more intuitive once the updated behaviour has been introduced consistently across all areas of Eloqua, rather than just in Emails. Another nice benefit of this update is the ability to search for landing pages based on vanity URL, which is incredibly useful. Oracle also claim that the update introduces the ability to search for forms by HTML name, which is news to me as that feature has existed for some time in my experience. ### Integration There have been significant updates to the reporting and notification options in the new salesforce.com integration app. This app finally reached feature parity in the last release, and now gains new capabilities not in the native integration. This includes the ability to integrate history objects with Eloqua to ensure that tracked field changes in Salesforce are reflected in Eloqua and can be used in campaigns or programs. With this capability, Eloqua users can build nurture campaigns that are triggered by changes to lead status or lead ownership as well as notification alerts when account details change. Otherwise, numerous new notification options ensure that admins are always kept up to date with the status of the integration. Statuses are now clearly visible imports while are in progress, and imports can be cancelled whilst running in the event of an error. The initial configuration of the app has been enhanced, with migration from the native integration becoming a much smoother process and less prone to unexpected errors. ### Security The introduction of SSL enabled branded app and image domains is notable. This was previously announced and has now reached controlled availability, with the process for configuring an SSL enabled app domain even available in a self-service capacity. Once enabled, email redirect links and images will always be rendered as [https://](https:) rather than [http://](https://marketingviatechnology.com/p/44412a48-ed16-40f9-a77c-29a2ca4496c6/http:) in emails. Previously, customers requiring https links to be used in emails sent from Eloqua, had to use t.eloqua.com branded tracking links rather than links branded using their organisation's own domain. In the past, this was a niche concern limited to industries with strict security requirements, but it has become increasingly important as the browser vendors and IT security community promote SSL everywhere. Also for security conscious customers is the general availability of secure email messages. This is an add-on to the optional advanced data security module used to encrypt the Eloqua contact database. With the data security module in place, Eloqua can then be used to store and send confidential information such as purchase history or financial information to contacts. Access to this secure information is possible through password protected secure microsites or encrypted emails that can only be viewed by logging into one of those secure microsites. The new capabilities allow the creation of these secure emails within Eloqua. Finally, there has been a change to the Eloqua cookie settings that customers should be aware of. Eloqua cookies will now be set to expire after 13 months. This is significantly lower than the current 99 year expiry date but is of limited consequence in practice. The change means that the Eloqua tracking cookie used to track website visits will be automatically deleted 13 months after the contact last visited an Eloqua tracked page. Return visits reset this timer, so only a small minority of contacts who visit less than once a year are affected. Given that browsers have started automatically blocking old tracking cookies anyway, the practical effect of this change is limited. The Oracle Eloqua 19D Update is scheduled over two weekends starting November 23rd, 2019\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as a change to hard bounce and soft bounce classification, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/19D/19D-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Microsoft Ignites the Connected Enterprise URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/microsoft-ignites-connected-ai/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:53:54.000Z Microsoft's annual conference for IT pros took place this week. As such, this sprawling monolith of enterprise computing had a lot to announce about a wide range of products and services. To commemorate the occasion, Microsoft even published an 88 page e-book listing all the announcements. Long gone are the days when Windows and Office dominated these events, although the resurrection of the previously deprecated OneNote 2016 is very welcome. Instead, it is Azure which dominates the Book of News, with well over half the announcements related to Microsoft's public cloud platform in one shape or other. The flagship announcements from the show are Azure Arc, a hybrid cloud version of Azure, and Azure Synapse Analytics, which is being pitched as a next generation data warehouse. From the Office side of the house, there is also Project Cortex which is a self-organising knowledge base. The common theme linking these announcements is AI. Microsoft have given an AI facelift to key components of two of their most successful products: SQL Server and SharePoint. ### Azure Synapse: A Connected Database The pitch for Azure Synapse is based around scale. Microsoft's database products are hugely popular both on-premise and in the cloud, but they have a reputation for being not quite as scalable as their competitors. Oracle have built their business on being the database that can handle the largest data volumes, whilst Google are seeing increasing adoption of their BigQuery data warehouse service. Synapse is Microsoft's answer to the latter threat. The traditional Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) still has a place in the technology stack of every large business, but its central role has been usurped by other platforms. Data analysts are increasingly using technologies such as data lakes to capture and query data for their analyses because they are much more flexible than the EDW. Synapse is intended to be much more flexible than an EDW, with advanced data transformation capabilities and built-in integration with Power BI. In effect, what Microsoft have done is combine a data warehouse and a data lake into a single product, before adding a set of analysis tools and a Machine Learning engine on top. The AI engine allows predictive data models to be run on the data in Synapse to normalise the data using full text analysis, spot trends or to calculate lead scores and other derived profile information. These are all key function of a modern data warehouse, where the scalability and rigidity of a data warehouse is still an advantage. By adding the best capabilities of a data lake, the disadvantages of a traditional data warehouse are mitigated. The modern enterprise has thousands of different data sources that need to be fed into the warehouse. These need to be converted into the structure of the EDW before they can be ingested. Synapse avoids this by storing the raw data format, carrying out the required data transformations in the database itself and then copying it into the desired format. This allows data analysts to work with both the raw data and the standardised version of the data as required. The built-in data analysis tools enable analysts and data scientists to carry out this work directly in the platform using their preferred coding language or using WYSIWYG tools. The results of the query can then be streamed into Power BI for visualisation and presentation to the business. This all-in-one has significant advantages which will allow Microsoft to protect their position as a leading database vendor in a fast moving market. ### Project Cortex: Enterprise Knowledge Network Enhanced Platform Integration also forms the foundation for Project Cortex, a new Office 365 application that organises SharePoint and related content into a topic based knowledge base. The pitch is that solves the content discovery problem, automatically delivering the relevant content at the right time using AI to classify all the content stored across the Office 365 portfolio and beyond. It does this using metatags, both those added to files in SharePoint by users as well as automatically generated metatags extracted by content using AI based rich text analysis. However, the scope of Project Cortex expands well beyond SharePoint to conversations in Teams, emails in Outlook and records stored in integrated systems. As with any AI based tool, Cortex can be trained to scan particular document types and extract the critical pieces of information in a structured way. This can include extracting contract details from commercial documents, as well as text recognition from whiteboard images or request details from PDF forms. The real power is the ability to extract keywords and phrases to derive topic information from written material such as documents and presentations. Tagged documents and resources are then added to automatically generated topic pages that display not just relevant topics but subject matter experts within the business and related topics. All this is built on top of SharePoint and the key topics and themes identified by the business. As such, it integrates with the rest of the Office 365 application suite so that topic pages and content can be linked to and will appear in Outlook and Teams. A whole host of third party services such as Salesforce are also supported by the service. The value of Project Cortex lies in its ability to automate one of the most frequently neglected tasks in any business: maintenance of the corporate knowledge base. The value of a knowledge base is directly proportional to the amount of effort put into maintaining it. Even the best designed repository will fail if content is missing or out of date, and all too often people don't have time to put in the necessary effort to maintain the content. What makes it worse, is that the missing content generally exists elsewhere in the business for some other purpose and just needs copying into the relevant location or format. Finding that content is a full time job that few organisations can afford to invest in when other forms of enablement are much more important. That is where the value of AI lines: in the ability to automate labour intensive tasks that are otherwise essential to the business. ### Joining the Dots: The Big Data Problem URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/joining-dots-the-big-data-problem/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:20:24.000Z Data is at the heart of all digital marketing activity. In an era of data-driven decision making, the information used to make investment and operational decisions must be as accurate and as comprehensive as possible. Yet, far too many B2B marketers pay little to no attention to the quality and completeness of the data they have available. More often than not, bad data inevitably leads to bad decisions. Ultimately, few marketers truly understand what good data looks like and the difference it can make. It is often only talked about in terms of segmentation and targeting possibilities, yet a comprehensive marketing database also acts as the foundation for detailed reporting. That's because there is more to a contact profile than an email address and job title. Activity data and Predictive scores are all part of that profile too. Knowing what a contact is interested in, the kinds of messages that resonate and the channels they're engaged with is vital in an omni-channel world. Marketers spend a lot of time trying to guess all these things based on gut instinct when a comprehensive data analysis can give you a scientific answer to any questions you may have on these topics. The trouble becomes actually making sense of all that data available. The typical enterprise actually knows a lot about their customers, despite the fragmentation and inconsistencies that exist within the business. For one thing, much of it will be held outside the marketing department in ERP systems or customer services. There are limitations surrounding how that data can be used for marketing in a GDPR world, but it can definitely be utilised in some capacity. ### Categorising Complexity Even if purchase history and support patterns can't be analysed at the contact or account level, they should definitely be aggregated. A lot can be learned by examining purchase history over the span of multiple years to discover buying patterns by industries or buying groups. This is an area where leveraging AI models and machine learning to tease out the trends and then map them to similar accounts. This is basic pattern matching at enterprise scale, an area where AI analysis has long been superior to human interpretation. A machine can analyse data to a much more granular level than a human and will be quicker to spot clusters of purchasing patterns in specific industries, company sizes and geographies. Predictive lead scoring has been doing it for the past decade. The complex part of this kind of analysis is aggregating the clusters of potential customers into a set of account types or buying unit categories which make sense to business users. That's an area where AI is less useful. Lead and account scoring is often seen as the best way of doing this because it best fits the way that predictive scoring works. However, this limits the usefulness of the output to marketers, who can struggle to interpret a score and what the score means in practice. That is because scores are now being used to measure more than just the difference between a hot lead vs a cold lead. They are being used to measure the level of potential fit for specific personas or product categories. ### Filling the Gaps In a marketing context, predictive data analysis is often only associated with scoring, but it doesn't have to be. CRMT's [Normalator](https://www.crmtechnologies.com/normalator) data normalisation service uses predictive AI to convert job titles into normalised job level and job function fields. This kind of data normalisation is a rule based process. A data analyst identifies specific keywords or phrases in job titles that can then be mapped to levels and functions. This is fine for the most common job titles in the most widely spoken languages, but can't account for the long tail of one-off job titles in niche industries that typically aren't mapped to a Job Role or Job Function, even when they should be. This is an example of the 80/20 rule in action. The typical data normalisation process will match 80% of your database, leaving the other 20% as blanks which can't be used for campaign segmentation or data analysis. Normalator uses AI based pattern matching to fill in these blanks, inventing the missing normalisation rules using similar rules for related words or phrases. This does leave the potential for error, so a confidence score is assigned to each match that measures how accurate the assigned value is likely to be. We typically recommend reviewing matches with low confidence scores and manually updating the normalisation rules to fix any incorrect matches. This teaches the normalisation algorithm the correct normalisation for a particular phrase, improving match rates and data accuracy over time. I've seen similar techniques used for de-duplication and other data cleansing tasks, taking days or hours off what are otherwise very laborious and error-prone manual maintenance processes. The sheer amount of data being stored in the marketing database means that cleansing and categorisation is essential, and such tasks can not be carried out manually. AI is an immense help in performing these tasks, but it cannot be used to interpret the output within a business context. That does not make AI totally useless in contextualising some kinds of data. ### The Power of AI Technology firms are now adding AI based recommendation engines to their products. Pardot can now tell you the best emails and subject lines to send to a particular audience. Eloqua and Marketo will be getting similar features soon. It sounds revolutionary, but in fact such recommendation engines aren't that new. Pardot's campaign recommendations are simply a more advanced form of pattern matching driven by advances in text and image recognition. Salesforce's Einstein AI is simply reviewing campaign results and identifying the best performing emails for a particular list. Emails that have performed well with similar lists are then recommended to marketers as a potential future campaign for that audience. Such recommendations seem cool but are actually of limited utility to a B2B audience. Marketers have spent the last decade trying to move away from random acts of email marketing to an orchestrated campaign strategy. Sending emails to one audience just because they worked for a different audience goes completely against this. The message has to fit in the overall communication strategy and the marketing calendar because the buying cycle takes longer than a single campaign. Opens and clicks are not the correct metrics to identify a successful B2B email blast. Much more useful would be identifying the specific messaging and campaign features that have worked to a specific audience over multiple campaigns. However, that is a harder task that AI isn't yet capable of assisting. It's only a matter of time. ### Drifting into Conversation: Chatbots URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/drifting-into-conversation/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:42:08.000Z Conversational Marketing has been a talking point for a while. The emergence of chatbots over the past 2 years have made it possible to add online chat as an interactive element to campaigns. As with any new technology, it's taken time for marketers to identify the best ways to use for what is effectively an entirely new delivery channel. Chat scripts are hardly a new concept, telemarketers have been writing them for a very long time. Applying those call scripts to online chat is also familiar to most marketers because online live chat has been around for over a decade. The difference is that live chat has historically been owned and controlled by Sales or Customer Support teams, which limits its use for marketing. Chatbots change that equation. Leading the charge has been Drift, who spent the last 18 months preaching the conversational marketing message to anyone willing to listen. There is more to martech's hottest start-up than hype though. Their product does have a key differentiator compared to the competition: platform integration. Drift doesn't just pull in your account and contact data, it uses it to personalise the conversation. In an era where personalisation is at the top of everyone's priority list, this gives the platform a major advantage. The chatbot experience is supposed to be seamless. Prospects don't want to feel like they're talking to an AI rather than a human, so context and understanding the customer at the other end of the conversation is crucial. ### Extending the Conversation The buying cycle is, in effect, just a long conversation. Engagement is seen as a two way conversation, in which the marketer reacts to buying signals by delivering targeted content that matches the specific product interest and funnel stage of each customer. Chatbots just make it much more personal, by allowing direct interaction with customers without the enormous cost of hiring the people having those conversations on the side of the marketer. A large part of this is because many of the conversations that customers have with businesses are repetitive. Multiple customers ask the same questions over and over because finding that information through web search or site search is too complicated. Live chat solved the quick question scenario years ago. AI makes it more useful by automating many of the basic conversation flows that occur every day. That's great for support reps but is not why chatbots are so powerful for marketers. In a marketing context, the key benefit of chatbots is not what your organisation is telling the customer, but is instead what the customer is telling your organisation. Information capture has become one of the hardest tasks for any marketer. Privacy scandals and data breaches have made prospects much more hesitant in volunteering information about themselves or their interests. Ad blockers and cookie laws have restricted the capabilities of businesses to make up for this data gap by using web tracking and engagement history. When introducing chatbots as a friendlier and more informal method of data capture, the idea is that you'll get a higher response rate and therefore more leads. ### The New Form? Drift claim their product can replace forms entirely. This is an exaggeration, just as Slack's claim to replace all email communication has proven to be false. It can definitely supplement forms though, by enabling profile building and a mechanism for collecting the kind of supplementary interest or business need questions that have been discarded from forms in the name of progressive profiling and driving form conversion rates. As any Sales rep will tell you, prospects always volunteer more information in a two way conversation than in a broadcast communication mechanism such as email. Chatbots can put this tendency into practice using playbooks to request information that is then fed into the contact's profile in CRM or Marketing Automation, assuming the prospect consents to such data capture. All that is needed is an incentive for a prospect to initiate a conversation with the bot. A finely crafted welcome message that appears to visitors browsing your website is supposed to be the solution to that problem. Some use cases work better than others. A chatbot can be used to register contacts for an event or webinar, but it doesn't replace the registration form. Instead, it provides a supplementary method for driving registrations when a contact is searching your website for information on a related topic. Rather than asking prospects to fill in forms that list a bunch of vague or generic interest options, chatbots facilitate a more organic method of finding out exactly what a lead's pain points actually are before serving up appropriate content or offering a route to Sales. Your lead qualification teams will have a set of questions that are used to assess someone's readiness to buy and to determine precisely how pain points and solutions are best suited to that prospect. These are the kind of soft sell qualification questions that you use when talking to prospects at events or in an informal environment. As in those settings, prospects won't volunteer information straight away but can become quite open once engaged. ### The Speed Advantage The interactive nature of chatbots makes them a lot less intimidating than a traditional web form, as well as a lot more immediate. One of Drift's USPs is that the standard lead routing process still has a time lag measured in hours, if not days. A chatbot short circuits this and the frequent issues of 'telephone tag' played by the LDR Team. If a website visitor interacting with a chatbot does indicate a level of interest equivalent to an MQL, then they can be escalated to Sales there and then. The escalation can even be to the account owner in CRM, assuming that the rep is available. If not, the visitor can book a meeting in the account owner's calendar straight away rather than negotiating one over email much later. This is a significantly smoother and more engaging experience for a prospect than a traditional contact us form, with the corresponding increase in conversion rates. Leads that are not yet ready to convert can be directed to a relevant offer and routed into the correct cross-channel nurture track, without the prospect even realising that they've given out large amounts of information that can be used for segmentation and campaign personalisation. Combining this interest data with company identification and firmographic profiling gained through technologies such as Demandbase or website personalisation solutions, allows a full prospect profile to be built out even for contacts that haven't necessarily opted-in to outbound email marketing. That is the revolution that Drift and their competitors claim to be leading. ### Translating the Language Barrier URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/translation-language-barrier/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:20:36.000Z Translation is expensive, and the decision about when to translate a piece of content can be a difficult one. Local language content always performs better than English content in most EMEA markets, but a 20% performance uplift often isn't enough to justify the cost of producing and then reviewing a localised campaign. There are over 50 languages in Europe alone, most of them spoken by less than 10 million people. It's simply not possible to cater to all of them. For those marketers not familiar with the EMEA market, the cost and complexity of translation comes as a surprise. Pretty much everybody underestimates how long it takes to get even the shortest content translated. The time and budget required to get campaigns localised is always the lengthiest component of any campaign launch plan. It doesn't matter how much time the project plan allows for translation, it always takes longer than expected. ### Personal Preference There are no easy ways to eliminate the delay and expense this causes. Translation is an art rather than a science. In most languages, there are multiple ways of translating a piece of content, just as there are numerous ways of expressing an idea in English. In some contexts, it doesn't matter how a sentence is translated so long as the meaning of the original is preserved. For Marketers, this isn't enough. Tone of voice is crucial, as does ensuring that the content is snappy and engaging. That's even before we consider the meaning of the text, and whether the wording of the translation is suitable for the target audience. These things can also vary from market to market depending on cultural differences. German translations are often more formal than the English that it is being translated from. They can also vary from brand to brand, making a translator's job even more difficult as what one business considers to be an acceptable translation for a piece of content can be very different from what another company considers to be an acceptable translation of the same piece of content. Given these challenges, cost efficiency is a huge priority for overstretched EMEA marketing teams needing to manage their translation budgets, particularly given that translation agencies often charge by the word. There have been plenty of attempts to make this budget stretch further over the years, usually by involving field marketers more heavily in the translation process or by using translation memory banks to ensure common phrases are always translated the same way. Results have been mixed. ### Person vs Machine The holy grail is always said to be machine translation - either through Google Translate or the in-house machine translation engines maintained by specialist translation agencies such as Lionbridge. Machine translation is much cheaper and faster than human translators because it eliminates the slowest and most expensive part of the translation process: namely the translator. Of course, this comes at the expense of translation quality. Whilst machine translation is rapidly improving, it still rarely sounds natural. Machine translation will preserve meaning for all but the most complex content, but it does come at the expense of creativity and brand. The previously mentioned Lionbridge have been incredibly successful in adding machine learning into the human translation process, and are widely used among enterprise marketing teams. This allows them to undercut competitors in both cost and turn-around time. However, even the best translations can suffer on the creative aspect of translation. The right translation is as much about personal preference as it is about technical accuracy. Many country marketers will have their preferred translators and translation agencies that can produce a translation that fits the tone they like to portray. Copywriting is the same, so this shouldn't be a surprise. ### The End Product Then there is the final and most overlooked aspect of translation: layout and typesetting. Translating a blog article is fairly straightforward because layout doesn't matter. Translating a white paper or marketing email is much more complicated because it requires putting the translated text in the same space as the original English copy. This takes time and introduces compromises in the translation, given that English sentences tend to be unusually succinct. Most languages are wordier than English or just have longer words. The traditional approach of sending translations in an Excel file for the creative team to add into the final layout has severe limitations and inefficiencies. As such, many translators will flow the translated text into the final document. Machine translation can help here, and there are dedicated technologies designed to overcome this challenge. Cloudwords have been successful in using their direct integrations with leading CMS and marketing automation platforms to differentiate their services. For large businesses with a high volume of translation needs that is an attractive prospect. ### Pardot Winter '20 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pardot-winter-20-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T17:49:06.000Z In a world of rapid release cycles and constant updates, major platform changes are a fact of life. The final Salesforce release of 2019 is one such update. It marks the end of the road for data.com and the Classic user experience, two core components of the Salesforce product family for many years. The previously discussed mandatory update to Lightning is now upon us. All Salesforce organisations are being forcibly upgraded from classic to Lightning regardless of the new UI's impact on customisations or training. This is a big change but an understandable one given the limited uptake of Lightning among existing customers. It is probable that most Salesforce customers would never have bothered transitioning to Lightning by choice due to the major workflow differences and the resulting training and support costs. Now that it has happened after plenty of warning, but in a way which allows heavily customised organisations to opt-out. The option of disabling Lightning Experience through user permissions still exists and isn't going anywhere. Instances with lightning disabled will continue to use Classic for the foreseeable future. Additionally, previously upgraded users still have the option to switch back to Classic using an option in the top right of the Salesforce UI. The only catch is that once enabled, the option for admins to disable Lightning at the system level has been removed. Lightning can no longer be ignored and with it the hundreds of new features that have been added to it over the past 4 years. Aside from all the new functionality, there have been some existing features that never made the jump from Classic to Lightning. One of them was the Recycle Bin, which has finally been added to Lightning. Previously, you had to switch back to Classic to see it. The same applies to printable list views. The headline feature in the Winter release is probably Einstein Search, which introduces AI powered personalised search and conversational search. Using AI to personalise search results is rapidly becoming a basic expectation for any system containing as much information as Salesforce. It's not just the search results that will be personalised though. The search experience will become much more personalised, with quick links, suggested searches and record previews in the search box. The ability to create profile specific search result list layouts only enhances the personalised feel. The primary catch with Einstein search is that it is a beta feature, which (as always) requires additional licensing. Fortunately, the ability to run mass actions such as merge and bulk assign from search results is available to everybody. This is a nice capability that will become essential to any admin. ### Salesforce Reporting Much more useful to Salesforce users is a long list of report enhancements that are also in beta. Salesforce reporting is very flexible but the capabilities of the reporting engine are quite limited. These limitations have been addressed by a set of additional reporting capabilities that will be a big deal for anybody who builds complex reports containing advanced filters and counts or summaries. Row-level formulas are the most powerful of these because it allows report builders to add formulas and create calculated columns in Salesforce reports. These introduce the full capability of calculated formula fields to reports. The formulas that can be written in Salesforce aren't quite as complex or powerful as Excel formulas, but it's a close run thing. The formulas available for use in reports can cover text and date calculations as well as numerical calculations. Trusted Excel favourites such as Vlookups and If statements can all be used, and the formula output can be a text string as well as a number. For many use cases, this removes the need to export and manually manipulate reports in Excel. Equally useful will be field to field comparisons in report filters, allowing report builders to see if the contents of one report field are higher or lower than another field on the report. Date and opportunity values comparisons will be the most common use for this capability, but they won't be the only ones. The new ability to report on unique values in report summaries will also be widely appreciated. This means that duplicates can be excluded in report totals, which is useful when producing data counts for marketing lists or data health analytics among many other use cases. ### Snippets and Variable Tags Moving onto Pardot, the headline marketing automation feature of this release is a big one. The introduction of Snippets is long overdue. Much like in other platforms, Snippets are sections of reusable shared content that can be inserted in emails. This allows promo banners, footers and header content to be maintained in one place, ensuring consistency across campaigns and reducing the time needed to make updates to widely used content. Snippets tend to be used far less than they should be, as they are an essential component of a sophisticated email template, particularly if that template needs to be used by multiple business units or multiple countries. For now, Snippets are an email only feature and don't work on landing pages, an unfortunate trend that also applies to numerous other useful email editor features in Pardot. The same applies to the optional upgrade from PML to HML that headlined the August Pardot release. This arcane and highly technical change is actually a big deal, but it only applies to emails. PML and HML are different methods for inserting field merges into code. PML is another name for 'variable tags', which Pardot admins will recognise as the method for adding prospect fields in emails. Handlebars is an open source templating language that is used to do the same thing in various CMS systems, as well as in Salesforce email templates. Thus, Salesforce are making this change to align Pardot with the core Salesforce platform better. To a standard Pardot user, the main difference is that variable tags will now be wrapped with curly brackets' {{ }}' rather than percentage signs' %% %%'. The importance of the HML upgrade lies in everything else that Handlebars can do. This blog uses handlebars to show you this article, with field merges used to insert the article content and conditional if statements used to hide the next and previous post navigation when there is no content to navigate to. A stripped back version of that functionality is now available in Pardot emails, as if-else statements can be used to show or hide sections of an email based on the contents of a prospect field. That is a powerful capability, which allows much greater flexibility in dynamic content than available in the native Pardot dynamic content feature. Then there is the ability to track links in field merges, which is only possible using HML and is not supported by classic PML variable tags. The upgrade from PML to HML has been available since the end of August. However, accounts using variable tags within landing pages are advised to hold off upgrading. Everyone else should make the change as soon as user training allows. Assets are converted automatically after the upgrade, so there is no loss in functionality unless you're using landing pages. ### Pardot Reporting Otherwise, this release is mostly centred around enhancements to reporting and Einstein lead scoring. B2B Marketing Analytics is being integrated directly into Salesforce so that a managed package is no longer required to install and configure it. Additionally, it is now possible to include prospect field history in custom dashboards created using B2B Marketing Analytics. This covers both current prospect field values and historical prospect field information, allowing the creation of bespoke reports to analyse activity by the profile data used to segment and score on leads, contacts and accounts. Comparative activity reporting that breaks down campaign results by persona or account profile is a common request, and this update makes such reporting easier. The engagement history dashboards used to display Pardot campaign results on Salesforce campaign records gain numerous enhancements. They are now available on accounts as well as on campaigns, which will be very useful for Sales who tend to be the main consumers of account level marketing analytics. At the same time, the Engagement History dashboards will gain visibility of web page activity and automated email activity alongside the existing list email and landing page information. This, in combination with the account level dashboards is a powerful reporting tool. Einstein scoring is a powerful predictive scoring add-on that gains much needed visibility and clarity. As the AI uses machine learning to score prospects, it can be challenging to determine exactly how a lead that qualifies through Einstein scoring actually achieved a high score. The available descriptions are vague. Now the scoring will actually tell you which assets it believes are driving conversions and contributing to the score, which has reporting benefits both for campaign performance and for scoring analysis. On a similar vein, the Einstein score fields are now available in Salesforce reports and score fields that you're not interested in using can now be hidden. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/winter20/release-notes/salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### The MarTech Merger Wave Continues URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-martech-merger-wave-continues/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:41:10.000Z The Marketing Technology market is rapidly growing and maturing. As in any trending technology sector, new startups are continually launching and old ones are being acquired by older and bigger businesses. Over the past 18 months, there has been a constant stream of mergers and acquisition activity. Private Equity firms and big tech companies are boosting their portfolios with the most promising new technologies. Some deals can be predicted in advance, but many come out of the blue. September saw two of the most unexpected deals yet. Just last week, MarTech's leading proponent of open source was brought by a private equity firm for $1bn. The buyer in this deal was Vista Equity Partners, owner of Cvent and formerly owner of Marketo. Their target was Acquia, the company created by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert to sponsor and sell services around the Drupal CMS. Vista are not buying the entirety of Acquia, merely a majority stake which will limit their influence a little. Drupal is an independent not for profit foundation with no direct connection to Acquia, but Dries and Acquia are major contributors to Drupal and have a big influence over the direction of the project. For all intents and purposes, a private equity firm now has a major influence over the future and direction of the open source Drupal platform. That's not a situation many open source projects would be comfortable with. ### Platform Play Yet, Acquia are about more than just Drupal. A couple of months ago they brought Mautic, an open source marketing automation system. Alongside that they have a suite of existing services of technologies that extend Drupal such as their Lift web personalisation tool. Mautic is a relatively new project - only 5 years old - and lacks many enterprise features found in Drupal. The plan is to probably integrate Mautic and Drupal into a comprehensive open source marketing technology stack, on top of which Acquia can sell their various ancillary products and services. This would enable them to go head to head with Adobe, who are currently winning a lot of content management deals in the enterprise space because of their integrated stack. Acquia are not the enterprise content management vendor to have received private equity investment over the past 18 months. Both Episerver and Sitecore have received significant private equity investments in order to boost their positions against competition from the technology firms. Both Episerver and SiteCore have long been known for their ability to integrate with the broader marketing technology stack, which is a major reason for their continued adoption by large businesses. It is widely believed that the long-term intention of their private equity owners is to sell their CMS vendors to tech firms. Salesforce lack a Web content management component to their tech stack, as do Microsoft and Google. The latter two firms have experience in this space but failed to gain traction as their offerings are non-core and did not receive sufficient executive or development attention. ### Predicting AI Marketing technology mergers are also taking place in the AI and Predictive data sector. Both Mintigo and Lattice Engines have been purchased over the last few weeks in deals that few saw coming. There are a lot of vendors with offerings in this space, so consolidation is long overdue. However, the identities of the buyers and the justifications for acquiring the technology are not what many expected. Both Lattice and Mintigo have been acquired for their AI expertise, rather than any products that actually use them. Lattice were brought by Dun & Bradstreet back in June, in order to add AI capabilities that D&B are missing in-house. Everyone knows about D&B and their status as the gold standard in marketing data providers, but at the moment they only sell you the raw data without any analysis or relevance scoring attached to it. Lattice have been purchased to change this. The plan appears to be to combine D&B data with their customer's data in order to provide recommendations and insights about how to intelligently segment individual accounts and contacts. AI based segmentation is a hot topic on the back of the CDP trend, with the major technology firms all building recommendation engines into their marketing automation platforms that recommend specific types of content to send to specific audiences. D&B don't want to miss out on the same opportunity. ### A Plan for Mintigo While the logic in combining Lattice and D&B is clear, the benefits of combining Anaplan and Mintigo are less so. Anaplan are an MRM vendor, and last month they announced their intention to acquire the Mintigo predictive scoring platform. The end result was lots of head-scratching. The benefits of adding AI to MRM are obvious, as it can aid immeasurably in interpreting campaign results and providing recommendations on where budgets should be allocated. The decision to acquire this expertise through buying a company best known for predicting which accounts are ready to buy is less obvious. These are two different use cases for AI, which would require substantially different algorithms and prediction engines. There is a risk to the market leading position of Mintigo in this deal, because AI is only as good as the results it produces. If Mintigo's data scientists and AI experts are working on Anaplan's AI models then they're not working on tuning their own product. This could make it less effective than the competition. It is far too early to tell if this risk will actually come to pass. Regardless, it is clear that the days of the standalone scoring vendor are now over. Everyone is playing the platform game. ### Computing on the Edge URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/computing-on-the-edge/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:53:26.000Z Cloud is everywhere and in everything. From servers through applications and even into networking. Public, Private and Hybrid: there is a version for everybody, fitting every use case and every requirement. At least that's the theory, but over the last two years a new buzzword is threatening to dethrone the cloud from its hard won position at the centre of enterprise computing. That hot new trend is the edge. The only problem with edge computing is that it's not new. In fact, most enterprises were doing it anyway to some degree or other and have been since their very beginning. At its most basic level, edge computing is little more hosting your own servers in a location close to the people using them. This is different from private cloud, which involves hosting servers in your own data center. ### New Problems The classic edge computing example is hosting a file server and domain controller in every branch office. In the age of slow or unreliable network connections this allowed every business location to continue working regardless of the status of the Internet connection to HQ. This concern no longer applies in most locations, but has been replaced by latency concerns in financial services and the requirements of IoT devices in manufacturing. Internet downtime doesn't matter any more for general business use, given the flexibility of most office workers. It can, however, grind a manufacturing plant to a halt unless the servers that control the production line are in the same building as the production line itself. In each of these scenarios, the physical distance between the user and the server is of crucial importance. Every additional mile or kilometre adds nanoseconds to the time between the user clicking a button and the server carrying out the requested action. If that action is a record being updated in the CRM system, then such small margins will make zero difference to business performance. If the action is a stock trade or other financial transaction then every nanosecond can make a critical difference to the bottom line, after price fluctuations and changing trading volumes are considered. ### After the Cloud The issues inherent in running data centres at scale have been solved by cloud computing. Therefore, the focus for IT departments and companies marketing to them has inevitably turned to deciding how to solve the same challenges for distributed devices and servers. The cloud after all requires a data center to be hosted in a small number of physical locations. Edge is the exact opposite. As such, the challenge that the edge presents has required new technologies and new standards to be developed, particularly around security and availability. Failover still needs to be considered for edge servers even without the vast array of duplicate and triplicate standby hardware available in an enterprise scale cloud. Security is even harder because traditional network boundary based security schemes such as firewalls and IP whitelisting are no longer sufficient to keep hackers out. ### Old Solutions At the same time, many of the solutions being pitched as edge computing were also being pitched as cloud solutions a few years ago. That applies to server and networking vendors whose products can fit both cloud and edge use cases depending on the buyer. Co-location vendors are doing it too, which may sound odd given that by definition this involves placing your servers with a third party in their data centre - a common description for the public cloud. Yet many data centres run by Equinix and similar firms were deliberately built near major financial and industrial centres, precisely so they cloud attract the financial and industrial firms that also comprise the core audience for the edge computing market. With cloud now synonymous with the major PaaS and IaaS vendors, Edge is actually a great way to pitch co-location services. Every important business or technology trend inevitably gets a lot of bandwagoning from marketers looking for a new angle to pitch old products. Witness the entire security industry trying to pitch firewalls and anti-virus software as a GDPR solution twelve months ago. There is nothing wrong with this, but an informed buyer will always cut past the hype. When considering the average enterprise purchase, the buyer almost always knows more about the market than the marketer trying to sell the product. They'll have done their research beforehand, so can eventually see through any attempt to pitch a product as something it isn't. ### The Content Waterfall Trap URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-content-waterfall-trap/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:20:47.000Z Talk of agile has been everywhere, particularly since Agile Development became one of the hottest software trends on the planet. This methodology has revolutionised software development, enabling the rapid update cycle commonly seen among mobile apps and web services. Its tenants have been applied to other areas of business too, with marketing being no exception. In fact, marketing is probably an even better use case for the agile methodology than software development. The core principle of accelerating release schedules by breaking down development cycles into smaller chunks of time with a fixed length is tailor-made for a world of always-on campaigns and perpetual content publishing. ### The Calendar Marketing departments have long been governed by the campaign calendar. Every marketer's world is dictated by a busy stream of events, mail drops and advertising campaigns all plotted to build a broader message. Shifting the work required to execute that calendar into weekly or monthly sprints is really only a natural progression for the typical marketing team. Most enterprise marketing departments will probably already operate one part of their operations through agile methodology: namely, their website updates. If a corporate website is large enough or important enough to merit continuous development effort, then some variation of agile will be used to plan and then deliver those updates. Rapid release cycles aid SEO and accelerate the ability of marketers to quickly respond to any usability concerns and market trends that affect their most valuable asset. ### The Sprint Web teams always have a long list of content updates, UX enhancements and bug fixes to work through. Every part of the business has their own priorities that need to be added onto the site, and balancing them is a real challenge given the limited number of developers and the enormous scale of the typical website. Short sprints allow the development schedule to be managed much more flexibly than traditional methods, with content and structural updates being published on a specific day every week or two. Everything else should be aligned to fit that schedule too. In many campaigns, development of the campaign pages is the most complicated and time-consuming part of the launch. The live date of every aspect of the campaign then shifts to fit the web publishing schedule. Build the idea of progressive enhancement into campaign schedules, so that content is added to the campaign gradually over time rather than being launched all at once. Not only does this reduce delays in launch but it also gives early previous visitors a reason to re-engage with the campaign. ### The Campaign Content development is often planned and developed as part of a wider campaign. All too frequently, the full content package is written and launched at the same time. This creates bottlenecks and is often unnecessary because much of the later stage content isn't needed at the beginning of the campaign. Second and third phase content will be produced and uploaded weeks before anyone actually reads it. If this is a familiar problem, then the entire concept of a campaign needs to be redefined. Many teams plan campaigns on a quarterly basis, introducing new themes and new messages every time. This is justified by the need to keep messaging fresh and evolve market trends. In reality, quarterly campaigns only exist because marketing budgets are allocated on a quarterly basis. Creating a new campaign every three months is the easiest way to justify that spend and prove successful outcomes. ### The Buyer However, quarterly campaign launches rarely align with the needs of the buyer. Many B2B buying cycles take longer, so themes have a life far beyond the current quarter. They should be continuously reviewed and reprioritised based on results and market conditions, but not so drastically. Campaign themes are typically defined at the start of year planning, so should be planned to last the full year. Drip feeding new content about each theme on a regular cadence over an extended period of time works far better than launching everything at once. Everyone knows that content has a life far beyond the quarter it launched in. Reusing old content is best practice for a reason, but new content is needed too in order to stay fresh. Doing so introduces the risk of appearing disjointed and confused when promoting different messages at the same time, particularly if some of that links through to old content. However, this is why effective targeting and personalisation is so important. ### Moving beyond Sales Enablement URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/moving-beyond-sales-enablement/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:21:02.000Z Few Sales reps are genuine experts concerning the industry in which they work. Most good reps know a lot about the products they're paid to promote but rarely have more than a skin-deep knowledge of market changes and industry trends. Such knowledge is the domain of pre-sales engineers who in technical fields are frequently called upon to prove in-depth knowledge and to provide the necessary expertise needed to flesh out the customer specific details of a solution. Marketers are also rarely genuine experts about the industry in which they operate That typically does not matter, because they don't need to be, so long as they have access to the people in the business that are. Marketing can play many roles in an organisation, but one of the most important is branding and positioning. ### Audience Matters Sales are generally only speaking to a small group of decision makers directly involved in a purchasing decision, marketing is frequently tasked with speaking to the entire marketplace with an audience that has a wide range of roles and responsibilities. The ability to distil market trends into language understood by a non-specialist audience is essential, as is the ability to provide a unique spin on the issues of the day that makes sense to a technical audience. Speaking to the broadest audience is critical to what marketers do, but is not always a skillset that Sales are required to have. Yet, Sales are increasingly being asked to sell end to end solutions rather than just the base product. There are valid reasons for the business to demand this. In most industries, it deepens the customer relationship, inflates deal size and overall profitability by enhancing the attach rate and bundling multiple products and services together, including partner ones in many cases. In doing so, Sales reps are asked to step well outside their comfort zone. It is therefore incumbent on marketing to support their colleagues in Sales when making that transition, but also in recognising the limitations of it. ### The Alignment Priority Sales and Marketing alignment has been a big topic of discussion for years, and its importance has only grown in light of the ABM boom. At its core, Account based Marketing is about developing account-specific messaging and a bespoke solution offering throughout the funnel, rather than by merely providing a generic message at the top of funnel marketing pitch and then delving into specifics further down the funnel when Sales enter the conversation. True 1 to 1 messaging isn't affordable or scalable for all except the very largest of potential customers, but far more can be done than in the past. The key is to align the marketing-led solution pitch with the product led sales conversation that Sales are having with the same stakeholders. Sales automation and sales enablement have been a growth area for both marketing operations and sales operations teams in recent years. The whole market segment has expanded beyond lead activity dashboards and campaign sales guides into fully fledged cross-channel playbooks. Reps now have the ability to accelerate deals by triggering automated campaigns that address specific products or buyer profiles when the conversation starts to stall or stray outside their comfort zone. ### Control vs Collaboration In an organisation with high sales and marketing alignment this is a great way for the two departments to work together to close deals. In badly aligned organisations this can lead to overlapping content creation and internal battles about where the sales hand-off actually is. Placing control over bottom of funnel campaigns in the hands of sales is an essential way of building trust with the sales teams, but this does not mean that campaign design and content production needs to be. Collaboration is of course vital to ensure that the campaign content is trusted and will be used. Sales led nurtures have been tried many times in many different organisations with very mixed results. Marketing designed sales nurtures traditionally have a very low adoption rate because sales don't trust the content and don't want to lose control over messaging at a critical point in the sales process. Education and confidence building helps bridge the gap, but ultimately sales teams need to feel as though they have equal or greater ownership over sales content and messaging otherwise they will stick to the traditional product led sales pitch they are familiar with. That is an outcome nobody in the business wants. ### Snooping by Design URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/snooping-by-design-virtual-assistants/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:53:13.000Z It's been a difficult summer for virtual assistants and the companies that develop them. At the beginning of August, it was revealed that there was more than just an AI listening to conversations between Amazon Customers and the ever popular Amazon Echo. According to press reports, Amazon sends a small number of Alexa recordings to human employees for verification and quality assurance. This was of particular interest to newspapers and privacy regulators because nowhere in Amazon's privacy policy was this practice actually disclosed. ### The Options Option To be fair to Amazon they're not the only ones caught doing this. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have all been caught doing the same thing, with a lot of negative coverage to match. Alexa has received the biggest share of the coverage though, because she is the most popular and most widely used virtual assistant. That's a little unfair on Amazon because they were simply following a general industry best practice. They weren't doing anything more nefarious than their competitors. Naturally, the tech giants have reacted to the negative coverage by reducing the number of virtual assistant recordings they send to human engineers for transcription, and adding an opt out option to the affected apps and services. Only Microsoft have gone as far as defending the practice and updating their privacy policy to explicitly permit it. They are also the only ones to already offer an opt-out, with both Cortana and Skype Translator having an option to help improve voice recognition in their privacy settings. Unselecting that option prevents recordings from being shared with Microsoft engineers. ### Clarity and Confusion The problem with adding checkboxes to privacy policies is that people often don't understand the consequences of what they're signing up to. It's well known that vanishingly few people read the terms and conditions for anything they register for, primarily because those t&cs are a long list of legal jargon that they don't understand. However, even plain English summaries only help so much. Consumers will read the summary, but that rarely explains what they're agreeing to in practice. Marketing opt-ins are one of the few exceptions to this rule, primarily because people already associate marketing with spam. This is a fair assessment when you consider that recipients aren't interested in the legality of the unsolicited emails they receive, only whether they agreed to receive them in the first place. Opt in laws were introduced for precisely this reason. Other privacy opt-ins such as software improvement programs don't have the same clarity of purpose, because consumers don't directly see the benefits of their consent. It is rarely clear what users are required to offer up in exchange for checking the relevant box, something that Microsoft have got into trouble for in recent years. Nor is it clear how that data is being used, which is the source of the controversy on this occasion. ### Dividing Lines In general, consumers draw a line between usage data and actual data when deciding whether a particular company has gone too far in data collection. Some people object to both, but many more will allow the former to be shared with sufficient justification. This isn't a blank slate. Sending actual document information or even document metadata as part of product diagnostics and software improvement programs is a surefire shortcut to unwanted media and regulatory attention. That is what happened here, and has also dogged Windows 10 since its release 4 years ago. People are more accepting of feature usage stats and click stream tracking being analysed for product improvement, but even then there is a widespread lack of understanding about what is actually included in such data and in how it is used. Transparency is key here. Microsoft would have avoided a lot of bad press in relation to Windows 10 if they'd been open and upfront prior to release about what was included in product telemetry and what data sharing was actually required to use the various cloud features embedded in the OS. ### Privacy by Design Now the same issue has raised its head again. Developers and product engineers need to remember that that data flowing through their applications is not controlled by them; it's owned by their customers. All too often that can get lost amid the desire to make a better product. Legal compliance and data protection are never going to be top priorities for any development team, nor should they be. However, the principles of privacy by design are important ones to consider at every stage of the development cycle. In the GDPR world, you're only allowed to use data for the express purpose that it was collected for and nothing else. From next year, that principle will become part of US law through CCPA. That requires a change of approach akin to OWASP and the secure software wave of the early 2000's. Not everyone has woken up to that fact yet, in part because data protection is often seen as someone else's problem. Yet, if it is ignored then it will come back to bite you in the form of media coverage and regulatory fines. The technology giants have just experienced this, and not for the first or last time either. ### Unlocking the Enterprise Data Landscape URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/unlocking-the-enterprise-data-landscape/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:40:42.000Z Any discussion of integrations and data management inevitably gets expanded to include references to a central data storage location controlled either by IT or a dedicated marketing data team. Terms typically used to refer to this system can include data warehouse, a data lake or MDM. Data Warehouses and Data Lakes are the embodiment of Big Data, the hottest enterprise trend of 2014\. They are intended as a repository to collect all data possessed by the business in one place so that it can be analysed by data analysts and data scientists to unlock trends and patterns that can improve marketing results and enhance corporate performance. As such, they can be considered the 'data' part in the decade old trend of data-driven marketing. To the typical marketer, these tools are a mysterious black box containing vast quantities of data that could be used for campaign segmentation or analytics if the high guardians of IT weren't on hand to stop them. Those access restrictions typically exist for a reason. Data is complicated, particularly at the terabyte scale of a global business earning millions of dollars a quarter. It takes a highly trained specialist months to understand all the data sources within an enterprise and what they can be used for. The average field marketer would be quickly overwhelmed by the array of information contained in the typical data warehouse. More importantly, data protection laws limit how the contents of a data warehouse or data lake can be used. GDPR was drafted to explicitly prevent organisations from using data collected for operational reasons for other uses, meaning that data in the data warehouse such as product health monitoring or usage analytics can't be used for marketing. Data warehouses and data lakes contain the full scope of the enterprise data landscape, so will include data sources that legally cannot be accessed by marketers. To prevent security breaches and compliance fines, access to these critical data storage locations are heavily locked down to the data analysts and IT staffers who absolutely must have access. Everyone else is given a locked-down feed or a BI dashboard with the information they need to know to do their jobs. The exact level of access will vary by type of tool. Data architecture is a complicated business of critical importance to the modern enterprise. Enterprise architects are highly sought after for their ability to harness the complex web of technology and data in ways that can empower the business. There are many different types of database, each with their own core purpose. Most companies will have more than one, and it is essential to understand the difference in order to make the most of them. ### Data Warehouse Often abbreviated to 'EDW', enterprise data warehouses have been around for decades. They were pioneered by IBM at the earliest stages of the modern computing revolution and have been a corporate mainstay ever since. They were intended as a mechanism for organising all the data held by an enterprise into a highly organised, normalised structure so that it can be used by the business for analysis and decision-making. Usage of data warehouses has been on the decline, with specialist tools taking over many use cases. ### Data Lake One of the newer data storage technologies, data lakes are a product of the cloud computing boom. The most widely used data lakes such as Azure Data Lake, Amazon S3 or Hadoop are cloud technologies. Like the data warehouses that proceeded them, they are designed to act as a central repository of all enterprise data so that it can be used for analysis or decision-making. The difference between data warehouses and data lakes is that the data in data lakes is unstructured. Any data loaded into a data lake is left in its raw format, and no attempt is made to organise that data or clean it. ### Master Data Management Commonly abbreviated to MDM, Master Data Management is both a methodology and a technology. MDM is a recent offshoot of data warehousing, intended to make the data contained in a data warehouse more useful for the business users that need access to it. They are a reaction to the fact that most enterprises have too much data for the average business user to understand. Master Data Management is the process of taking the most important information out of all of the various data sources in the enterprise and organising it into a single easily understandable database that can be used by the entire business across all functions. This can include finance and operations as well as sales and marketing. ### Data Management Platform Commonly abbreviated to DMP, Data Management Platforms are most frequently used in B2C marketing and B2B advertising. They are used to build audiences for digital advertising campaigns, which are then synced to DSPs when the time comes to launch a campaign. Unlike MDM systems, DMPs typically only deal with anonymous web visitors. Most DMPs are simply pools of third-party advertising cookies dropped by the platform vendor on the devices of web visitors. The DMP vendor then builds a profile of the individual in front of the cookie based on IP information and the data collected by the cookie. Only rarely is the data in a DMP integrated into the broader enterprise technology landscape. Few DMPs attempt to link the data they contain to known contacts or customers in the enterprise as the cookies behind the DMP are controlled by the vendor rather than the customer, and in some cases may be used by all of the DMP's customers. ### Customer Data Platforms The newest type of data platform in the B2B marketing tech stack, CDPs are marketing-centric databases designed to collect all the information that the marketing department holds about all customers and prospects in one central database. Unlike the other tools on this list, CDPs natively handle account, contact and anonymous visitor information and aren't supposed to privilege one data source over the others. They build a single customer view, including a harmonised of view of both profile data and activity data across the entire marketing technology stack. This is then cleansed and normalised using AI so that it can be used for segmentation across all marketing channels. The leading CMS vendors have had CDP integrations for a while, and now the leading marketing automation platforms are following suit with both Oracle and expected to add integrations between their marketing automation and CDP products in the next six months. The idea is that CDPs will bring the different marketing channels closer together, and link them all together with the rest of the technology stack in a way that the other technologies on this list haven't been able to. It's still early days for CDP adoption in B2B marketing, but the technology has seen great success for B2C marketing. ### Oracle Eloqua 19C Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-19c-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-08-16T07:30:00.000Z It's a time of transition for the Eloqua platform. Last year's new asset editors have been followed up by the deprecation of the previous classic asset editors. This release sees the final sunset of the legacy email and landing page editors. These drag and drop style WYSIWYG editors have been totally unusable for years due to crippling limitations and their inability to support responsive design. They will not be missed. Fortunately, assets created using these editors can still be viewed in Eloqua, even if they can't be edited. The classic form layout editor has been given a stay of execution until February 2020\. This too was initially supposed to be retiring in the current quarter, but the deadline to migrate forms to the new editor has been extended by six months. Migrating forms to the new editor requires CSS changes to landing page templates, so more time has been given for customers to make the necessary changes. Three months' notice was never going to be enough time for template designers and enterprise web teams to support any changes on their side. Also transitioning this month is the LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration with Profiler. This is being broken out into an Oracle developed first-party app, and the existing native Sales Navigator integration will be going away on 27th September. Nothing in Profiler will change as a result of this development. It is only a back-end update. Admins have a little over a month to make the switch though, with the new app being released on 16th August. Speaking of apps, there have quite a few enhancements to the new Salesforce Integration app. It is now possible to create contact and account fields from the app, a feature also possible in the native integration, albeit deeply buried. The missing option to create activities in Salesforce for Web Visits and Page View has finally been added several releases after all the other activity types possible in the native integration. Error notifications have been enhanced with the ability to select how frequently integration admins should be notified. It is also easier to find error notifications within the app. Finally, the default integration configuration has been updated to include several options such as activities and converted leads that were standard in the native integration. The headline feature of the release is definitely the integration with Oracle's Infinity web analytics product. Customers of both products can now pull Eloqua campaign data into Infinity to enable cross-device reporting and analysis. Infinity also includes re-marketing capabilities with Infinity Streams, allowing Infinity customers to push contacts who complete a particular action on a web page (such as viewing a video) into an Eloqua campaign canvas or program. Eloqua has always had web tracking capabilities of its own, but these are exceptionally limited by modern standards, covering little more than page views. The integration with Infinity allows visitors who engage with other types of interactions to be tracked and ultimately pushed to Eloqua. Customers interested in trialling these capabilities can now do so, but should be aware that they have only been released under Controlled Availability. The rest of the Eloqua customer base will be much more interested in some small but highly useful tweaks to the email design editor. The Hyperlink Manager feature from the old email editor is now available in the new editor, allowing marketers to review all the links in an email from one screen and check whether they're correct. It is possible to edit the links from this screen as well, but it is not recommended to do so. A canvas alignment option has been added to the email design editor too, so that emails can be left or right aligned when the design calls for it. This is most useful for text emails, which are typically left aligned like an Outlook email. There is improved support for CSS in the design editor. Class names are clearer, making it easier to apply styles in a template to individual sections or paragraphs. CSS will also be applied when editing a section of an email, as well as when previewing it. This makes it easier to make text changes, and to see whether any changes have broken styling. Finally, the view dependencies link has been made more prominent on both forms and landing pages. There have been major enhancements to asset search on the Email Overview page. It is now possible to search using the subject line as well as on the asset name. Results returned by the search can then be further filtered by create user and date, modified date, status and editor type, making it significantly easier to find emails after they've been created. The existing *Recently Modified* and *Recently Accessed by Me* views on the Email Overview page have been removed to make room for this change, but that's no great loss because the new capability totally replaces this functionality and more. Search has long been the most common way of finding assets in Eloqua, so making it better and more prominent is overdue. Expect the new capabilities to be rolled out to other areas of the application over time. Also worth noting are some changes to the default campaign duration and segment re-evaluation frequencies for new campaign canvases. These only affect new campaigns and not existing ones, but should be remembered when creating long-running campaigns. The default end date of campaigns is now 3 months in the future rather than 1 year, which is plenty long enough for a batch email blast but maybe too short for event campaigns. Make sure to check the end date when activating campaigns. Segments configured to add members on a recurring basis, will now do so daily by default rather than hourly. This is actually fine for most campaigns, but not necessarily for programs so make to check and amend this setting when adding segments to a campaign. Finally, it is now possible to report on click-throughs by dynamic content rule in Insight. Previously, the only way to compare the results of different rules in a dynamic content section was to use a different link in each rule. This made identifying the most successful dynamic content version difficult, particularly if the CTA was the same across all variations. For emails sent after the 19C release, it will be possible to drill down by dynamic content version when viewing Email Click-through reports in Insight. This makes reporting much easier. The Oracle Eloqua 19C Update is scheduled over two weekends starting August 16th, 2019\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as faster segments and context sensitive editor help, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/19C/19C-eloqua-wn.htm). ### Marketo August '19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-august-19-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-08-09T07:30:00.000Z August is often a quiet time for technology companies and that's definitely the case for Marketo's summer release, which is due to ship on the 16th August. The unusually short two month gap between this release and the last one is probably to blame for the lack of updates. There are still several new features, most notably in Sky, but the release notes are definitely on the lighter side after a packed spring release back in June. It's notable that the headline features are all API changes, which rarely excites administrators or end users, but will make a big difference to developers and third parties selling Marketo integrations through LaunchPoint. ### Integration The ability to create, read, update and delete Smart Campaigns through the API has finally been added. This is limited to lifecycle capabilities for now, so creating new campaigns by cloning an existing campaign, changing the basic properties of the campaign or deleting campaigns, but it does make it significantly easier to build integrations. The ability to actually create or change campaign flows or smart list triggers and filters is still missing but will arrive in a future release. Also added to the API, is the ability to edit email headers for assets that have been broken from the template. This was always a weird limitation, which won't mean much unless you are developing apps that create email assets in Marketo. The REST API has several strange and somewhat arbitrary limitations. Among the most frustrating is the restriction on editing the subject line, from name, from address and reply address of an email asset programmatically. It is only possible to edit these four attributes through the API if the email in question was created from a template. It is not possible to edit the subject line or sender details if the email has previously been disconnected from a template after the source code was manually edited. That has now been fixed, and as of this release it will be possible to edit the subject line and sender details of all email assets through the API. The final integration related change will be a lot more relevant to most marketing users. The enhanced webinar provider integration used by event programs to sync registrants and attendees with third-party event platforms has gained support for Zoom and Cvent. This promises to significantly improve the integration between Marketo and both of these widely used event platforms. The Cvent integration is particularly notable as it is the first time that the event provider feature has been used for offline event applications, in the past it was only used for webinar platforms including Zoom. This is a very significant upgrade over the existing API based integration that is somewhat clunky and can cause problems when used for the most complex events such as the major tradeshows and global customer events typically associated with the Cvent platform. ### Sky The headline features are saved for Sky, which takes two major steps to feature parity with the classic UI. Marketo is a modular platform with each area of the platform being migrated to Sky in turn. Marketing Activities, the most commonly used area of Marketo, was migrated at launch over a year ago. This was followed by the new My Marketo home screen and Design Studio at the end of last year. Each of these areas is now close to feature parity with the existing interface, meaning the time has come to migrate the third most commonly used section of Marketo: Lead Database. The ability to create lists and smart lists in Sky was released earlier this year, so most of the needed capabilities already existed. However, now admins and standard users can manage shared and system lists in the database area of the application. The Database area of Marketo is often underused, with it frequently becoming a mess of test lists, one-off data management and reporting queries. However, its presence is an important milestone in the transition from the Classic UI to Sky. The other new headline capability for Sky is much smaller in scope, but will be much more widely used. In fact, it's absence has been a significant impediment to my personal use of Sky. Marketo users have long been used to right clicking on any folder in the folder tree and creating a local asset in that folder. Among my team, it is the most common way to create an asset or list within a program. Yet, that feature has been frustratingly missing from Sky. Now it is being added back in. I'm delighted. I've switched from Sky to classic more than once out of frustration that the only way to create an asset is through a program rather than a folder. ### ABM There are a couple of important milestones for Marketo ABM in this release. The LinkedIn Account Matching feature is now generally available after being in beta for the last couple of months. This feature allows Marketo users to sync named account lists to LinkedIn for campaign targeting. The synced list is created as an Account level matched audience, with LinkedIn attempting to match the Marketo account names to their LinkedIn profile. Creating a matched audience in this manner drastically simplifies matched audience creation. Finally, the previously announced renaming of Account AI to Account Profiling reaches the product itself. This is the heavily promoted AI capability to automate named account selection through Mintigo. Marketing collateral has been using the updated Account Profiling name for months, but the product documentation and in-app configuration page still use the old Account AI branding. This has been fixed. ### Misattributing Attribution URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/misattributing-attribution/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:21:15.000Z Performance measurement is the most important task for any marketing operations team. When corporate revenues fall short of targets, marketing is often the first department to notice the impact. Every dollar spent starts to be questioned, and the need to justify campaign spending and investment decisions becomes overwhelming. In many organisations, marketing is still seen at board level as discretionary spending for the good times rather than a revenue generating activity. The rapid expansion of digital marketing and marketing technology has helped redress that balance a bit by facilitating holistic user journey tracking and closing the loop between inbound marketing leads and closed sales opportunities. Yet more needs to be done because many marketers still cannot get the numbers they need to prove results in the only language that the business understands: dollars and cents. It's been a decade since revenue marketing became a buzz word. While many CMOs are now measured in terms of revenue rather than leads, actually proving that marketing campaigns lead to closed deals is still a challenge in many organisations. Once a lead has gone over to Sales, marketing teams frequently stop worrying about the outcome of it. This is precisely the type of behaviour that financial KPIs are designed to eliminate, but it still happens due to a lack of alignment with sales. The traditional rivalry between marketing leaders and sales leaders is in decline, even when each side has unrealistic expectations of what the other can contribute to the success of the business. Sales expect marketing to provide sales-ready leads all the time, whilst marketing expect their leads to be prioritised over deals that sales are already working on. Thus Sales ignore leads that get passed by marketing, and on the occasions they do follow up on MQLs they don't follow the expected conversion processes in CRM. Actually getting Sales to convert marketing generated leads into opportunities is a challenge across the board, because there is rarely any benefit to them in doing so. It is normally easier for reps to create a new opportunity for every deal, regardless of whether it was marketing generated or not. This of course, breaks the link between lead and revenue that is so crucial to ROI reporting. ### Closing the Loop Even when Sales do follow the correct processes, closing the loop is easier said than done because some businesses have very little idea of who their customers actually are. In many industries, a strong partner channel is a necessary requirement for doing business. It is simply impossible to shift large quantities of physical products at scale without a broad mix of high-volume distributors and specialist resellers. The downside of this is that there is no direct relationship between the end user and the manufacturer, with businesses relying on resellers following deal registration processes to get some idea of who is actually buying product through retail. This becomes a particular problem in organisations that only sell through the channel, either for high volume orders or for all orders. Such organisations often only have an incomplete picture of their customer base. Not all partners will supply end user information for all deals, with internal sales teams or channel relationship teams providing anecdotal evidence to fill in the blanks. This ultimately harms marketing most of all, because they have no way of knowing whether the audience for their campaigns have failed to convert or if they purchased through a third-party. Indeed, this lack of information about who their customers actually are was one of the key justifications for Adobe's switch from a product based business model to a subscription based one. Given that every Adobe customer must have an online account to access their software, Sales and Marketing teams can now match every user back to the marketing interactions that led to the purchasing decision, thereby providing a 360 degree view of the typical customer journey as well as exactly what content and experiences contributed to the bottom line. Typically, this is all mapped back to campaigns because that is where the budget is spent. After all, the goal of revenue reporting is to prove that every campaign ultimately contributes to the bottom line. That's an important concept to prove the business value of marketing activity for internal accountability, it's just that content engagement and campaign responses don't map nicely on to the campaign investment in a specific financial period. People respond to brands and content not campaigns, the recency or value of the content to the brand are not necessarily factors that influence customer engagement. Some interactions will be with old content that has already been paid for, whilst other early stage engagements won't bear fruit until next year due to the length of the sales cycle. Typically, businesses choose one or more interactions they regard as the most important ones and attribute that response as the one that led to the deal. This can be an even spread across all responses, the first response or the last response. All that matters is that corporate revenue is attributed using a consistent methodology, so that budgets can be justified at the highest level. ### Comparative Value Attribution is a complex business, which when carried out correctly is essential to the continued success of pretty much every marketing department. It works as a mechanism for assigning budgets at a high level. As a model for which campaigns influenced a purchasing decision it is woefully inadequate, because at the end of the day everything matters. Purchasing decisions are shaped based upon every interaction with the brand, and the importance of each interaction is a deeply personal one which cannot be measured through graphs and numbers alone. This extends beyond campaign collateral and individual ads to every pixel of every page on the corporate website. Marketers instinctively know this when designing content and producing campaigns, but this fundamental truth gets forgotten when the time comes to report on results. Organic traffic and social content get deprioritised because they are consumed by large numbers of very early stage prospects. Anything that results in a guaranteed volume of leads being generated by a third party gets all the investment, even if none of the leads in question are remotely ready for a sales conversation. Any nurture content or BAU communication gets forgotten about because it's primary purpose is not to acquire new names or provide a final conversion point, but to instead provide one or more of the 5 touches needed to turn a new lead into a sales-ready MQL. For all the attention rightly lauded on ABM, marketing is a volume game. Large numbers of low value interactions to a high number of contacts in the most personalised way possible, all happening at scale over an extended period. By focusing one or a few interactions, traditional attribution models give a misleading picture of which tactics are most effective. This works in the boardroom when discussing financials with the CFO, but tactical decisions should instead be made with the full picture in mind. ### Unified Interfaces for Sky and Lightning URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/unified-interfaces-for-sky-and-lightning/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:40:25.000Z One of the things I love about being a consultant is the sheer variety of projects that I get to work on. I regularly interact with a wide range of technology and use cases spanning the full enterprise tech stack. Seeing the evolution of business needs, platforms and user experience over time across the entire industry over a ten year period shows just how radical many organisations can be when they put their mind to it. This is true as much for the technology vendors as it is for the marketing and sales teams that use their end products. In recent years, many of the leading CRM and Marketing Automation have gone through radical UI redesigns. Salesforce have Lightning, Marketo have Sky and Microsoft have the Unified Interface for Dynamics. Actually getting customers to adopt the new workflows that these experiences provide has been a significant challenge. It doesn't matter what the potential benefits are, far too many admins never bother to give more than a five second glance to whatever new features are being offered. Eloqua managed to overcome this a decade ago for their transition from Eloqua 9 to Eloqua 10, by marketing the new UI as an entirely new product and by offering managed upgrades both directly and through partners. Even then there was a lot of pushback, and the company had a dedicated professional services team carrying out the migrations over the span of multiple years. Eloqua 10 was very barebones at release and often buggy. As a result, migration didn't really get getting until a couple of years after the product had been on the market for new customers. Salesforce have adopted a similar approach for Lightning. They have started forcibly upgrading customers unless they proactively opt-out by creating custom security profiles. There are valid reasons for doing this. Salesforce are no longer developing the classic experience, and no doubt would like to remove it at soon point, probably sooner rather than later. That would not be an unreasonable expectation for most SaaS platforms, as Lightning was first released nearly four years ago in October 2015\. CRM systems are somewhat different from a point solution, as they are frequently heavily customised to fit a customer's core business requirements far more deeply than many other applications. In some cases, this can involve custom development using triggers and visualforce that might require substantial re-development effort before any upgrade to Lightning can take place. The majority of Salesforce customisations are compatible with Lightning, but some are not which is problematic if your business processes depend on them. That highlights the biggest barrier to the lightning upgrade for many organisations. The Lightning Experience looks very different from the classic experience. Sure, if you make an effort to use it, you discover that the basic workflow isn't too different to classic, but many salespeople simply won't make the effort for what is essentially an admin task. Pretty much all businesses of any size struggle to get Sales to actually use CRM to any meaningful degree unless there are financial incentives attached to doing so. Changing the UI from one which privileges lead or opportunity details to one which puts activity and timelines front and centre is a big shift that will throw many power users for a loop without proper training. In many respects, Sales users familiar with Microsoft Dynamics might have an easier time adapting to Lightning than users of Salesforce Classic. That's partially because Dynamics uses are more familiar with UI changes than Salesforce users, but also because there has been a convergence in the UI of the two leading CRM platforms. Microsoft are notorious for making major changes to the look and feel of their products every few years, and Dynamics is no exception. However, Dynamics users will be familiar with process flows at the top of the lead and opportunity records, as well as with tabbed contact and account views. Both of these UI innovations were seen in Dynamics prior to the launch of Salesforce Lightning. Microsoft did introduce another round of UI changes last year, with the launch of their Unified Interface. In terms of end user experience, the changes aren't actually that big. The top navigation has been changed to a side navigation, but should otherwise be reasonably familiar for anyone with previous experience of Dynamics CRM. Instead, the big changes are confined to the backend, which had been totally overhauled. The product is now a modular application built on top of Microsoft's PowerApps code-free application development platform. This allows customers to tap into the Dynamics database to build add-on apps in the same way that the force platform can be used to extend Salesforce. The traditional Dynamics server still exists and is used for various pieces of functionality that have not yet found its way into PowerApps and the related Microsoft Flow process automation tool. Upending your developer story with a radical change to the backend is a brave move, but one that Microsoft have tried before across other products with mixed success. It does make sense though as administrators and developers are generally far more willing to learn a new UI and new workflows than standard users. The various Dynamics products have long needed far more intuitive admin pages, as the UI of the configuration screens was several generations behind those of the front end. Given the increasing adoption of Dynamics, this is an important consideration. It certainly makes my life easier. ### Don't Panic: Avoiding Marketing Automation Errors URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/avoiding-marketing-automation-errors/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:24:07.000Z It's the nightmare scenario for any marketing automation user. You've just pressed the send button on a beautifully designed email with engaging copy and a tempting call to action, only to realise that you've made the wrong audience selection. It's happened to all of us, but few marketing operations teams make much effort to mitigate the risk until after they've incorrectly sent multiple emails to their entire marketing database. We all understand that data and marketing automation workflows don't come naturally to many marketers, nor to many of the developers that are responsible for coding marketing emails. Even those who are proficient in the logic of segments, campaign canvases and smart campaigns still make mistakes. It is very easy to choose the wrong value in a filter or select the wrong list when building your audience for a campaign. It's tempting to see technology as the solution to this problem, but it really isn't. Most global enterprises react to persistent audience selection errors by introducing restrictions on which contacts users can see in the marketing automation platform. Marketo also has the ability to set a maximum batch size using their smart campaign limit feature. This deals with the most high profile concern, namely sending an email meant for one country to the entire marketing database of every country. It does little to prevent smaller scale errors, such as sending an email meant for one country to a different country in the same region. Few marketing automation systems implement data separation down to the country level. At best, data access restrictions are implemented at a regional level - blocking APJ and EMEA users from touching contacts in each other's regions as well as ring-fencing them from the North American business generally run along very different lines. Some marketing teams with a strong channel component to their business model will also split their partner contacts into a separate partition or even into a totally separate instance. Partner communications are often commercially sensitive, and can't be sent to customers for legal reasons, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they have to be blocked off from other teams. For one thing, many channel partners will be interested in customer or prospect campaigns, particularly when it comes to webinars and other events. This makes it difficult to totally ring-fence partners unless you're willing to recreate campaigns in two different places with two different audience segments. Some businesses with particularly sizeable partner marketing programs are prepared to do this, but smaller firms often aren't willing to send out different partner communications for every campaign because of the extra overhead and resource this requires. Instead, many marketing departments need to improve the governance of their marketing automation systems, if they're going to eliminate errors in email campaigns. No amount of technical controls can replace extensive training and rigorous QA procedures. It is possible to go overboard with training and testing – it's a balance I've struggled with in previous roles building emails campaigns – but many teams don't go far enough, often due to lack of resource rather than lack of expertise. This is particularly true for smaller teams both in midsize businesses or among regional marketing teams in enterprise organisations, where there simply aren't enough expert marketing automation users on staff to ensure proper training is carried out. Many regional teams only have 1 person on their team responsible for building all campaigns, with only a limited amount of basic training given before other users are let loose in complex systems such as Eloqua, Marketo or Pardot, leaving them to figure out the rest themselves. It is no wonder mistakes happen. Better training is only part of the answer. No amount of classroom learning can make up for day to day real-world experience. If marketers aren't using marketing automation on a regular basis, then the skills required to use it will atrophy and mistakes will creep back in. Fundamentally, many marketers don't need to use marketing automation that often, because the campaigns they're running don't require it. For many field marketers, events are the most common use for the technology and it simply isn't possible to run an event every day. Clear usage guidelines are therefore essential to make up for this skills gap. Template as much as possible, and make sure that the usage of templates is documented as much as they can be in the system itself. Use descriptions and in-system note capabilities to provide pointers and instructions. Above all, make it clear what sections of a segment or workflow template are there for compliance reasons to avoid mistakes that could cost the business in financial terms. So long as it is abundantly clear what each template is for, there is rarely such a thing as too many templates. Having lots of templates does make marketing operations' job harder, but equally, it reduces mistakes as well, so long as unnecessary duplication is avoided. At the end of the day, no amount of training or templates can replace proper QA. Whilst it is preferable for the people reviewing campaign set up to be marketing automation experts, this doesn't have to be the case. Technical knowledge is not required to test the links, content and rendering of a marketing email. If anything, it is preferable for a creative-minded marketer to be reviewing and testing email or web content because they'll provide more relevant feedback. Data and workflow are different because many marketers don't understand them. This should not be a barrier to effective testing. It simply means that someone with the right expertise needs to talk through the campaign setup, explaining how it works and the decisions made when setting it up. This is an approach I've used for years in my day job at CRMT, and it's surprising how well it works and how many mistakes it catches. Ultimately, there is no magic bullet that can stop all marketing automation errors. Technical controls can only do so much, training is only effective if the trainee remembers what they are taught and templates only work if they're used correctly. Thorough QA helps minimise the risk, testers are as fallible as anyone else. It is only by combining all these different approaches that some guarantee against errors can be achieved. Even then, be prepared for something to slip through despite best efforts. Mistakes will be missed, as with all walks of life, the key is to own up and learn from them. ### Missing the Moment: The Post Event Problem URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/missing-the-moment-post-event/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:24:37.000Z So, you've just got back to the office after managing a brilliantly successful event. It could be the annual customer conference, it could be a small breakfast seminar, or it could be an industry tradeshow. Now you need to hand over to Sales all the hot leads you collected and send out the post-event comms to attendees and no-shows. It doesn't matter how big or small the event is, the challenge is always the same: you need to deal with all the post-event admin whilst juggling the rest of the to do list that you neglected in the build-up to the big day. All that changes is how much else there is to do because all those other things you put off during the build-up are now super urgent as a result. Something has to slip down the priority list, and inevitably that something will be the attendee lead upload and event follow up email, even though you know it really shouldn't. On paper, post-event marketing activities should be easy. Actually running the event is the hard part; yet organising timely and targeted event follow up is a challenge for everybody. Few marketing teams do it well, in large part because it is a surprisingly manual process in a digital world with ubiquitous mobile devices. There is plenty of technology out there to automate events from dedicated apps to bullet point features in systems that the typical marketing department already has, such as marketing automation and CRM platforms. Everyone has heard of Cvent, who dominate the market for organising large scale events. At a smaller scale, event campaigns are the most common use of marketing automation across a wide range of organisations. All of these technologies can create a great registration experience for customers and prospects when they sign-up to attend, but what happens when that person turns up on-site tends to be an afterthought. Despite the proliferation of mobile apps designed to help with the check-in process, too many on-the-day registration desks are run from spreadsheets, particularly if its a simple seminar without the need for attendee badges. If the on-site team are lucky with the Wi-Fi, then that registration list might be a Google Sheet or cloud-hosted Excel document syncing updates back to HQ in real time. This at least ensures that one of the biggest delays in post-event marketing activities is avoided. In some cases, it can take days for the finalised attendee list to make its way into the hands of marketing operations for uploading into marketing automation or CRM. Although third parties are often at fault for this. Those events which still distribute attendee lists to sponsors, often only send them out a day or two afterwards. By this time, sales have probably already started following up the hottest leads they got, bypassing the attendee upload to CRM resulting inevitably in duplicate leads and potentially duplicate sales follow-up. For enterprise marketing teams running a lot of small scale events, there are plenty of mobile lead capture apps designed either for recording the details of stand visitors at tradeshows or checking off visitors as they turn up at hosted events. Apps such as Zuant and atEvent scan event badges or business cards using off the shelf Apple or Android mobile devices, and sync the resulting contact details to marketing automation or CRM systems in the cloud. This isn't a 100% reliable technology but is improving all the time. Where it does fail, the apps can capture details through in-app forms that supplement the business card scanning capability and can be used to additionally capture information such as opt-ins, follow up requests or conversation notes. The end result is leads flowing into marketing automation in real time enabling instant attendee engagement emails to be sent even while the event is in progress, as well as pre-scheduled thank you for attending emails as soon as the event ends. This is even before the standard thank you email with presentations or session recordings is considered. Follow up emails always get much higher levels of engagement than any other type of email communications, purely because they're directly related to a previous interaction. Any delay between the end of the event and sending the follow up reduces their impact, so it's essential to send the email as soon as possible with relevant messaging and next stage content. Yet, all too often they drip out a week later, long after any interest generated by the event has died down. This does require a degree of organisation that rarely actually happens for in-person events, but should be aspired too. In most cases, the drafting of a post-event email copy doesn't happen until after the fact. This is mostly down to marketing teams simply not thinking about post-event activity until too late, generally at a point when there are more important preparations to be made. Even where speaker permission to distribute presentations and recordings is required, there is no reason why the relevant event presentations page and email communications can't be drafted at the same time as the invites and registration process, with the missing content added in later once it is available. This at least minimises the delays and gets emails out the door as soon as possible. Timing is everything, and marketers are missing out by waiting too long to sustain any engagement generated at events. All too often, the focus is only on the few sales-ready leads rather than the majority of attendees who aren't quite ready to make that jump. Events are a major part of every marketing team's time and energy, particularly at a field level. Face to face contact is an essential part of many business relationships, and events are the main way to get in front of prospects before they're ready to start a sales conversation. Yet, many marketing teams could be doing more to make the most of the opportunity this represents. ### Get Ready for Smart Marketing URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/get-ready-for-smart-marketing/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:24:55.000Z Customer Experience has been a hot topic of conversation among B2C marketers for a long time. There has been plenty of discussion about CX in B2B circles too. It's just that in practice, many enterprise marketers have adopted a piecemeal approach. Existing digital experiences have been updated to meet consumer levels of design and usability, but the creation of new online customer journeys has often been held back by the limitations of available technology and the lack of integration between different platforms. ### Fragmented Stack It's not just new technologies that suffer from this capability gap. Even long-standing corporate mainstays such as marketing automation and the corporate website frequently don't talk to each other as well as they should. Marketers can't personalise website content based on the visitor's contact profile in marketing automation or CRM. In an ideal world, contacts who visit the website immediately after receiving a marketing email should see the email call to action prominently on the home page. Yet this doesn't happen because website personalisation is controlled by the web team and is managed separately from campaigns. Marketo tried to work around this with their real-time personalisation product, but the end result simply wasn't sophisticated enough for web developers to invest in with confidence. Even worse is the vast gulf in every tech stack that separate anonymous website visitors from known prospects being tracked by marketing automation. This extends all the way down the funnel causing numerous reporting gaps. Even the most basic requirement, such as identifying the exact source of registrations for a webinar appears to be an enormous challenge for many marketing departments. Without that information, it is impossible to get even a basic understanding of how different social or advertising networks are contributing to the funnel let alone use those same channels to promote the next campaign to webinar attendees. ### Fragmented Data The underlying cause of this disconnect is well understood. It is impossible to build a full picture of every engagement prospects have with a business because every single application in the marketing technology stack has its own contact database and its own visitor activity history log, leading to fragmentation and duplication in both reporting and segmentation. Some tools in the stack integrate with marketing automation or CRM for contact data and web analytics for visitor journey visualisation, but these integrations are limited to the information that marketing automation and web analytics can actually capture. Marketing automation does have native web tracking capabilities, but these can only track website page views and not the thousands of other online interactions such as video plays and social shares that even a basic Google Analytics implementation will be recording through event tracking. This allows GA and Adobe Analytics to build a full picture of the digital interactions every single visitor has with a website. The trouble is that all this incredible engagement history is totally anonymous, and not linked in any way to an actual CRM lead or Marketing Automation contact record. This wouldn't be so bad if it was at least possible to use all this web analytics data to build audiences for advertising campaigns and paid social content. Typically, this can't be done either. Most DMPs don't allow their customers to build advertising audiences using their own data. Advertisers are expected to use the DMP's segmentation options to select what are basically a pool of anonymous tracking cookies under the control of the relevant platform. Paid social works much the same way. At best, some DMPs and Social Networks allow marketers to place conversation pixels on corporate websites so that page views can be used as an audience selection criteria. The end result is still an additional tool in the tech stack with its own contact database and activity tracking data. ### Customer Data Platforms Thankfully, the major technology vendors finally have an answer to this problem. They're all releasing new Customer Data Platforms (CDP) that sit underneath their marketing clouds to act as a unified data and integration layer for every application in their technology portfolio. Oracle launched Oracle CX Unity at the end of March. Salesforce have just announced a pilot for the revamped version of [Salesforce Customer 360](https://www.salesforce.com/solutions/customer-360/), which has evolved from an integration hub into a full CDP since being announced at Dreamforce last year. At the same time, existing CDPs such as Tealium AudienceStream are expanding their feature set to cope with B2B audiences. Adobe launched Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) at their summit last month, pitching their brand new product as the first real-time Customer Data Platform designed for B2B. The Adobe Experience Cloud portfolio is already better integrated than competing stacks, which is one of the key drivers for its success. However, there are still gaps between the various solutions that Adobe's new CDP is designed to bridge. Rather than have separate contact profiles for each user in the Adobe Experience Manager CMS, Adobe Analytics and Marketo, Adobe Experience Platform will combine them all into one holistic cross-platform customer view feeding in activity history and profile data from across the Adobe, Microsoft and SAP clouds as well as from a network of supporting partners such as ServiceNow. Furthermore, AEP is an open platform with a well-developed API and a flexible database structure that can collect any information you want to include in a customer profile from whatever system or database it is stored in. ### Single Customer View This can cover far more than anonymous website visitors. All too often a discussion of marketing data ignores the thousands of other customer databases sitting elsewhere in other departments listing what customers have actually purchased and when they've interacted with those products or services. Much of that information can't be used for marketing purposes due to data protection laws, but some of it can be. Too many organisations are passing up the opportunity to do so. Master Data Management (MDM) databases are already being deployed to solve this problem, but still miss the critical history of marketing engagements and anonymous digital interactions truly needed to personalise the customer experience. In many enterprise organisations, the master data management system isn't properly integrated with the marketing automation system either, leaving Marketo or Eloqua to see only a small percentage of contacts and related profile information available to marketing elsewhere in the enterprise. CDPs such as Adobe Experience Platform are intended to capture the entire contact database from the MDM as well as the linked customer purchase history, to build a full 360-degree view of every customer, account and prospect that has ever engaged with the business. All this data is then organised, de-duplicated and normalised using Adobe Sensei AI so it can be used to build segments and target campaigns across any of the applications in the Adobe stack and beyond. This works for applications targeting both known and unknown audience through any channel, including eventually Marketo. ### Unified Experiences The classic example of this in practice is an abandoned shopping cart email. Adobe Analytics tracks the contents of a visitor's cart in a brand's e-commerce store recording all of the user's page views and saved items to their profile in AEP. Also linked to the user's profile would be their Marketo user profile with all of the fields, custom objects and related activity included on it. If the visitor adds items to their online shopping cart but subsequently doesn't reach the end of the check-out process, they would be added to an 'Abandoned Cart' segment within AEP. The members of this segment would then be pushed into either Marketo or Adobe Campaign where they would be sent an email listing the cart contents. They could also be fed into Adobe Advertising Cloud to be targeted with ads promoting the products in the cart in a technique made famous by Amazon. Additionally, the same cart data can be fed into Tableau, Domo or Power BI for reporting and analytics, as AEP integrates directly with the market-leading BI tools. If the visitor subsequently returns to the site and actually finishes their purchase then that engagement would also be recorded by Adobe Analytics and can be fed into Marketo by AEP to close the loop on the successful conversion as well as into Microsoft Dynamics to update the contact's purchase history information in the all-important CRM and ERP systems. This is an example most relevant to B2C, but the same tactics could equally be applied to B2B user journeys. Software companies tracking product usage through Adobe Analytics could push users struggling with their products into a product training nurture that illustrates the capability of the purchased product and key features that the user has missed. Adobe already do this for Creative Cloud customers. The shopping cart scenario can be reworked for a B2B content experience. If a visitor visits your site but refuses to fill in a form or sign-up for an event, then retarget them with a lower value piece of ungated content through LinkedIn, Google Ads or Adobe Ad Cloud. ### Personalised Experiences Adapting the highly streamlined and heavily optimised B2C buying experience to Account Based Marketing and demand generation is the core of Adobe's pitch to B2B marketers. Adobe Experience Platform is the technology designed to make it happen. In both cases, the audience is looking for one to one personalisation that provides the information needed to make a purchasing decision, while ensuring that barriers to closing the deal are kept as low as possible. From the marketers perspective, an adaptive customer journey that eliminates dead-ends and irrelevant distractions will keep the audience engaged for as long as possible. As any salesperson will testify, the attention span of a key decision maker is short due to the competing demands placed upon them by their roles. A single view of the customer comprising everything known about them and their previous interactions keeps the sales conversation relevant and the marketing engagements highly personalised, maximising the limited time a business has in front of their prospects. By bringing CDPs into B2B, both Oracle and Adobe are placing the power to personalise the entire sales funnel at scale from top to bottom in the hands of marketing teams. As with all technology, the challenge is then to make the most effective use of it. ### Salesforce Discovers Analytics with Tableau URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/salesforce-discovers-analytics-with-tableau/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:40:05.000Z Analytics has long been a pain point for both marketing and sales. Getting accurate and comprehensive reports in a digestible format for time-poor business leaders that don't really understand data is a widespread challenge. Getting that information when you need it is near impossible without a dedicated team of highly paid data scientists capable of delving into the depths of that data and develop a set of bespoke dashboards with fancy graphics, incomprehensible queries and lots of numbers. Designing good dashboards is hard. For one thing, the person consuming the reports needs to understand exactly what they want to learn from the numbers presented before the dashboard has even been designed and built. This may sound obvious, but typically people only have a rough idea of what they want to see in a report before they see the final output. Reporting requirements are continually evolving much to the frustration of the people actually producing them. In the beginning, executives will only be interested in measuring the KPIs that they've been given from above in addition to the set of standard metrics that are used as industry wide benchmarks for whatever activity or business process they're currently interested in. It's only after they see the initial output that more questions arise and a deeper or broader analysis is needed. It's possible to pre-empt some of these questions by preparing follow-up reports in advance, but not all of them. That's why Tableau was so revolutionary. It gave business users the power to explore the dashboards created by their BI teams for themselves, without needing to call on an analyst. Like all truly revolutionary paradigm shifts we take the ability to manipulate BI dashboards in real time for granted these days, but it wasn't so long ago that executive dashboards were expected to be little more than collections of static dashboards that only updated in real time if you were lucky. Sure, some of these dashboards may have had filters or multiple views but these had to be hardcoded by the dashboard designer. The ability to drill down, add arbitrary filters and create new graphs without needing to be a data expert all come from Tableau's then unique focus on visualisation and data discovery over static representation and data transformation. Many MarTech vendors and enterprise software companies are still struggling to catch up. So, it's no surprise to see a wave of mergers and acquisitions within the Business Intelligence software market. Last week's acquisition of Tableau by Salesforce is the latest in a string of deals as the midsize players try to bolster their position. Alongside Salesforce, Google have also been aggressively expanding into the BI space, complementing their existing Google Data Studio service with the purchase of the big-data focused Looker. This still leaves quite a few independent major players such as SiSense, Qlik and Domo, as well as market-leading solutions from established tech firms such as Microsoft and Oracle. Among marketing departments, Domo, in particular, has seen rapid growth because of its native integrations with numerous cloud applications as well as a focus on collaboration, speed and ease of use. One thing that most of these competing solutions have in common is a focus on open source and deep integration with the entire technology ecosystem present inside an organisation. This is especially true for the newly acquired Tableau, which has a strong user base among universities and research scientists. As a result, there are concerns that Salesforce may try to lock down their new acquisition, particularly given that Tableau has a widely used server version that is popular among companies that don't want to put all their data in the cloud. They have a rapidly growing cloud version too, but that is not perceived as the core product for the majority of the userbase. Salesforce is famous for the cloud only sales pitch during their early days, so there is a culture clash in that area, but ultimately Tableau has been promised sufficient independence for this not to be an issue. Eventually, Salesforce will need to integrate Tableau with their wider ecosystem. There are numerous companies already reporting on the sales funnel and marketing ROI in Tableau using Salesforce data, so this shouldn't be a challenge. In fact, the sheer number of joint customers was one of the justifications that Jeff Bezos gave for spending over $15 billion on a BI vendor, even though Salesforce already have competing products in this space. The likely death of their existing Einstein Analytics reporting tools should serve as a warning for what happens when you release a BI tool that only visualises data from one vendor's products. No one uses them, particularly given that Salesforce already has a suite of relatively easy and flexible reporting tools for business users in the first place. Marketo have had the same challenges with their various analytics add-ons. The core users for BI are always going to be data analysts, who prefer to work in a dedicated analytics platform that gives them the power to manipulate any data from any source in whatever way is needed. With data silos and a fragmented tech stack becoming a major challenge for many organisations, reporting through one of the market-leading BI tools is the only way to get a complete picture of the entire funnel, the investment that has gone into that funnel and the impact each activity has had on it. What's more a well designed set of dashboards built by a dedicated data analyst promises to be an interactive experience allowing the people viewing it to slice and dice the reports being presented with the aim of finding the answers to the questions that the top level numbers will inevitably raise. To make data driven decisions, you need to start by making all the relevant data available at the press of a button in a format that makes sense for you and your business. It's surprising how few companies actually have this, but it's definitely possible. ### Marketo June '19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-june-19-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-06-14T07:30:00.000Z It seems to be the season for marketing automation vendors to deprecate legacy features. Hot on the heels of Oracle killing off their legacy email editor in Eloqua, Adobe have now made the same announcement for Marketo. They will be retiring their legacy "Email Editor 1.0" at the end of the year. This doesn't affect very many Marketo users, as most long-standing customers migrated to the newer Email Editor 2.0 years ago. The difference between Marketo and Eloqua is the amount of notice given to affected customers. The migration was only announced a few weeks ago but is being kicked-off this week. On Tuesday June 18th, all remaining users of Email Editor 1.0 will be forcibly migrated to the newer Email Editor 2.0. The upgrade is supposed to be seamless, as the new editor is backwards compatible with templates created for the old editor. This is generally true, but only if your old templates are coded correctly. The new editor is not as forgiving with syntax errors as the old one and will break if you use the wrong tags or code an editable section within another editable section. The old editor would typically work in this situation. If you are one of the customers affected by the forced migration, then the change should not be too disruptive. There are some visual and layout changes, but the new email editor can pretty much be used in exactly the same way as the old one. However, you are strongly encouraged to explore the extra features found in Email Editor 2.0 such as modules and variables as they enable designers to create much more creative email templates with a broader range of customisation options. This gives marketers much more flexibility when designing campaigns, while still staying on brand and on message. There is a second deadline that Marketo users who have previously made the upgrade to Email Editor 2.0 need to be aware of. When the new editor is enabled, existing emails created using the old editor are not migrated to email editor 2.0 until they are opened and saved within Marketo. This has allowed users to continue using old emails in existing campaigns without having to worry about migrating them, while leaving open the possibility of doing so in future should the asset need to be edited. Marketo have now imposed a deadline after which assets built using Email Editor 1.0 won't be migrated. From December, the old email editor 1.0 and the APIs related to it will be removed. After this date, emails created using this editor will not be usable unless they have previously been migrated. Marketo customers are strongly encouraged to identify any emails that were created by the old editor and re-approve them between now and the end of November. ### Event Goals The removal of this old functionality is balanced by plenty of new features coming to Marketo Sky in this and future releases. Any new features going forward will only be released in the Sky user experience, which means that customers should familiarise themselves with this interface and be prepared to switch between the new and old UIs as required. There are still reasons to use the old UI in places, but by sticking to it exclusively, Marketo users are missing out on a lot of useful functionality. This month sees the most useful Sky enhancement yet affecting one of the most widely used features in Marketo. It is now possible to set a registration limit on event registrations for Event Programs. A maximum number of permitted registrants can be configured as part of program settings, reflecting any capacity constraints that may apply to an event. When the desired number of registered program members is reached, any new form submissions for the event will be added to a waiting list, and the visitor redirected to a 'Registration Full' landing page specified as part of the event setup. This extra landing page for waitlisted registrants should be added to any event program templates and considered as part of program builds going forward. This won't be useful for all events, as not every event will have a fixed capacity. Every event, both offline or online, will have a registration target. This target can now be specified in the event program settings regardless of whether you're using event caps or not. Marketo allows you to list both registration and attendee targets for an event, which can then be monitored in Sky from My Marketo or the program dashboard. In addition, the system will notify you when the registration target is reached as well as when there is a risk your targets won't be met. This will allow event organisers to take proactive action to drive registrations for underperforming events through Marketo using an extra email blast or outside of Marketo by way of additional social activity or sales incentives. ### Marketo Sky Whilst useful, the event functionality is not the coolest feature update for Sky this quarter, That title belongs to the other big feature this month, namely, the ability to edit images directly within Marketo. Users browsing images in Design Studio will notice a brand new 'Edit Image' button when viewing an asset. This opens up the image in the Adobe Creative Cloud online image editors also included in some of Adobe's other online services. These editors are limited, but are perfectly serviceable for simple changes such as image resizing, cropping or colour retouching. Major image editing will still require the assistance of a designer with Photoshop or Illustrator expertise, but this should reduce lead times for the simple fixes. The biggest use case here is definitely the ability to text on banner images, assuming that the banners have been created in the right format to make the text editable. Banner text is a constant pain point for every email marketing team I've worked with. Image editing may be the most prominent Sky UX update, but there are a high number of smaller updates to the Sky user interface as Marketo seek to bring it up to feature parity with the old UI. These are continuing to happen every month in small incremental releases that have a major impact on usability when added up. The missing Create Task flow step was added in May and the missing CRM system smart list criteria will be added this month. Test Engagement Streams has also been added back into the new UI, and the My Marketo dashboard is continuing to gain new widgets. The default dashboard now boasts an Expiring Soon widget that lists expiring landing pages and emails as well as an optional Community blog widget. The navigation options in Sky have been significantly enhanced as well. At the beginning of the quarter, the date filter in the navigation tree was broken out from the rest of the filters and is now displayed prominently at the top of the tree so that users are always aware that old assets are hidden in the default view. Numerous new options have been added to the right-hand application navigation bar, including a recently viewed history list, a heavily upgraded global search and additional links to all application modules rather than just the ones released in Sky. The ability to select multiple assets and run mass actions on the selected assets has been added back into Design Studio, when the emails, forms or landing page nodes have been selected in the tree. This also affects images too. Furthermore, the image details card in Design Studio has got a significant update and is now much clearer and more useful than the equivalent feature in the old UI. ### Other Applications Elsewhere, Marketo Sales Connect, the new name for the Sales Engage Sales automation add-on, gets quite a few new updates. These include enhanced settings screens, vastly improved system email customisation and the ability to bulk add contacts to a Sales Engage campaign from within Salesforce. Bizible gets additional contact, account and campaign level drill-down options in the discover dashboards. This allows you to see the full range of activity for each opportunity and view attribution information right down to the most granular level possible. On top of this, multi-currency support has been added for Bizible customers integrated with Microsoft Dynamics following on from the release of this same feature for Salesforce customers at the beginning of the year. Finally, Bizible now integrates with Drift, allowing conversations taking place on this market-leading chatbot platform to be included in revenue attribution reports. Drift is one of three vendors to launch brand new integrations with Marketo Engage this month. Demandbase and Liveramp are the other two. Finally, Marketo customers using bulk exports to export data for archiving or analysis should be aware of an integration enhancement. Marketo will now supply the checksum for any file retrieved using the bulk extract rest API, allowing customers to verify that the downloaded file has been extracted correctly. IT departments should be made aware of this change, as it will improve the reliability of any integration developed using the bulk extract APIs. ### Pardot Summer '19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pardot-summer-19-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-06-07T07:30:00.000Z Summer has arrived, and with it comes the second Salesforce release of the year. The biggest concern for any Salesforce customer at the moment is the impending switch on of Lightning within all instances. The customer communications surrounding this change have already started, and fortunately they are accompanied by fairly comprehensive migration resources. However, these tools can't rewrite any visualforce code or action buttons affected by the transition from Classic to Lightning. Even after the change rolls out in October, users can still switch back to Classic view but it will no longer be the default unless they are configured to use a custom security profile with the Lightning Experience User Permission disabled. Thankfully, users will now be redirected to the right record if they do need to switch between the Classic and Lightning views. Previously, switching views dumped you back on the home screen. More importantly, for many admins is the recently enhanced help features for users new to the Lightning UX. The out of the box help prompts can now be supplemented with custom ones created by a Salesforce admin through the Salesforce user interface, complete with links to external documentation that may exist elsewhere in your organisation. This should be of major help in transitioning confused users to what is otherwise a very different layout and very different workflow, particularly for instances that use a lot of custom links or visualforce. One other enhancement designed to ease the transition to Lightning is a new Full View option for page layouts within Lightning. This removes the tabs and columns from the standard Lightning page layout, displaying all fields and related lists in a single column much like the Classic UI. For users forcibly migrated from the old experience to the new one, this is likely to be mighty popular as it will massively reduce confusion by ensuring that all the options people are looking for will be in roughly the same place as before. The activities-centric view of the lead and opportunity records in the existing Lightning page layout does not work for all user types. It is great for inside sales reps, who generally ignore activities otherwise but is less useful for marketing users and IT staff. As such, it will be possible to use both the Full View and original Grouped layout for an object, with different user profiles having a different type of view. ### Pardot From a marketing automation perspective, this quarter is a relatively quiet one for Pardot updates. Most of the new stuff is just an evolution of features introduced last quarter. There still some notable updates though. For a start, the Full View page layout type will apply to many Pardot for Lightning Experience screens, as well as to core Sales Cloud functionality. That's not the only Lightning UI change, as quick filters have been added to Pardot related lists throughout the application. The headline feature is definitely the enhanced integration of prospect activity data into Sales Cloud. Assuming you're using Connected campaigns and the latest version of the Salesforce connector, all email and landing page activity is now available as activity records against both the asset and contact or lead record in Salesforce. This allows full reporting of opens, clicks and page views within Salesforce using an engagement history dashboard on the campaign record, or by viewing the brand new 'Engagement History' related list against the asset record, if using the Lightning Experience. The Engagement History related list can also be added to other Salesforce objects, such as the Campaign, Contact or Lead should admins so choose. There will be a limit to the number of users who can view the Engagement History dashboard though, with the exact number of licenses available depending on the contact's trim. This should enable asset reporting within Salesforce rather than Pardot using Salesforce's excellent reports functionality. It will work a bit like Program Member Statuses in Marketo or Campaign Member Statuses in Salesforce. Each engagement record will list the prospect, asset and the type of activity that occurred such as 'Click', 'View' or 'Success'. Think of types as being like the aforementioned Campaign Member Status, except not customisable. Also, unlike Campaign Members, users will have multiple Engagement History records for each asset, as every engagement will create a separate record. ### Pardot Einstein The AI-powered Campaign Insights feature that makes recommendations on potential ways to improve campaign and list email performance has now reached GA. This is an optional Lightning component that can be added to campaign pages in Lightning Experience, giving recommendations on new audiences for campaigns as well as trend analysis and comparisons against other campaigns. In this respect, it is most useful as a reporting and analysis tool for providing real language context around campaign results. As part of the GA release, the feature will now provide commentary on landing pages and forms as well as emails. The Einstein powered predictive behaviour scoring feature also gets an enhancement. This functionality is powerful but requires a large prospect database with a high volume of activity to be accurate. Additionally, there are some caveats around where it can actually be used and the licensing required. One of the main caveats has been lifted though. It is now possible to trigger workflows based off changes to the predictive behaviour score so that lead notifications can be sent to sales reps when a threshold is reached or alternatively assignment processes, and data update processes can be run in Process Builder for the related lead or contact. This opens much more flexibility for organisations using Einstein Behaviour Scoring so should definitely be considered if that applies to you. ### April Release Last quarter saw the release of Business Units, the long-awaited workspaces and data security feature that allows a single Pardot instance to be shared between different divisions of an organisation, while separating out assets and prospects so that one business unit can't see the prospects owned by a different business unit. The downside of this is that prospects and campaigns can't be shared between business units in both Salesforce and Pardot. Fortunately, users now can be shared between business units. This allows central marketing teams and system administrators to switch between business units without needing separate logins. There is now a dropdown that allows users to switch between business units when navigating the Pardot lightning app. There is a small but critical update to the way the Salesforce connector handles opt-outs. By default, the 'Prospect Opted Out' and 'Do Not Email' fields that control the overall unsubscribe status cannot be overwritten from within Salesforce, as they are not part of the sync between the two systems. There is a setting from within the integration connector to override this, syncing the Do Not Email field in both places. Changes to the field in one system are then reflected in the other. This has caused problems when trying to update the Do Not Email field within Pardot through list imports, leading to the integration re-subscribing prospects accidentally in some situations. That is obviously totally unacceptable from a GDPR perspective. As such, the way the sync handles the Do Not Email field has been changed. Effective immediately, Salesforce will never overwrite the Do Not Email flag in Pardot if it was initially set to true in Pardot. The Do Not Email status will only be overwritten in Pardot if it was initially set to true in Salesforce. This ensures any explicit unsubscribe provided through Pardot by the prospect themselves is always respected, whilst allowing Sales-sourced marketing exclusions to be reversed if your organisation uses the Do Not Email field for that purpose. Finally, there is a security enhancement that will be of interest to IT departments. Two factor authentication is now supported for Pardot only users using the same mobile app and SMS factors supported by Salesforce. This will only affect a minority of the userbase given that most users now connect to Pardot through their Salesforce logins. However, Pardot only users are frequently used for external or temporary users such as agencies. Many companies require tools containing personal contact data to be protected with two-factor authentication as this gives an extra layer of protection against leaked or hacked login details. If your organisation's security policy requires this then the change will be of interest. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/summer19/release-notes/salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### Enter the Privacy Network? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/enter-the-privacy-network/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:52:55.000Z It has been a tough couple of years for social media networks. After years of rapid growth, Facebook has faced a significant backlash following several high profile scandals. Twitter has faced questions from investors about whether it will ever be profitable. Google+ has finally been shut down long after it ceased to be relevant due to a potential security breach caused by bugs in their API. Oh and MySpace apparently lost a large chunk of their user's uploads during a server migration. It is clear that many people are finally reconsidering how much time they spend online and how much they share on social media. Quitting Facebook has grown from a niche phenomenon to a widespread consideration and a subject of mainstream discussion. Few do it, but many are actively considering it. There have long been anecdotes about the downsides of sharing personal details too openly, but it wasn't until the Cambridge Analytica scandal that this truly broke through to the mainstream. People have become a lot more vigilant about how the information they provide tech companies since Cambridge Analytica were found to be in possession of Facebook profile data that users hadn't agreed to share with them. The more pressing concern for Mark Zuckerberg is the possibility of regulatory scrutiny from the European Union and the US Federal Government. This has been a looming threat ever since foreign citizens were found to have influenced the US Presidential Elections by posting fake news on both Twitter and Facebook. Restrictions on who can post political advertising and how political ads are displayed have been introduced, but some campaigners want more action to be taken. To head this threat off, Facebook appointed former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg as their VP of Global Affairs and Communications - effectively the chief lobbyist. His job is to use his experience and address book to build a less adverse relationship with a European Commission that has a history of investigating prominent tech giants for anti-trust issues. Google have already been hit multiple times this year with fines after several long-running investigations. ### Core Metrics Despite the hype, the core metrics by which the social networking giant is measured by are heading in the right direction. The number of active Facebook users has not dropped, but growth has definitely slowed as fewer young people sign up for accounts. The sharpest slowdown has come from developed economies in North American and European markets, with most of their growth coming from emerging markets in Asia-Pacific and Latin America. The problem Facebook has is that they get significantly more revenue per user from developed markets than from emerging markets due to wealth disparities and the higher cost of advertising to US audiences compared to other groups. Mark Zuckerberg has a grand plan to arrest this slowdown in growth before it turns negative, but many analysts are sceptical about whether the world's largest social network can make it happen. His attempt to rebrand Facebook as a privacy network has received a lot of scorn and ridicule from all quarters. To pull it off requires not just product updates and a change in public perception, but also a total reinvention of Facebook's corporate culture. The company has in the past struggled to differentiate between actions that benefit the company and activities that benefit their users. Ex-employees have described the company as cult-like, with an emphasis on following management strategy and discouraging any dissent. The way that Facebook has reacted to the various scandals have contributed to the perception that Senior Executives can't handle criticism. Each incident has been accompanied by strenuous denials, counter-attacks and stonewalling of press and politicians rather than open engagement with critics. Even when they admit their mistakes, it is often too little too late, contributing to the suspicion that the company has something to hide and isn't serious about making changes. If the apologies aren't genuine, then people simply won't believe the fixes are either. ### The Privacy Pivot When Facebook announced their intention to refocus their core product around group communications rather than the public News Feed, there was general scepticism about the motives of doing so and whether the redesign would be anything more than skin deep. Groups will now be the starting point for the daily Facebook user experience, with group news being the first tab users see after logging in. Users will also be offered recommendations about Groups they should join right on their home screen. For marketers, this makes generating traffic from Facebook much harder. Brands will want to build and promote their own groups, rather than relying on updates posted to their company page appearing in followers news feeds. This is a net win-win for Facebook's bottom line, as it hopes the changes will regain consumer interest whilst ensuring that consumer brands will have to invest more in advertising in order to get their content seen. More likely, is the continued migration of younger audiences away from Facebook towards Instagram. That shouldn't disrupt Facebook's financials that much, given that they own both sites. Recent ventures into e-commerce and shopping ads, should lead to increased advertising revenue from the still mostly image based Instagram. Then there is a mooted crypto-currency product, which might take blockchain based electronic currency into the mainstream, but probably won't. Even that particular venture does fail, it does show that the company still has plenty of ideas about new technology and the ability to bring it to market, so don't write off Mark Zuckerburg just yet. ### GDPR: One Year On URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/gdpr-one-year-on/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:26:11.000Z It's been twelve months since GDPR came along and changed everything. It feels like far longer. Businesses spent most of the first half of 2018 preparing for the EU's privacy regulations, without any idea of what the new law actually meant in practice or what their long term impact would be. A year later, and that uncertainty still persists. For a law intended to harmonise privacy regulations across Europe the variety of interpretations was remarkable. In this respect, the law has not worked as expected. Businesses did generally align their compliance mechanisms at the regional level, but every company I worked with had a different interpretation of the law and their own reasons for choosing their particular GDPR and data protection policy. Some businesses adopted a legitimate interest clause to continue their outbound marketing activities after GDPR precisely as they did before it, perhaps with a slight tidying up of their database and new opt-out processes. Others adopted an opt-in policy for one of many different reasons. These included: - An IT security vendor who settled on a strict opt-in policy as a core value to align with the expectations of their audience. - A Chinese owned company who decided to adopt an opt-in policy over concerns that regulators might adopt a stricter attitude towards them than other companies as a result of geopolitical tensions. - A company who suffered a major data breach so adopted a strict opt-in policy to regain customer trust. Some of these companies have since relaxed their policies due to concerns about the number of opt-ins, whilst others have tightened up after seeing national data protection authorities applying penalties to Google, Facebook and others over non-compliance. There is no sign of any convergence in corporate policies though, with some brands sticking to a strict opt-in policy, others relying on legitimate interest and the majority somewhere in between. Even at the Adobe Summit last week, I was having discussions with companies confused by the requirements of GDPR and how to implement it within a marketing environment. The expectation was that case law and rulings from national data protection authorities would sort the situation out. In the immediate aftermath of the GDPR deadline, there were a flurry of complaints from privacy advocates against high profile tech firms, as well as other businesses that potentially were in the firing line. At the start of the year, high profile fines were levied against Google because their method of collecting consent to track users for advertising wasn't clear enough. Consent for tracking cookies was one area where there was a lot of activity in the run-up to GDPR. This didn't necessarily affect marketers because cookie consent in GDPR is generally interpreted as only being required for cookies used for personalised advertising. This hit media publishers who now display very prominent opt-in banners before reading an article on their sites. It is claimed most people click through on cookie opt-in banners, but that is probably because opting-out is often very difficult, if not possible which is in breach of both the letter and spirit of GDPR. In fact, it's this breach which led to Google being fined. So far, punishments levied for GDPR breaches have been light. This includes any high profile hacks and data breaches. GDPR was intended to change business models so that companies started to consider consumer privacy as part of their products and go to market strategy. Facebook's high profile privacy woes dovetailed well into this at exactly the right time by raising consumer awareness of the potential risks inherent to any business which doesn't value data protection. There has been a definite sea-change in consumer attitudes towards corporate use of their personal data in Europe and across the world. Governments are now scrambling to catch up, and have been looking to GDPR as a blueprint for their own data protection legislation. First off the mark was California, which passed the CCPA last June. This is due to come into force at the beginning of next year. Its implementation has been dogged by battles between privacy advocates and tech businesses in Sacramento to water down the requirements of the new law. As such, a series of exemptions have been carved out for small businesses. The focus of the law has also shifted from consent gathering to information disclosure. It does not give any new opt-in rights to Californian consumers. Instead, it extends the existing right of opt-out in CAN-SPAM to the sharing of personal information and introduces a requirement for any sharing of personal details to be disclosed on the company website through a page that is accessible from the home page. In general, if you're compliant with GDPR you're probably compliant with CCPA. Brazil has also passed a version of GDPR called LGPD which adheres quite closely to the original European law, but with a few small differences. Due to come into force at the end of August 2020, LGPD has a slightly looser definition of legitimate interest and adds four additional legal justifications for data processing most of which are intended for Brazilian government agencies. Brazil will not be the last country to follow the EU's lead on data protection legislation, with draft data protection legislation based on GDPR already under discussion in both China and India among many other countries. Elsewhere, Japan and South Korea have tightened up their already strict data protection laws to achieve regulatory equivalence opening up the possibility of cross border flows and local data processing of EU citizens data. GDPR has become the gold standard by which data protection is judged and not just in Europe. Businesses need to be prepared to extend its provisions to countries outside the EU as they adopt their own versions of it. They also need to remember that compliance is an ongoing effort rather than a one-off event. Valid consent for data processing needs to be obtained for every contact, so data collection processes require constant monitoring. Managing data retention is also an ongoing process, as GDPR imposes limits on how long data can be kept. Then there is the ePrivacy regulation, this planned update to the EU's consent and cookie laws was supposed to enter into force at the same time as GDPR but has been stuck in limbo for the past 18 months due to disagreements between member states. When it does eventually get passed it will clarify many of the uncertainties within GDPR, but don't expect that to happen anytime soon. In the meantime, the questions about what GDPR exactly means will persist. National data protection authorities are aware of the issue, and are looking to help businesses making a serious effort to comply with the regulation. The fines allowed by the regulation are hefty, but so far severe penalties have only been applied to firms who try to ignore the law or bypass it. Businesses who have been trying to comply with the law have been let off minor punishments, even in the case of serious data breaches. The uncertainty around what GDPR actually means in practice is a potential business risk, but the bigger risk is ignoring the law entirely and attracting serious regulatory scrutiny. ### Oracle Eloqua 19B Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-19b-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-06-05T22:20:29.000Z We're halfway through Q2, which means that it's time for another Eloqua update. The 19B release will be pushed to Eloqua customers over the next week, but don't expect any major new features. After a succession of blockbuster new capabilities, this update is a little on the light side, focusing on foundational work and UI tweaks. There are definitely talking points though, with the controlled availability release of Send Time Optimisation being the most high profile. Oracle's customer communication in the run-up to the release has been focused on the impending retirement of legacy functionality rather than the release of anything new. Oracle will be retiring the classic non-responsive email and landing page design editors after the next release in August, and have sent out multiple communications asking customers to upgrade existing assets built using these tools. This week marks the end of the line for new assets built using these features - as the ability to create emails and landing pages using the legacy editors is being removed. Existing assets can be edited for another three months, before being made read-only in the next release. ### Landing Page Enhancements Fortunately, the new editors are easy to use, if a little inflexible. Landing Pages created in the new editor can be a lot a more sophisticated after this release though, as a UI option to add custom JavaScript has been added to the editor, opening up a much more extensive range of front-end experiences for audiences. A UI option to change the browser title of a landing page has been added to the toolbox – until now it was only customisable through the page meta tag options. The ability to edit the default font for forms has been added back in too. This was an option in the old landing page editor, that was mysteriously absent from the new editor until now. Perhaps the most welcome change is a small but exceptionally useful tweak to the page redirect options. Eloqua has had a UI option to redirect landing pages to a different page for well over a decade. This was most commonly used for form confirmation pages, where users could set the page to redirect to the website or a different landing page after a few seconds. It also could be used to redirect retired landing pages to updated versions. As of this release, the page redirect feature now works on deactivated landing pages too. This means that when a landing page is unpublished using the deactivate page toggle, users can specify where visitors who hit the retired page should be redirected to. Previously, they saw an error message or were directed to the default page for the microsite, neither of which was a great experience. ### Form Enhancements The responsive form editor also gets some updates in this release. The primary enhancement is the addition of Progressive Profiling, which means that the new form editor incorporates all the features of the old editor just three months after release. As such, Oracle have now announced the timeline for the deprecation of the old form editor, and it's an aggressive one. The classic form layout editor will be going away as of the 20B release this time next year. All new forms will use the responsive form editor as of the 19C release. Meanwhile, after this release saving a copy of a form created in the classic editor will convert it to the new editor. There is no way to convert a form to the new editor without saving a copy of it. This is a very aggressive timeline for a feature whose deprecation will have potentially uncertain impacts on customers. The classic email and landing page editor were rarely used due to their inherent limitations so removing them only affected a small proportion of users, but forms are used by all Eloqua customers and not just in Eloqua. There are a lot of forms out there on websites, that will not be editable in Eloqua after May next year. This has major implications for web teams and some third party integrations, many of which use forms to post data to Eloqua as a workaround to avoid using the API. Fortunately, the retirement of the old form editor only affects the ability to edit form fields and layouts. It will still be possible to edit form processing steps on forms created using the old editor, which does significantly reduce the impact. Oracle are advising Eloqua customers to re-create all existing forms in the new editor. This seems excessive. I would definitely recommend running an audit of all active forms to identify which ones are being used on external sites or applications. There is no need to replace them with forms created in the new editor until field or layout updates are required. Be aware though that in future, any changes to the fields on these forms will likely require creating a copy of the form in question with a new form id and form name. Make sure that your procedures for updating forms account for this. The more pressing concern is that as of this release, it is going to become very difficult to create forms using the classic editor. This may not sound like a big deal, but the HTML Eloqua generates for forms created using the new editor is very different from that generated by the old form editor. This will break any custom styling or custom scripting included in landing page templates as well as on websites. I'm not expecting much sympathy from Oracle on this one though – they will simply advise re-creating the forms and relevant scripting from scratch. If you're not actively using forms created in the new layout editor, make switching to it your top priority. Fortunately, Oracle are making it much easier to identify the editor type that assets were created in. The email, landing page and form browsers will all be getting an extra Type column in this release, which means that users will be able to immediately identify assets created in the classic editors simply by browsing through the folder tree. Until now the only way to extract this information in bulk has been through the API. ### Salesforce Integration The new Salesforce Integration app reaches general availability. This follows its launch in controlled availability a few months ago. It now matches the features of the existing native Salesforce integration except for a small number of rarely used legacy features. The only notable one is that the list of marketing activities that cause an activity to be logged in Salesforce is a lot more limited than the native integration. The new app only supports logging email related activities such as sends, opens, clicks, subscribes, unsubscribes and bouncebacks. The web visit and form activity types are not currently included in the app. Also, the app requires 18 character Salesforce IDs to be used in Eloqua, which is not the default even if it is best practice. There is a manual migration required if your existing Salesforce integration uses the shorter case sensitive 15 character ID format. Customers using CLR will need to involve Oracle Support in this migration if they're importing opportunities into Eloqua. Assuming your Eloqua instance uses the longer Salesforce ID format, there is now an option in the app to migrate your native integration configuration into the Salesforce integration app when you install it from the marketplace. The app can then be run in parallel with the existing integration until you are ready to migrate completely and switch off the old integration. Complex integrations that involve multiple Salesforce instances or custom object integrations are mostly supported by the app but should be extensively tested. ### Program Enhancements A late addition to the last release was Field Level Tracking for program canvases. Eloqua has never had the ability to monitor changes to contact fields and trigger program workflows off the back of field changes. This makes building program feeders difficult and has severely comprised the utility of listeners on program canvases. It is now possible to track data value changes for 10 contacts fields under field settings, and then use changes to those fields through Contact Field Change listeners on program canvases. This doesn't tell you who changed the field or when, but it does allow compliance workflows to be triggered based on updates to opt-in fields or integration workflows to be run following updates to country or lead owner fields. The main downside of this much welcome functionality is that the Contact Field Change listener can only be used 10 times across all programs in an Eloqua instance, so use it sparingly only for essential programs. This is actually an increase from the 3 times that it could be used when made generally available in the 19A release. ### Other Changes There is a new opt-in feature that enables cascade delete on specified custom objects. It is now possible to automatically delete custom object records when the linked contact is deleted. By default, this doesn't happen, and instead, records are left orphaned and unmapped when the contact they're linked to is removed. Eloqua customers can ask support to switch on an option to override this behaviour, on a per CDO basis. If enabled, linked custom object records are deleted when the contact is deleted. There are valid use cases for the default behaviour and valid use cases for this new behaviour, so make sure to consider what the required setting should be when creating CDOs. Finally, customer administrators should be aware that Oracle will be automatically installing the RSS, Contact Washing Machine, External Activity & Date Apps from the Oracle Marketplace in all customer instances as of this release. These are all add-ons developed by Oracle themselves as part of their strategy of separating out useful but non-essential functionality as separate apps. Eloqua power users should be aware of these apps, as there is little reason not to use them when the need calls for them, but they do require a small amount of initial configuration. Pre-packaging them with the main platform does defeat the point of splitting them out in marketplace apps though. The Oracle Eloqua 19B Update is scheduled over two weekends starting May 18th, 2018\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article such as faster segments and context sensitive editor help, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/19B/19B-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Changing Ad Market hits Google Earnings URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/changing-ad-market-hits-google/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:39:52.000Z Google shocked Wall Street last week by reporting quarterly earnings well significantly below expectations. Investors took flight as the market value of Alphabet, Google's parent company, dropped 7.5% on the wake of the announcement. Quarterly earnings still went up by 20%, but margins fell substantially, spooking investors who have often worried about the long term viability of the search giant's current business model. At the heart of their problem is the persistent drop in cost-per-click numbers that has been going on for years. The cost of the average Adword is falling and has been doing so consistently for the past decade. Google are making less money from every ad displayed, in a trend that most analysts believe to be irreversible. Google have been making up for this by selling an increasing number of ads on mobile – total revenue from advertising went up again by 15%, but this is a far slower increase than in the comparable quarter in previous years. Ultimately, there is a limit in how many extra ads that Google can serve up to audiences. Their growth in previous quarters has come from mobile, particularly their own Android operating system. Every quarter has seen questions about how many ads Google can place on the typical 4" to 6" mobile screen. This misses the point – Google's increasing revenues have come more from the increasing number of screens rather than increasing the number of ads on the same number of screens. It is no surprise that Google's revenue growth is now slowing at the same time that growth in the mobile phone market is beginning to plateau. That is not the only trend harming Google's advertising revenue. Amazon has reported record advertising revenues over recent quarters, as a result of agencies shifting ad spend for shopping ads from Google to Amazon over recent quarters reflecting better ROI for CPG firms on the internet retailer, and the declining relevance of Google Shopping. Other advertising destinations have seen sharp increases in revenue as well, not least Twitter and Microsoft owned LinkedIn. Even under fire Facebook is reporting faster revenue growth. Notably, both these platforms have reported particularly high revenues with video ads, which matches the success and high conversion rates reported by advertisers for video and carousel ads. ### The Controversial Problem Ironically, the one company struggling with video advertising is Google. In a conference call to investors, YouTube was named as the root cause for the search giant's slowing advertising revenues. The world's leading video sharing site has had a tough 18 months, with multiple scandals caused by controversial user generated content from a number of content creators. This is caused a consistent cycle of advertisers pulling their spend after each scandal over concerns that their ads could appear alongside the offending content, only to return to the platform once changes have been made by YouTube management to fix the underlying issue. There have also been changes to ad formats, which it is believed have reduced the number of clicks that ads are receiving. Unfortunately, for Google, the problem of inappropriate content is still not a solved one. Already this year there has been a scandal related to comments against videos targeted towards children that led to YouTube banning comments against kids videos. So long as these problems continue to exist there will always be a certain level of reluctance to direct ad spend towards YouTube. This is despite the undoubted benefits of the platform to advertisers. It is the only place on the internet that has a video audience that matches the size of broadcast television. With 2 billion users the platform is too big to ignore for brands looking to target video ads at the demographics that don't typically watch mainstream television, but there is a definite trust gap that YouTube needs to close if it is to regain its lost advertisers. That's one of the reasons they've been promoting their original content efforts so hard; it gives advertisers a safe space to place their ads free from the threat of inappropriate or brand-damaging content. ### The Algorithm Problem Google's business is based on AI and algorithms. Their core search product is successful because it has the best search algorithm in the business. This has been applied to YouTube as well. YouTube's algorithms drive not just their own search features but also the content moderation features that are so crucial to advertisers in separating brand appropriate from brand inappropriate content. Sure the platform does have human moderators, but they only review a small proportion of the content uploaded to the platform. Instead, YouTube relies on machine learning to identify and remove or restrict controversial content. Videos containing copyrighted, illegal or harmful material are automatically removed. However, videos that are merely controversial or sensitive are instead demonetized, which means that advertising cannot be shown against them. This is controversial among YouTubers with accusations that the automatic demonetization of certain topics is discriminatory. This is the underlying concern about any form of advertising on social media platforms. You can't control what content your ads are shown against. For some categories of advertising, this is an accepted risk – notably Google's core Adwords platform where targeting ads towards your competitors brand names is an accepted business practice. The problem comes when ad platforms rely on automation and imperfect machine learning algorithms to prevent this practice where it is inappropriate. Google's over-reliance on machine learning has caused many problems for them over the years – particularly when it comes to their consumer offerings. The reputation of their customer service is abysmal. Their content ID copyright protection system has come under heavy scrutiny too. They've been able to overcome these challenges by improving the algorithms that underlie them and will continue to do so. However, machine learning is still an evolving technology. Google are the best in the business at it and will continue to make huge profits from their AI leadership for years to come. But, there is still a place for human judgement and intuition. It is noticeable that even Google are relying on human moderation for the advertiser safe YouTube Originals. In fact, they've expanded human moderation across their platforms over the past year in response to their many scandals. Facebook have done likewise. Both AI and Humans have complementary skills - no market leading business can afford to rely on one exclusively. ### Why Personas are Essential for Successful ABM URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/why-personas-are-essential-for-successful-abm/ Last updated: 2024-03-15T20:02:51.000Z So, you've decided to go with an Account Based Marketing approach. You've chosen your target accounts, identified the message that resonates with that account and are now wondering how your existing buyer personas fit into all this. If so, you're missing a critical dimension to ABM that cannot be ignored. Successful enterprise marketing requires building connections and is all about driving engagement with your audience at scale, so that Sales can then build the buyer confidence and inter-personal relationships required to close the deal. Such relationship building starts from the very first point of contact with a prospect, and the fact they're an ABM target doesn't change that. For this reason, traditional buyer personas are just as important in the ABM world as they are in a classic demand generation strategy. Yet, many marketers downplay their relevance preferring to focus on the account specific challenges of an ABM target, rather than the needs of the individuals within that account. ABM is still about people, it's just that an additional layer of context is added so that the messaging and targeting can be much more personalised than in lead-based campaigns. Focusing on the business needs within your target accounts is still central to the success of ABM, but marketers should also consider how those business needs affect the day to day needs and ambitions of the individuals within each account. Without the personal dimension to their message, the ability for marketers to build engagement over time is just as limited as it would be for any other type of activity. ### Multiple Decision Makers ABM inverts the funnel to better mirror the reality of corporate decision making, namely that there are multiple individuals involved in every buying decision. Typically, there are multiple decision makers in that decision-making group reflecting the various layers of approval that are required within any large organisation. That's before the broad group of influencers consulted in the purchasing process is considered, some of whom will have an effective veto over the decision or a far greater say than the final decision maker. From a marketing perspective, the key difference between ABM and other approaches is that you're targeting this entire buying team within the account as a collective rather than treating each individual in that team as a discrete entity. As such, marketers need to be including all the relevant individuals in the audience for their campaigns. There is little benefit to ABM if you're only targeting the same one or two key decisions makers that would have been targeted anyway – campaigns can be more targeted due to the focus on account specific needs, but this additional level of personalisation can be done as part of a best-in-class demand generation strategy, and often has been. ### The Entire Team Expanding your reach within an account is just as important as progressing that account through the funnel. Typically, the key decision maker is not the person you want to be speaking to early in the decision making process. This decision maker will be a senior executive with budget and authority. However, he or she will have delegated the consideration stage research to the rest of the buying team. Sales will need to speak to the decision maker when they're ready to engage face to face, but until that point is reached you need to be getting your content in front of the key influencers responsible for drawing up shortlists and inputting into selection criteria. This is where Account Based Marketing really shines – a traditional marketing process often ignores these people because they don't qualify for Sales contact under BANT criteria. Marketers then focus on this same group because they're measured on leads and contributions to the bottom line, even though they can make just as much business impact focusing on targets within an account that Sales don't want to speak to. If sales concentrate on the people holding the budget, that frees marketing to optimise their messaging towards the people responsible for shaping the business requirements, thus putting in place the foundations to shape the customer perceptions underlying the purchasing decision in your favour. ABM explicitly targets these key influencers with content describing the different aspects of your solution that is most relevant to their specific role in the business. You don't have to use different content pieces for each individual – combining multiple pain points into one asset works just as well. The goal is to spread your message as widely as possible in your target accounts so their buying team does the job of your sales rep for you. The key decision maker is far more likely to listen to your brand messaging if it's delivered by a colleague with intimate knowledge of his or her business rather than a salesperson paid to pitch your products. ### End to End That doesn't mean you can afford to ignore the decision makers. They're still the most important people in the decision-making process, and your marketing messages will always have a critical influence over their decision-making process. It is just that spreading your word as widely as possible makes it far more likely that any buying decisions get decided in your favour. This relies on the messaging being joined up. It also relies on you knowing who the key decision makers in each buying team actually are, so that Sales can work that angle of the relationship whilst marketing does their job. That's because there is one other factor that is even more essential to successful ABM than personas: strong Sales and Marketing alignment. Taking a holistic approach to major accounts only works if Sales are on-board with the message being used for that account. A sharp divide between sales and marketing messaging leads to the all too common age-old problems and the familiar blame game when deals inevitably break down. ABM works best when Sales and Marketing can sit down together to agree a shared set of target accounts, as well as a strategy to penetrate those accounts as deeply as possible with as personalised a message as is practical. Personas are still a critical ingredient in achieving that. ### PDF: The Responsive Content Problem URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pdf-the-responsive-content-problem/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:26:58.000Z Mobile devices are important. Anywhere between a third and two-thirds of your audience will be consuming your content on the go, either through a mobile phone or less commonly a tablet. Designers and marketers have adopted responsive design techniques to meet this trend, adapting websites and marketing emails, so they look good at any screen size. Yet, all too often these emails and websites push audiences to consume PDF content that is not mobile responsive and is not optimised for viewing on any screen size other than a desktop screen. Worse, many Android devices require you to download the PDF file before opening it in an external app. This means that the user needs to swipe away from your site, find the PDF in their downloads folder and open it in Adobe Acrobat Reader before they can even consume your content. It's probably fair to assume they won't bother. As you'd expect, the PDF user experience in Safari on iOS is a lot better. Apple devices generally do open PDF files in browser, but it can struggle with large files or complex documents. This also applies to the PDF viewers used by some desktop browsers, which don't support the full PDF feature set. Firefox is a particular culprit in this regard. ### Legacy Technology Fundamentally, PDF is a 25 year old file format designed for a different era. It was developed in the mid 90s to share desktop publishing documents in a format that could be opened by anybody, regardless of the software they used. It achieved widespread adoption because Adobe made it easy to view PDFs using their free reader apps but difficult to edit unless you had their expensive proprietary editor. This made it perfect for marketers looking to distribute high quality reports and white papers that mix text and graphics. Unlike Flash - Adobe's other famous media format - evolving Web technologies have not been able to come up with a suitable alternative that maintains the advantages of the PDF format whilst minimising the disadvantages. Flash was killed off because new HTML 5 web standards made the technology necessary, whilst also eliminating the many security risks that Flash introduced. Browser makers have taken a different approach to replacing Adobe Acrobat. Most Windows and Android users still continue to use the Adobe Acrobat desktop app through force of habit, but they don't need to. There are plenty of alternative ways to view a PDF on both platforms. For a start, every major desktop browser now opens PDF files natively, in part because Adobe open-sourced the PDF standard for free in 2008\. This allows any developer to create or read PDFs without paying Adobe. Microsoft Word has been able to edit PDFs since the 2013 version, although PowerPoint still can't for reasons known only to Microsoft and Adobe. If you need to edit PDFs these days, there is little reason to fork out for an Adobe Acrobat license, unless you're working with PDF forms. ### Trade-offs Their still plenty of use cases for PDFs in marketing. There is a lot of high value collateral where pixel perfect layout is of vital importance, and where sacrificing responsiveness is a perfectly viable trade-off to achieve it. If you're sharing a document that mixes images and text, then PDF is still the best file format for it. In part, this is because many of the applications used to create these documents such as InDesign, Illustrator and Microsoft PowerPoint are not responsive either. In fact, PDFs can be partially responsive if you enable the format's text reflow features, but this requires giving up a large degree of control over the layout and design of the document eliminating one of the primary benefits of using PDF files in this first place. It is notable that not even Adobe attempt to make their PDF content in any way responsive. If responsiveness and mobile device support are important to you, your only real alternative is to build a web page or a mobile app. The mobile app route for distributing content has prohibitively high barriers to adoption, particularly among less technically sophisticated users or among business users viewing your content on heavily locked-down company devices. ### The Value Question Designing content as a web page results in a perceived lack of value, particularly if the content is sufficiently high value to be gated. There is a general perception that anything offered as a download has a much higher value than something provided as a web page. Marketers have conditioned prospects to think this way, and then there is the lingering perception that web pages should be freely accessible. For many people, filling in web forms is actually a significant investment in time and energy, so redirecting post-registration to just another web page with the standard site header and navigation does lead to disappointment. The fact a PDF can be downloaded and referred back to later when offline or on a different device is a significant benefit to using them. It automatically gives them a much higher value than the same content in a video format or designed as a typical web page. Yet, this is also a double-edged sword. It takes the visitor outside of your site into a different tab with no clear signpost to the next piece of content. Sure, you can force the document to open in a new tab, leaving the original download page open in the previous tab ready for the visitor to return to. That doesn't mean that they will though. The majority of PDF downloads result in the original page being closed once the document has been read. Unless they're particularly engaged, visitors rarely bother to look for new content on asset download pages because far too often there isn't any. In an era where attention spans are short this can be a real issue. ### Extending the Experience The answer to this problem comes from content marketing tools such as Uberflip and PathFactory, which embed the PDF within a content hub. Acquia, the digital experience services firm owned by the developers of Drupal, recently relaunched their website with the same functionality included in their resource pages. There is also a secondary benefit to this approach - it allows the PDFs to be displayed in the browser across every device, including Android. Embedding the PDF within a web site page also reduces the drop-off caused by PDF documents opening in a new tab. The website navigation is still at the top of the same page, right where it should be. Additionally, it allows you to promote related assets alongside the content - either underneath or in a fixed sidebar, using the UI mechanisms made famous by the previously mentioned PathFactory and Uberflip. This does have a positive impact on the number of content pieces the typical visitor consumes, extending dwell time and visitor engagement. These binge content consumers are your hot leads – converting far more often than a typical MQL, yet many brands make life too difficult for them by putting dead-ends in front of their visitor journeys. Ensuring that every page visited and every asset consumed has a clear next step is essential in retaining engagement – a precious commodity for busy decision makers in a time-poor economy. Even a few simple design changes can have a big difference to their web experience, and your bottom line. ### The Return of Data-Driven Marketing URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-return-of-data-driven-marketing/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:27:53.000Z It's event season in the MarTech world. Over the past month we have had presentations from the leading analysts and technology vendors about the state of the market and the direction in which the industry is heading. I've written about both Oracle Modern CX and Adobe Summit over the past few weeks. There was a fair degree of commonality between the announcements by both firms at their annual summits even though they are pursuing different strategies. Data-driven marketing is back in the conversation, due to a renewed emphasis on single customer view and AI enablement. If this sounds familiar, that's because we're retreading old ground. B2B marketers have been here before. In the early days of marketing automation, deployments were often justified by the lack of any central marketing database. Many businesses had tried to use CRM systems for that purpose, but quickly discovered that the conflicting needs of Sales and Marketing departments meant that a new solution was required. ### Early Promises Enter marketing automation with its native lead scoring and web tracking capabilities, as well as a direct line into the all important CRM system for Sales follow-up. The revolutionary capacity offered by this brand new technology was the possibility of mixing engagement history data and contact profile data when building audience segments or making decisions in workflows. Combined with the native reporting tools, it became possible to execute outbound email campaigns using data from previous campaigns to choose the right message, select the right audience and deliver at the right time. In practice, things haven't worked out quite as expected. Reporting has always been a major pain point for marketing automation users, and the web tracking capabilities of Eloqua and Marketo are extremely basic. This makes it challenging to integrate web activity into campaign segmentation within those platforms because the only activity options are a list of page views and form submissions. None of this data has context and ignores the wide range of web interactions that aren’t page views such as interactive content clicks and video plays. On top of this, there is an extensive portfolio of digital activity run offsite to be considered. There are workarounds for all these things, but they require either manual effort or custom development. Even more criminally, the reporting and tracking limitations also apply to the core email capability of marketing automation. In some systems, it can be difficult to report on which links have been clicked if a particular URL appears twice in an email. ### The Data Gap Every marketer talks about data-driven marketing, but the gaps in tracking digital activity have made it difficult to implement in practice. There's still a lot of data available for Marketers to interpret despite these gaps, but it is siloed across multiple tools and is highly fragmented. The most forward-thinking teams have implemented deep integrations between their MarTech stack and BI tools in order to get as much data as possible for analysts to delve into and interpret. Reporting systems such as Domo and Tableau have seen broad adoption within marketing departments to visualise the stream of analytics and activity data flowing from websites, marketing automation and other systems. Even with these integrations in place, it is still necessary for marketers to join all the various data sources together to build a complete picture and then spot the trends amidst the noise. The sheer volume of data required for this means that marketers need to ask the right questions ahead of time, as there is a long lead time if a different analysis is needed. Vendors are touting AI as the solution to this problem. AI and its precursors have been around for as long as data-driven marketing has been discussed. Its primary use case so far has been in lead scoring, which is the most widely understood manifestation of the need for data-driven decision making within the marketing organisation. Inaccurate lead scoring results in the wrong leads going to Sales, and the unwelcome high-level executive attention that this often generates. It has long been seen as self-evident that a lead scoring model which uses a hundred data points crunched by data scientists is better than one which uses half a dozen data points crunched by marketing operations. This doesn't necessarily work on practice, but multiple vendors have built very successful businesses on top of this fact, and have developed AI algorithms to aid them. ### The Latest Must-Have Now these same AIs are being retrained for the latest must-have marketing technology – customer data platforms (CDPs). CDPs solve a clear need – the data models of marketing automation platforms are too simple for modern marketing departments, and the data structures of CRM platforms are too focused on Sales needs. Marketing deals with anonymous engagements tracked through a DMP, digital engagements tracked through a MAP and face to face engagements tracked through a CRM, yet lacks a mechanism to tie all these things together into a single database that can then be sliced and diced for decision making, be they funnel related decisions or campaign related decisions. CDPs are designed to do precisely that. They ingest the engagement and profile data from all your other platforms, and then send back lists of contacts or accounts to be targeted for campaigns. Oracle and Adobe are re-architecting their marketing clouds around their recently launched CDP products, and Salesforce are promising to do the same. They will become the underlying data layer upon which all the other tools in the stack are built. In future, Eloqua and Marketo will pull lists from these new data platforms when selecting audiences or triggering campaigns. The end result is that marketers will finally be able to use prospect activities that occur on one channel such as a content marketing platform or mobile app to trigger on different channels, such as outbound campaigns through marketing automation or digital advertising through a DMP. The CDP will act as the central database of the marketing department bringing together all the data and platforms needed to achieve this into one place. CDPs are more than just databases or dashboards. A standard database optimised for working with the largest of datasets can't help with organising and interpreting all the information received from the rest of the stack. This limitation starts with the basics such as merging duplicates and allocating contacts to accounts, and extends all the way to making decisions about campaign audiences or email send times. This is where CDPs and the AI buzz attached to them come into play. Your job is to collect all your data in the CDP and tell the platform how the various elements fit together, it then builds a unified account and contact view that can be analysed using reporting tools or pushed into a cross-channel campaign stream. If this sounds like the original vision of lead nurturing and marketing automation, that's because it is. ### A Lost Vision Data-driven marketing was revolutionary not just because it opened up new channels of communication, but also because it made it easier to measure the outcomes of those communications. Marketers could then optimise their audience, timing and messaging based on actual results of previous campaigns. This has happened to a degree, but the avalanche of inaccurate or irrelevant data has made it more difficult than it should be. Marketers have then fallen back on gut instinct to bridge the data gap with predictable results. New technology is being deployed to bring order to that chaos, so that the initial promise of digital marketing can finally be fulfilled. The pay-off will be in the results you deliver to the business; the trade-off is the additional technology complexity this brings. CDPs have been around in B2C for a while. Adapting them to B2B is a new idea with the potential to bridge the performance gap between the weakest and strongest marketing teams. The road to better campaign results is in the data. You just need to look for it. ### Marketo talk Account Based Experiences at Summit URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/adobe-engages-marketo-for-account-based-experiences/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:39:40.000Z It's been six months since Adobe's acquisition of Marketo, and the first steps towards integrating the Marketo Engagement Platform with the Adobe Experience Cloud were taken this week. The most obvious sign is the rebranding of the core Marketo platform as Marketo Engage, surely the first step in dropping the Marketo name entirely. The new AccountAI feature also got a rebrand as Account Profiling. A wave of Marketo product integration announcements were made with Adobe and third party vendors, but no timeline was given for the release of the new functionality. For marketers, the big theme from the summit was the blurring of B2B and B2C customer journeys, and the importance of what Adobe called Account Based Experiences (ABX). This ties in with the two big product announcements from the event - the Adobe Experience Platform CDP and an extended partnership with Microsoft and their LinkedIn subsidiary as part of their Open Data Initiative to combine customer data into a single data lake. ### Account Based Everywhere Perhaps the most interesting thing from a Marketo perspective was the enablement of chatbots in ABM programs through an integration with Drift. This builds on an existing partnership to integrate Drift with Marketo's ABM module for customised chatbots experiences for named accounts. This can include dedicated conversation options for prospects at target accounts or even the option to route chat requests to the sales rep who owns the account internally. This is something that I've talked about with clients, but have never been able to implement because the most relevant customers already have LivePerson on their website linked through to their in-house telemarketing or LDR team. Even if you do have existing live chat functionality make sure your scripts and chat routing for campaigns cover ABM scenarios. Also announced at Adobe Summit were enhanced integrations with Demandbase and LiveRamp. LiveRamp is a DMP that already integrates with a wide range of data sources for use with targeted advertising. Now Marketo is supported too, using Marketo's existing AdBridge digital advertising integration module. This allows Marketo lead and account data to be used to run paid media campaigns through LiveRamp and their DSP partners. The Demandbase integration works along similar lines, but for account data and at a much deeper level. Demandbase is widely known as one of the leading ABM platforms. It can be used to run ABM digital advertising campaigns to target accounts through an integrated DMP. It already integrates with both Salesforce and Marketo for known account data, updating Marketo leads and accounts with firmographic information from their database. More recently, Demandbase have also launched an intent data offering. This works along the same lines as Bombora, tracking web searches and content consumption on publisher sites to determine what accounts are currently researching. This information now syncs to Marketo alongside the rest of the data that Demandbase has on accounts. This allows marketers to bridge the gap between known accounts in Marketo and unknown accounts targeted through Demandbase's digital advertising and web personalisation tools. ### Best Friends As important as these announcements are, the real ABM talking point from Adobe Summit was the latest extension to an Adobe – Microsoft partnership that is already among the deepest in the entire technology sector. Adobe and Microsoft are closely aligned across their product, sales and leadership teams. This alignment is being extended to LinkedIn, which was purchased by Microsoft three years ago and is now finally being integrated into the rest of their product portfolio. The ability to create matched audiences based upon Marketo Named Account lists is minor but makes automation of ABM programs much easier. This will work both ways, giving visibility of Marketo contacts in LinkedIn audiences. Support for Account Profiling lists identified using lookalike matching adds an additional layer of automation. Much more significant is an integration between LinkedIn and Adobe Audience Manager (AAM), which allows LinkedIn campaigns to be run directly from Adobe's DMP, with the results reported back to AAM for further follow up. It will now be possible to build campaign lists for known and anonymous audiences using more granular targeting than is possible through the platform directly. LinkedIn's audience tools are very good but aren't always granular enough, particularly for specialist roles and verticals. Using Marketo to build social audiences is possible, but limits you to your existing marketing database and carries GDPR concerns. Using a DMP avoids these issues and allows for much better alignment with other publishers and media sources when running campaigns. The other big Microsoft related announcement concerned the Open Data Initiative launched by Microsoft, Adobe and SAP back in September. The three companies intend to pool their customers' data together into a single customer view, with a common structure and framework shared by all their products. Customers decide which CDP or Data Lake service they want their data stored in, and then their Microsoft or SAP CRM systems and Adobe or SAP marketing platforms use that database to store all the data they need. This massively simplifies data governance in the enterprise, so has attracted a lot of interest. We're still a long way off an actual implementation of the concept, but the three companies have created an advisory council containing a wide variety of stakeholders to aid progress. Keep on eye on this one, as it has real potential. ### The Platform Game Adobe used the Open Data Initiative to tout the benefits of their new CDP which was launched at the summit. The Adobe Experience Platform is now generally available, joining Oracle and others in what is becoming a crowded market. This is a trend which clearly worries Salesforce, who revealed tentative plans to develop their own CDP away from the show. The reasons behind the trend are well understood and comprised the core message of the show. CDPs first emerged in B2C marketing a few years ago to bridge the gap between known and anonymous experiences. DMPs work well for personalised advertising, and Marketing Automation works well for personalising outbound user journeys to known visitors. But coordatining consistent cross-channel campaigns across email, social and Web requires a new technology to combine the customer profiles from the various marketing tools into a single view that can then be used to trigger personalised messages in those same execution platforms. CDPs fulfil that role. However, they have seen much less adoption in B2B because the majority of the customer journey is based on known interactions over outbound channels or with Sales. Instead, the focus for B2B organisations has been on Master Data Management to ensure that contact profiles are consistent across the entire platform. Marketo CEO, Steve Lucas, spoke heavily about the convergence of B2B and B2C marketing in his keynote. The increased focus on data protection and the one to one personalisation requirements needed for ABM have increased the complexity of campaigns to new levels, particularly now that cross-channel activity is considered to be normal. Many agencies are running ABM campaigns through contact databases or spreadsheets. This is the opening into which Oracle, Adobe and others are trying to push their CDPs in a B2B context. Marketo will integrate with Adobe Experience Platform, as well as the Adobe Sensei AI that powers the data discovery and decision-making capabilities of the tool. The combination of the two tools is being pushed heavily as the foundation upon which B2B marketers can build cross-channel content experiences equal to anything found in B2C. Integration between Marketo and the rest of the Adobe stack is sorely needed. It is increasingly common for customers to have both products but integrating them is a challenge that typically requires bespoke development. Marketo integrates better with Adobe's competitors in the CMS or DMP space than it does with Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager or Adobe Experience Manager. The same applies to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which has a much more limited integration than Salesforce. This will change with a wave of integrations between Marketo and these products due over time. In upcoming updates, Marketo will integrate with Creative Cloud for content editing and asset management, the Dynamics Integration will gain Task creation and Owner change capabilities and Marketo Sky will gain predictive smart lists and recommended actions powered by Adobe Sensei. These will take time to come to market as they're still in the planning stages, so in the meantime the key product focus for Marketo users are ABM and the new Sky user interface - which is where all these new features will be found The MarTech landscape is evolving quickly, with a particular emphasis on ABM as well as data management. Oracle and Adobe have made significant announcements to address gaps in these areas over the past few weeks with more to come. ### Eloqua gets an AI makeover at Modern CX URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/eloqua-gets-an-ai-makeover-at-modern-cx/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:39:32.000Z It's customer conference season in the MarTech world. Last week Oracle held their annual Modern CX event in Las Vegas. This week Adobe are in town for their Adobe Summit, which ended yesterday with a dedicated Marketo Day. I'll post a write up about Adobe and Marketo next week. On the Oracle side, it is clear from the post-event buzz that Eloqua's role in the MarTech stack is changing. ‌‌These days Eloqua is part of the broader Oracle Customer Experience division which spans the entire customer lifecycle from marketing and sales through to commerce and service. Underlying all this is their data management platform (DMP), which started off as BlueKai but has expanded over time to include additional technologies. It is the job of the DMP to stitch all the activity and data in these different CX tools together into a single customer profile. ‌‌This is an architecture that many B2B sales and marketing teams have deployed over the last few years, with a master data management (MDM) platform slotting in to replace the DMP. Historically, DMPs have been more of a B2C tool than a B2B tool. This is because DMPs are built around demographic data and anonymous engagement activity. This doesn’t work so well in B2B where Sales cycles are longer, and the middle and late stages of the sales cycle are done with named individuals over the phone or face to face through marketing events and sales pitches. Oracle have seen this same struggle with their DMP. The personalisation challenge facing marketers is the same across both B2B and B2C, but the solutions needed are different.‌‌ At its core, effective personalisation is all about data. Even the most highly targeted content is wasted if the need or pain point it addresses isn't relevant to the audience that is consuming it. The only way to discover the right message for a prospect, is to collect everything you have about them and their interactions with your business and then analyse that data to spot a trend. A DMP can do this for B2C audiences, where the entire customer journey is experienced digitally and can be recorded using digital tracking mechanisms. In B2B, the 50% to 70% of the buying cycle that takes place offline has to be considered. At OpenWorld last year, Oracle announced CX Unity, a new CDP designed to pull in all the data you have about an individual across your entire Oracle tech stack so that it can be analysed and segmented for marketing, sales and service engagements across Eloqua, Responsys and CRM engagements.‌‌ Last week saw the announcement of further integrations between Eloqua and the Oracle Data Platform. Eloqua now integrates with the Oracle Infinity web analytics tool, another new product launched in the last 12 months. Infinity should be read as a defensive play against Adobe, who currently dominate the high-end web analytics market with Adobe Analytics – the former Omniture. As a full web analytics tool, Infinity tracks user interaction on pages at a much more detailed level than Eloqua can natively. The detail of how users interacted with pages, such as which links they did or didn't click, can now be used to feed website visitors into Eloqua campaigns, and will eventually be made available to Eloqua Segments and Lead Scoring‌‌. Also featuring prominently at Modern CX was an integration between Eloqua and Oracle's recent DataFox acquisition. DataFox is the Sales equivalent of a predictive lead scoring vendor such as LatticeEngines or Mintigo. It integrates with CRM systems to act as a predictive account scoring engine, surfacing potential new opportunities using a bespoke AI based data model as well as using the data behind its model to enrich CRM account records. This will now integrate with Eloqua data too, so it can be used for ABM programs.‌‌ AI was a big theme at Modern CX. Oracle spoke heavily about using AI to reduce the burden of information overload from Marketers. Modern marketing is very data-centric, but most marketers are creative left-brained types rather than data-orientated right-brain types. This puts a heavy burden on marketing leaders and data analysts to correctly interpret the wealth of data under the control of the modern marketing department. Now Oracle intend to integrate AI into Eloqua to help simplify decision making, by adding a recommendations engine that can make content and customer experience recommendations throughout the tool. Examples include suggesting subject line revisions based upon what worked well in previous email campaigns. One particular use case for this AI is Send Time Optimisation, which is a new closed beta feature that gives Eloqua the ability to decide which time and day recipients should receive emails based upon their previous behaviour. You specify the audience and the email. Eloqua decides the rest.‌‌ There is a definite shift in Oracle's positioning of Eloqua in the broader Marketing Cloud portfolio. The cross-channel campaign orchestration capabilities of the platform have always been emphasised, and the integration with the Data Cloud often features in customer pitches. However, few B2B marketers actually use these additional tools unless they're heavily invested in the entire Oracle ecosystem. Eloqua is still used as a traditional marketing automation tool to both manage marketing data and execute campaigns. Some thought leaders have shifted the data management piece of that jigsaw into dedicated data platforms, now Oracle will be making a renewed appeal for the rest of their customer base to do so. This isn't entirely surprising. Oracle have a set of new AI and data products to sell, led by DataFox and Infinity. As a sales-led organisation, Oracle's business has long been based around buying in new technology and then selling it to their existing customer base. This doesn't always work - much of their CX portfolio is too B2C-centric to be a good fit for the typical Eloqua customer. After years of neglecting B2B marketing teams, this is a gap that they've finally trying to address. It's about time. ### Is Web Tracking a GDPR Risk for Marketers? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/is-web-tracking-a-gdpr-risk/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:28:32.000Z During my work as a consultant, I am asked to talk about many different aspects of marketing. Technology is the lynchpin of digital marketing. It touches everything that a marketing team does from strategic planning through to campaign execution and beyond. Most of what B2B marketers do in the 21st century wouldn't be possible without the CRM systems, marketing automation tools and web platforms used to deliver campaigns through digital channels. Enterprise marketing departments have built complex technology architectures comprising dozens of separate applications linked together. This sprawling tech stack has become so complicated that many companies are now looking to simplify it. Underlying this entire technology ecosystem is data, be that known contacts in marketing automation or anonymous prospects on a website. Demand generation is ultimately about leads and accounts, and the process of building a relationship with these groups over an extended period of time. Marketing Operations spends a lot of time and energy making sure that every action taken by a lead is tracked and logged in a central marketing database, such as a marketing automation or CRM system. The most relevant activities are them collated together and used for scoring leads, triggering follow-up activity or reporting on campaign outcomes. This benefits the business through better leads and comprehensive reporting, as well as the prospect for more relevant content and personalised campaigns. There are plenty of technical problems with this strategy, but the legal risks are just as important and are often overlooked. GDPR was explicitly drafted to change the way businesses thought about data collection. Whilst website tracking and digital body language were not primary considerations of the law, it definitely limited the way they could be used. According to most interpretations, GDPR imposes no new restrictions on the anonymous use of page view trackers or conversion pixels on websites – the existing EU cookie directive deals with that. The moment these things are linked back to an individual with an email or IP Address, then your lawyers might have an interest in this tracking data and its purpose. Media publishers have been the most affected by this, because they use visitor website tracking to personalise advertising, and in many cases, the same data is aggregated and then sold to a wide variety of adtech firms so that they can derive intent data. These practices require separate and unbundled consent under GDPR, hence the giant cookie pop-ups whenever you click through to the website of a magazine or news publication. They need you to consent to each advertising use case so that they can make money from your visit. In a related sphere, Google were fined by European Data Protection authorities earlier this year because their privacy notices and opt-out mechanisms for targeted advertising fell short of the requirements imposed by the new data protection law. Other tech firms will likely fall foul of the same problem in due course as the initial wave of GDPR complaints are finally ruled upon. Enterprise marketers have an easier time of things then adtech platforms or the big tech firms – and Google falls into both categories. Your website is probably not running targeted advertising. However, the same data collection requirements still apply. If you're running retargeting campaigns, then your cookie consent mechanisms might need to make this clear, particularly if you're creating lists based off named individuals. The social networks and DSPs all suggest that consent is required for retargeting but put the consent burden for getting that consent onto the advertiser, so it is important to clarify precisely what website tracking data is collected by the different tracking scripts on your website and what each one is actually used for. Also, find out whether your lawyers believe that personalisation requires separate consent. You may also need permission to share tracking data with the advertising technology you're using to run campaigns. The major marketing automation platforms provide opt-out mechanisms for website tracking that may need to be implemented if they weren't before now. Marketers need to start thinking about activity data in the same way they think about demographic and contact data. They're not quite the same thing, but sharing it with third parties carries risks because data sharing requires consent under GDPR and businesses have to make sure that activity data is collected on a legal basis and is totally anonymised when shared. Data has to be obtained for a specific purpose specified before collection, and can only be used for that purpose once stored. Tracking website engagement for reporting or campaign response tracking is a very different use case from tracking page views for personalisation and campaign segmentation. They might require separate consent and different consent mechanisms. The former may be fine with just a cookie pop-up, but that later use case involves tracking that data back to a named individual in a marketing automation platform. As marketers, we know this happens and what this data is used for. However, you need to be clear whether your customers do and how they are informed about this practice, because some data protection authorities are being strict in their interpretation of the law. There is still a fair amount of uncertainty about how GDPR has actually impacted advertising. The upcoming ePrivacy legislation will clarify some of this uncertainty by making the rules around tracking cookies much stricter – but this law is months or years away from being ratified after repeated delays. In the interim, existing privacy legislation may still apply. **Disclaimer:** This article reflects my understanding of the issues raised, but does not constitute legal advice. I am a digital marketing consultant rather than a lawyer. In practice, different lawyers will provide sharply different legal guidance about how to handle these issues, so please do consult with the relevant team if you have any concerns. ### Marketo Spring 19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-spring-19-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-03-15T08:30:00.000Z It's Spring next week and to mark the new season Marketo are rolling out their Spring '19 release, just in time for Adobe Summit at the end of the month. Marketo's quarterly releases are not as important as they used to be because the platform's major focus areas such as Sky and Bizible follow a monthly or bi-monthly schedule. There are still some useful enhancements to the core platform this week, although the top priority is definitely the new Marketo Sky user experience. Expect a lot of discussion about Sky during the Marketo Day at Adobe's annual customer conference, because the effort to get customers to adopt the new UI has now started. ### Marketo Sky Sky was granted general availability status at the end of last year, after the ability to create all program types was made available in it. This ignored the fact that many other features, particularly on the design studio side, were still missing. A standard marketing user can build a basic campaign in Sky, but the majority of admin and power user features have yet to be migrated over from the classic UI. The functionality available in Sky does work without show-stopping bugs, although some advanced options such as Script Tokens are broken and require dropping back to Marketo Classic. Adobe are making rapid progress in closing the gap between the old UX and the new UX after a slow start. Sky is light years ahead of where it was six months ago. Every monthly release brings a long list of new and enhanced features. Already this quarter Marketo Sky has received two major updates, gaining the ability to create landing page templates and integrate webinar programs with additional platforms. Now the full suite of email program functionality such as A/B testing will be added to Sky. The real focus though has been on bug fixes and improving Smart Campaign usability within the new UI. Sky is a substantial improvement when navigating the tree and creating programs, but there are still occasional options missing elsewhere. This particularly affects Smart Campaigns, where some scenarios workflow creation can take longer than under the Classic experience. The shortcuts that power users use to create or edit campaigns quickly have no alternative in Sky. Some of these usability gaps were closed last month, with an update to picklist handling and flow choices. More enhancements in this area are being made, as well as additional reporting on recipient time zone sends which doesn't exist in the old UI. ### Core Platform For users of the old UI, the headline feature for this release is custom communication limits. Marketo has long had the ability to limit the number of emails sent to individual recipients on a daily or weekly basis, so long as that limit is up to 5 per day and 15 per week. The problem is that this is a global setting – it is set at the system level and applies to all emails sent to the entire lead database. It even applies to seed lists. Customers have frequently chosen not to use the feature because of this lack of granularity. The only way to work-around it was to ignore the limit on a per campaign basis, which defeats the point of having it in the first place. More flexibility in setting the limit is definitely welcome. Also welcome is a minor update to the Secure Tracking Links add-on. For security-conscious customers, Marketo offers the ability to enable HTTPS on your email tracking domain. This goes alongside the Secure Landing Pages add-on to enable HTTPS landing pages, which guarantee that the connection between visitors' web browsers and your Marketo instance is encrypted, protecting any data entered on Marketo forms from hackers or eavesdroppers. In the era of GDPR and data protection, purchasing and configuring both capabilities should be a basic requirement for all Marketo customers. However, the secure email tracking link capability has always suffered from one crippling limitation. Whilst you could purchase the add-on and enable email links to work over HTTPS, Marketo never actually updated the emails it sent to put HTTPS in the links themselves, effectively making the Secure Tracking Links add-on entirely pointless for most customers. This has now been fixed. If you have the Secure Tracking Links add-on enabled, then Marketo will now rewrite the links in your emails so that they are HTTPS. Better late than never, but the system should have worked like this from day one. ### AccountAI Another of Marketo's new products goes GA in this release. The AccountAI add-on is now available for all customers to purchase. It adds predictive capabilities to the ABM module, identifying accounts in your Marketo database that should be added to your Named Account List because they fit your Ideal Customer Profile. The underlying technology that makes this possible is powered by Mintigo and their new 'AI' branded predictive lead scoring engine. To configure the model, all you need to do is give it a Smart List containing contacts that fit your ideal customer profile. The list of matching accounts can then be reviewed and tuned by adjusting the weightings used by the model and promoting accounts into your named account list. This is definitely an interesting capability, but it faces plenty of competition among ABM vendors, many of which have more sophisticated feature sets. In practice though, Account AI is a repackaging of Mintigo's existing predictive account scoring features for Marketo customers. Ultimately, the success or failure of the product rests upon the accuracy of the data model that powers it, and the quality of the data that is used by customers to configure it. If you intend to adopt the feature, using good data and an accurate representation of your ideal customer profile to train the model is critical. ### Bizible & Sales Engage Marketo have been putting a lot of effort into selling Bizible's ROI reporting tools to their customer base, so it is good to see some useful additions to the product in this release. The CRM connector is now API based rather than package based, which reduces the complexity of the integration and eliminates barriers to implementation in locked down environments. It also introduces two new features, the most important of which is the ability to pull in campaign costs from CRM campaigns for offline activities. The platform currently pulls costs for digital activities from Marketo or from the advertising platforms that it integrates with, but this previously left a reporting gap for offline activities that only have their costs logged in Salesforce or Dynamics. Multi-currency support is also now available in Bizible, pulling in the currency conversions from your CRM so that reports are automatically displayed in the correct currency for your local teams. This will allow for much wider adoption of Bizible among decentralised organisations. There are also additional segmentation capabilities in Discover, allowing for more granular drill-downs when reviewing dashboards. Sales Engage gets a pair of compliance enhancements. There is much better unsubscribe management, with the ability to block specific email domains from being contacted using the product. Also, Sales Engage will now verify if recipients are unsubscribed in the Marketo Lead Database before sending an email. Sales Engage emails will not be sent if they are, regardless of where they are sent from. With the advent of GDPR, there has been an increase in companies using Sales automation tools such as Sales Engage to bypass privacy and compliance requirements. Ensuring that Sales Engage respects marketing unsubscribes goes a long way to preventing this. Additional auditing has been added too, with better visibility of all the contacts and campaigns in an instance as well as the changes made to them. Admins will also be able to end campaigns that were activated by other users. These are not the only updates coming this month. There are numerous enhancements to Sky and a new Get Smart Campaigns API. For full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Spring+%2719) that can be found on Marketo Docs. ### The Power of Marketing Automation Templates URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-power-of-marketing-automation-templates/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:28:51.000Z It's not a new problem. Marketers buy a fancy new marketing automation system and then proceed to use it to send a lot of emails. The marketing automation vendor is happy; they have another customer. The marketer is happy; they have a powerful and flexible tool to send their email campaigns. They know it can do a lot more than just email, but that other stuff looks complicated so they leave it to a later date that never comes. This leaves one of the marketing department's most expensive assets sitting there being wasted, and everyone knows it. The CMO will be screaming to justify their technology investment through lead scoring and nurture campaigns, without realising that actually developing and building these things is beyond the skill of the typical marketer. A data analyst or an IT administrator might have the relevant skills, but they typically lack the necessary marketing knowledge or even the aptitude for acquiring it. This is where a good marketing ops team or agencies such as CRMT come in, bridging the gap between marketing knowledge and technical savvy. Marketing Automation has been around a long time, but there is still a shortage of people capable of using the leading platforms to their full potential. ### The Skills Gap The underlying reasons are hardly rocket science. Sending an email is easy, building a workflow to automate that email is hard. Any trained developer can code a marketing email, but building a template that can be adapted by a marketing user without breaking is exceptionally difficult and requires a lot of design compromises. It took Oracle nearly a decade to deliver usable templating capabilities for Eloqua, and there are plenty of limitations in what the platform can be used for without calling upon a developer. Templates are an essential part of any marketing automation platform, yet they are vastly underutilised. Most organisations have some form of email template, if only to ensure that branding and legal information matches corporate guidelines. The current trend is for these templates to be modular, with designers specifying a wide range of potential layout variations that can be mixed and matched to ensure flexibility, whilst guaranteeing that the end result stays on brand. A lot of energy has been invested over the years in trying to make template builders both simple and bulletproof regardless of what the user does, but no one has quite managed it, although some tools have come close by enforcing strict limits on what elements of the template can be edited and what can be entered into editable sections. As a result, many marketing departments still outsource all email creation to external agencies or internal teams containing specialist developers. These specialists often have some marketing automation skills, but are typically developers rather than marketing automation specialists. The resulting team have enough knowledge to build a basic workflow, but lack the data skills or the technology expertise of a marketing ops team. Anything more complicated than a standard email campaign requires calling in a marketing automation specialist from marketing operations or an outside agency. ### Avoiding Mistakes Yet, it doesn't have to be this way. Most marketers understand the need for email and web templates, often because they're forced on them by brand. However, it is surprising how many marketing automation users neglect to maintain campaign workflow templates. This is the fault of Marketing Operations teams who fail to realise how difficult a marketer or developer finds building a multi-touch email campaign with the right audience selections and reporting configuration. There is just too much to consider unless you have a good understanding of data and are doing it every day for an extended period of time. It is only when confused marketing automation users start sending emails to the wrong people that action is taken to solve the problem, by simplifying contact database structures and templating lists or campaign workflows. Even then, the remedial action is merely blocking individual users from emailing specific contacts they shouldn’t be touching, which is fine for excluding opted-out or out of region lists but not for ensuring the right emailable group is selected for the right campaign. Instead, providing documentation on the correct audience selections should be sufficient to avoid mistakes in many cases. On top of that, publishing list or segment templates with the required contact exclusions built-in is essential. All this requires close monitoring, particularly for new users or external agencies who might not be familiar with your organisation's database setup. Even experienced Marketing Automation Consultants struggle with building lists, because every database is different and the options and exclusions used by one company will be very different from those used by another company – even if they're direct competitors using the same tools. The only way to overcome this is through actually using or analysing a database in detail until you've got a clear idea of the available fields and the number of contacts available for use. Distributing database counts for typical campaign selections goes a long way to avoiding errors in audience selection. ### Reporting Efficiencies Even more essential are campaign or program templates, particularly in Marketo and Eloqua where all but the most basic of email blasts necessitate using their workflow tools. It's not just email campaigns. Form submissions and event list uploads generally require running the affected contacts through a workflow to ensure the correct data flagging and campaign associations are made for reporting purposes, and to ensure that leads are followed-up correctly. Marketing Ops will have set guidelines about what needs to happen, and will generally try to automate as much as possible. However, there are limits to what can be derived from the typical form submission or import file without further configuration. Analytics and proving ROI is a top priority for CMOs, and this starts with ensuring that the Marketing Automation or CRM configuration required to track campaign responses is actually in place for all activity. This can be automated to a degree, but ultimately specifying the correct campaign and sources for leads to be recorded against requires manual entry somewhere along the line, be that in the links pushed to your prospects or in the lead capture process after they clicked that link. Templates are a crucial mechanism for ensuring that tracking for all key campaign conversion points has been considered and that all the right information will be set. If it's in the workflow template, then users will configure it if relevant. If it's not relevant, it can be ignored or removed when the template is used to build a campaign. ### Knowledge Transfer In the end, though, even the best templates in the world are only useful, if the people working with them know how to configure them. No one likes having to wade through documentation or endless training sessions about seemingly trivial things, but this is the only way to ensure that marketing automation users know what templates they should be using to build campaigns and how they should be used. When introducing users to your tech stack, it is important to walk-through how you use each tool and provide guidelines rather than relying purely on the vendor's materials. Not only does this make the training and the processes you're instructing much more relevant, but it also provides context around what the options they need to configure actually mean in your business. That, ultimately, is the most important thing. Nobody knows everything, so by pre-configuring as much as possible, templates allow users to focus on the elements that actually need to change for each campaign. With sufficient experience, this allows your templates to become a strategic benefit, granting a greater understanding of what each configurable option does and how it can be adjusted to maximise campaign results. ### The Opportunity Cost of Internet Explorer URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/opportunity-cost-of-ie/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:52:26.000Z Microsoft made headlines a few weeks ago when they asked customers not to use two of their products. One of the products in question is Internet Explorer, which was only included in Windows 10 for backwards compatibility reasons. The other is Office 2019, which is merely a cut-down version of Office 365 rather than a standalone offering. Their new 'twins' marketing campaign for Office 365 got media attention for the way it denigrated the recently released Office 2019\. The campaign features a series of video showing twins doing tasks in Microsoft Office. One twin uses Office 365 and the other uses Office 2019, with the former completing the task first. The aim is to highlight the feature differences between the two versions and drive customers towards taking out an Office 365 subscription instead of buying the traditional Office 2019 boxed product. ### Subscription Models The move towards subscription pricing for Office is still controversial in SMB circles but doesn't change very much for larger businesses who have preferred to pay for Microsoft products using subscription-based enterprise agreements anyway. Finance departments traditionally prefer subscription pricing because it appears as an Operating Expense rather than a Capital Expense on the balance sheet and allows greater flexibility in scaling license quantities up and down as business needs change. There will always be a contingent of software buyers opposed to subscription pricing either due to corporate culture or financial realities, but these are a minority. Changes in how recent versions of Office are licensed and installed have made life deliberately difficult for those businesses, leading to increased dissatisfaction amongst firms looking to purchase and manage software in the traditional manner. Not all companies can move to the new modern management and cloud infrastructure paradigms favoured by the big enterprise technology vendors, either due to compliance concerns or the limitations imposed by the existing IT environment. There are tradeoffs in this new way of doing things that not all IT departments can cope with even if they wanted to. For many, the old ways still work fine and the evolving digital workplace hasn't impacted them enough to become disruptive. Stick in the mud IT managers definitely exist, but in many cases are concerned with trying to make things easier for change resistant users and investment shy bosses. Change is scary, and Microsoft have struggled to communicate the benefits to overworked IT staff that are too busy keeping the lights on to think about improvements to infrastructure. The success of Office 365 has been built upon the administrative benefits of having Microsoft host Exchange rather than doing it yourself. The fact you get the Office desktop apps and a bunch of other cloud services as part of the subscription is widely seen as secondary. ### Technical Debt Regardless of the human factors, the most significant barrier to IT transformation is generally existing infrastructure. This was best illustrated by the high amount of push back from IT managers to Microsoft's request not to use Internet Explorer. Very few IT managers want to use IE - they hate it as much as everybody else. Instead, its continued foothold in the enterprise is a result of compromises forced by existing devices and applications rather than a love for what Microsoft considers to be legacy technologies. The typical enterprise uses thousands of applications. Some of them will be off-the-shelf commercial software, others will be relatively modern cloud services, but in every business there is the long tail of heavily customised or internally developed intranet apps that have been around since the mid 2000s, if not earlier. Most of these are browser-based apps developed according to the web coding standards of the time, which until 2010 were mostly whatever Internet Explorer happened to support at the time the application was designed. Standards have moved on significantly since then due to the rise of the mobile web and the additional capabilities required to support the trend of desktop level applications running in the web browser. As part of this, many legacy standards and development models – such as Flash or Java - have been removed from modern browsers, leaving Internet Explorer as the only one to support sites that require these deprecated technologies. Enterprise applications dating from the mid 2000s use these legacy development models because they were cutting edge at the time of release. The cost of rewriting and replacing all of these applications can be prohibitive, and in some cases can require extremely disruptive changes to business models or internal operations. It took a long time for the process to get going, but most IT departments are now making a concentrated to replace apps that only work in IE, but this will take time to complete, often years. ### Long Term Consequences This unfortunate situation facing businesses is a holdover from the era when Internet Explorer 6 held an effective monopoly in browser usage and Microsoft dominated desktop computing. Windows and IE still get hatred from developers over their attempts to push out competitors and redefine web standards around the turn of the millennium. They succeeded in these efforts, but then sat back and rested on their laurels, effectively stopping work on Internet Explorer for several years only to be surpassed in mindshare and usage initially by Firefox and then Chrome. Business decisions made by Microsoft 20 years ago still have practical day to day consequences for developers, who have been spent the past 15 years trying to get their projects to work in Microsoft browsers that don't support the latest standards. Few developers actively test in Internet Explorer these days except for sites where enterprise support for the long tail of businesses running Windows 7 is a requirement. When support for Windows 7 ends early next year, it is likely developers will abandon any pretence of supporting IE, especially because it hasn't been updated properly for 5 years. A lot has changed in web development during that time. Entire frameworks and UI paradigms such as react and flexbox have moved from bleeding edge into the mainstream. IE11 simply doesn’t support them properly, and the workarounds required to get them to work aren't worth the effort required. Technology is constantly evolving and whilst a lot of effort is put into backwards compatibility, it is inevitable that as part of this evolution some things get left behind. Microsoft, in particular, have put a lot of effort into making Windows and IE backwards compatible with old applications, but there are limits to what can be done to enable legacy technology to work in modern environments. Technical advances are not just down to new features, they also result from new security requirements. Microsoft killed IE in the first place because the trade-offs needed to maintain backwards compatibility with 15 year intranet sites were preventing them from introducing new security models and modern web standards pioneered in other browsers and the wider community. These demands haven't gone away. If anything they've become stronger. Of course, there are downsides to this progress in technology too. Killing off an old app always results in disruption to the people who used it. The death of IE resulted in the loss of numerous features compared to its replacement and the migration of its userbase to Chrome. As such, Microsoft will be repeating the trick again later this year, replacing their Edge browser with a new version based on Google Chrome. There are trade-offs in that decision too, but if it makes Edge more useable than that's a net win for everybody. Just don't expect a mass migration from Chrome to Edge. ### More Than Just Checklists URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/more-than-just-checklists/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:29:06.000Z It's the part of the campaign execution process that always takes the longest time, yet it is also the task which is most frequently rushed or skipped. QA isn't glamorous, but it is critical to a successful launch. Surveys show that testing is the aspect of the production cycle that marketers struggle the most with. Finding the right balance is hard. Too much time testing reduces agility and increases costs, too little time testing results in errors routinely slipping into live campaigns. Your CEO is more likely to remember that one mistake than the hundreds of successful campaigns. Failure to spot a critical error can have financial consequences for a business, but the time spent trying to find those errors is a cost that no one can afford to invest in. More likely are the reputational costs of a mistake, which can range from unnoticeable to headlines news, depending on audience and severity. ### Mind the Gaps Ultimately, time and money can only do so much. Testing a website or email nurture is a complicated business, with a thousand different items to check. Having a checklist of the important things is essential, but only if it is actually used properly. No one can remember everything that needs to be reviewed, so listing them out and checking them off one by one goes a long way to making sure everything is covered. Too many testers treat checklists as a compliance exercise and then wonder why mistakes aren't caught. It is very easy to get complacent if you complete a checklist regularly, so each round of testing should be treated as if it is the first time you have conducted testing. A checklist is only useful if each item on it is tested as they are checked off. This needs to happen every time, regardless of whether it is the first time you have completed a checklist or the thousandth time. Completing a checklist from memory often results in testers skipping or forgetting specific items on it. Inevitably, these become the errors that lead to trouble with your boss further down the line. At the same time, it is important not to focus too much on QA checklists. Testing against the checklist is the other classic error that can lead to trouble in the long term. No checklist is ever complete, because testing a marketing campaign is too complicated to fit on a short document. A checklist can be used to confirm that the links work or the legally required small print is present. It can't be used to check if the copy reads correctly or if the layout leaves enough white space for the focus and content to be clear. These things are more about personal taste or corporate standards than objective truth. Checklists deal in the black and white of right or wrong, whereas design, copy-writing and positioning belong to the shades of grey. There is no hard pass or hard fail when it comes to reviewing copy or checking design because there is always scope to improve these things. ### Multi-Stage Testing Testing is a multi-stage process and generally requires a creative review to confirm that the campaign is likely to encourage responses, a content review to ensure that the right message is being used and a technical QA to confirm that the campaign has been configured correctly in the platforms that will be used to execute it. These are all separate processes which require a different type of analysis, often by different people. Checklists should only be used for the technical QA phase, because the design and content checks are too subjective to fit a standardised list. It's important to make sure these checks are done, and the checklist confirms this, but a checklist is no substitute for actually reviewing the final collateral from a design, product or user perspective to ensure it meets the requirements of the campaign. The situational nature of content checks means that adding design or copy considerations to a checklist can result in a multi-page list of items to review. Human nature dictates that if your checklist can't fit on one sheet of paper, it's probably too long. Overly long checklists are the number one reason for people not wanting to fill them in. They simply slow the QA process down too much. Checklists shouldn't be about every little detail. They are a guide listing all the components that need to be reviewed. The tester should then have sufficient knowledge of what they're testing in order to understand all the nuances of each component and sufficient knowledge of the campaign to know what the correct setup for those components should be. For an email campaign checklist, it can be tempting to list out separately the sender name and from address, or the individual items that need to go into the footer - but this just adds extra overhead when the tester will be reviewing the footer or the sender details as a whole anyway. Do make sure to add a specific checklist entry for items such as the unsubscribe link though - testers frequently skip over the unsubscribe because it appears in every email, so is assumed to be correct. Yet, I have seen plenty of emails where it has been left off by the designer or corrupted whilst coding the email. The only way to catch these occurrences is to test the unsubscribe process on every email. ### End to End This illustrates the importance of doing an end to end test of every aspect of a campaign prior to launch. If you're relying on a critical marketing automation workflow or existing web page make sure they still work before going live, and ensure the end reports are showing the data they're supposed to. There's nothing worse than running an expensive campaign, only to discover that the lead capture forms you're relying on aren't working properly or are missing a critical piece of information required to link back the generated leads to your campaign. In doing so, you will also confirm that the user experience is clear and easy to use, and that is ultimately the most critical test of all. If the expected next step in a campaign journey is ever unclear, then your audience will lose interest and move on to something else. This is perhaps the number one thing to do when testing a campaign. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience, and experience it from their perspective as if you have never seen the content before and aren't familiar with its context. Retrace all the likely user journeys, and make sure they work correctly and that the end result meets the campaign objectives you've been set. If this works, then the campaign is probably ready for launch, assuming it also passes the checklist that is. ### Oracle Eloqua 19A Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-19a-release-overview/ Last updated: 2019-02-18T21:19:10.000Z 2018 was a big year for Eloqua. The once dominant marketing automation platform has been losing customers to their competitors, whilst their status as thought leader was usurped by Marketo years ago. Instead, the product appeared to be neglected as Oracle Marketing Cloud chased high profile opportunities in the B2C space with Responsys and BlueKai. Change was clearly needed, and over the course of last year a succession of new features and major updates delivered it. As a result, many of the biggest usability issues that have dogged the platform since its inception have finally been resolved. For the first time, the platform has responsive email and landing page templates that are simple enough for a standard marketing user to manipulate. Steps are being taken to modernise admin screens and native integrations beset by a UI that hasn't been updated since the days of Eloqua 9 over a decade ago. The first release of 2019 drops this weekend with further improvements in these areas. The headline feature is the new form design editor, that follows hot on the heels of the recent landing page design editor, introducing improved validation and greater flexibility in form layouts. Oracle have spent a lot of effort on extending Eloqua's native form builder over the last few years to remove many of the annoying and often baffling limitations within it. Now the entire form builder has been redesigned so that forms built for the new landing pages can have totally responsive multi-column layouts and better styling capabilities. This also fixes the last of the legacy validation restrictions, finally allowing checkboxes and radios to be marked as required fields. The downside is that this is a totally new editor, rather than an upgrade to the existing one. There is no support for progressive profiling, but that will be introduced later this year. Much of the new functionality included was already possible if you had a good developer at hand, but eliminating the need for coding hacks and workarounds makes everyone's lives easier. If your website or landing pages were created using the old editor with custom styles, then template tweaks may be required to enable the new forms to work on your existing pages. It is likely the current form editor will be deprecated at some point once existing forms can be migrated to work with it, so start planning for the upgrade. Eloqua customers should also start planning for the new Salesforce Integration App. This is still a beta release in controlled availability, but it reaches 'major' feature parity this quarter, indicating a general release is likely to be close. Major parity means that marketing activity creation and closed loop reporting features have been added to the app's feature set, but that a number of smaller features such as certain activity types are still missing. The app is intended to be used on Program and Campaign Canvas, whereas the current native integration only works in Program Builder. Users can bi-directionally sync any Salesforce object with Eloqua at the desired schedule, as the option to adjust the frequency of import feeders has been added in this release. Contacts can be synced to Salesforce using action steps on either canvas, and imported contacts can be fed into programs or campaigns for further processing – this only applies to contacts and custom objects, account records cannot be fed into programs which is a notable limitation compared to the existing integration. Nevertheless, the flexibility and attempt to reach parity is welcome. The impending migration of the Salesforce integration from native feature to optional app is a reflection of Oracle's product strategy. The Oracle Sales Cloud integration is also an app, so this change should not be seen as a downgrade. In the modern Eloqua platform, apps are first class citizens. Eloqua administrators are expected to be aware of the App Cloud portfolio and making full use of them. Integrations are just one use case for apps. There are also a wide variety of apps dedicated to data enhancement, sales enablement and multi-channel marketing in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. As a result, Oracle's portfolio of Eloqua apps is about to get a lot more prominent, with the addition of Recommended Apps to the cloud button displayed widely across the entire Eloqua platform. Some admins will consider this to be free advertising for Oracle, but it does give much better visibility to the full scale of Eloqua's capabilities. A lot of the tool's most powerful features are locked away as free apps in the Cloud Marketplace, and Eloqua customers are encouraged to make full use of them. One area where apps and extensions have seen a big push in the past few quarters is with the Sales Tools. External apps can now be embedded into Profiler, and this is extended to include the Contact Details area in this release. There are some settings changes to Profiler in this release too, the ability to restrict visibility of a profiler extension to a limited group of users has been added, whilst the legacy profiler settings screen in the main Eloqua admin area has been removed. All relevant configuration settings are now in the App configuration area of Eloqua. Many of the best profiler apps, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, are sold on a per license basis, so the ability to restrict visibility to only sales reps with a license is welcome. Secure Microsites are also seeing an upgrade in the admin experience. Rolling out later this year is a self-service capability for the SSL Certificates required to make Secure Microsites work. Given that SSL Certificates need to be renewed every year or two, this is long overdue. If only, Secure Microsites weren't a paid add-on. In this release, the new UI is a beta in controlled availability, but if customers need this functionality they are advised to apply for it. Also, security related is the ability to prevent specified fields from being included in field merges or web data lookups. This is defined on a field by field basis and can be used to block fields from being used in data lookups or to ensure they can only be used if the visitor is known and trusted. Security conscious admins should also be aware that it is going to be much easier to export data after this release. The baffling inability to export data from Program Canvas has been fixed. Users will be able to export lists and step members from programs in exactly the same way they've been able to from Campaign Canvas since day one. Another bizarre data export ability has been removed – it is no longer possible to schedule Insight export agents to be run every minute. This is another feature that has been around since day one, but I would be surprised if anyone has ever used it deliberately. Users mourning the loss of the 'all the time' export frequency will be pleased to hear that it is now possible to export 200,000 rows in an Insight Agent export, significantly increased from the previous limit of 5,000 rows. This is a limit that has caused problems for data analysts looking into contact activity over the years, and as such the increase is welcome. Also in Insight, there are now Campaign Activity by Asset reports, as well as additional dynamic date capabilities for landing page, email and campaign reports. The Eloqua reporting dashboards get a useful UI refresh, with Insight click-through and export capabilities becoming much more prominent where available. These options have also been added to more campaign reports. The individual email dashboards are now much easier to get to, with direct links to them from the email editor. As part of this, the email click-through visualizer option in the email editor menus has been removed, because this report is also found on the aforementioned email performance dashboards. Finally, there are quite a few API changes in this release, some of which were introduced last month. The most useful is the LinkedToContactDate activity field in the Bulk API, which indicates when a visitor record was linked to a contact. This enables the export of historical activity data for contacts that have just become known, facilitating more comprehensive reporting through BI tools and data warehouses. Another change is the creation of an Audit Log API, which can interrogate the system log of user actions through the API. The actual export link is sent by email, but the change will be welcome by security and compliance teams. The Oracle Eloqua 19A Update is scheduled for February 16th, 2018\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/releases/19A/19A-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### Pardot Spring '19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/salesforce-pardot-spring-19/ Last updated: 2019-02-08T20:39:38.000Z We're only just into February, but the Salesforce Spring Release is now upon us. The first of this year's three big updates goes live this weekend. It's a big update for Pardot and introduces a critical milestone for the ongoing transition from Classic Experience to Lightning Experience that Salesforce admins need to be aware of. This is also the start of a new release schedule for Pardot, which will be getting two updates in every release window. The major releases will still happen three times a year at the same time as the rest of the platform. However, there will also be three smaller out-of-band releases the first of which was the week before Christmas to coincide with the publication of the release notes for this week's update. ### Salesforce Lightning The big news for Sales Cloud admins is the announcement that from October this year, Lightning will be automatically enabled for all users unless the organisation chooses to opt-out of the upgrade. While there has been a lot of interest in Lightning, adoption in the enterprise space has been slow due to the effort required to convert existing customisations. Given that Classic experience is no longer being developed, the desire to push users towards the new UX is understandable but is deeply unhelpful to overstretched IT and Ops teams that simply don't have the time to redesign their instance to cope with the new UI. The good news for panicking admins is that this automatic upgrade will only apply to users that use one of the standard user profiles. A new Lightning Experience User permission is being added in the current release, this is enabled by default for standard profiles, but disabled by default on custom profiles. Admins have six months to go in and alter this setting before users with the Lightning Experience User permission enabled get switched to the Lightning experience by default in next winter's release. That's assuming, this change doesn’t get delayed, which is definitely possible if pushback is strong enough. Fortunately, this move is being accompanied by a major upgrade to the Lightning upgrade tools available within Salesforce, there is a new migration area in setup to help validate and migrate customisations to the new UI. This includes enhancements to the help available to both users and admins, as well as upgrades to the Configuration Converter to provide much more granular feedback on Visualforce pages. One update that will be less appreciated is the new Lightning Experience Feedback Form that will be randomly displayed to users using the new UI from March. This is a brief user satisfaction survey intended to collect feedback directly from end users, without the need to go through admins. Naturally, admins are advised to disable this feature on behalf of their users from the newly renamed Adoption Assistance area in Setup. The buzz pre-release though has mostly been about the new Flow builder that replaces the existing Cloud Flow Designer tool with a streamlined interface for building automated process flows without the need for code. This is an update that has been forced on Salesforce by Adobe's decision to kill Flash next year, but admins are the ultimate beneficiary, as the new Flow Builder is both simpler and far more powerful. If you've used any of Salesforce's workflow build tools you'll be right at home, the resemblance to the Lightning App Builder or Pardot Engagement Studio is obvious. For users, the main benefit is enhanced templating capabilities for workflows build using the new tool. This applies to your own flows as well as those installed from managed packages. In terms of functionality, you can now trigger flows following built-in platform alerts and errors, rather than just custom ones. These are used by Einstein for its follow-up actions recommendations engine, so are far more useful than they used to be. There have also been some significant enhancements to the scheduling capabilities, allowing Flows to be run in real-time and to be used for building integrations with external objects. ### Pardot Einstein Announced to great fanfare last spring, Pardot gets its AI refresh with the launch of Einstein powered behavioural scoring and campaign insights. While built-in predictive lead scoring and report summaries sound revolutionary, these are in fact extensions of existing Sales Cloud features to Pardot. As such, they only work for Pardot Prospects that are synced with Sales Leads. To take advantage of the predictive capabilities, Pardot users will need to have the relevant Sales Cloud Einstein features configured in their organisation. The scores and recommendations produced by these predictive features will then be displayed in Pardot for Lightning and in Pardot prospect lists. Given the lightning dependencies, users will need to be using the Sales Cloud Lightning Experience to take maximum advantage of these capabilities. ### Pardot Lightning The Salesforce Integration enhancements in this release will prove far more critical to the future of the platform than Einstein. Pardot has always struggled in an enterprise context with its limited Salesforce connector, that contains some unexpected gotchas to make life difficult. This release fixes some of them with a new connector setup wizard that can be run from within Salesforce. For now, this connector is only available for new customers. Expect that to change in a future release as there are several new capabilities with this connector that would be useful to all Pardot customers. In an enterprise context, the most useful is the ability to connect multiple Pardot instances natively to a single Salesforce instance. This has always been possible but required support to intervene and limited the integration's capabilities in other areas. The new connector also introduces selective sync, allowing decisions on Pardot's access to Salesforce data to be configured on the Pardot side. This is done by setting Marketing Data Sharing Rules in the new integration connector, that are then applied to records being synced to Pardot. As with the equivalent Marketo feature, there are some serious limitations to the selective sync capabilities which mean that many Pardot users will continue to configure Pardot's data access using custom security profiles and Salesforce sharing rules. Most notably, the field used in the sync filter cannot itself be synced with Pardot. These integration changes are required for the release of Pardot Business Units, which allow prospects and assets to be partitioned between users. Users are assigned to a Business Unit and can only see prospects and assets in their BU. In this respect, they function in a manner similar to Marketo Lead Partitions. Unlike the Marketo equivalent, they are controlled from Salesforce but contain many of the same gotchas. Each Business Unit is effectively an entirely separate Pardot instance, with its own Salesforce integration configuration. Leads, Contacts and Campaigns can only sync with one Pardot Business Unit, whilst users can’t switch between Business Units. Organisations that can live with these limitations and who signed up to Pardot after 11th February should consider testing this new capability. Do bear in mind that the strict data segregation imposed by the feature will result in duplicate records in Salesforce. There is always an overlap between the prospect database of Business Units, even in scenarios where there shouldn't be. ### Pardot Custom Domains Even if they're not using Business Units, there is a useful upgrade to email tracking links for multi-brand organisations. It has long been possible to create multiple landing page domains. However, until now landing page vanity URLs and email tracking links had to use the primary domain. Secondary domains could only be used for landing pages that had the default numeric URL format. This has now been changed. The domain used for email tracking links is now an option in the email template editor, and the domain used for vanity URLs can now be changed when the relevant URL is created. This ensures brand consistency and flexibility across all campaigns. ### Pardot Analytics Users of connected campaigns can now view asset engagement metrics directly from the Salesforce campaign record. There is a new lightning component to support this, but the additional metrics are also synced to Salesforce for Classic users. Note that this capability does require setup, and the data required counts against Salesforce storage limits. However, it does mean that engagement history can now be reported on from Salesforce as well as from Pardot. It can also be added to lead, contact and campaign page layouts so that Sales have the full picture about what their leads and contacts are getting up to. The integration connector enhancements affect Analytics too, with the configuration of the B2B Marketing Analytics module now being included in the new connector setup screens. This Analytics module is built on top of Einstein Analytics and provides a set of built-in marketing dashboards that respect the new Business Unit capabilities. The downside of this enhancement is that existing competitive integration with GoodData has been retired, this was announced a year ago when B2B Marketing Analytics was made generally available. Also previously announced was the introduction more accurate click tracking. Many email security tools automatically verify email links prior to delivery by clicking on every link an email. Unless filtered out, these checks count as click-throughs for reporting. This is a major annoyance for Marketing Automation and Email Service Providers, and different tools have different solutions. A new algorithm was introduced in November to filter out automated clicks from the most popular security tools. Finally, this month marks General Availability of the French, German and Spanish translations of the Pardot User Interface. Pardot users wishing to use Pardot in their native language can change the language from their account setting in Pardot, or Salesforce if they're using a synced account. As always, there are a huge number of changes in the release most of which fall outside the scope of this article. For full details, including smaller changes to Pardot not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring19/release-notes/salesforce%5Frelease%5Fnotes.htm). Contents of the release are subject to change. ### Is Buying MarTech Too Easy? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/is-buying-martech-too-easy/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:39:02.000Z Developing software is easy. Anybody can do it if they have the requisite coding skills. Developing good software is hard, because it requires more than just talented developers. As any successful app vendor would tell you, the most important part of any development project is the design process not the actual coding. That's not to denigrate the efforts of software developers, it's just that the process of building and maintaining a software product is so complex that a comprehensive plan is required to do it properly. Success comes as much from defining what an app shouldn't do as compared to what it should. Buying software is also easy. It's not in anyone's interests to make it difficult, although some vendors do manage to do it with arcane and complex price lists intended to give sales reps the maximum scope to set prices according to the buyer's budget. Yet the key to being a successful technology buyer is to make the buying process difficult, by introducing many of the same planning strategies that make developers successful. In software development, the coding is only a small part of the overall process. The same applies to buying technology. The purchasing decision is only a small part of the overall journey, and is also by far the easiest bit. Everyone knows the challenges of implementation. Understanding a technology you just brought takes time and effort that you might not have. Decisions need to be made, but few buyers know enough about what they've brought to know their impact. The roll-out of any enterprise technology is always a complex and frustrating process that always takes longer than you originally thought. There is almost always some limitation in the software that you didn't account for in your original planning. A good implementation consultant will help with this, but an external advisor can only do so much. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the buyer to make configuration and usage decisions, the consultant is there to guide them to the right decision. Following best practice is important, but there are always exceptions. What the correct decision actually is, will frequently depend on the customer's specific requirements. The can only happen if the buyer understands what those requirements are. It's surprising how frequently this isn't the case. Scoping what a particular piece of technology is supposed to do and selecting the right application for that requirement is a surprisingly difficult job that requires rigour and an objective decision-making process. This applies as much for a single purpose application such as a webinar platform as it does for a highly customisable CRM system or Marketing Automation Platform. There are five common mistakes made when collecting requirements for a technology purchase: ### Ignoring the Existing Tech Stack Whatever problem you're trying to solve, there is already a solution for it inside the business. The question is whether that solution is fit for purpose. Buying in new technology isn't always the answer, because that existing solution may work absolutely fine even if it isn't necessarily best practice. Even if you don't, there's probably an existing tool in place that can do what you want. Anything can be developed in house if you have enough time and resources, but sooner or later the cost of developing a fancy new predictive AI outweighs the benefits of a bespoke solution. The core sales & marketing tech stack is already fairly flexible, so make sure to consider what it can do before deciding buy in something new. ### The Impulse Purchase A typical enterprise with change control processes and multiple approval levels doesn't suffer from impulse purchases, because management or procurement will stop any attempt to buy technology without justification. Instead, what you get is one group or individual driving the buying decision to fit a vague theory of a possible business need, without actually validating with all the relevant stakeholders whether that need actually exists in the business. Internal politics is often the cause of this, but the end result is always major problems further down the line. It is essential that all stakeholders in a decision are identified, and their feedback properly considered. Write up a list of everyone's needs and concerns and make sure they're considered in the decision. These needs don't need to have equal priority, but collectively agreeing what the priorities are up-front avoids a lot of wasted time and bruised egos later on. ### The All in One Solution Every technology has trade-offs, so it's important to know what the key priorities are what is nice to have. It's good to have a comprehensive list of requirements, but at the same time, not all of them will be fulfiled by the chosen solution. Don't look for a platform which does everything, because it doesn't exist. Instead, decide what the core purpose of the technology you're looking for will be. It could have multiple purposes, but if that's case be prepared to search for multiple tools which integrate. Many of the items on your priority list will be wish list items intended to make life easier rather than solutions to a genuine business challenge. A new solution should solve some of those wish list items, but it won't be able to solve all of them. Always remain focused on the major problems that you're trying to address and avoid getting distracted by secondary concerns. Otherwise, you may find yourself implementing a solution that doesn't actually address the original business requirement. ### Ignore the Technical Stuff Integrations are never the ideal solution, but they do work and are frequently a necessity. Yet technical requirements such as administration options, API maturity and native integrations are often overlooked in the buying process. Don't make assumptions about these things because they're often incorrect. If you're relying on a specific feature being available make sure to check it actually exists before pulling the trigger on the deal. More importantly, make sure to find out how this essential feature works because there will always be limitations. Security is another thing people ignore, primarily because IT can be overly strict about it. However, if the required security or compliance checks have been glossed over or bypassed, then the relevant departments will find out later. The vendor will hate you for it, but it's worth asking the right questions up front before IT even need to get involved. ### Trusting the Sales Guy Sales won't lie outright when closing the deal, but you can you be sure there are things they're not telling you. There's a reason why customer references are a standard part of any buying decision, but even that can't be trusted. Vendors get to chose their happiest customers to provide the reference, when what you really need to know is the problems that unhappy customers have. Seeing the platform when you don't have the vendors Sales teams guiding you is important. Proof of concepts are frequently too late for this, because the decision will effectively have been made at this point. Too many people are too invested in the success of a purchase for a POC to fail, unless there is a good reason. To this end, always consider what the failure conditions for a piece of technology, what should it do and what should it absolutely not do. Then make sure these are possible before making a commitment. ### ### The Power of Intent URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-power-of-intent/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:29:53.000Z For the second year in a row, personalisation is one of the hottest topics in Marketing. The big data explosion has opened up new possibilities for targeted content that didn't exist previously. Millions of potential customers browse the web every day searching for information on their current needs and interests. Every click is tracked by website owners and numerous third parties. Your website is likely host to multiple internal marketing tools for reporting and retargeting - most B2B websites tend to have at least 10 web analytics, marketing automation and conversion tracking tools all collecting user visit data. Some of these website tags such as Eloqua, Marketo Munchkin or LinkedIn Insight will be used for building audience segments for future campaigns. This was the initial promise of marketing automation. Not only would you be able to target campaigns and score leads based off CRM contact profiles, but also use their website activity and engagement history as well. Website activity data is now routinely used to build lists and score leads by the majority of marketers. Website visit data is a common feature of lead scoring and occasionally in campaign segmentation. However, single page visits simply aren't a strong enough indicator of interest, as your LDR team will tell you. Instead, the goal is to report on trends using the contact's full engagement history to build a picture of where they are in the funnel and what products or solutions they are interested in. Using this method can be effective, but it only gives part of that story rather than the whole picture. A contact profile tells you whether someone should be interested not whether they actually are. There can be many reasons for lack of interest that simply aren't captured on a standard lead record such as the timing of the buying cycle, availability of budget or competitor install base. As a result, engagement data is being used to fill the gap. Of course, all this fantastic activity data you're using to make decisions only comes from sites that you control. You might get registration details from content syndication providers or conversion metrics from social networks, but the data these sources give is often limited to the minimum required to provide the service. Some services allow you to add your own tracking scripts to supplement this, but not many. The end result is you only get part of the picture. It becomes difficult to discover what ads or social posts each prospect has been exposed to. In the past, this may not have been much of an issue, but in today's increasingly interconnected world over half of the buyer's journey has been completed before a prospect has even reached your website. This has implications for attribution, but there are specialist tools such as Bizible that handle this challenge by collating all online activity into a comprehensive set of dashboards. ### Plugging the Gap From a personalisation perspective, what Marketer's really want to know is the competitor or analyst content people are searching for, so that when a prospect hits your website you can serve them content related to what they've been searching for elsewhere. An entire Industry has grown up around precisely this need, with the data needed to power this technology being sourced from a small band of intent data vendors, the most famous of which is [Bombora](https://www.bombora.com/). These companies work by aggregating the traffic reading content on publisher websites into a complex data model that can then be used to determine what individuals are searching for over time. The end result is a list of topics and keywords that each individual is searching for and a score to indicate the level of interest. For B2B, this is tracked at the account rather than contact level in order to give a more accurate picture. This technique is something that many businesses do for their own audiences on their own websites using a DMP and website personalisation tools. Bombora does this on a much larger scale across thousands of media publishers. They then sell the results back to those same publishers for use in targeted advertising and audience trend analysis. Intent data is the backbone of the adtech boom, and is used heavily in personalised advertising. Media agencies were quick to spot the potential of intent and use it heavily in their programmatic offerings. As a result, many leading DMPs and ABM platforms have their own version of it using either their own data or data supplied by Bombora. ### The Decision Maker For the regular B2B marketer, this information is extremely useful, particularly if you're running an ABM strategy. Bombora data is the starting point for many ABM campaigns, with it being increasingly used to determine which members of your target account list should be targeted for particular themes or solution messages. Accounts showing no activity either through Bombora or through regular marketing activity are deemed to be inactive and are excluded from campaigns, and in some cases removed from the target account list entirely. It is important to remember that this intent data is only one segmentation criteria among many – it can be used to determine whether an account is searching for a particular keyword, but that still doesn't mean they're interested in your products. For instance, they could be happily buying from a competitor. Predictive vendors do use intent data in their scoring models, but it is typically only a secondary measure with the primary components of the score coming from your own data. Think of intent data as a measure of awareness, rather than readiness to buy. If an account is searching heavily for a particular topic, then they could be in the market for a solution that addresses this topic. You have no way of knowing this for sure, but it definitely makes them a prime target for a highly targeted marketing message, with the objective of getting your name on their shortlist. ### Audience Discovery Intent is not just an interesting addition to the ABM toolkit, it is also an essential part of any mid-market campaign strategy. The leading digital agencies use intent data heavily when building audiences for your top of funnel advertising campaigns, but it also has a place further down the funnel when discussing lead recycling. If a dormant lead is appearing in intent data, then it might be worth adding them to a nurture on the same topic as it could be that they are ready to buy again. Use it to supplement LDR or sales rep coverage for inactive or infrequent accounts, so that contacts are only added to nurture when they're likely to show interest, rather than spamming unnecessarily at times when they're focused on something else. Do consider the length of your sales cycle when doing this though, companies with short sales cycles typically do not benefit as much from intent data because there is a time lag in the data models that power Bombora and their competitors. Intent often acts as a trailing indicator of interest for products with a short sales cycle, because the account will already have purchased by the time they are flagged as surging in Bombora's data model. Switching intent data vendors might help, particularly if you're looking for companies based outside of North America where local vendors will have better account coverage and a wider range of local data sources. When using intent to build audiences for lead generation campaigns this matters. As with all personalisation strategies, more targeted keywords and a more focused firmographic selection will lead to better results. B2C marketers will tell you it is easier to execute personalised campaigns by tweaking the audience to match the content, rather than tweaking the content to match the audience. This was learned the hard way over the past two decades of marketing automation adoption, but has been forgotten in the rush to implement ABM to win new major accounts. Those existing lead generation tactics still apply for the rest of your business, maximising the use of intent data just makes them work even better. ### Is Marketing Automation Still Relevant? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/is-marketing-automation-still-relevant/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:30:16.000Z It is no secret that the success of Marketing Automation has been built on email marketing. For many marketers, sending emails is still the primary use case for Marketo, Eloqua or Pardot. Email capabilities were the initial hook that persuaded many businesses to adopt the technology in the first place. Marketers found that traditional email service providers were simply too limited for B2B use cases so switched to Marketing Automation as an email marketing solution that was more optimised for a business managing the typical sales cycle. Many B2C companies adopted MA too, but over time this usage has become limited to high ticket product segments or specific sectors such as sports where customer loyalty is a priority. ### The Perception Problem Having used their email marketing capabilities to get customers through the door, marketing automation platforms have spent years trying to move their user base beyond basic batch and blast email campaigns with mixed results. Whilst marketing operations teams have a clear knowledge of what Marketing Automation can do there are many field marketers who still lack this understanding. There is a lingering perception in some quarters as a platform for email campaigns rather than the complete cycle of lead generation and demand marketing. Perhaps the biggest symptom of this is the common misunderstanding about what a nurture campaign actually is. Too many marketers still use the term nurture to refer to a content based email campaign. If an email campaign has multiple touch points it often gets called a nurture, even if the emails are time-limited and only intended to be sent as a one-off on a specific date. These campaigns are still drip campaigns, regardless of whether the campaign uses more sophisticated tactics like acceleration, auto-responder emails or dynamic content. There is a tendency to refer to any drip campaign that uses automation or advanced tactics as a nurture, regardless of any other factor. This is done because 'nurture' is seen as good, while drip campaigns are seen as bad after the efforts of the marketing automation industry to promote nurturing. The problem is that 'nurture' and 'drip' are not contradictory tactics, it is perfectly possible for a campaign to be both. In fact, most genuine email nurtures are drip campaigns. In this context, drip refers to the pre-scheduled series of emails that the prospect will receive once they enter the campaign. The fact these emails are scheduled relatively based on the date of the previous email rather than on fixed dates does not change the terminology. ### Diverging Strategies Much like ABM, the solution is to stop thinking of nurture as a 'campaign'. Nurture is a strategy for building relationships and developing engagement over an extended period of time. Nurturing is a recognition that buying cycles occur on the buyers' schedule rather than the sellers, so companies need to keep leads warm until they are ready to progress through the funnel. This naturally requires a regular schedule of touches over an extended timeframe to ensure that your brand remains top of mind, and your solution doesn't get forgotten when the prospect is finally ready to engage. This doesn't have to happen over email, its just that historically email has had the highest ROI of any tactic when used as part of a nurture strategy. That's because email campaigns are cheaper and easier than many alternative tactics, and are less intrusive than telemarketing. GDPR has changed the balance, and there is now more investment in online nurturing strategies using web and social channels as the primary communication channel. There is a place for all channels when designing a nurture sequence, given that effective results now require a multi-channel approach. The problem that marketing automation vendors have is that their tools are rarely used for the online components of a nurture campaign. Regardless of the channels used, automation is still an essential part of any nurturing strategy. It is possible to run a nurture campaign manually, but the resources and effort required to run the email component of any nurture on a batch and blast basis are prohibitive for all but the deepest pockets. This is the problem that marketing automation is intended to solve, and it is still where it works best. Far too many marketing ops teams focus on the email and lead management capabilities of marketing automation and overlook the ability of the leading MAP tools to integrate deeply with additional channels such as web, social or SMS. Part of this is the fault of the vendors themselves as the social capabilities usually involve add-ons rather than being out of the box. The internal structures of marketing automation users are also a factor, with different channels being operated by different teams in the business. Email gets delegated to marketing ops because it is executed through the marketing automation platform, so Ops teams privilege it even when other tactics would work better. The relative ease of reporting on email campaigns compared to many other channels reinforces this trend. ### Converging Capabilities For now, marketing automation has been able to get away with the perception that it is an email-centric platform. Its place in the tech stack has been guaranteed by its central role in managing the funnel and passing leads to Sales. No other technology has been able to match those capabilities. This is beginning to change though, as ABM platforms gain additional functionality. Unlike marketing automation the campaign execution capabilities of these platforms tend to be based around digital advertising, which complements the relative weakness of marketing automation in this area. However, there is no particular reason why these platforms can't gain the complex integration and nurture workflow capabilities that marketing automation already has. Currently, ABM platforms choose to leave lead based marketing and lead based activities to marketing automation, but some observers are beginning to question this decision. ABM is not a binary choice. Marketers can and do run account based and lead based marketing in parallel, frequently to the same individuals. It is generally advised to execute campaigns and manage the funnel at both lead and account level, but existing tools don't allow marketers to do this in one place. It makes sense to run these capabilities through the same platforms, it is just that currently there are no platforms capable of doing so. Marketo comes closest. They have all the relevant capabilities at a basic level, but their ABM module has fundamental limitations that limit its utility. It's probably only a matter of time before Oracle and Salesforce open their chequebooks to buy one of the ABM platform vendors so they can integrate them into their CRM and Marketing Automation platforms. This would hopefully eliminate the complete inability of their existing marketing products to manage account relations properly. If the likes of Engagio or Demandbase do remain independent though they could eventually supplant Marketo or Eloqua in some organisations, by deepening their existing CRM integrations to a level which allows them to manage the entire funnel. This may be some time away, but it is a possibility that vendors and marketing automation users need to be aware of. ### Enterprise Mobility meets Platform Maturity URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/question-of-platforms/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:52:04.000Z It's January, which means that the entire technology industry has converged on Las Vegas for the glitz and glamour of CES. The annual Consumer Electronics Show is an important event, but probably receives more press coverage than it actually deserves. The gadgets presented at the show tend to be either interesting or relevant to mainstream technology buyers, but rarely both. This year is an important one for mobile technology. The launch of 5G will revolutionise the industry, even if most of the benefits will be enjoyed by carriers rather than consumers. Foldable phones appear to be finally a reality after years of hype, which should liberate smartphone design from current constraints assuming the technology works as advertised. ### The Apple Question It is the inventors of the smartphone that have dominated technology news so far this year. Apple started 2019 by issuing an unexpected profit warning after a sharp drop in Chinese iPhone sales. There have been rumours for months that the latest models have underperformed and this was confirmed by last Wednesday's announcement. It is now clear that we have reached peak Apple, the long-expected milestone that marks the pinnacle of the empire that Steve Jobs built. The company is in no danger of going out of business anytime soon, and their revenues and profits will continue to grow despite the recent miss. Their user base may continue to grow too, even if probably not unit sales. However, their cultural influence appears to be in terminal decline. Apple's success is built on their ability to turn immature technologies into revolutionary new consumer experiences. In doing so, they have transformed the global economy half a dozen times in the past two decades. Very little of the technology they've popularised was invented in-house, but they did perfect numerous innovations in consumer electronics, polishing many interesting new innovations until they were ready to bring to market. They're still doing this today, but the maturity of the mobile phone market limits the impact. The markets have woken up that fact, with their stock declining by almost 40% from its peak in the summer reflecting a realisation on Wall Street that the company is now a bluechip stock rather than a growth stock. ### Competitive Concerns As a result of Apple's tanking stock price, the title of the world's largest company has passed to Microsoft. This is a remarkable turnaround for a firm whose most famous product is in terminal decline, but it's more to do with the failings of others rather than anything Microsoft have done. Their share price has remained broadly static while their rivals have dropped. Of all the leading technology firms, Microsoft have the broadest product offerings and the most diversified range of revenue sources. Apple (with iPhones) and Google (with Ads) are overly reliant on one product line for the bulk of their revenue, which only works when that product is growing. Amazon has also seen sharp declines in their share price with investors finally realising that the online retail giant is never going to be the monopoly provider their market capitalisation assumed they would be. There is plenty of competition in their core retail and cloud computing businesses. Both have low barriers to entry and are not natural monopolies in the same way that social network or other online services are. All this market chaos does is remind people that the technology market has matured, with the market for mobile phones now resembling that for PCs. The hardware has become commoditised, with new product generations only showing incremental improvements over time. The operating systems that run on these devices have become interchangeable too. It is the apps that count. Nowhere is this more true than China, whose mobile market is dominated not by OS developers or handset manufacturers but by the ubiquitous WeChat. In the west, iOS and the app store guarantees the loyalty of Apple's user base even though every generation of Apple products is more expensive than the last. This dynamic does not exist in China, and Chinese consumers have reacted to increased iPhone prices by switching to cheaper local brands. The brewing US-China trade war has reinforced this trend, particularly after last month's arrest of Huawei's CFO following a US extradition request. ### The Enterprise Dimension The same is true in business contexts. The advantages enjoyed by widely used business operating systems such as Windows and IOS are disappearing. Companies now standardise on Windows PCs due to cost rather than any technical reasons. In any enterprise, a small number of employees still need to use Windows PCs to access bespoke or legacy applications, but most office workers would be perfectly capable of doing their jobs on either Mac or PC. Some companies allow users the choice, but most don't due to the cost and complexity of locking down and configuring two separate device types. A significant part of Windows continued success in the enterprise is down to the sheer configurability of a Windows PC when connected to an enterprise network running Active Directory. Apple can't match this, although there are third-party tools that come close. There are other benefits to Mac use, but there is not enough reason to switch unless the new platform provides an overwhelming advantage, which so far it doesn't. Windows, Mac and Linux are relatively evenly matched. However, Windows has a small advantage because it is far more flexible than any Apple device, and has far better software support than Linux outside of a few highly technical niches. Apple have always prioritised ease of use over user choice, and this decision has been essential to their success. However, this does have costs, one of which is that it limits enterprise adoption. iOS overcame enterprise concerns about locked down platforms due to lack of alternatives, Windows Phone was too late to market and Android had numerous privacy and security question marks. Many of these concerns about Android have been mitigated, and it is now a fully enterprise-ready platform. In some aspects, it is actually superior to iOS, but the history of security issues needs to be overcome before it can fully displace Apple in the enterprise. The fact that it can is itself a risk to the market position of iPhones. Apple has identified enterprise as a future growth area alongside consumer services. Rising prices won't impact this position. Business buyers are less cost sensitive than consumer buyers but do expect deep volume discounts. For now, the fact the enterprise has already standardised on iOS is sufficient to maintain their position. Much like with Windows, the investment in enterprise apps and the cost of porting them to a different platform will see to that. Businesses have put up with a lot of nonsense from Microsoft over the years and still use Windows. There is no reason for IT departments to treat Apple differently. ### B2B Marketing gets Complicated URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/2019-b2b-marketing-trends/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:30:37.000Z 2018 was a year of change. New legal obligations and evolving technology proved to be more disruptive than expected. Preferred tactics and strategies changed overnight, and many marketers are still scrambling to cope with the fall-out. Over the last few years, many brands relied far too heavily on email to reach audiences, with social media and advertising often being seen as a way to attract new email subscribers rather than fully fledged channels in their own right. The content marketing boom reinforced this trend by providing a seemingly endless source of collateral to spam the inboxes of prospective customers. Email nurtures were designed and implemented to provide an outlet to promote all the content that was being produced. Not all marketers fell into this trap, but many did. ### Omnichannel goes Mainstream Increased consumer and political awareness of data protection has reduced the viability of a marketing plan built around email nurtures. Legal restrictions on the use of outbound email mean that marketers are going to need to find more channels to promote their content, and previously niche social networks or advertising platforms will take on greater importance. Until now, B2B marketers have had it easy compared to our B2C counterparts. The scope of inbound marketing has frequently been restricted to attracting new prospects with brand and awareness messaging. Nurturing those prospects after that first touch has been the domain of sales and outbound marketing. This neat distinction is being blurred with social, web and advertising needing to take on a greater share of the middle of funnel messaging. This is a challenge that B2C marketers have been dealing with for years. The more transactional nature of consumer decision making and stricter attitudes to email marketing and telemarketing mean that there is a wealth of experience in making social, advertising and email channels work together to build a consistent user journey. B2B marketers have additional resources they can leverage as well, that have often been overlooked in the past due to the need to get buy-in on campaigns from other departments. Restrictions on outbound email, mean that going forward more assistance will be needed from LDR teams and Sales reps in promoting campaigns. If you're still struggling to decide on a new year's resolution, then better sales alignment will go a long way to making your job easier in 2019. ### ABM reaches Maturity Better sales alignment will also help with the second business priority for 2019\. ABM has been slow to gain traction in EMEA, but since GDPR there has been a definite shift in priorities among European marketing teams. ABM is now a top priority, and the timing couldn't be better. The initial wave of ABM programs are now several years old, and an entire technology ecosystem has developed to help run them. You don't need this technology to run ABM, but it definitely helps. This year will see a new wave of ABM programs being launched. Many of the companies running these programs will have experimented with ABM previously, but either struggled to identify the right approach or didn't get the expected results. There is no single best approach to ABM, but successful programs all rely on a common set of principles and capabilities. A data-driven approach to target account selection is essential, and Sales need to be equal partners when doing this. The technology required to enable this process, as well as to manage the resulting campaign automation has now reached maturity, with features such as account scoring, lead to account matching and account lists available in a wide range of MarTech products, including some CRM and Marketing Automation platforms. An awareness that ABM messaging and tactics don't have to be different standard campaigns will help too, the main difference with ABM is at the strategic and operational levels rather than the tactical. With the basic structure of account based marketing understood, the focus will shift to enabling more targeted account personalisation at scale. Account based personalisation of digital experiences using both explicit and implicit data will be a discussion point. Many account based campaigns still require manual work, particularly when aiming for a one to one experience. Currently, this, requires dedicated customer branded microsites and individually co-branded emails limiting the audience for such campaigns. The desire to automate ABM experiences across both outbound and inbound channels, as well as to overlay this with existing demand generation and persona based messaging will see solutions for this proposed in 2019\. This not only enables a more consistent journey for prospects at target accounts but importantly, it also allows the full ABM campaign experience to be extended to a greater number of accounts. Many web personalisation and advertising technologies already support ABM, the challenge is making the best use of them. ### Customer Lifecycle Marketing Marketing has taken on greater responsibility for customer experience in recent years, as executives tap into the design and user journey expertise of marketers in an effort to reduce friction and increase engagement with products. It is the CMOs job to map out every stage of the customer experience and ensure it is smooth, coherent and consistent. The ultimate aim of this effort has been to increase user adoption and make their products stickier within their customer base. Customer marketing has been a secondary consideration in CX programs, and in many instances has been deliberately ignored to avoid irritating customers with an unwanted sales message. 2019 will see a renewed focus on the end to end customer experience, as companies look for ways to increase revenue from their existing customer base. With customer acquisition becoming more difficult, retention is now more important than ever. Previously neglected interaction points such as renewals or first run experiences will take on a bigger priority as marketers look to drive cross-sell and upsell at every stage of the customer journey. Trial and demo experiences will take on increasing importance, with more automation and more supporting content and campaign journeys created to support them. ### Automating Marketing Automation Investments in marketing automation will be driven by the desire to enhance and automate customer experiences. For many marketers, systems such as Marketo, Eloqua or Pardot will become tools for orchestrating user journeys across disparate channels and platforms rather than tools for executing campaigns in their own right. MAP will continue to be used for email execution, but this is only one part of the new multichannel world that B2B marketers operate in. Currently, many of these channels are run independently with no feedback loop between them. This contributes to the sense of tech stack sprawl that many CMOs are worried about, 2019 will see an effort to optimise that tech stack and link it to all together with marketing automation acting as the central hub for marketing profile data and customer activity history. Cross-channel customer journeys will then be built with tracking data from previous interactions on one channel used to personalise website experiences or target ads on third-party sites. ### Privacy hits the headlines again Data protection laws are only going to get stricter, as consumer privacy continues to feature on the media agenda. The US is expected to follow the lead of California and devote serious attention to passing an American version of GDPR in 2019\. Much of this effort is driven by the desire to harmonise federal regulations prior to the California Consumer Privacy Act coming into force at the start of next year. This may not be possible given the difficulty in passing laws through a divided Congress. Even if the federal government fails to act, other states still might as there is a desire across the political spectrum to have a level playing field on privacy laws. Across the Atlantic, new privacy laws will also be on the European agenda. Brexit shouldn't have any impact on this area - the UK was among the leading advocates for GDPR. However, there is a new ePrivacy regulation making its way through EU institutions. This ePrivacy regulation was supposed to be ratified several years ago but has been severely delayed by disagreements between member states on its contents. The EU is still a long way from a consensus on ePrivacy so the final version may not be ready this year. If it does pass, expect to hear a lot about it. Additionally, expect more clarity on the real world impact of GDPR too as the first batch of complaints reaches their conclusion. This will set precedents that legal teams will use when they review internal GDPR compliance midway through the year. Marketing ops will be horrified to discover that further compliance efforts are required, as loopholes and inconsistencies in the law are clarified. ### Next Generation Analytics You may not hear the phrase data-driven marketing much this year, but it will underpin many of the technology trends that people do talk about in 2019\. The biggest of those is personalisation, which was a buzz topic last year too. Lots of companies claim to be data-driven marketing but aren't able to maximise the potential of this approach because they don't have the right numbers. Expect a lot of effort dedicated to fixing this. CMOs have long identified reporting and analytics as a priority, and if anything it is getting harder to find the right metrics rather than easier. Most enterprises have all the data they need and the tools to pull out together, but actually doing so is a challenge, often requiring a lot of manual work. Where the problem is solved, it has been done so by hiring a dedicated team of data analysts and building a complex web of integrations. This is great if you have an unlimited budget, but not everyone does. For the rest of us, a lot of manual effort is required which reduces flexibility and increases the time needed to get the right numbers. Fortunately, MarTech vendors are aware of the challenge and solutions exist to solve it. Expect a bigger focus from the entire industry on analytics and dedicated marketing data platforms in 2019\. Until now, marketing leaders have made do with what they've got due to other priorities. With a slowing economy at the start of the year, there will be a push for greater efficiency and the need to streamline reporting will shoot up the priority list. A changing blend of tactics will make this especially critical. Proving ROI is a lot more important when hard decisions need to be made about budgets. ### B2B Marketing: Year in Review URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/2018-in-b2b-marketing/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:31:01.000Z 2018 has been a year of change with several trends combining to shake up go to market strategies and change priorities. Some of these changes were predicted going into the year, but others were not. The end result is that many B2B marketers are struggling to work out how to make the best use of their budgets heading into 2019. ### Data Protection It is difficult to discuss the year without commenting on the overriding priority that overshadowed the first half of 2018\. GDPR dominated the first six months, certainly among Marketing Operations teams whose workload was overwhelmed by compliance challenges and implementing new consent and data protection frameworks prior to the law coming into effect at the end of May. In some cases work has continued since, with up to half of businesses still not fully GDPR compliant. Companies had plenty of warning about GDPR, but the impact of the law on marketing was frequently underestimated by many inside and outside the industry. This left marketers scrambling to plug the gap in company-wide GDPR efforts led by IT or legal departments who frequently misunderstood the consent issues involved as well as the effect they had on marketing databases. The unexpected vagueness of the law didn't help. When first drafted in 2016, it appeared to be straightforward EU directive with predictable but worrying consequences. The focus of discussion for Marketing was on the consent requirements and little else. The importance of the legitimate interest clause was initially overlooked, but since then it has been adopted by many businesses to justify some or all of their marketing efforts. This was not the original intention of the clause, and efforts are being made to restrict or eliminate legitimate interest as part of the upcoming ePrivacy regulation, the next wave of EU data protection legislation due to be ratified in 2019. GDPR was not the only data protection headache for Marketers in 2018, as the fall out from the Cambridge Analytica scandal made headlines across the world. For the first time, questions about what social networks and tech firms do with personal data grabbed consumer attention. The reputation of Facebook has suffered precipitously since, but the broader marketing industry has been affected too. Consumers are a lot more cautious about handing over information than they were a year ago, which makes effective personalised user journeys a lot more difficult. This has affected the entire industry and really couldn't have been better timed as the scandal peaked just as companies were looking to renew or acquire opt-ins during the spring build-up up to the GDPR enforcement deadline. ### Death of Email The inevitable consequence of GDPR was the decline in the importance of email marketing. Smaller mailing lists meant that many firms struggled to build large enough audiences to justify investing in outbound email. This applied equally to email nurtures. Critics have been questioning the level of investment required to design effective nurtures for years. Nurtures tend to be more expensive than other types of email campaigns, but only generate the expected uplift in revenue if done correctly. The reduction in database sizes has given ammunition to their detractors, and many firms have reduced investment in email nurtures as a result. Instead, there has been a definite shift towards social and PPC, with firms seeking to promote content and nurture prospects over inbound channels. There is also a broader range of B2B firms experimenting with other types of advertising such as programmatic or content syndication. These tactics don't work for all companies, but marketers are testing them in their quest to reach prospects who have opted out of email. Expect this to continue into 2019. ### Personalisation GDPR has had more subtle effects too, by decimating mailing lists and marketing databases, it has forced marketers to up their game. Better personalisation was identified as a priority by many at the start of the year. So it has proved, with efforts to populate data gaps and enhance one to one web personalisation occurring across marketing departments. Progress has been slow going though, and outbound channels have been ignored or left behind as businesses focus on making inbound channels more effective. There is a growing awareness that personalisation works best when it is reactive, with touches based on buying signals or past engagement. Many marketers struggle to make this a reality, often unable to bridge the gap between the solution or product based content matrix and the wealth of data they have on prospects and their activity. Expect closing this gap to be a priority in 2019. ### MarTech Consolidation 2018 has seen the first signs of consolidation in the rapidly expanding MarTech sector. There have been several high profile acquisitions this year, such as Adobe's purchases of Marketo and Magento. This was driven by their desire to round out the Adobe Experience Cloud and attract B2B and SMB customers. Other deals that drew attention include Terminus's acquisition of Brightfunnel and Marketo's acquisition of Bizible. Expect this wave of mergers and acquisitions to continue. The consolidation trend started in AdTech a few years ago and has only accelerated in 2018, with telcos such as AT&T and Verizon making significant investments this year. The consolidation trend is beginning to affect customers of MarTech vendors too. Many enterprises have built up tech stacks of 50 or more technologies and are looking to optimise this number in an effort to reduce ballooning technology budgets. This will drive further deals in the MarTech sector, as vendors look to expand their capabilities to retain existing customers or win new ones. There are still plenty of businesses looking to invest in new technologies, but CMOs are reaching the limits of their technology budgets and need to make better use of what they have. ### AI Hype MarTech vendors would have you believe that the number one trend of 2018 is AI. There has been an explosion in the number of new AI products or vendors adding AI capabilities to existing products. Marketers have not been by fooled by the AI buzz. Vendor investment in AI has not been matched by customer interest. Whilst businesses are looking for increased automation to cope with the big data challenge, they understand that AI is only one potential solution to the problem. Increasingly, AI is a bullet point feature. Vendors list it because it sounds good and makes their product appear more sophisticated. The question that marketing departments really want to know is how much effort is required to implement a particular technology given limited resources and expanding tech stacks. If AI helps reduce the burden on overstretched Marketing Operations teams, then it's a bonus. If not, then customers just aren't interested. The AI hype in the broader technology space is beginning to cool down. This will affect MarTech too. Much like Machine Learning before it, the technology isn't going away but will continue to be used where it makes sense. Making better use of the data they have is an ongoing challenge for marketers and one that AI is well placed to help with. In 2018, the priority has been on compliance - making sure that you only have the data you're legally allowed to use. Going into 2019, priorities will shift back towards making the best use of that data and gleaning the right insights from it. The compliance concerns haven't gone away though with additional territories due to follow the lead of California and adopt GDPR like legislation. The world of B2B Marketing changed in 2018, and there is no going back. ### Lead Qualification: A European Perspective URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/lead-qualification-europe/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:31:19.000Z B2B marketers often focus on lead generation: the art of finding a prospective buyer and getting them in front of a sales rep, so that they can be persuaded to buy whatever is your business sells. The goal is to generate demand by raising awareness of the products or services a firm is selling, as well as by identifying the individuals or groups who have a need for those solutions and then getting them into the pipeline. At that point, Sales are brought in and take responsibility for closing the deal. At least that's the theory. All too often Sales reject the leads marketing provide because they're poor quality. Sometimes, their complaints have a basis, but every customer I've worked with has the story of a hot prospect who was ignored by Sales even though they were desperate to buy. Discussion about Sales and Marketing Alignment is as old as the hills. People have been talking about it as a major issue for a very long time. Yet, it still surprises me how big the disconnect between Sales and Marketing teams actually is. Even now in the modern era of enterprise collaboration, it is depressingly common to come across a customer where Sales don't understand what Marketing actually does, and Marketing don't know what Sales actually want. Marketing are drawing up personas and lead criteria with no input from Sales, and then wondering why reps complain about the quality of the names they're getting from campaigns. It's no wonder the two departments end up at loggerheads, with business leaders picking sides. Despite all the benefits of demand marketing, there are still plenty of sales teams out there who have a policy of only following up manually selected contact us leads because they don't trust what's coming from marketing. These same teams often complain they don't have enough leads. That is not entirely the fault of Marketing. Sales teams have unrealistic expectations of what a Marketing Qualified Lead actually is. MQLs inherently have a much lower conversion rate than sales generated leads because Marketing simply don't know whether the hot prospect they've sent over is genuinely looking to buy right now or is just researching. MQL conversion rates vary wildly but are rarely higher than 10% to 20%. Sales sourced leads can have a conversion rate as high as 50%, and sales leaders often have the same expectation of marketing sourced leads. Generally, the solution to this disconnect is hiring lead development teams (LDRs) to screen interested prospects before they go to Sales. This doesn't work everywhere due to legal restrictions on outbound calling as well as the unwillingness of many people to speak to telemarketers. In North America this is less of a problem. LDRs only need to speak one language and prospects are much more willing to have a phone conversation with a stranger. In Europe, there are a large number of languages an LDR team needs to cover and a stronger aversion to cold calling. As a result, LDR qualification is pretty much the norm in the US, but not so much elsewhere. There are plenty of EMEA teams that do LDR qualification, but it's nowhere near as common as the US. Use of LDRs varies within EMEA by country and region. Where it does exist it will often be focused primarily on the largest markets, with leads in Eastern Europe and Africa still going directly to inside sales or partners due to lack of coverage. Unlike the US, there has been a trend away from in-house teams in EMEA over recent years. Telemarketing is typically outsourced to agencies who can better afford to hire a team with the wide spread of languages and local knowledge required. This doesn't resolve the cultural factors that mark face to face conversations far more important in establishing business relationships than in North America. Email and online methods are more likely to be used for qualification, compared to the US where leads without a phone number are routinely ignored or rejected. In EMEA, the phone number requirement is frequently a major barrier to conversion. In some countries, there are do not call registers for B2B as well as B2C which limit the reach of telemarketers. GDPR also imposes limitations on unsolicited calling, the extent of which depends on each businesses risk profile and interpretation of consent and legitimate interest. The primary factor limiting tele-qualification in EMEA is almost always budget, rather than legal restrictions. Marketing campaigns can do many things, but they are especially bad at determining whether a lead is genuinely in a position to buy right now. Successful demand generation relies on making assumptions about the prospect's interests based on their engagement history, then using that to personalise the content of the next touch. What it can't reliably do is determine whether that engagement is down to general interest or a desire to initiate a sales conversation. The only to get this information reliably is to ask someone directly, and that’s where LDRs work best. They give marketing the opportunity to develop a lead and ask the questions that sales care about on budget, authority, need and timeline. If these are established the lead can be passed onto Sales, if not it is pushed back to nurturing. Even in an era of ubiquitous AI, human interaction is the best way of weighing a potential opportunity. A good LDR is able to assess a prospect not just on what they're saying, but also on what they're leaving out. Experience and human judgement are the deciding factors in determining whether someone is a lead rather than objective criteria. Digital channels can't do this, as the conversation is guided by the prospect in response to automation and pre-configured workflows. Ultimately, an LDR is doing a job that can equally be done by a sales rep. It's just that Sales only care about closing deals, so pay more attention to the warmer leads that LDRs pass on. Marketing can't always afford the costs though, for what is often only bringing a small uplift in leads to Sales. To compensate, some sales teams have reps handling all incoming MQLs, before passing any resulting opportunities out to colleagues. There's no right or wrong way to structure lead follow-up, provided of course that leads are actually followed-up. Whether Sales or Marketing handle this process depends entirely on how you structure the funnel and where you want the hand-off between departments to be. Make sure you have a method for following up MQLs somewhere in the business, and that it is enforced with SLAs and infraction penalties. The critical thing is making sure you have alignment on expectations, otherwise hot leads will get left behind. If that happens too often, both teams suffer. ### Marketo Winter '19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-winter-19-release/ Last updated: 2018-12-14T09:58:44.000Z It may only be the dying days of 2018, but Marketo have already delivered their Winter 2019 release. Their final update of the year rolled out to customers last week, just two months after the previous one. The release of the new Sky UX has mixed up the Marketo schedule this year, with updates to this beta experience happening on a monthly rather than a quarterly basis. The accelerated release schedule of the new Marketo User Experience has definitely shone through, with each release delivering significant improvements and filling in functionality gaps. Marketo Sky was initially released as an early beta in a limited state, with numerous bugs and only a small subset of features. As a result, it was widely ignored despite the workflow improvements it offers. With this Q4 release, most of the major functionality gaps have been closed, and the new UX can now be set as the default UI if users so desire. This is an important milestone, albeit a little premature as there are still bugs and some smaller missing features such as integration with ReadyTalk or WebEx. The existing 'Classic' UI isn’t going anywhere though, and any features found in it aren’t going away anytime soon. Switching between the two is easy. The headline of this month's Sky update is the new customisable MyMarketo home page. This is a modular dashboard, which allows users to create their own personalised home screen with useful information and shortcuts. There is a global default MyMarketo screen for new and infrequent users, with power users having the ability to create their own version by selecting from a list of available widgets. The list of widgets currently released is limited, but includes a status widget, modules widget and recent asset widgets. Many more, including a campaign queue widget, are promised for next year. Of greater importance, is the addition of Smart Lists and Webinar programs to the Sky experience. These are the two most important marketing activities features still missing, although their implementation is similar to existing workflows used elsewhere in Sky. The webinar programs integrate with an updated Webinar framework that allows the integrated webinar platform to be selected and configured from within the Marketo UI. Global Search makes an appearance too, extending the existing Marketing Activities to search into Design Studio. The revised search and tree navigation mechanisms are among the best parts of Sky, so it is good to see them extended to all areas of the application. The ability to search all areas of the app from one screen doesn't exist in the classic UI so is useful, although it will be so when the Database module is added to Sky. ### ABM However, Sky is not the only Marketo product to see an out of band release this year. November saw the launch on AudienceAI, the new account discovery tool first announced at Summit. This is a new add-on to their ABM product, leveraging AI and machine learning to identify ABM target accounts. Many leading ABM programs are based on complex data models that analyse last deals and existing customers to determine what makes someone a good fit. The results are then used to build a sophisticated predictive scoring model that identifies other accounts with the same attributes. AccountAI does this all for you, removing the need to invest in a separate product such as Lattice Engines or Mintigo. The initial beta launch is used solely to generate target lists for Marketo's existing ABM module automatically, but it is expected to be made available to a broader customer base over time. As with all AI products, what you're buying here is the underlying data model, and its value will be directly linked to the effectiveness of that model. This month saw another beta capability added to Marketo ABM customers – the integration of persona based segmentation into ABM campaigns. This is hardly a revolutionary capability, as the creation of personas is already possible using Smart Lists and Segmentation, but a dedicated persona creation wizard allows for better reporting options. The feature allows to customers to use the ABM dashboards to view how many contacts they have at their named accounts for each persona, which is certainly useful if you've invested in Marketo for your ABM toolkit. Dedicated platforms provide a more comprehensive feature set, but updates such as this help close the gap. More importantly, this feature does not rely only on job title. Personas can be built from 2 user defined fields as well as title, with groupings and categorisations in the control of the Marketo admin. That in itself is a benefit over the previous approach to personas – as this persona engine can be used in campaign segmentation. ### CC Emails The most useful new functionality in this release though is available to everyone. It is now possible to CC Marketo emails, allowing relevant contacts to be included on emails sent from Marketo. This is a long overdue feature that has been asked for at every customer I've worked with. Account managers and sales reps have always wanted to be copied on Marketo email campaigns to their contacts, and now they can be. It's a reasonable request. Sales own the relationship and want to use the marketing touches to drive the conversations they're having and close deals. It's just not been possible though, as until now no marketing automation platform allows you to copy internal stakeholders on an email sent through their tool. Marketo have broken the mould, by adding the capability to CC email campaigns, similar to how you would CC an email in Outlook. This option has been added to the email editor, so that the recipient's lead or account owner is copied on the email whenever it is sent from Marketo as part of a campaign. This should be used sparingly for large batch sends, but is very useful for nurture campaigns where volumes are lower and adding seeds to the recipient list is less useful due to irregular cadences and always on workflows. This feature is fully supported by the API too, which is even better and not always considered. Also added to the core platform are some updates to Munchkin web tracking. The tracking opt-out introduced a few months ago has been enhanced, and an option to not track specific pages automatically on page load has been added. There are use cases for this around single-page apps, where the page can reload automatically in whole or part, resulting in duplicate page view activities in the Marketo activity log. There are some improvements to the tracking of web domains that end in non-standard domain endings such as .io. These aren’t always picked up by tracking so can now be specified in the admin configuration within Marketo to ensure that all sites are tracked as they should be. These are not the only updates coming this month. There are major updates to Sales Engage and Bizible, as well as additional product updates due in the next few weeks. For full details of what's in the release, view the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Fall+'18) that can be found on Marketo Docs. ### Emerging from the Shadow URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/emerging-from-the-shadow/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:51:10.000Z One of the things that still surprises me in my day job as a consultant, is how difficult enterprise IT departments make it to share information and files with suppliers. Much of this is the fault of legacy systems, such as old SharePoint versions or old school FTP sites, but in today’s interconnected world making external collaboration difficult actually increases security risks. Too many IT departments still fail to realise this. Part of this is cultural. User experience is never going to be the number one priority for IT, nor is it supposed to be. Their job is security and availability, in that order. UX is still a consideration, but ranks third in the priority list. The never ending news cycle of data breaches has elevated preventing data leaks to the top of the IT to do list, GDPR re-enforced this trend. The problem is that implementing the right protections requires changes to business processes that other departments can be hesitant to adopt. This reinforces the unfortunate trend for people to refer to IT as the "No" department. Things are changing. Few IT departments these days still conform strictly to the "No" department stereotype. The Digital Transformation buzz has eliminated the tendency for IT to react to change by blocking it at the firewall, but they do still move slower than other departments. This is by design. IT departments have a large number of external technical standards that they need to comply with such as the ISO 27001 information security standard or the PCI payment card protection standard. These standards aren't just about configuring servers in a specific way, they enforce a set methodology that IT departments need to follow when developing applications, systems and processes. At the heart of this methodology is the concept of identifying and managing risk. Potential issues and threats are evaluated for both their severity and likelihood. Measures to reduce those risks are then identified and implemented. Failure to follow this approach, has financial consequences for the business. Other departments are rarely this methodical, often not considering the security or compliance landscape that firms operate under. This causes friction between employees looking to do their job and security or process oriented IT staff. Internal politics can reinforce this trend with CIOs often thinking that all technology should belong under their remit. The problem with the traditional IT approach is that applications are only useful if they fulfil the purpose they were designed to perform. This is one area where IT has had a bad reputation historically, preferring complex but technically interesting platforms that can be developed internally over a user friendly, off the shelf solution. Given that IT rarely have to use the line of business applications they're supporting, ease of use has never been given sufficient priority. This applies as much to leading enterprise software companies such as Oracle or Microsoft as it does to the IT departments who buy from them. The alternative approach of commissioning a developer to write a custom solution allows the software to meet usability requirements, but as the cost of reduced flexibility causing problems further down the line. Until the cloud came along there was nothing that frustrated sales or marketing teams could do about the complexity of your average enterprise software application. IT was the only place you could get new software for your team, unless you were lucky enough to have an Excel or Access guru on hand. Cheap online services changed everything, allowing anybody with a company credit card to buy the software they needed to get the job done, assuming you didn't just use your personal Dropbox account. This do it yourself approach is called Shadow IT. There is just one problem with Shadow IT - data security. Shadow IT bypasses all the security controls in place to prevent downtime and security incidents. This is a real concern to IT given that they are explicitly responsible for securing the businesses digital assets. If departments are using technologies and applications without their knowledge then they can't be held responsible for a breach, yet will often get blamed anyway. A decade ago, security breaches were more of a theoretical threat than a real one to many businesses. Numerous high profile examples have changed attitudes, but not as much as IT departments would like. Belatedly, there is an awareness on all sides that a balance needs to be struck. A new generation of enterprise software startups have transformed the marketplace. Business users have the opportunity to choose from a vast array of different products fitting every niche imaginable. In many companies, IT are letting them make that choice too just with a degree of oversight and education to ensure that security and compliance requirements are met. What's more, the established enterprise software players favoured by CIOs have begun to take notice of the competition. The cloud has opened up numerous markets to new entrants built using the same principles and technologies as consumer software. Companies such as Box or Google have provided much needed alternatives to an industry that was becoming increasingly deaf to their customer's needs. Oracle, Microsoft and SAP have been making real efforts to increase the user friendliness of their products. Even Sharepoint, long a byword for terrible UI, has been relaunched with a modern interface that just works (most of the time). They, like the IT managers who comprise their customer base, know that blocking the competition at the firewall is no longer an option. They've learned the hard way that the long-term solution to the Shadow IT threat, is to make sure that business users have no reason to bypass IT when making decisions about technology. Not before time. ### Forrester make a Sirius Decision URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/forrester-make-a-siriusdecisions/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:31:49.000Z It's been a year of mergers and big money purchases in the B2B martech space, with Adobe in particular splashing the cash for both Marketo and Magento. This week delivered news of another major acquisition – Forrester Research are buying SiriusDecisions for $245m. This is a good deal for both parties, making Forrester the market leader in an area they've been trying to expand into anyway and allowing Sirius to expand their offerings to a broader IT and B2C audience. Whilst not as high profile as some previous deals, it does indicate a broader shift in the market. Both Forrester and Sirius are research and advisory firms selling their analyst insights and market research to business leaders. Forrester's core customers are IT leaders, they're the number 2 technology advisory business behind Gartner. Sirius's core market is Marketing and Sales leaders – their Demand Waterfall framework is widely used across a range of B2B markets to model the pipeline and benchmark their business. The rise of marketing technology over the last few years has led to a convergence between Sirius's work and the work of Forrester or Gartner. Forrester publish their Forrester Wave market analysis charts for a range of marketing technologies including ABM, Lead Management and Marketing Automation. Gartner do likewise with their famous Magic Quadrants. Technology comparison may be their most well-known offering, but there's much more to Forrester than Waves and Quadrants. They also advise IT leaders on industry trends as well as strategies to meet them. Technology marketers buy this analysis and use it as third-party collateral to promote their own products and services. Sirius Decisions do much the same thing as Forrester, advising CMOs on Industry trends and priorities. They're best known for devising frameworks that Sales and Marketing leaders use to structure their activity, decide on strategy and set benchmarks. The sheer number of frameworks published by Sirius has led to confusion – there are three versions of the demand waterfall, with a framework to decide which one a business should use. Worse, there has been a feeling recently that Sirius have run out of new ideas. Their traditional approach to a new industry trend is to publish a framework which maps out how to solve it. However, they already have a framework for everything that a marketing department does. Their customers are now more interested in learning how to apply the existing frameworks rather than adopting new ones. ### Consumerisation of B2B The current challenges faced by marketing leaders lie outside of Sirius's core competency. They're brilliant at advising on go to market strategy, clarifying the decisions that need to be made and telling you what capabilities and structures you need to have to make it work. They have far less to say on selecting the technology to fill those gaps or the tactics and approaches required to implement the strategy that their frameworks advise. CMO priorities this year have been related to end to end customer experience and rebuilding databases depleted by GDPR. As a result, there has been a shift in approach away from outbound and event marketing towards attracting new prospects through inbound channels and retaining interest using personalised cross-channel experiences. These are approaches pioneered by B2C, and as a result, the technologies and tactics used by B2C marketers are seeing adoption in B2B. At the same time, there has been a renewed focus on customer marketing with CMOs investing in upgrading onboarding processes and customer education programs. The unifying factor in these two trends is the website - a brand's digital presence takes on a renewed importance, as do customer portals and campaign pages. Sirius have plenty to say on these topics, but it tends to be very generic. The most successful marketers though are finding out what works in a B2C context and figuring out how to adapt it to a B2B environment. Business users are still consumers, there's no reason why consumer tactics can't work in a business context. The best way to decide on the right tactics is through experience and testing rather than analyst advice. Where expert advice is needed, there is plenty of research into B2C marketing strategies from other analysts, including Forrester. The convergence of B2B and B2C does work both ways. Forrester's stated justification for the purchase is their desire to expand Sirius's target audience to B2C marketers and IT leaders. Much of Sirius's campaign strategy and taxonomy frameworks can be applied to consumer marketing, and their product PPM strategy could be adapted easily too. There are a lot of technology and manufacturing firms that sell to both B2B and B2C, so the ability of Forrester to advise on both sides of the business will be a competitive advantage. Many such companies operate separate marketing teams and technology stacks for their corporate and consumer audiences. Anything which increases alignment between the two would be appreciated by CMOs provided it doesn't impact results. ### The Technology Question Then there is Forrester's core audience. Relationships between IT and marketing tend to be difficult, with the primary sticking point being who owns the marketing technology stack. IT departments tend to believe that technology should fall under their remit for reasons that are not entirely selfish. As an inherently digital function, marketing owns more technology than other departments, so must deal with the same security, compliance and architectural issues that IT has to grapple with. There is a lot of research and advice out there about these subjects, but it's all targeted at IT folk. Repackaging that material into language that marketers understand would be appreciated by CMOs and marketing operations teams who have built complex tech stacks and are now struggling with linking it all together in a way that avoids duplication of capabilities. Forrester's bread and butter is advising CIOs on enterprise architecture and tech stack optimisation. They're far more involved with customers than Gartner analysts, and as a result, their research tends to be more practical and grounded in the reality of corporate priorities rather than the highly technical and often theoretical approach of their leading competitor. Sirius has been trying to make the same shift, but there is a feeling that it hasn't been entirely successful. They're still too focused on selling their frameworks rather than adapting them to fit the experiences of their customers. A pivot away from devising frameworks is needed, and their new owners are well placed to help with this. Forrester's strength is their ability to translate technology into terms that the C-Suite can understand, Sirius will only increase this advantage. It gives Forrester an unparalleled understanding of B2B marketing, which they can take to their existing IT customer base and educate them on the objectives and principles behind the marketing technology stack. This won't resolve the turf battles between IT and marketing, but if it deepens executive alignment, then CMOs everywhere will be grateful. Acquisitions always result in major changes as the process of integrating the two companies proceeds. In the case of SiriusDecisions, that's not a bad thing as they're struggling to remain relevant in a fast-changing market. Change is required. Whether being purchased by Forrester is the answer to their problems is yet to be determined, but at least initially it won't be a bad thing for them or for the rest of us. It merely reflects the direction that B2B Marketing is heading anyway. Markets abhor a vacuum. If this deal fails, then someone else will rise to fill the resulting thought leadership gap. There are plenty of analysts who would be interested in trying. ### Bridging the Reporting Gap URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/bridging-the-reporting-gap/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:32:08.000Z You've just launched your spectacular new campaign. Engagement is high, leads are flowing like water and the pipeline is bursting with new opportunities. Now comes the discussion about reporting. Decisions need to be made about what numbers to show the business, how to present them and the story to put behind them. You have a campaign code and UTM tracking, so no problem. At least that's how it's supposed to work. The reality tends to be far different. Getting coherent end to end reporting always seems to be the hardest part of any campaign. If you struggle with getting comprehensive reporting, start by checking if you have the right campaign codes and source tracking. Far too many marketers create one campaign code for the entire campaign and then run into trouble attributing leads to individual tactics further down the line. This is because campaign codes are typically designed to do two different and potentially contradictory things. They are mainly a mechanism for attribution - for reporting which leads came from which campaign so that ROI reporting further down the line accurately shows marketing's contribution to the bottom line. Business and Sales leadership typically only care about this at a high level, so campaign codes are high level to match. Granular campaign codes often get pushback from Sales teams who use them to make decisions about how to follow up MQLs. They find too detailed campaign codes a confusing chore, and would rather not have to deal with them. The conflict is that marketing want highly granular campaign codes so they can report on the success of every tactic individually. Marketing managers expect full funnel views, so they can see the status of every stage of the campaign and analyse results to inform the next one. Multi-level campaign hierarchies solve part of this problem. This approach allows the creation of parent and child campaigns, enabling the creation of more granular tactic or channel level codes that roll up into an overall campaign code for executive reporting. The one limitation of this approach is that these hierarchies only exist in CRM, so give a small part of the picture. ### The Data Gap When talking about attribution, restricting yourself to looking at leads attached to a campaign record in CRM is generally considered to be a good starting point. If your systems are configured according to best practice, any high value activity tracked by a marketing platform is added as a campaign response against the relevant campaign. If someone responds to enough campaigns they become a lead and get included in attribution reporting along with all the campaign responses logged against their record in CRM. This would be fine if all your marketing activity took place in sites and platforms that track every click or conversation back to a named individual in your CRM or your Marketing Automation. In the real world, nobody has that luxury. At least 50% of the buyer's journey takes place before you even know who the buyer is, and that number is going up not down. Sure, Google knows the names of the people hitting your website from search and PPC, but they're not sharing that with you, the same goes for the social networks. The majority of your website visitors are not linked back to known MA contacts until they fill in a form, which few people do. Campaign code based attribution misses out on all this activity because it takes place outside of your CRM and Marketing Automation platforms. Marketo and Eloqua only have information about known visitors linked to a contact in their database. What they do not have is any information about the overwhelming majority of website visits that are tracked in your Web analytics. Sure, your MA system might have anonymous website history, but it can't be used for reporting on inbound traffic. The net effect of this is that all this critically important website traffic ends up being left out of any funnel reporting, as well as any buyer's journey analysis. No one knows whether it actually contributed to a purchase because no one how the people visiting the site actually are. ### The Next Generation of Tools This reporting gap has given rise to a new generation of attribution focused reporting tools that can show lead volumes, funnel velocity and revenue contribution at every stage or level. The most prominent of these is [Bizible](https://www.bizible.com), who are now part of Marketo. They eliminate campaign codes entirely and pull all your data into a giant funnel dashboard with extensive drill down options. To get this to work, Bizible integrates with your entire tech stack from CRM through Marketing Automation and on to your website and Content platforms. This also have direct integrations with all the major ad platforms and social networks so they can extract page views, clicks and impressions to give the full picture. This is a revolutionary capability which exposes how little of the funnel Marketers have visibility of using traditional methods. Your BAU LinkedIn and Twitter updates all have an impact but are often ignored in attribution reporting because you don't have information on who is viewing what. Bizible claim to have that detail, and to be capable of linking it with opportunity data to prove ROI. Doing this reminds marketers that campaigns are not the only way to measure business results. The board is often more interested in the impact of marketing on the revenues of specific business units or product streams, while marketing leaders care more about the results of themes and tactics than individual activities. Campaigns are a budgeting and planning construct intended to group a related set of tactics into a coherent message with a clear journey. You think in terms of campaigns, but your audience does not. They only see the brand and the content across the channels they're using. In doing this, they align much better with the Bizible way of viewing the world than the traditional one. ### The Importance of Interpretation Individual campaigns are still relevant and for a good reason. The key is to remember why. When looking at campaign results, you are actually looking at the impact that specific messaging, design and channels are having on your pipeline. It can be difficult to interpret which of these three factors is causing success or failure for particular cases, but interpretation is generally focused on deciding the effects of individual campaign elements in these areas. Grouping related campaigns together adds clarity by allowing trends to be observed. Traditional reporting frameworks do enable this by using campaign fields to record the channel, themes and business units of the campaign. Campaign roll-up reporting is then used to draw comparisons. Such reports are critical when trying to interpret results and discover learnings, yet many marketers don't do enough of them. When doing roll-ups, remember that you need to consider the full picture, and that doesn't exist solely in your CRM system or only in your web analytics. A holistic view requires pulling all the various lead activity data sources into one location so that you can see the end to end impact of specific activities. Bizible can do this, but so can a data analyst in a BI tool if you have enough time and money. Bizible's advantage is they do all the work in getting that data for you. However, to get the most out of it, you need to be running a high level of activity across a wide range of channels otherwise you don't get the full benefit of their dashboards. Bizible can then empower you to map user journeys and spot trends in a way that the typical CMO dashboard can't match. The guiding principle behind robust reporting is that getting the right information is necessary but not sufficient. It's important not just to have all the relevant reporting data, you need to be able to analyse it and use it effectively. If you're relying on offline formats for your reporting, then this just isn't possible. You will always be limited to what the data can show. It can't be sliced, diced and explored until you discover the insights needed to make the report relevant to you and your team. Effective reporting is based upon shaping the data to fit the narrative you want to tell, but this requires all the right data to be available in the first place. It's surprising how difficult this is to achieve, but the right tools make it easier. The challenge then becomes drawing the correct conclusions, but that's a problem for humans rather than technology to solve. ### Oracle Eloqua 18D Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-18d-release-overview/ Last updated: 2018-11-30T12:08:33.000Z This week marks the final release in what has been a busy year for Eloqua releases. After a few years of lean updates, Oracle have been rolling out the big guns in 2018\. Q4 is no exception with the headline feature undoubtedly being the general release of the new landing page design editor. This was only released as a beta back in August but has proven to be far more stable and usable than expected, so has been fast tracked for GA this quarter. It fills an important feature gap for Oracle, allowing the easy creation of well designed form landing pages. This is something that Marketo have with their guided landing pages, but Eloqua lacked. The Eloqua version is less flexible but has the advantage that there is no need for a developer to code the initial template. A simple registration page can be built from scratch with no coding skills. There are a few limitations with the editor if you want control over spacing or dimensions, the adjustment of which can vary between fiddly and impossible to set. However, for the average marketing user, the new templates are really user friendly so long as you keep it simple. A designer would be frustrated with the limitations caused by the strict wireframe and restrictions in HTML usage, but a basic one or two column template with a banner is definitely possible. Unlike competitive products, these templates are genuinely modular out of the box, so can be extended with additional content if needed, which is also a strong positive. The landing page editor beta has been so successful that Oracle have now announced the depreciation of the old WYSIWYG email and landing page design editors. As of May 2019, the option to create assets using these old drag and drop PowerPoint style editors will be removed, with the ability to edit existing assets disabled in August. Usage of these editors is low, with most Eloqua customers switching in recent years to the HTML editors due to the lack of support for responsive design in the legacy design editors. However, the HTML editor has always been fragile, as it is far too easy to accidentally break assets when editing them using the preview pane. If you're running into these issues, then the new editors are definitely be worth considering, so long as you're comfortable with having more basic layouts and much less sophisticated designs. Either way, the HTML editors are going nowhere. ### Salesforce Integration App Over the longer term, the most significant feature in this release will be the closed beta of the new Salesforce integration app. This has been coming for a long time. When Oracle brought Eloqua, they threw out the existing native Oracle Sales Cloud integration and developed a new one using the app cloud framework. This Oracle CRM app went GA last year, and now a few lucky customers get the Salesforce version. The key benefit is not so much the app itself, but instead the ability to use it on program canvas and campaign canvas. The existing native integration requires program builder, which limits how fast it can run - adding delays of minutes or hours to lead creation in CRM. Program canvas runs much faster. The key question is whether it will retain the flexibility of the existing integration, whilst being easier to use and configure. Other systems have deeper integrations with Salesforce, but Eloqua's is the most flexible. With the current setup Oracle support much more complex multi-CRM scenarios compared to their competitors as well as vastly more custom configurations. This is one of the major selling points of the product. Although, if the feature set of the Sales Cloud integration app is any indicator, then this shouldn't be a problem. ### Forms There are yet more updates to form configuration options in this release. Last time, some UI enhancements were made to processing step conditions. This time they're adding starts with, ends with, contains and not operators. None of this is new functionality as the same conditions were already possible using wildcards, but the updated UI is welcome and makes the capability more obvious. One of the big pushes in recent years has been around form security. Continuing this theme is a new option on form fields to reject form submissions that contain HTML. This option will be enabled by default, so be aware of this if you use forms to post email or landing page content into Eloqua for any reason. The primary users of HTML in form submissions are spammers though, so this has the nice side effect of restricting spambots. The ability to restrict forms to internal usage will help too. These forms will only be visible in Eloqua, so can't be used by people who aren't logged into the app. There are several use cases for this one related to project management and program workflows with the form post app, so the option is more useful than it might initially seem. ### Dashboards The ever increasing number of built-in dashboards get a new landing page with a tabbed view to group them together by type. Users also get a closed loop reporting dashboard, so that attribution information can be viewed in Eloqua without delving into Insight. Not all Eloqua customers use this functionality, so its benefit is limited. The addition of the email click-through visualiser to the email dashboard has broader utility. This report already exists as a standalone option in the email editor, but it is good to have it in the same page as the other email reporting. Insight gets extra customisation options to go alongside the ability to assign an analyser license to any Eloqua user. This is now a self-service capability that admins can grant to users through user management without requiring support cases. Also in Insight, more reports get the time span option on the prompt screen, including the widely used Email Analysis Overview report. There are additional customisation options to the website and closed loop reports in Insight as well. Some reports had been locked to prevent editing, but Oracle are gradually going through the affected ones and adding customisation options or tweaking their content so this restriction can be removed. ### Cloud Apps There is a new capability on campaign canvas - the ability to set scheduling restrictions on action steps that call a cloud app, allowing users to set time windows during which they want apps to run. This functionality already exists for email steps, and is most often used for nurture tracks to ensure that emails are only sent during working hours. That capability is now extended to third party communication channels that are run from Eloqua campaigns such as SMS apps or WeChat. It can also be used for data updates and integrations being run from program canvas, if needed. There is a new cloud integration as well - with the image library on Oracle Content and Experience Cloud - allowing images stored in this platform to be accessed directly from Eloqua when selecting images in the email and landing page editors. Customers need to be subscribed to both products to get the benefit. Alongside these features are the usual array of minor changes and API updates. This time they affect options such as campaign canvas activation (which now defaults to the current server time, just in case the clock on the user's PC is wrong), campaign end dates (which can no longer be edited on upload) and picklists (no longer display quicklists in the UI, but does show how many options in each list). There is also enhanced error visibility on forms and campaign canvas steps, as well as new APIs for landing pages and forms. Overall, the release is a positive one. Eloqua administrators should definitely be looking at the new landing page capabilities. Particularly, if they're still using the legacy design editors as these will be going away in six months time. Oracle do have a history of announcing aggressive depreciation deadlines for old features and then pushing them out in response to customer feedback, but there is no guarantee that will happen in this case. Also, admins should take a note to review Analyser permissions in Insight, if they haven't already, as there may be users who would benefit from this capability if they have sufficient skill with BI tools. The new Insight is a substantial improvement over the old one, even for standard users. The Oracle Eloqua 18D Update is scheduled for November 16th, 2018\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentioned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/18C-eloqua-nfs.htm). ### ABM Simplified: Building Blocks for Success URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/abm-simplified-building-blocks/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:32:25.000Z You know you want to run Account Based Marketing. Yet, you're stuck on the complexity of the typical ABM campaign. It's hard pulling together your target account list and writing enough personalised content for your target list to receive. It doesn't have to be that way. ABM doesn't need to involve writing bespoke content for each account or building a complex content hub. These things are definitely useful if you have the budget, but are not essential for success. For a start it is perfectly fine to use the content you've already got. New content is useful if you've got gaps in your library, but the content needed for ABM is no different from that required for regular campaigns. It's still about identifying a need that you can address and then offering the product or service to solve that problem. The solutions and high level messaging relevant to your target accounts are the same as those needed for the rest of your prospect base. The difference between an ABM approach and the traditional approach is not what you're saying to your audience but instead how you say it. ABM is best thought of as a nurture strategy. The goal is to 'land and expand' by identifying some initial interest and then building engagement over the medium term until the account is ready to buy. Unlike a traditional nurture campaign, individual leads are not viewed in isolation. This is the critical difference between ABM and traditional demand generation. The activity and profile of one lead at a target account is used when deciding segmentation or qualification for all leads at that account. If one individual is engaged with content surrounding a particular need or solution area, then you use that to send related messaging to everyone else at the account. The problem is that out of the box, marketing automation doesn't do this particularly well. All the major MA platforms support accounts, but they're very much an afterthought included so that account information can be included in contact based segmentation. They rely on the CRM system to link new leads to account records, and don't allow you to segment or report on activity at the account level. This limits the capabilities of Eloqua or Marketo to support ABM, opening the way for a huge array of tools to support ABM campaigns in their place. ### Building the Foundations Fortunately, there are workarounds for those unable to invest in new technology. More sophisticated Eloqua users were building account based scoring even before people started talking about ABM. There are limitations in what you can do without the Eloqua or Marketo ABM modules, but building a simple account scoring model can be done in the base version of both platforms, provided you're integrated with a CRM system. Much like traditional lead scoring, an account scoring model can be used to make decisions about whether accounts should be on your target list, whether you should be nurturing them or whether they are ready to be routed to Sales. If you have the right data in place account scores can also be used to identify which solutions or products you should be promoting to an account. To make the most of account scoring, you need to have a process for matching incoming leads to your account target accounts. Otherwise, your account scores will be missing out on the activity performed by a large chunk of your database. The matching process can be done manually if volumes are low enough or through your CRM if you have the mechanisms in place to enable it there. Expedite this process by creating marketing automation workflows to identify leads that have the same email domain or company name as one of your target accounts. ### Expanding an Account Putting in place the right scoring and data setup allows a full ABM campaign to be run to known contacts at your target accounts with little difficulty. The challenge is in building up the list of known contacts to feed into that campaign. At a high level, this requires the same inbound tactics that you already use for your demand generation campaigns. Social, programmatic and paid all have their place here. The key is to use the audience selection tools of your chosen advertising networks so that you're only targeting relevant roles at your target accounts. Some of the more consumer focused tools don't allow you to filter by company though. The most important platform this affects is Google Ads a restriction which does limit the usefulness of Adwords in an ABM strategy. One of the key selling points of a dedicated ABM tool such as Demandbase or Engagio is their ability to automate the inbound component of your account based campaigns. These platforms take your account list from Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, match it against activity data from across the web and then target ads to the ones that have been searching for your keywords on search engines or publisher websites. Demandbase even runs your ad campaigns through their own DMP, so that results can be displayed in their reporting tools. All this can be done manually; it just takes more effort to run. After all, you or your media agency has been doing manually for years to run your other advertising campaigns. Targeting your ads based on company is not that much different from the other targeting criteria you were using before ABM. ### Proving Results The key advantage that the dedicated ABM platforms have is reporting. One of the main challenges marketers have is proving ROI on inbound activities. Using conversion pixels and Google Analytics UTM codes in your links helps, but there is still a disconnect between the known contact reporting you're getting from your marketing automation platform and the anonymous traffic reports you're getting from your media agency. Your web analytics will include most of the information you need. It just needs to be linked together with the contact data in your MA and CRM. The source tracking can be combined with the contact level activity data in your MA as well as the lead and opportunity data in CRM to build an end to end funnel view of every campaign. You just need a BI tool such as Tableau or Power BI to pull the three sources of data into one set of dashboard reports. More importantly, combining all your different reporting sources together is the only way to show whether you genuinely are building momentum at your target accounts. If an account is engaging on a particular topic, send the key contacts more about it. As always, content is king. Matching the right message to each target account is where your campaign will succeed or fail. If an account in your target list isn't engaging, be prepared to send them a different message or replace them with a different company who are showing intent. It is important to give ABM time, whilst also remembering that many of your target accounts will be happy buying from your competitors. Focus on the easier targets rather than the glamorous ones. Putting the foundations in place for successful ABM doesn't have to involve buying lots of expensive technology although doing so will make your life easier. Instead, it's about making sure you have the right data in the right places as well as the methods to reach that audience through the most relevant channels. The difficult part is then finding the message which is applicable to each account. Modern marketing is a conversation between you and your prospects. When you run ABM, that conversation becomes a group discussion between you and the entire buying team at your target accounts. This is why the strategy is so successful, but it does require getting the basics right first. Fortunately, there is more than one method of doing this. You just need to find the one which works for you and your customers. ### Blue meets Red URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/blue-meets-red/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:50:25.000Z Over the weekend IBM announced that they were buying Red Hat for $34bn, in the world's largest ever software acquisition. Leaving aside the eye-watering price tag, the general reaction has been decidedly mixed with IBM shares falling by 5%. This was not a deal that anyone had seen coming. Red Hat employees were horrified, with some saying that they'd prefer the company to have been purchased by their former archenemies in Microsoft rather than by IBM. Not a comfortable prospect for the world's second largest contributor to Linux. The concern is one of cultural fit. IBM have strong open source credentials. They've supported running Linux on their mainframes for a long time. However, they have a highly traditional corporate culture. Red Hat are a fast-growing and dynamic company with a famously open culture. As the champions of Linux in the enterprise, they've built a highly successful business developing and supporting Open Source software for the world's largest firms. This has led them to become the Switzerland of the cloud business, building upon relationships established within the Linux Foundation to develop alliances with everybody in the industry. All the major cloud providers allow you to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux on their platforms, and their software can be used to manage an entire cloud infrastructure. They have a bright future as the unifying force that binds the many disparate cloud providers together. IBM, on the other hand, are a company in terminal decline. Their profits still come from the shrinking mainframe business despite high profile attempts to pivot towards AI and the cloud. They've been successful in generating publicity for their Watson AI, but have not been able to turn it into a revenue stream. The head of the Watson business unit stepped down last week after disappointing financials in their Health business. There have been reports of layoffs to accompany the change in leadership. The modern IBM is still a giant, with quarterly revenues of $20bn, but it is radically different from the Big Blue of days gone by. Their historical position was built on their industry-leading hardware, but most of that business has been sold to Lenovo in an attempt to please Wall Street and boost profit margins. These days their point remaining hardware are the mainframes they're synonymous - a market they've dominated since the 1960s. This dominance opened connections to the C-Suite that their competitors couldn't match, allowing the company to complement their hardware with end to end to solutions using software and services their competitors simply didn't have. In recent years, the world has moved on. Mainframes are a legacy technology, increasingly being replaced by cloud servers. IBM have attempted to change to, developing into a software and services company with ambitions to match Amazon and Google in the cloud space. The problem is that very few people care about IBM's cloud portfolio. The pioneers in the public cloud arena are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. IBM are also rans and copycats, selling add-on services to their shrinking band of mainframe users. Their market position as the 4th largest provider reflects this. Many companies would be satisfied with this position, but IBM are not one of them. Their cloud business is profitable, but it has little traction outside their existing customer base. For a company with a long and proud tradition of being pioneers in a wide variety of computing fields, mindshare is as important as market share. Buying Red Hat is an attempt to obtain the market position they've been unable to establish independently. Their desperation is evident in how much they're overpaying for their new acquisition. The big idea is that a combination of Red Hat and IBM could dominate the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud spaces. Red Hat could be used to run and manage workloads hosted across multiple data centres and cloud providers, leaving Amazon, Microsoft and Google to fight it out for public cloud revenues. It's undoubtedly true that IBM's core customer base are interested in hybrid cloud, the problem is that Amazon and Microsoft are also well placed to provide a solution. Microsoft already offer a version of Azure that you can run in your own data centres, while Amazon have developed a close relationship with VMware, who also have a strong hybrid cloud message based on their hypervisor dominance. Other companies, such as Rackspace or F5, offer multi-cloud solutions. Nor is any of this really thought-leading. Hybrid Cloud has been a talking point for years, but with limited ability to back-up the hype. Technology has finally made hybrid cloud possible, but IBM aren't actually offering anything new to the market. They're just trying to leverage their scale to sell Red Hat's existing solutions. In doing so, they could jeopardise Red Hat's position as the vendor neutral solution. If IBM try to limit Red Hat's capabilities on other clouds then customers will simply move to a different Linux distribution. Switching cloud providers is a lot harder than switching which version of Linux you use. This would allow another Linux vendor to move in and fill the gap, leaving IBM right where they started. Then they really would be irrelevant, just with a lot less money. ### Are You Running Effective Webinars? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/are-you-running-effective-webinars/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:33:02.000Z A regular webinar series has been the mainstay of campaign calendars for a long time. They frequently serve as an anchor for the marketing event program, fitting around local seminars, regional tradeshows and global summits as required. In part, this is because they are cheaper to produce and easier to run than a physical event. The biggest cost is generally the time required by the presenter to prepare their presentation, which rarely impacts marketing budgets. As a result, the most successful programs have streamlined the task of promoting a webinar until it has become a highly efficient production line. They are frequently the most automated demand generation initiative, relying heavily on marketing automation to send invites and drive attendance. A high proportion of webinar registrations are generated through email, even when they are promoted across social and other inbound channels. This results in webinars being targeted to middle or bottom of funnel audiences because these align with the interests of the typical mailing list. However, recent research into actual buying decisions from Sirius Decisions reveals that prospects are generally most interested in attending webinars at top of funnel, during the education phase of the buying cycle. Interest in webinars drops off significantly as leads progress through the funnel. ### The right audience? The takeaway from this is that Marketers should be pitching their webinars to top of funnel audiences through web and social channels. Topic choices and session content should align with top of funnel thought leadership and general best practice messaging, rather than brand or product detail. Product webinars are typically more relevant to an audience of existing customers or partners than to prospects. As such, the primary focus of the presentation should be a business challenge that your audience is facing. Don't cut the product content from the presentation, but think of it as a 5-minute segment at the end. The main segment shouldn't be about you at all, but instead be about your customers. Prospects will join the webinar expecting a product pitch at some point in the presentation. However, this isn't what they're actually interested in. By giving 20 minutes of engaging content your audience cares about, you earn their attention for the product or solution messages that you as the marketer are looking to drive conversion. There is anecdotal evidence to back this up. The fastest growing webinar technology platforms, promote themselves on their ability to drive new prospects to your existing webinar library, rather than their presenter or organiser experience. Take BrightTalk as an example. Their unique selling point is their ability to build webinar attendances on behalf of marketers by cross-promoting related webinars of different brands. In theory, this allows decision makers to discover webinars through browsing the BrightTalk platform rather than having to rely on your promotional activity. In this respect, they are more akin to a social network such as YouTube or SlideShare than a traditional webinar platform such as WebEx. Using BrightTalk does have its downsides, the social network type structure means that ultimate control over the attendee experience lies with BrightTalk rather than the Marketer. Many companies have chosen not to use the platform because of concern that registrants may end up consuming a competitor's content after registering for their event. If BrightTalk is viewed as more akin to a content syndication channel, then this compromise makes more sense. Other platforms such as ON24, don't include the social element but heavily promote their webinar library features. This has the same result but ensures prospects aren't exposed to events run by other brands. ### Social Experience Webinar recordings have long been viewed as an asset to be included in the corporate content library. Now, the live webinar itself has also become another asset to be used as part of a broader campaign. Webinars are no longer an event tactic but are instead a larger part of a Marketer's inbound strategy. As with any inbound tactic the key to success is driving registrations through multiple channels, especially email and social. Personal invitations are still relevant too. Webinars are useful for Sales as a platform to re-engage cold prospects or to push cross-sell and up-sell, so make sure that Sales and field marketing teams are equipped with the messaging and enablement tools they need to attract registrations. Location is no barrier to attendance. Many global enterprises organise their webinars on a regional basis. There are good reasons for this, as it allows them to tailor their content to local audiences. European or Asian audiences frequently have different priorities and perspectives compared to North American audiences. However, you will inevitably receive registrations and attendees from out of region. Be aware of this, and embrace it. For top of funnel audiences this isn't generally a problem, as presenters in each region are typically putting a different spin on the same core themes. It's only when you start talking about product detail that this becomes a real problem. ### Acquire New Names Webinars are a leading method for online education. There are good reasons for this, as no other top of funnel tactic allows you to go into as much depth with audiences. Use them to get prospects thinking about the right problems and asking the right questions so that you can continue the conversation across other channels. At the same time, don't waste the opportunity to use webinar registrations to build your database and push new contacts into broader multi-channel campaigns. Getting new prospects to fill out a form in exchange for a PDF is hard because they don't see any benefit to themselves in doing so. They're often sceptical about whether a white paper is worth the valuable personal details they would give up for it. The same individual will happily give out the same information when signing up for a webinar because they know what to expect and understand that there are valid reasons for needing to provide personal information. A webinar is a known quantity. Attendees go into it expecting to see a 45-minute presentation in return for their name and email address. ### Follow Up Engagement The key challenge then becomes getting consent into further communications at the same time. A regular webinar series is one of the best ways of feeding your nurture programs because you know that the contacts you're adding are already engaged. They filled in a form to register for the webinar. So make sure that form has an opt-in checkbox on it. If this is ticked, start nurturing straight away. Even if a prospect doesn't opt in on initial registration remember that post-event follow up emails provide a second chance to acquire an opt-in. The value of a good follow up email sent in a timely manner is frequently underestimated, and as a result, they're often an afterthought put together at the last minute. This is a missed opportunity because follow up emails are the perfect time to get additional engagement whilst the prospect is still interested. Think of it as the first stage of the next campaign, in addition to being the conclusion of the current webinar campaign. Even a poor follow up email will get 3-4 times more opens than an outbound invite or a nurture email sent at the same time. As such, always include relevant white papers or additional video content in your follow up emails, alongside the recording and presentation. This extra content then forms the start of a digital nurture track, that is designed to build sufficient engagement to get the lead in front of sales. Few attendees will be ready for Sales contact immediately, and those that are will let you know during the session, but then lead generation is a secondary objective of a top of funnel webinar. The primary purpose of a webinar campaign is to raise awareness and educate your audience during a 45-minute session in which you have the undivided attention of new prospects. In a world of constant time pressures and short attention spans that's a rare opportunity for Marketers. It's essential that you make the most of it. ### Pardot Winter '19 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/pardot-winter-19-release-overview/ Last updated: 2018-10-19T08:28:11.000Z Fresh from Dreamforce, the Salesforce winter release is now upon us. Headlining the release is some new forecasting capabilities surrounding account territories. However, another key focus appears to be encouraging adoption of the lighting experience. It has been several years since lightning was first launched, but relatively few established Salesforce customers have made the migration due to the complexity of the migration process. The general availability of Pardot in Lightning Experience is part of this push. This has been in beta for 6 months, and now finally reaches full release. It integrates Pardot directly into the Sales Cloud Lightning Experience for reporting and activity tracking. This allows for Pardot campaigns, activity and assets to be included in Salesforce reporting. With Lightning enabled, customers no longer need to use Pardot's weak reporting capabilities to prove campaign results because all the data needed to build reports is available within Salesforce Einstein Analytics as well as directly within Salesforce. The integration also replaces the Engage sales enablement plugin, ensuring that the capabilities of this tool match equivalent offerings from Marketo and Eloqua. As a result, the full prospect engagement history can now be displayed to Sales within Salesforce. ### Engagement The primary updates in this release are to Engagement Studio, as part of the ongoing process of bringing Pardot's workflow engine up to match the competition. This includes repeating programs that allow prospects to enter and run through an engagement program more than once. Copy and paste of program steps matches a feature already in Eloqua. So are the more granular reporting and user permissions that round out the upgrade. The most significant change is actually the ability to send non-marketing emails through Pardot. This can be used for support communications and customer lifecycle emails, which previously could not be sent through Pardot. At first glance, the new operational emails feature is minor, but it indicates a shift in Pardot's usage policy. Historically, Pardot have had an extremely strict opt-in policy that they rigorously enforce on customers. Failure to comply can lead to account termination. Now, there is a setting in the email editor that allows admins (and only admins) to send emails to opted out contacts. Also in this area is an integration change that allows the Pardot opt-out flag to be reset from Salesforce. Previously, the only way to opt-in a previously opted-out contact was to ask a Pardot admin to do it, or for the contact to make the update using a preference page. ### Integration Updates There are a few other updates to the Salesforce integration. Most notably the ability to sync Pardot campaign membership to the matching Salesforce campaign. Previously, this wasn't possible, which limited the usefulness of the connected campaigns feature that launched with much fanfare over the summer. Now connected campaigns merit further investigation as they allow Pardot campaigns to be used for first touch attribution and Salesforce Campaigns to be used for multi-touch models with no conflict. For admins, there is a new integration capability that eliminates an annoyance found across all marketing automation platforms. When a new field in Pardot is mapped to a Salesforce field, the contents of that field are not updated on existing contacts in the marketing automation platform. A manual update is required. Pardot will now handle that process automatically. ### Partnerships There are still a number of areas where Pardot has no native solution to compete with competing platforms. Account based marketing is one particularly major feature gap. Consequently, it is interesting to see that Salesforce are leaning on Demandbase for this capability. Demandbase launched a new integration with Pardot earlier this year, which was promoted heavily at Dreamforce. This does fill the gap but at the cost of requiring Demandbase, which is far from cheap. There has been a definite increase in the number of technology vendors integrating with Pardot over the last year, particularly at the enterprise end of the market. Until recently, vendors typically only supported Marketo, Eloqua and occasionally Hubspot. Many platforms still have a much deeper integration with Marketo or Eloqua than anything else. Demandbase are unusual in that they have leveraged their Salesforce integration to build a much deeper connection with Pardot than with other marketing automation platforms. With Pardot becoming a more integrated part of the Salesforce family, the quality and quantity of third-party integrations with it will continue to increase. This is good news for both Salesforce and their customers. ### Marketo Fall '18 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-fall-18-release-overview/ Last updated: 2018-10-12T07:30:00.000Z Fresh from the news of their impending acquisition by Adobe, this month marks a major milestone for Marketo. They kicked off October with a rebrand, launching a refreshed website sporting a brand new logo. Now it's time for a slightly delayed Q3 release, that features a substantial update to Marketo Sky and a number of product launches. ### Marketo Sky The Fall release is headlined by the first significant update to Marketo Sky. This is the new product user experience first launched in a limited form back in May. Since then it has received monthly updates that have gradually migrated existing features from the old user experience to the new. Throughout this time it has remained limited to a small selection of program and asset configuration screens in the Marketing Activities area of the product. This month marks the debut of Design Studio and email programs within the new UI. Sky is still nowhere near ready for customers to use instead of the existing UI, but there is definite progress. Over recent months there have been a number of small but useful improvements within Sky, including the ability to hide the navigation tree in the UI, as well as updated icons within that tree. The ability to hide the tree is long overdue, and does make a big difference on a laptop screen. In the most recent release was the addition of the full system navigation to Sky, complete with subscription information and a main menu. This has made a significant difference in making Sky look like a working product, rather than just an early mock-up. Perhaps the biggest addition in recent months was the new Marketing Activities home page, which uses a dashboard style design to provide a list of recently edited assets and scheduled campaigns, both of which can be filtered by program and asset type. This is a useful feature, particularly given finding this information in the classic UI can be difficult. ### Sales Engage After launching last quarter, the new Sales Tool product gets a much deeper integration with Salesforce, and crucially gains support for Salesforce Lightning Experience. This allows Sales Engage to be embedded directly into Salesforce within both the Classic and Lightning UIs, allowing the lead discovery and sales acceleration functionality within the tool to be available directly in the system Sales most want it. Sales Engage also gets an updated version of the ToutApp Outlook plugin that uses Microsoft's Office 365 extensions framework so that the plugin is available within Outlook across Windows, Mac and the Web. As part of this, Outlook emails can be included as engagements in a Sales campaign, thus allowing true 1 to 1 personalisation and the improved deliverability that comes with sending email through corporate mail servers rather than Marketo's bulk mail servers. Using this capability still retains all the response tracking capabilities found in a marketing email. Existing plugin features such as lead discovery, calendar integration and Outlook email templates are still available in the new release across all the supported Outlook versions. Sales Engage also gets a refreshed admin UI, particularly in relation to Salesforce settings, as well as real-time password validation when setting a password. This latter function extends the existing Marketo password validation workflow to Sales Engage and the ToutApp product that Sales Engage is based on. ### Other Updates The Marketing Performance Insights reporting add-on gets another comprehensive update in this release, with a multitude of small UI enhancements as well as support for ABM Named Accounts and engagement activity dates when filtering reports. The time range of reporting has been extended to the full 24 months of reporting data that Marketo has available. Like all the major marketing automation platforms, activity data is deleted after this timeframe due to GDPR considerations. The most significant UI change though is that MPI now alerts users if the report they’re viewing is being limited by missing data. A notification centre has been added to the UI (already available in the main Marketo product and Sky), with alerts and notifications detailing the gaps. Where possible instructions will be given on how to fill those gaps. For instance, a link will be provided to populate missing acquisition date and program details for affected contacts. Marketo's web personalisation tools gain support for workspaces, allowing web personalisation assets to be restricted to Marketo users within specific business units or regions. Workspaces are the primary mechanism for controlling user access to asset folders, so seeing this extended to RTP is long overdue. This quarter's API update fixes an odd oversight in the lead API. Until now, it has not been possible to view the out of the box email status fields using the lead APIs. This has now been corrected, with fields such as unsubscribe, black list and marketing suspended fields all accessible to the API. These are not the only updates coming this month. There are major updates to Bizible, as well as additional product updates due in the next few weeks. However, for full details of what's in the current release, view the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Fall+'18) that can be found on Marketo Docs. ### Igniting the Future of Productivity URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/igniting-the-future-of-productivity/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:50:09.000Z Microsoft held their customer conference last week. There were a number of big announcements related to the future of Office and Windows that provided clues to the new direction this behemoth of enterprise computing is taking. Firstly, Windows is no longer Microsoft's core product. It's never been officially announced, but it's been clear for a while that their core focus is on the Azure and Office 365 cloud platforms rather than PCs. Microsoft disbanded their Windows division earlier this year in a re-org, splitting it between the Office and Azure businesses. Emblematic of this change, was the announcements last week that OneDrive Files on Demand would be released for Mac. This was the headline feature of a recent Windows feature update. It quickly became a key benefit to using Windows. Releasing it to Mac benefits Office and OneDrive at the expense of removing that differentiator. Windows is now just a component of a broader bundle of end user productivity applications that together comprise Microsoft 365\. The Office desktop apps that everyone uses on both Windows and Mac are another part of this suite. Taken as a whole, Microsoft 365 is a set of applications that extends across the entire range of office productivity, security and communication scenarios. Some of the software included is best in class, whereas others are the type of clunky me too efforts that drive people to Macs. The core of Microsoft 365 is not the apps installed on your PC, despite its inclusion of their two most famous products. It's the web services that sit behind them which matter. Exchange, SharePoint and Active Directory provide the foundation of Microsoft's productivity services, everything else is built-in top of them. Office is now just a set of tools to access and edit data stored on the Exchange email server or SharePoint document management system. Like these services, Office is available everywhere and is constantly being updated. The proof can be seen in the release of Office 2019, which happened during the conference. Historically, Microsoft Office releases have been a big deal for IT and the technology press, but this one got little coverage because it didn't contain any new features. Everything in it had already been released as feature updates to Office 365 subscribers years ago. Furthermore, the two biggest new features of Office - autosave and shared editing - were both conspicuous by their absense despite being in the Office 365 versions of the same apps. The reason given was that these features required SharePoint to function. Microsoft are also planning a major UI change to Office, but saw no need to time it coincide with the launch of the new version as in the past. ### New Features The biggest indicator of the reduced importance of Windows was the announcement of Azure Virtual Desktops. This is a technology that Microsoft has had for at least five years, but has chosen to hold back to avoid canabalising their desktop and server businesses. Previously, VDI had been restricted to the server and enterprise versions of Windows. Last week, it was made available to everyone provided they're willing to pay for the desktop to be hosted on Azure. A key motivator for releasing this is the impending retirement of Windows 7 in early 2020\. Azure Virtual Desktops will be allowed to run this OS for several years after the official end of life date, providing a mechanism for companies to run Windows 7 in a supported environment without paying extortionate amounts for extended support contracts. This is big news to security and compliance teams who have to deal with legacy apps. Also last week, came the release of password-free authentication technology for Office 365 and Azure. This uses the Microsoft authenticator mobile app and biometrics to replace passwords on Windows devices. Then there is Microsoft Search, an integration of the search technologies within Windows, Bing and Office into one platform. Searching through one of those tools will bring you results from all of them. At first glance the value of this may seem limited. That's because it only benefits those Microsoft customers who use Office 365 for email, documents and instant messages. This gives the ability to search all that data directly from Windows. It might even give them a reason to use Bing. ### Cloud First Microsoft now seem to be actively trying to migrate their on-premises server customers to the cloud. In the space of a year, Microsoft 365 has gone from being a disparate collection of gimped cloud services, to being more fully featured than their on-premises alternatives. This is particularly true for the SMB version, which now supports a hybrid model. Support for working alongside on-premises infrastructure was added earlier this year. ### The Subscription Model Microsoft want their smaller customers to move to a cloud only infrastructure model, but in a way which allows the new and the old to be run side by side. There are financial reasons for this - the desire to move Windows to a subscription model is an open secret. Enterprises have been paying for Windows on a subscription basis for decades. This gives them additional features and more flexibility around upgrades and downgrades. Their ability to charge consumers for Windows was killed by the smartphone. The focus instead is the legions of small businesses running Windows Pro, who until now have had no reason to pay for the OS independently of the device it came on. By bundling Windows with the cloud services needed to secure and manage it they've found a formula which works for both Microsoft and customers. This strategy is a legacy of their current CEO, Satya Nadella. Prior to taking the top job a few years ago, he was the man responsible for bringing Azure to market and building it into the number two cloud platform behind Amazon. This transformed a dull but growing server business into a market leading cloud services provider. Now the rest of the company is going through the same transition, with Office having a head start due to Office 365 having all the foundations in place already. In doing this, they have made a virtue of their on-premises legacy. Their ability to deeply integrate with existing windows based servers and infrastructure is a unique selling point. ### A Microsoft without Windows? The Windows business has been affected most profoundly by the shift to a cloud first business model. After losing in the mobile market, some analysts questioned whether Microsoft had a future. The company was built on the success of Windows, and looked like it would decline into irrelevance with it. Now, Azure runs Linux, Dynamics on Mac and Office on mobile. All three would still be market leaders in a world without Windows. The success or otherwise of Windows is now irrelevant to Microsoft's ultimate fate. This is a dramatic transformation for a company who historically has done everything possible to protect their Windows monopoly on PCs. Indeed, the story of Dynamics is most instructive. A few years ago after a previous re-org, it had an awkward position sitting outside the rest of the corporate structure. Most analysts expected it to be sold. After a brief flirtation with buying Salesforce, Dynamics has become deeply embedded with Office 365 and integral to their future. Perhaps, Windows will experience a similar turnaround in future. Don't bet on it. ### Adobe and Marketo: The Right Engagement URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/adobe-and-marketo-the-right-engagement/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:39:16.000Z It's been known for some time that Marketo was for sale to the right bidder at the right price. Rumours about the eventual ownership of the company have been circulating since the day Vista Equity Partners brought them back in 2016\. Nevertheless, last week's news that Adobe are buying Marketo in a $4.75bn deal was received with widespread surprise. What caught people out was the timing - no one saw a deal this soon. The belief was that Vista would sell out to a major industry player in 2019 or 2020, with SAP or Microsoft often assumed to be likely buyers. Both have substantial B2B CRM customer bases, but no marketing automation play. Adobe have been linked too, but were often discounted due to their B2C focus, or the overlap between Marketo and Adobe Campaign. The logic behind this deal is obvious. Marketing Automation is the only part of the marketing technology stack where Adobe don't already have an industry-leading solution. Marketo will now fill that gap, in what is an excellent deal for both parties. In the past, Adobe have tried to use Campaign to fill the B2B automation gap, but this hasn't worked for customers. Campaign is an excellent platform for B2C, but B2B companies have often struggled with its quirky and somewhat limited capabilities on the lead management side. In the last year, Adobe have removed those capabilities, a long overdue move that focuses the product on its core functionality as a platform for B2C campaign orchestration. In contrast, the rest of Adobe's experience cloud portfolio has had significant success amongst B2B as well as B2C. Adobe Experience Manager is used by an increasing number of B2B brands as their CMS because it's an incredibly flexible product that scales well to enterprise use cases. At the heart of AEM's success is its tight integration with their Target personalisation tools, their Audience Manager DMP and Adobe Analytics, the leading competitor to the ubiquitous Google Analytics. This allows large scale websites to take advantage of the highly targeted web personalisation technology honed by Adobe's core B2C customer base. Until now, Adobe have lacked the ability to extend these capabilities down the funnel. The Adobe cloud has no mechanism for managing lead generation or nurturing B2B audiences across outbound as well as inbound channels. Marketo is the perfect platform to fill this gap. They've been the thought leaders of the marketing automation market for years. Few products match their capabilities when it comes to outbound marketing or B2B automation. Furthermore, Marketo have long recognised that their future relies on inbound as much as it does on their outbound capabilities. They've had web personalisation capabilities since 2013, but adoption has been hampered by the preference for marketing departments to rely on the personalisation capabilities of their CMS or DMP rather than their MAP. To overcome this, Marketo developed Ad Bridge, which allows direct integration between Marketo and many leading DMPs. It's a powerful feature, but one that few people are aware of. Ultimately, Marketo have been unable to overcome the core weakness of marketing automation. MA is structured around interactions with known contacts. Its ability to track and target personalised content to known prospects and customers is unmatched. However, there are gaps when it comes to anonymous web activity and account-based marketing. Adobe are ideally placed to help with the former. As for the latter, there is a thriving marketplace of technologies to help with ABM, most of which deeply integrate with Marketo. In an industry which is trending towards ABM and inbound, this has led Marketers to look to other technologies to build out their marketing tech stack. The result is the fragmentation of the B2B Marketing Technology landscape over the last few years. There are now over 7000 marketing technology products. Marketing Automation has gone from being the core platform for marketing departments to being one of the dozens of technologies that the typical marketing team uses to run their campaigns. It still has a privileged position in that stack as the central automation engine and pipeline to CRM, but it is less important than it used to be. This position of Marketing Automation as the bridge to Sales is another reason why this deal is such a good fit for Marketo. Adobe are the only major player in marketing automation who don't also develop a CRM system. Marketo have benefited substantially from being vendor neutral in the CRM space, allowing them to provide equal focus on both Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. Eloqua's integrations with both systems have definitely suffered under Oracle's ownership. Marketo have reaped the rewards, winning many deals from competitors to Oracle and Salesforce. One of those wins was from Microsoft, who are now among Marketo's largest customers. Microsoft also have a close strategic alliance with Adobe. There are various facets to this deal, but one of them is that Microsoft resell Adobe Campaign as part of their Dynamics 365 product family. As a result, they have developed several integrations between Campaign and Dynamics. If the same relationship is extended to Marketo for B2B marketers, then this will be a major benefit to the increasing number of marketers who use both Marketo and Dynamics, without impacting the many Marketo customers who use Salesforce. There are still risks associated with this acquisition, as there are with any deal. Adobe's core focus is on B2C inbound after all, so they may take Marketo in the wrong direction. However, in a market where B2C and B2B technologies are beginning to diverge this risk is far outweighed by the potential benefits. The marketing technology sector is in desperate need of consolidation. Marketers are frequently bewildered by the sheer array of technology options. Consolidation would help the situation. Some deals have already happened, including Adobe's purchase of the Magento ecommerce platform over the summer. Perhaps, this is the beginning of a trend. ### Dreaming of a Single Customer View URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/dreaming-of-single-customer-view/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:38:22.000Z It's Dreamforce this week. Salesforce's massive customer conference is taking in San Francisco. Simultaneously, on the opposite coast, Microsoft hold their customer conference for IT pros in Orlando. These two tech titans dominate the cloud CRM market, winning the lions share of new deals between them. Salesforce has been the market leader for a while and thought leader for even longer. In recent years, Microsoft Dynamics has been closing the feature gap leading some analysts to predict that eventually it may surpass Salesforce on the basis of its close integration with Office 365 and the bundling opportunities this allows. Salesforce's answer to this threat is to build out a full range of enterprise applications in which they can compete directly with Microsoft in their core products. They have a partnership with Google's G Suite and have been building out Quip, their own set of document editing tools that they purchased last year. The real push recently has been with Einstein, Salesforce's AI capability, but whilst Microsoft and Adobe have been talking about AI in Florida. Salesforce were demonstrating their thought leadership credentials in their home city by talking about the next big thing - system integration and single customer view. Earlier this year Salesforce brought Mulesoft, to form the Salesforce Integration Cloud, a platform for integrating SaaS and Web software without using code. Among the many announcements at Dreamforce were some related to this new member of the Salesforce product portfolio, including that of an API knowledge graph for enterprises to publish maps of all the systems and API connections available within the business. This can then be used to connect internal systems together, using a new AI that automatically suggests data mappings for those connections. However, the real value of Mulesoft is not as a standalone platform, but as a mechanism for integrating third-party tools into Salesforce Customer 360, the big headline announcement from Dreamforce. CRM vendors have been talking about bringing all of a business's data into a single customer view since the late 90s. When customers began migrating to Cloud CRM a decade ago, a key objective was to combine sales, marketing and customer service data into one place. Salesforce become the market leader because they have the flexibility to make this possible. Over the last few years, the number of cloud applications in enterprises has exploded, as increasingly specialised tools have been developed to meet specific business needs. There has been a definite trend away from using heavyweight enterprise platforms such as CRM systems or Marketing Automation for more than their core functions. The rise of AI and the mobile app store business model is to blame for this. A new breed of single-purpose web apps has resulted. These are built around a bespoke AI model or a basic UI concept. Marketers have been at the forefront of this trend, but other departments are affected too. The result is that customer data is now fragmented among at least 20 or 30 different systems. This makes it incredibly difficult to build a complete picture of a customer's interactions with the business. In a world where one to one personalisation is becoming a basic expectation among customers, this poses a problem. This fragmentation is frequently identified as being a problem in conversations about web personalisation, funnel reporting and ABM. Unless all that data is in place, it is impossible to build cross-channel experiences. Salesforce's take on the solution is interesting. It avoids the traditional approach of pulling all this disparate data into a Master Data Management system for use by a data analyst to feed other systems. Instead, it leaves all that data in the source system and provides an interface to link all these sources together using the Integration Cloud or AI. When a customer raises a support case through Service Cloud, Customer 360 links that data automatically using Mulesoft to Sales Cloud or any other system that needs to know about it. The support case could trigger an email through Marketing Cloud for instance. As part of this, they also announced Customer 360 ID, which allows a Single Customer View of every interaction that the customer has with a company through Salesforce. In this respect, it functions more like a search engine for customer details than a database. This is great for Sales but less useful for Marketers. It is also not quite as original as Marc Benioff and new co-CEO Keith Block would like to claim. Codeless integration platforms are hardly new - the pioneers in this space have been around for a decade. I first used Boomi for this kind of purpose in 2011\. Zapier is widely used for ad-hoc integrations, and integrates with pretty much everything. The claim is that Customer 360 will allow closer and easier integration, but the proof will be in the execution. Microsoft have this capability too - their Flow process automation tool has already been built into both Dynamics and Office 365 for nearly 2 years. Microsoft have spent a lot of time unifying their Dynamics and Office 365 datasets into a unified data set known as the Common Data Model. This week they extended this shared data set to Adobe Experience Cloud (now including Marketo) and SAP HANA. The three companies announced the Open Data Initiative, to create a common data model that combines customer data held by all three companies into a unified data lake hosted on Microsoft Azure. This was framed as a data portability initiative by the tech press, but is intended to make the data held in one application available for use in all of them. The ability to use AI to search and visualise that dataset was touted, as was the ability to use CRM and ERP data to drive personalised customer experiences using Adobe's marketing platforms. This is two different approaches to the same problem. Salesforce's approach is a new and unique one, with a good looking interface, but it is not the only game in town. This illustrates Salesforce's position in the CRM market. They still lead it, but not by as much as they used to. Their competitors can match their features at an equivalent price, just with not quite the same usability or sophistication. That's not great for Marc Benioff, but it's good for customers. *P.S. The big news for B2B marketers actually came last week. My thoughts on the impending acquistion of Marketo by Adobe were published on the CRMT blog on Monday. [Read it here](https://www.crmtechnologies.com/insights/adobe-and-marketo-right-engagement).* ### The Wrong Metrics URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/wrong-metrics/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:33:36.000Z In a time poor society, demonstrating engagement is crucial if you want to prove marketing's impact on the bottom line. Yet, it is surprising how many marketers still report on volume rather than activity. When showing successful campaign outcomes to the business, it is essential to make sure you only present genuine indicators of interest in your reports. Avoid these 5 metrics which are really only measurements of how much you spent rather than the return from that investment. ### Email Open Rate It is widely stated that B2C open rates are higher than B2B open rates. This is true, and there are many reasons for it. However, one of them is that B2C emails tend to be viewed on Gmail and IOS which download images automatically, whereas B2B emails are displayed in Outlook which doesn't. Opens are a better measure of which email clients your audience is using rather than whether they've actually looked at the email. This is because email opens are tracked by downloading a single pixel image on to the recipient's PC. Typically this image is placed at the bottom of the email, so people don't see a missing image placeholder if images are blocked in the inbox. The problem is that Apple devices download images automatically the moment an email is clicked on. This could easily happen if someone has clicked on an email with the intention of deleting it not just if someone clicked on the email to read it. Images in Outlook or many Android devices typically have to be downloaded manually for every email by clicking a notification message displayed in the email client directly above the preview pane. Few users bother to do this unless they absolutely need to download the images to see the full email content. In B2B, a substantial minority of your click-throughs will never download images on the email at all, so will never be tracked as having actually opened the email. To account for this most ESPs have an implicit open adjustment, which automatically tracks an open whenever the email is clicked. The fact that this adjustment is even needed should indicate how unreliable opens are as a metric for reporting. *Alternative Metrics:* Your key metric for email is clicks. Also make sure to track delivery and bounce rates to monitor deliverability. ### Industry Benchmarks Industry benchmarks are great. However, they vary wildly in both quality and actual numbers. They also tend to be targeted at very broad industry categories. It's rare to come across a company that fits a benchmark perfectly. To complicate matters further, user habits differ depending on the profile and location of the campaign audience. Within Europe, this means that the most reliable benchmarks are those that break down results into country or regional figures, with the industry further categorised by the industry of the target audience, rather than the industry of the company running the campaign. Unless you're lucky enough to have access to industry figures with this level of detail, benchmark against your past performance. The aim should be to get better results compared to previous campaigns. Compare against benchmarks to ensure you're matching industry trends, but don't worry so much about the actual numbers as they may be for an entirely different audience type. *Alternative Metrics:* Your past performance should be used as a guide to predict future outcomes. ### Page Views Sure, everyone wants their content to be read, but page views are a poor measure of engagement. For one they don't actually give any indication about whether a visitor actually even looked at the page content. Many web analytics tools make some allowance for accidental clicks, with a minimum dwell time often used to eliminate them from reporting. However, they are surprisingly common. The assumption is often made that they're balanced out by the increasing numbers of people using ad blockers, some of which block the mechanisms such as cookies or tracking pixels that are commonly used for tracking page views. That's not to say that page view numbers don't have their place. For media companies, getting your content in front of as many eyeballs as possible is the ultimate end goal. As such, publishers still use page views because they are an easy way of getting an idea of audience numbers. That's important to them because they rely on advertising to survive. As such, advertisers want to know how many people their ads are reaching before purchasing ad space. They're the online equivalent to the circulation numbers that are still widely used as a benchmark for newspaper readership. Marketers, particularly in B2B, have different priorities. Content consumption is merely a milestone on the road to becoming a customer. The key indicator of success is not whether someone read a particular web page, but whether it helped push them to the next stage of the funnel. For this reason, measuring actual engagement and interaction with a page is far more important. This leads to a greater emphasis on dwell time - to prove that the page content was actually read - or user interaction numbers such as form submissions and link clicks. When reporting on web page success, the decision needs to be made as to what the primary conversion metric is for each page or site. Optimise the site, and focus your reporting on that to the exclusion of everything else. *Alternative metrics:* Dwell time for ungated content or form submissions for gated content ### Impressions Measuring ad spend using impressions is another holdover from offline business models. It's surprising how many ad networks still prefer you to pay based on thousands of impressions rather than clicks. To a marketer, there is no value in measuring impressions at all. A page view at least means you got your logo in front of someone for at least a brief period of time. Ad impressions can't even promise you that much. So many people tune out online ads that there's no guarantee that anyone looked at your ad, let alone interacted with it. To get value from your advertising budget pay per click is still the leading game in town. It revolutionised online advertising for a good reason, and 20 years on its more relevant than ever. *Alternative Metrics:* You were already reporting on ad results using clicks anyway. ### MQLs Just because you've passed over an MQL, that doesn't mean that anything has happened to it. Sales ignoring marketing's MQLs in favour of leads they've generated themselves is an age old complaint. The typical Sales response is that marketing leads are worthless, and are not worth following up anyway. Typically, both sides are right. There are many marketing teams with an MQL target to meet, so it's understandable that many marketers react to this by creating MQLs for every inquiry. That way they reach their target. Measuring MQLs is still important as part of the full funnel, but on its own proves no value to the business. Modern CMOs are measured using revenue targets rather than lead targets. This can be challenging for companies with long sales cycles, but is the best way to prove value in the only way that counts to management. One of the benefits of revenue targets is that they force marketing to align with sales in a meaningful way. It puts pressure on marketing to generate leads that are actually interesting to Sales. The flip side is that there needs to be processes and SLAs in place with Sales to ensure that leads are followed up in a timely manner, without these being enforced Marketing's ability to demonstrate value is at the mercy of Sales. The only way to overcome this is to align closely with sales at all level of the corporate hierarchy. In a B2B environment marketing's job typically is to feed the sales pipeline, a deal can't close without significant work from Sales anyway. If you want to prove value to the business, you need to demonstrate that you're giving sales the leads that they want. *Alternative Metrics:* Return on Investment is the key metric of marketing success for a good reason. ### ABM Simplified: A Shift in Perspective URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/adopting-an-account-based-perspective/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:33:52.000Z Account Based Marketing is everywhere. People have been talking about it for years and everyone claims to be in the process of implementing it. Yet no one seems to truly understand what it actually is or how to make a success of it. In the simplest terms, Account Based Marketing (ABM) sounds revolutionary. Enterprise sales teams typically think in terms of accounts, marketing in terms of leads. By focusing your entire go to market strategy exclusively around accounts all along the funnel you substantially increase marketing and sales alignment, as well as your ability to penetrate and expand your target accounts. ### Lifetime Value The catch is that few companies have the luxury of exclusively following an ABM model. The 80/20 rule applies as it does everywhere else in business - 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. ABM is a strategy targeted at expanding that top 20% of your customer base. You still need a demand creation strategy for the long tail of small accounts that make up the other 80%. As such, average deal size is a significant factor in deciding whether to pursue ABM. To do it properly you need to make substantial investments in targeting individual accounts. If the lifetime value of a customer isn't large enough to justify this investment, then ABM is a waste of time. For this reason, ABM is often seen as exclusively a strategy to attract enterprise customers. That's not to say that it can't work in a mid-market or SMB context, but be careful about your approach if you are using it to market to smaller businesses. For an SMB audience it is often better to adopt a vertical specialisation strategy. Targeting specific industries in your messaging allows you to personalise your content without worrying about selecting or targeting individual accounts. It is sometimes claimed that vertical specialisation is itself a form of ABM. It's not. Industry specialisation allows you to achieve ABM levels of personalisation using highly focused content in highly targeted campaigns, but fundamentally your funnel and strategy in this scenario is still lead-based rather than account-based. ### ABM before ABM To do ABM properly, you need to start by tracking, measuring and reporting on accounts all the way from inquiry to closed won. Even prior to the rise of ABM, go to market campaigns sponsored by business development leaders would often be framed in terms of the number of new accounts acquired as a result of the campaign rather than the number of leads. In such campaigns, the audience would be supplied by sales based on a specific set of accounts preselected to meet the original segmentation criteria. The most forward-thinking execs would also place a significant emphasis on account expansion, to draw the entire network of influencers and decision makers within an organisation into the funnel. Done well, such campaigns were often highly successful, particularly when used for product launches or greenfield expansion. However, inevitably the frustration would arise that the technology and reporting available in the CRM systems and marketing automation platforms of 5 years ago was unable to match the scale of the ambition. Principally, this would arise in three areas: - The contact-centric nature of marketing automation reporting meant that the account based roll-up dashboards they were looking for could only be created manually in Excel. - The inability to measure account expansion because matching the new names acquired by the campaign back to their parent account in the original target list was a manual exercise. - The difficulty in ensuring that inbound activity intended to support the campaign was actually reaching the right audience. Marketing automation allowed them to achieve the desired one to one level of personalisation, particularly when combined with web personalisation technologies on the website. The challenge was actually proving it. ABM is a methodology designed to enable this strategy without the drawbacks and frustrations. Technology has evolved to close the gaps which prevented marketing and sales from successfully running campaigns along the lines of the type outlined above. ### A Shift in Perspective At the core, ABM shifts marketing from measuring leads to measuring accounts. Campaign audiences evolve from a set of contacts that fit a set of demographic or firmographic criteria to a set of target accounts that meet the same options. These accounts can be a manually selected account list or they can be a dynamic set of accounts matching a specific size and sub-industry with a known need or interest. The goal becomes to generate demand among decision makers at these accounts using highly personalised content that addresses the pain points the company is experiencing, whilst also nurturing the interest of influencers so they can drive forward a potential opportunity. ABM doesn't require a long sales cycle or a small number of large deals, but it helps in making it successful. Even in a small business, a typical buying decision can involve 6-8 people. In an ABM strategy, your objective is to get the right message in front of all those people so that every one of them is considering your product or service when inputting into the final purchasing decision. It's rarely possible to do this using a single campaign. You need a coordinated marketing plan to get the right content in the right channels so that all stakeholders discover it. Each stakeholder will probably require a different channel and a different message. This is why ABM is spoken of as a strategy. To do it properly requires a multichannel marketing calendar pushing different aspects of the same story to each persona stretching over several months. To show success, you need to have the tools to place accounts at the heart of your reporting and a mechanism to match leads and contacts to those accounts. Using these technologies allows you to discover whether you are touching all members of an account or just one of them. Without this knowledge, there is simply no way of understanding whether you genuinely are building momentum at your target accounts, or if prospect activity is just a series of unrelated one-off touches with no follow-up. Then you're back square one, encountering the same frustrations as the Business Development leaders of 5 years ago, who developed a strong marketing led go to market, but had no visibility into campaign ROI or whether marketing was actually contributing to the bottom line. That's not a situation any CMO wants to be in. ### The Weakest Link URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-weakest-link/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:48:52.000Z Barely a week seems to go by without news of a new data breach hitting the headlines. The situation has got so bad that IT Security experts advise website owners that preventing breaches against a determined foe is impossible. Best practice is to lock systems down so that if a breach does occur nothing important is affected. Most breaches aren't by determined hackers anyway, they're the result of automated botnets scanning the web and exploiting misconfigurations or unpatched security vulnerabilities in Internet-accessible databases. Last year's major breach at Equifax was down to an unpatched bug in their online support portal. The bug granted direct access to their customer database, all the hackers had to do was guess the admin password to the site. This is far from the first time this has happened. When designing security the human factor is almost always the weakest link. An unpatched server is the result of a human decision to prioritise uptime ahead of security. An insecure admin password set to something a human could remember is the result of a human decision to make access easier for IT. All websites have security vulnerabilities at some point or other. Even Drupal has had several major high profile security updates this year, and this from a platform which is widely considered to be a highly secure CMS that follows security best practices. There is no such thing as a totally secure system, only one whose security holes haven't been found yet. Security researchers, therefore, are focusing on eliminating the weakest link in the chain, which is the need for humans to log in to a system and the passwords that enable them to do this. The leading technology companies are actively developing ways to replace passwords with newer means of verifying logins. The issue with passwords is that they are predictable and all too easily crackable. Increases in computing power now mean that the common 8 character password can now be cracked in hours or days rather than months or years as used to the case in the past. That's enough to deter a casual hacker, but not enough to stop a determined foe who can set up a powerful server in the cloud and let it run until its guessed your password and gained access to whatever it is protecting. Adding more complex characters or using completely random sequences characters used to be a good defence, but no longer is enough. Expert advice on password security has recently changed, to using simple but long passwords, as well as to only changing passwords rarely. The typical pattern of changing passwords every 60 or 90 days results in passwords following a predictable pattern that hackers have noticed. The idea behind regular password changes was that if a hacker obtained a person's password, then they only had a limited window of access before you changed it and they lost access again. If that password change is incrementing the numerical part of that password, then that can be easily guessed, and the whole reason for enforcing password changes falls apart. Worse, studies have shown that regular password changes result in people using simpler passwords. In an enterprise environment, single sign-on technologies provide a solution to this problem. Single sign-on systems are built around a widely adopted security standard called SAML. This is a technology that allows apps to delegate login handling to another application such as Okta, OneLogin or ADFS. Not only does this reduce the number of passwords that people need to remember, in a strict implementation it can eliminate those passwords entirely. Most apps that support SAML Single Sign-on include an option to require its use and to block users from logging in with a password if one exists. The technology has been widely adopted because it is one of those rare technologies that unambiguously benefits both end users and IT. Attempts are being made to replace passwords with biometric alternatives such as fingerprint readers or facial recognition. These technologies have existed for a long time but are finally hitting the mainstream due to their use on mobile phones. Both Apple and Microsoft allow you to use those mobile phones to unlock other devices such as Macs and PCs. Microsoft have [openly spoken](https://news.microsoft.com/features/whats-solution-growing-problem-passwords-says-microsoft/) of their efforts to eliminate passwords and replace them with the Windows Hello features built into Windows 10\. This is the brand name for Microsoft's biometric login features. The aim is that in future PC users will use facial recognition and a hardware device such as a mobile phone or USB token to sign in to Windows rather than a username and password. Technologies have been developed to extend this to the web, by allowing the use of fingerprint readers on phones and PCs to log into websites. In the interim, the entire technology industry is heavily pushing two-factor authentication as a way to ensure that accounts can't be compromised even if passwords are hacked. If you set this up, you will be required to enter a 6 digit single-use code when logging into a website. Where this code comes from varies by the site. Most allow you to specify a mobile phone number to receive verification codes when you log in or use the ubiquitous Google Authenticator app to generate it. Security experts strongly recommend you configure this option for all your email accounts, as well as any other site which holds your personal or financial information. It's a minor inconvenience when logging in, but it does substantially reduce the chances of an account being hacked. As such, it's definitely worth taking advantage of where available. ### Five Steps to Effective Reporting URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/five-steps-to-effective-reporting/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:34:17.000Z It's the most important part of the marketing operations role, yet also the most difficult. Comprehensive reporting that correctly tracks activity and attributes responses to the right campaigns is the foundation by which marketing activity is evaluated. All of the many KPIs and metrics that marketers are judged by depend on the right leads being tied to the right campaigns. If this doesn't happen, budgets are cut and otherwise successful programs are cancelled. For too many campaigns, reporting is an afterthought. Sometimes quite literally so because no one involved in designing or executing the campaign will consider reporting requirements until after the campaign has launched. By that time, it's too late. You can only report on an activity, if you have data about it. If you want to monitor visitors from a specific site, or see detailed information about form submissions then you need to ensure that you've configured the relevant tracking or data capture points prior to the first live visitor arriving. Marketers tend to assume that all this configuration happens automatically, and get understandably upset when they discover that there are manual setup steps involved. To ensure that everything is working smoothly it's important to be prepared, and to consider the end to end journey using the following process prior to launching a campaign. ### Know the campaign objectives No one is expecting you to have detailed revenue or MQL targets for every single activity. However, it's important to make sure you're clear on what story you'd like to tell your boss at the end of the campaign, and what metrics that might require. If you're not clear on what success and failure looks like then no one else will either. Make sure that the execution team is clear on this too, so that they can make sure the right numbers are available during their testing phase. ### Consider the entire journey A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It will have a number of interesting events that happen along the way. A user journey is the same. When designing the campaign, you'll have all these journey points and user actions mapped out as part of your campaign design. Even if you're not interested in the numbers for each asset and user action now, you will be when the time comes to actually present the campaign results to the wider team. List out the key actions that a user might take, and check that there is reporting in place for all of them. Make sure the execution team are aware of the entire end to end journey too. If they know there's going to be social or paid advertising, then it can be considered as part of the tracking setup prior to launch. ### Define your own benchmarks Industry benchmarks are great. However, they vary wildly in both quality and actual numbers. They also tend to be targeted at very broad industry categories. It's rare to come across a company that fits a benchmark perfectly. Habits differ depending on the profile and location of the campaign audience. Within Europe, email open rates vary significantly by country. This means that the most reliable benchmarks are those that break down results into country or regional figures, with the industry categorised by the industry of the target audience, rather than the industry of the company running the campaign. Without these, benchmark against your past performance. The aim should be to get better results compared to previous campaigns. Compare against benchmarks to ensure you're matching industry trends, but don't worry so much about the actual numbers as they may be for a completely different audience type. ### Keep your eye on the prize The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to generate leads and drive revenue. Even if the campaign isn't expected to be lead generating, it will still have an influence on those who do subsequently convert. So always make sure that form submissions and key downloads appear against leads in CRM either as activities or as campaign history. Sales will want to know about any relevant marketing activity as it gives them something to talk about with the prospect, so make sure that campaign responses are visible to reps with context. This data will form the basis of your ROI reporting too, so it's important to get this right for every campaign. It may not matter to you whether the campaign membership history in CRM is complete, but it matters a lot to your boss. Every user activity should tie back to a marketing campaign with an appropriate status. Then make sure that the lead creation process is tested for every campaign, to ensure that leads generated appear in revenue reporting with the right source and campaign details. ### Use the right reporting tool Everyone always wants all reporting in one place, including both the campaign funnel metrics and operational statistics. That place is a BI tool using a dashboard created by a data analyst who can pull together data from your CRM, Marketing Automation and Web analytics platforms and combine into a single view. If you're not lucky enough to have one of those, then you'll need to extract the relevant numbers from each system separately and combine them in Excel or PowerPoint. Marketing Automation tools are great for email statistics and contact level reporting, but are highly unreliable sources for website visit numbers. They can be used for ROI and lead funnel reporting when setup correctly if opportunity data and campaign costs are available in the system, but in most cases Salesforce reporting will be more comprehensive. ### Email Marketing in an Opt-in World URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/email-marketing-in-an-opt-in-world/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:34:44.000Z Two months on from the email marketing apocalypse and I haven't really noticed the difference. There probably have been fewer marketing emails hitting my mailbox since GDPR, but not enough to make a meaningful impact on my workflow. To be fair, some of the emails I still receive are from brands that I opted in to. The flip side is that some are not. There are still a number of companies out there who have either ignored GDPR or are following a loose interpretation of it so that they can carry on as previously. That's not what the EU intended, yet it is understandable reaction. Email is a popular tactic because it is easy to execute and has a high ROI. Marketing Automation has made it comparatively easy to prove that ROI. This has led to the situation where other tactics are used to build a large mailing list, which is then repeatedly sent the same messages until they either convert or unsubscribe. Even event attendences are frequently built on the back of outbound email invites, with email expected to generate the majority of attendees for both offline and online events. Sales reps are often incentivised to provide attendees, with some social activity providing the balance. This was always unsustainable, and forward thinking marketers have been taking steps to address this for some time. Marketing calendars and system communication limits help in internal co-ordination, but do nothing to make your emails stand out for the other marketing emails in your recipients inbox. ### Anatomy of a Mailing List Email never really worked as a top of funnel tactic, in part because email recipients tend not to be top of funnel audiences. Unless you're buying in large quantities of data, greenfield prospects generally aren't in your database. Cold leads are difficult to engage at the best of times, but email is seen as a fairly intrusive method of reaching out to them. Few people actually open emails from senders they don't recognise anyway, particularly at management levels or above. Instead, mailing lists are typically comprised of former customers and dead leads, mostly several years old, and some previously purchased data of potentially dubious quality. At their worst marketing databases are a mix of the previously interested and the never will be interested. It is difficult to get unengaged prospects to fill in forms, precisely because they know they'll be added to your mailing list if they do engage. Requiring an opt-in might increase conversion rates, but it when it comes to your subscriber numbers it compounds this effect. ### Right Message, Right People, Right Time Thus email campaigns work best at re-engaging the previously interested. As a result the emphasis on email marketing has been shifting from using it as a high volume top of funnel demand generation tactic to a highly targeted conversion incentive designed to get already engaged prospects in front of sales. This can take the form of an event invitation or a special offer. Many tactical email campaigns are already run on this basis. It's not uncommon, particularly in the B2C world, to fix a slow sales period or empty pipeline by running a last minute ad-hoc email campaign. Such communications are frequently highly targeted and written to fit a specific context. Doing this requires matching the right message to the right people at the right time? This only works if you know who the right people in your database are. There is no benefit to having thousands of opt-ins if all you about them is their email address. In a B2B context the ability to fill gaps in your database using firmographic information derieved from company databases such as D&B is essential. ### Unlocking your Data The real power in your database lies with the engagement history and activity data of your contacts. In an opt-in environment you actually have a fair amount of knowledge of what people are interested in based on how they come to be in your database. Your marketing automation platform will already have a decent amount of web tracking data and campaign history that can be combined with account profiles to get a useful baseline for segmentation. B2C marketers have been collecting all that information into dedicated databases and using it to target prospects that brought specific products at specific times. This is then restricted to just opted-in contacts to produce a target list for email campaigns. The problem in a B2B context is that much of the most useful segmentation information such as opportunities and sales activities is only available in the CRM system, whilst customer purchase history are often in an ERP or purchasing database. This is a digital transformation challenge that can be overcome with integration between systems and a well designed central customer database that can be used by all departments. ### Enabling Efficiency Many marketers use the smaller size of B2B databases to avoid using the highly personalised approach. Email campaigns do have a minimum volume to justify the investment, but a highly efficient production process can reduce the audience needed for an email campaign to the hundreds. This requires standard templates and a strong brand library that allows field marketers to pull together an urgent email blast at the last minute, using their own copy. Approval processes need to be fast enough to allow this agility, whilst still ensuring that all communications are compliy with all brand, legal and technical requirements that need to be met. For companies with sufficient volume this can mean a centralised demand center structure often works best. As this allows email production to be turned into a digital production line using specialist teams. The efficiency this approach unlocks, allows marketers to be much more reactive to changing business needs. It is possible to design and send email campaigns in a few days, a timescale no other tactic can match. Good timing is essential to the success tactical campaigns, but nowhere is it more critical than with email marketing. It ensures the content is relevant. Personalisation is all about relevance, without it your carefully crafted email is just another spam message in your recipients inboxes. ### Oracle Eloqua 18C Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/oracle-eloqua-18c-release-overview/ Last updated: 2018-08-17T15:40:54.000Z Recent Eloqua releases have marked a welcome change after several years of minor updates. Last autumn marked the release of the new Oracle BI based Insight reporting module. A new responsive email design editor arrived in the Winter release. This week's release marks the start of controlled availability for the new landing page design editor. The general availability of this feature is expected to be in 2019, but it fills a significant gap in Eloqua's capabilities. Until now the only way to build a responsive landing page has been in HTML. For many years, Eloqua customers have ignored the WYSIWYG editor because it doesn't support basic functionality such as responsive design, while simultaneously being too inflexible for power users and too easy to break for less sophisticated users. The design editor is far from perfect, but it significantly improves the power and flexibility available to Eloqua users that don't have development skills whilst being easier to use than previous Eloqua editors. This release also adds custom CSS support to the email design editor allowing more complex use cases for the new editor. The landing page beta goes beyond this, and will include additional features such as video backgrounds and image carousels beyond those available for emails. ### Analytics Enhancements The other big new feature of recent years receives a few updates too. Oracle are adding a website performance dashboard to the increasingly sophisticated built-in dashboards. This won't replace a proper website analytics tool but opens up a summary of website source and trend data to all Eloqua users. Extra links are being added between the dashboards and insight to allow drill down from the dashboards, something which is very limited currently. Insight adds essential new functionality ahead of the planned decommissioning of the legacy Classic Insight reporting module next month. When running reports in Classic Insight, relative date ranges such as the last 7 days or last 30 days were the preferred way of filtering activities to specific timescales. However, this feature has been notably absent from the new Insight module. This is being rectified starting with email reports. Most surprinsing is a licensing update that applies from this release. Oracle are raising the limit on the number of Analyzer licenses that customers can have. This is the special license required to create custom reports in Insight's OBIEE engine. There has always been a limit on the number of Analyzer licenses available for customers ever since the initial release of Classic Insight. This is now being removed – customers can have Analyzer licenses allocated to all of their licensed marketing users if they so wish. All they need to do is raise a support case with Oracle. ### Usability Enhancements There are some small user interface enhancements in this release that have the potential to make Eloqua user's lives much easier. Perhaps the biggest is the ability to add notes to both campaigns and programs. This includes functionality to add notes to each program or campaign, but also to individual steps within them. This allows instructions and descriptions to be added to individual campaign steps indicating what needs to be configured in that step. This could make life much easier for less confident users by allowing power users to leave basic procedures in campaign canvases listing required actions for when they come to edit them. There is already a description field for both campaigns and programs so the general notes are less important, but will still be useful. Drag and drop reordering of segment components is a long overdue update in this release. Segments are one of the major ways of creating and reviewing database counts in Eloqua, and the inability to change the order of individual filters in the segment is a frustration when editing them. This should allow the numbers in reporting segments to be much clearer to business users. Custom Object Programs become useful with the addition of listener steps for new custom object records. Previously, custom object programs were of limited use, because the only way to add a custom object record to a program was by adding them from another contact level program. This enhancement opens up the possibility of custom object programs replacing the legacy custom object services functionality for automating actions following updates to CDO records. There are also some enhancements to the UI for processing step conditions on forms to make reviewing and deleting conditions easier. It will be possible to view conditions on hover after this release, which while small will make QA of forms much faster. ### Admin Enhancements Eloqua has had user auditing features since the earliest days of the platform. However, these have been confined to a legacy UI resulting in incomplete information and frequent errors or usability issues. February saw the beta release of a new audit log covering a wide range of actions but especially changes to users & security, data uploads and data exports. This has now reached GA, so is being rolled out to all customers. This is a critical feature from a GDPR compliance perspective, because the old auditing features are a major benefit when troubleshooting user and data issues. A more modern version of the log to replace the legacy log is highly welcome. ### New Sales Tools However, from a broader Industry perspective the most significant updates in this release are to the Eloqua Sales Tools. Following their announcement at Modern CX in the spring, add-ons to [Profiler](https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/marketingcs%5Fgs/OMCAA/Help/Profiler/Profiler.htm) are now in Controlled Availability. These display as additional tabs in the Profiler UI, regardless of whether it is used in a CRM system, on the web or within Eloqua itself. First out of the gate is LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but Profiler integrations are coming from a number of MarTech vendors including PathFactory, Demandbase and 6sense. Ask Oracle Support for access if you'd like to join the pilot. The bigger announcement though is the release of the Eloqua Sales Tool plugin for Microsoft Outlook. This will bring both Profiler and [Engage](https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/marketingcs%5Fgs/OMCAA/Help/Engage/Engage.htm) directly into most sales teams preferred email client. This comes 5 years after a previous Eloqua product management team scrapped the legacy ELMO plugin upon the initial release of the Engage sales email app. Unlike ELMO, this will be exactly the same app that Sales will already be (not) using in the CRM system or on mobile. Having it in Outlook will significantly increase adoption. *The Oracle Eloqua 18C Update is scheduled for August 17th, 2018\. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details, including smaller changes not mentionned in this article, can be found in the official [release notes](http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/technetwork/tutorials/tutorial/cloud/eloqua/18C-eloqua-nfs.htm).* ### Creatures of Habit URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/creatures-of-habit/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:48:00.000Z I have a confession to make. In late 2017 my employer made a small change to their standard operating procedures. Yet, I'm still following the old procedure even though I was part of the team that devised the updated procedure. Why? Force of habit. The change was a small one designed to streamline project management workflows during campaign development. It involved adding an extra step to a QA process. This extra step required 8 clicks to compete, with significant time savings for everyone else involved in the campaign. Furthermore, this extra step and the knock-on effects elsewhere in the process had no impact on the results of the QA being conducted. I was part of the group that proposed this change and argued strongly for it when it encountered internal opposition. That opposition was won over and the revised process was introduced in October 2017\. I have since written documentation and trained new starters in our procedures, and always made sure to use the revised QA process with the extra step when doing this. Today, I realised that despite all these benefits I'm still following the old process. I always forget the extra step. Fortunately, there have been no consequences from me not doing this on our end product, but it's creating inefficiencies elsewhere in the business. To be fair, I don't do that much QA these days. That's probably part of the problem. I used to do a lot of QA. Now I do very little. As a result, people make allowances and do the necessary actions for me. Even when our PM team sent group reminders about this process, it never occurred to me that I was one of the ones at fault. Although, I think that says more about me than them! ### Managing Shortcuts This anecdote raises a broader question about human nature and its impact on the way we use our tools. We learn through repetition, and if we don't need to repeat a process that often, then we might not get the process right. If we don't get it right, some people will make allowances - especially if that person is their boss or someone senior. They shouldn't be doing that. If someone had pointed out each time that I wasn't following the full process, I might have remembered the next time. Instead, our project management team has been doing it for me. If a change makes our life more difficult then, we are going to look to take shortcuts. This can lead to significant efficiencies in some cases. Other times, such as with a security or QA procedure, taking shortcuts can lead to mistakes with financial or reputational impacts for businesses. If shortcuts are being made it is important to understand why, and what needs to happen as a result. Can the shortcut be incorporated into the process? Is more user education required? ### Managing Change As any project manager will tell you, the trickiest part of implementing a new piece of software or delivering a major project is not the design or development phases. That's comparatively easy. It's getting user adoption that is the hard part. A lot of the time training isn't enough. You can run as many training sessions as you like or write all the documentation in the world and ultimately it might not matter if not matched by real-world usage. It is common to underestimate the effort required to drive user adoption when planning a project, even though this is the area that actually determines whether the overall project is ultimately seen as a success or a failure. Driving user adoption requires both carrot and stick. Some of your users will see the immediate benefit of the change and take the carrot. Others will resist the change or fail to see the benefits, so will need to be persuaded to make the change. Most project managers plan for these two sets of users when designing a roll out plan. The main barrier to successful change management often comes down to the reaction of the other users who don't fall into these two extremes. People are generally open to change if they understand the reasons for it. They'll see the benefits, they will probably even welcome the change. Yet simple inertia will prevent them from actually changing their behaviour. They may even be able to come up with an excuse for this inconsistency. It's important to plan for this when launching a new system or process. If you allow people to adopt out of a process, then invariably they will sooner or later. ### An SMB's Life in the Cloud URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/life-in-the-cloud/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:47:35.000Z This month marks a notable milestone in the history of my employer's IT department. We're decommissioning our last on premises server, and completing the migration of our data center to AWS and Azure. This is a process that began nearly a decade ago, when we launched our first virtual machine on Amazon Web Services. When I first joined CRMT, they hosted marketing databases in a dedicated data center. Salesforce and Eloqua killed that market during the 2009 recession. Yet many of the legacies of that infrastructure remained, whilst being upgraded to more recent versions as they were released over the years. On premises rack servers were considered the only way to safely and reliably host a domain in a Windows environment. Whilst it has long been possible to host file servers and Active Directory on the public cloud the experience is not optimal. Instead, many small businesses have persisted with hosting their own servers for core domain infrastructure, whilst moving as much as they can to the public cloud. Cloud storage and device management technologies simply haven't been mature enough to meet the requirements of existing businesses with a legacy network. This is beginning to change with technologies such as Azure Active Directory or Jumpcloud. The biggest shift has been the realisation that unless you have the scale to build an enterprise grade data center, public cloud is actually a much cheaper and more secure option for hosting servers. For this reason, Governments and Healthcare have become leading adopters of cloud computing after a belated start. Customers needing bespoke hardware or performance requirements not available on the public cloud can look at the rapidly consolidating co-location market rather than attempting to build their own server room. Even in 2009 the cost benefits of scale were significant, but the advances in technology driven by public cloud providers have only increased this advantage. It's just that achieving the required scale requires a 6 or 7 figure investment which is only possible for enterprises or businesses looking to make a profit from server infrastructure, by hosting for third parties. The main thing holding companies back has been the concern that not all workloads are suitable for running in the cloud. This applies particularly to latency sensitive applications, where a few extra milliseconds lag can have business changing consequences. Such applications are particularly common in financial services, where massive sums of money are wagered in stock trades every second. This has resulted in the edge computing trend, where data centers are broken up and applications moved so they are physically closer to their end users. Data sovereignty concerns in Europe, China and elsewhere have accelerated this trend. This has opened up an opportunity for the likes of Equinix to pitch their data centers to new audiences. However, the biggest impact of the edge computing buzz has been on Amazon, Microsoft and Google, all of whom have substantially accelerated the pace of new data center openings for their public cloud services rather than just expanding their existing locations as in the past. Yet for many small businesses, talk of edge computing is meaningless. Their applications don't have the scale to take advantage of the benefits. European businesses appreciate the opening of new AWS and Azure data centres in their home countries though. This resolves one data security concern for them, yet for many SMBs the biggest barrier to cloud adoption is trust in the lack of control over data in the relevant services and the reliability of the Internet connection used to access such services. These questions apply to on premises data centres too. However, cloud advocates have yet to adequately address these concerns, until they do many companies will continue to invest in on premises solutions. ### Designing a Personalised Nurture URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/are-your-nurtures-cross-channel/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:35:17.000Z Much has been written about the importance of strong personalisation. For many, this means maximising the use of profile data in campaigns, either by explicitly including it in the content being presented or by customising the content to fit the information in the profile. An entire industry has developed around personalising website content based on geographic, demographic and firmographic information. However, there is much more to personalisation than just the contents of the visitor profile or contact record. Effective personalisation is about responding to the activity of each individual with the right content at the right time. People are notoriously bad at articulating what they actually want, Steve Jobs built the world's most successful company off the back of that belief. For Marketers, this means It is much more effective to segment campaigns by responding to buying signals than by blasting everyone who meets a particular demographic criteria. ### Achieving the Ideal This is what email nurture was supposed to be about - building a dynamic engagement engine that reacts to a particular set of buying signals by automatically sending a relevant communication at the right timeframe. Nurturing has never been about scale. It is instead a method of achieving one to one personalisation in a B2B environment. This ideal is something few companies have achieved because it requires a very data-driven approach, backed by a strong tech stack and constant evolution. Doing it well at scale is extremely difficult, so many companies opt-out of the challenge altogether, and design email nurtures as a linear campaign instead. They might set up an automated feeder for new leads to enter the campaign, thus making it always on. Yet it is still a regular campaign, just with stale content because you set it to last year and don't have the budget to refresh it. Companies are beginning to discover that this approach requires a lot of care and constant attention, so increasingly are reducing the scope of their email nurture programs. Instead, online content marketing programs are taking up the slack. This is a false dichotomy. Your nurture campaigns should be as omni-channel as your events or your promotions. Every successful event is promoted across every successful channel. The same is true of nurtures. ### Online Journeys A good nurture journey starts on the web, but not on your website. Your website is a sales tool, and one that your leads know about and can find on their own. You don't need to link to it unless you're actively talking about product. The second common mistake is to use your content hub as the landing page for social campaigns, or paid media. For one thing, your content hub is probably part of your website. It also includes all your content, not just the one the lead clicked through to see. Content hubs have traditionally suffered from the problem that they're too unfocused. There's no obvious priority to the content and no clear content, so confused visitors end up consuming nothing. You will have designed a nurture journey, with assets displayed in a desired order. The standard Pathfactory or Uberflip user experiences are a good example to follow. The great thing about these tools is the fact that you can present the content straight away and then have your secondary content alongside, but not be distracted from the current asset. You can even time the related content list in these roles to appear only once the visitor has been on the page for a few seconds. This is a good middle ground between the chaos of a content hub and the rigidity of email nurture, particularly if you also include a link back to your full content library for those who want to see more. The goal here is to facilitate binge consumption to the point where someone qualifies as a lead and gets a sales call. Few people will get to this point on the first visit. This means you need a method for getting people back, once they leave your content and get on with their day. If they filled in a form, you'll have sent them an auto-responder email with links to the next content stream, and a sales trigger. If they opted-in, add them to a nurture which prompts them to complete the stream and then move to the next one. ### Generate Repeat Engagement Email nurtures have always suffered from the issue that the recipient has no possibility of choosing what they consume and when. The prospects schedule is entirely dictated by you. In a world of time poor executives and fully booked calendars, this simply isn't sustainable as the primary touch point in a marketing campaign. Instead, your email is a re-engagement strategy, to get previous visitors back into your nurture program. For colder prospects, social and contextual advertising are a much better method of outreach. Retargeting works well here as a mechanism for promoting new content streams to people who have consumed a previous stream. Unlike with email, there is less scope to promote subsequent content in the stream they've just consumed. This avoids the Amazon effect, named after the online retailer's early retargeting efforts which involved showing ads for the last item the user viewed on their site. This annoyed people who had already made a decision not to purchase the product in question. Do remember that retargeting requires consent under GDPR, as it involves sharing personal data with a third party. When designing your nurtures always remember the defining principle of data protection legislation - one that will be familiar to Marketers everywhere. The customer is king. They decide who has their data and how it is used. This affects marketers more than anybody else. If your contact wants to be nurtured online, then you need to provide that experience to them. Far too many brands have been failing in that respect. However, for many people email is still one of the preferred methods of engaging with brands they trust. The ROI on email hasn't changed, if anything, it's got better. However, companies need to be more intelligent about what they send prospects. The decision about what to send in an outbound nurture requires complex data analysis to identify actual journeys and adjusting the experience accordingly. Technology is in the process of making this much easier. ### Pardot's Lightning Future URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/lightning-future-for-pardot/ Last updated: 2018-07-20T07:30:00.000Z It's been a big year for Pardot. For a long time, Pardot has seemed like the black sheep of the Salesforce family. It lacks the flexibility of Salesforce's core products, whilst still being too complicated for SMB. It found a successful niche within midsized businesses that don't have complex funnels or advanced localisation capabilities, but was often given away as part of larger deals to enterprises whose needs far exceeded the capability of the product. The biggest black mark was its weak integration with Salesforce. Eloqua and Marketo have long had significantly better integrations with Sales Cloud than Salesforce's own product. This has often been a significant factor in the decision to use other marketing automation platforms. Which is why Salesforce's efforts to correct this oversight are long overdue. ## Campaigns In June, they announced a new campaign integration between Pardot and Salesforce that they heavily promoted as the deepest ever integration between marketing automation campaigns and Salesforce campaigns. In truth, all the features released in the new integration were already available in either Eloqua or Marketo, just not in both. Pardot's handling of campaigns has long confused marketers. Pardot follows a strict first touch attribution model, in that prospects must be associated with a Pardot campaign when they enter the system, and they can only be a member of that one campaign. Subsequent touches can be registered in Salesforce, because Pardot has long had the ability to create campaign associations in Salesforce. However, these have been distinct from Pardot campaigns. The new capability doesn't entirely bring the two types of campaigns together, the two types of campaign can be synced but Pardot campaign membership will not sync to Salesforce, although campaign details will. You will still need to make the Salesforce campaign association as well. It is just that salesforce campaign membership will now be visible, editable and reportable in Pardot as well as Salesforce. Pardot campaigns will still exist, but will no longer be a primary reporting unit. They will fulfil the same function as Marketo's acquisition campaign concept, in that they record the source of the prospect. However, marketers that want to report on the full campaign history will ignore them and use Salesforce campaigns for reporting instead. [\> Download the Official FAQ](http://www2.pardot.com/ConnectingCampaignsFAQ/) ## Marketing Analytics The other big new innovation with Pardot, is their integration with Salesforce Einstein Analytics. Analytics has long been the biggest weakness across the marketing automation platforms, and all vendors are taking steps to address it. For Salesforce, this means building a B2B Marketing Analytics app within their existing Einstein BI tools. This app uses their Einstein analytics BI tools to combine Salesforce and Pardot data into a single set of dashboards. In doing so, it works around the fact that Pardot reporting is limited, with major gaps in feature set and little scope for customisation. In particular, ROI and attribution reporting is pretty much non-existent in Pardot, whereas these dashboards are explicitly designed for revenue reporting. It's not a new capability though, B2B Marketing Analytics was first released in 2016 as an add-on. Last month, it was added into this plus and advanced editions of Pardot as part of the package so is now available to many more Pardot customers for free. Marketo and Eloqua do have limited ROI reporting built-in to their platforms, with extra options available as add-ons particularly on the Marketo side. However, these do not have the native Salesforce integration component, so are harder to setup and are not as comprehensive. Integrated reporting is one of the major challenges marketers of all types face, and this promises to help Pardot customers in addressing the issue. [\> View the Product Page](https://www.pardot.com/solutions/b2b-marketing-analytics/) ## Engagement History It's not just Salesforce Einstein users that benefit from improved reporting. The new campaign integration enables another new feature, that is truly unique - the ability to report on the full Pardot engagement history for all campaigns and assets directly within Salesforce using Salesforce's native reporting tools. This is a component of the Pardot Lightning App for Salesforce, which is the lightning version of Pardot's sales enablement tool. The new beta for the app pulls in all of Pardot's asset and engagement data directly into Salesforce, rather than just providing a window into the Pardot database. This allows campaign and asset statistics to be reported on using Salesforce reports, rather than Pardot reports. Eloqua does this already to a degree with the ability to create Salesforce activity records when contacts perform a tracked action, but this is of limited use for reporting. Pardot takes this to the next level by creating a record in Salesforce for each asset with all the key metrics for that asset, and allowing them to be used Salesforce reports and dashboards. In theory, this means that there is no need to run any reporting within Pardot at all. All activity and operational reporting can be conducted within Salesforce. [\> Download the Official FAQ](http://www2.pardot.com/EngagementHistoryFAQ) ## Matched Leads Perhaps the coolest new feature is also in the new Lightning App for Sales Cloud. Pardot is being used to enable Lead to Account Matching within Salesforce. The new app adds a Matched Leads to the Salesforce Account screen, which displays all lead records for that account. This is extremely useful in an ABM strategy, as it allows account owners to view and convert any leads created for their account, even if there is no link between the lead and the account. The only downside is that there is no automatic conversion for this feature, and no method for changing the matching algorithim. [\> Read the Release Notes](https://releasenotes.docs.salesforce.com/en-us/spring18/release-notes/rn%5Fsales%5Faccounts%5Fmatched%5Fleads%5Fcomponent.htm) ### The Slow Death of the Telephone URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/the-slow-death-of-the-telephone/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:47:18.000Z Like the other big accountancy firms, PwC have been in the news a lot recently over concerns about the impartiality of auditors. Last week, they made headlines for a different reason. They are going to stop issuing staff with desk phones. By the end of the summer they will have removed all landlines from the desks of their UK offices. They already issue mobile phones to all their employees anyway, so the assumption is that day to day business won't be affected. It's a good one to make. Like many professional services firms, PwC staff are relatively mobile. They're out with clients regularly, they work from home a lot, and they hotdesk when they do come into the office. Anything which ties consultants, auditors and account managers to their desk reduces flexibility and productivity. This is certainly my experience at CRMT. IT managers everywhere will be cheering the news. They don't rate as highly as printers in the list of IT pet hates, but telephone systems aren't far off. VOIP systems are complex beasts understood only by specialist technicians. They also significantly complicate network design, by mixing voice and data traffic over the same wires. Many SMBs have refused to adopt VOIP for this reason despite the obvious benefits. They will now use this case study as an argument to save costs and remove corporate desk phones completely, assuming mobile reception is good enough at their offices. Microsoft have tried to disrupt this space with Skype, by replacing handsets with dial pads tied to laptops. They saw adoption, but ultimately it was an inferior experience for all involved compared to an actual handset. It is noticeable that phone use is declining in businesses. The newest players in the conference calling market either don't offer a phone dial-in option or only offer it as an upsell. This extends to webinars too, where BrightTalk and ON24 are seeing growth despite only supporting online audio. The continued growth in video conferencing can be blamed in part for this. However, the simple truth is that mobile phones make desk phones irrelevant. Why bother calling a desk phone when there is a possibility that the person you're calling may not be at their desk. If you call their mobile you know you'll get through. The numbers support this. Accompanying the news was a startling statistic that the number of minutes spent by businesses over landlines has halved since 2010 in the UK. The drop in residential calls is even steeper. This is a well documented social trend. Like many millennials, I don't have a home phone. In fact, I don't know anyone in my age group who uses a home phone. Some have them because they get one as part of a broadband package but I've never seen them used. It's inevitable that this trend was going to impact the workplace sooner or later. Landlines aren't going to die completely. Not even PwC are getting rid of all them. Security teams, reception desks and conference rooms will continue to have handsets. Call centres and other specialist businesses will need VOIP systems for a long time to come. However, much like the home phone, the desk phone will no longer be an automatic expectation. A lot of knowledge workers will be upset by this; the rest weren't using it anyway. ### Are your Landing Pages Secure? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/is-chrome-marking-your-site-as-not-secure/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:38:10.000Z This month marks an important milestone in the history of the web. For several years the leading browser makers, led by Google and Mozilla, have been aggressively trying to kill off HTTP and expand the usage of SSL and HTTPS based secure websites. This increases user privacy and web security by encrypting connections between web browsers and servers, preventing third parties from intercepting the connection or even knowing what pages you're visiting. ### Let's Encrypt In 2016, Mozilla launched [Let's Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/), a provider of free SSL Certificates. The aim was to expand the adoption of HTTPS across the web by changing certificates from something you buy and configure on a server, to something that is generated programmatically by an API. There are significant limitations to Let's Encrypt certificates which mean that they aren't designed to be used for enterprise use cases. However, encouraged by the browser makers they've been wildly successful. Until a few years ago, cheap hosting plans generally blocked websites from using SSL. It was an upsell for both technical and commercial reasons. Now, even the cheapest hosting plans require websites to be SSL and provide free certificates from Let's Encrypt. ### Marketing Automation In January, Salesforce got in the act, [announcing](https://www.pardot.com/blog/ssl-vanity-domains-now-available/) free SSL for Pardot landing pages. The technology powering this is Let's Encrypt. Previously, Pardot hadn't supported SSL for vanity domains at all. Now, SSL can be added to a Pardot microsite in a few minutes, with just a couple of clicks. This is an entirely self-service capability with no technical knowledge required. Compare this to Marketo and Eloqua, who still require you to purchase secure microsite add-ons, and then follow a support led implementation process. Marketo at least buy the certificate and do the configuration work for you now. Oracle don't even do that much. Their Eloqua SSL microsites service still requires you to get a certificate from IT, and then setup a new landing page domain just for SSL. ### Brand Impact This is important due to forthcoming changes in both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Google are first. Their next version is due at the end of the month. It will prominently mark all web pages as 'Not Secure' unless they are served over a HTTPS connection. Initially, the warning will be black text, but in October the text will change to red for all pages containing a form. Firefox will make a similar UI change in their September release. !\[Treatment-of-HTTP-Pages@1x\](![Treatment-of-HTTP-Pages@1x](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/cc/55cc6544-14f5-43be-8e47-d10e9a7fe6d6/content/images/2020/12/Treatment-of-HTTP-Pages@1x.png) Chrome 68 UI change - Image from [Google](https://security.googleblog.com/2018/02/a-secure-web-is-here-to-stay.html) In the context of an industry just coming to terms with the impact of GDPR, this will have an impact on form conversion rates. With data breaches now a regular occurrence consumer awareness of data protection has never been higher. People rarely notice the absence of a padlock icon on a web page despite repeated attempts by many sources to make people look for it. Google and Mozilla are hoping that this change will scare off users from filling in forms on insecure web pages. Not everyone will see the message but enough people will notice the warning to have an effect not just on conversion rates, but on overall brand reputation. Most corporate web teams have migrated their websites to SSL in preparation for the change. However, external microsites and marketing automation landing pages set by marketers may not have been considered. It's not too late to fix that. Although, more support from marketing automation vendors in making this transition would be appreciated. ### Is the AI Revolution Real? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/is-the-martech-ai-revolution-real/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:35:56.000Z Hardly a week goes by recently without some Marketing Technology vendor promoting their new AI product. This is not an especially new trend. The AI buzz has been building since late 2016\. Every major Data Platform is branding themselves as an AI vendor. Even Marketo are getting in the act with their upcoming AudienceAI capabilities. Nor is this a trend confined to MarTech. Even Microsoft Office is getting an [AI makeover](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2017/12/13/new-to-office-365-in-december-extending-human-ingenuity-with-everyday-ai/). The likes of Microsoft, Google and Intel have devoted large proportions of their considerable R&D budgets to Artificial Intelligence for many years. The results of this investment are now being seen across the entire technology sector. All the major technology companies are promoting the AI revolution as the next big thing, and have been using their customer conferences to talk about AI, and its impact on their products. There's one thing they're not telling you though - this trend is not a result of high profile breakthroughs in AI research over recent years. Instead, the driving force behind the AI revolution is cloud computing. This has allowed unlimited amounts of resources to be put behind the algorithms and data models that tech firms are branding as AI. Few of these underlying data models are actually new. They are powered by the same algorithms that the same companies were calling predictive four years ago and machine learning eight years ago. As these models have evolved, they have become more accurate to the point that many firms can remove the probabilities and confidence scores from their output, and just give you the actual results. ### Machine Learning The technology used to enable all this is called machine learning. At its simplest, machine learning is a form of pattern recognition. It takes in large quantities of data and uses it to spot lookalike matches at a scale no human analyst could hope to match. The initial promise was that models built using this technique would become more accurate over time. This has proved to be true. Take predictive scoring. The vendors in this space have been around since the late 2000s. Their business model is based on them reviewing your sales history and your marketing database, performing a data analysis with expert data scientists, and then using the resulting data model to give every contact a lead score. The key difference was that their model was vastly more sophisticated than a traditional lead score model, taking in many more data points. Over time their model used machine learning techniques to become more accurate, evolving to identify who your customers are based on the data you provide it. Now their models have reached the point where predictive data vendors simply tell you who your targets should be. The score is optional. The main advantage such data platforms have is that they work by combining your data with publically available demographic and firmographic data, and then add web tracking and intent data from firms such as [Bombora](https://bombora.com/) on top. All this data is then aggregated across customers to see if there are any general industry trends which can be applied to all scoring models. This aggregation has allowed them to overcome the critical weakness in their approach, namely that to be useful machine learning requires a large, clean database and extensive training. Applying machine learning to small databases gives inaccurate results because it relies on high data volumes to spot the patterns in the underlying data. Secondly, it is allowed vendors to compensate for the Garbage In Garbage Out principle. Much like a human data analyst AI is only as good as the data that it has been given. In some cases it can be worse as a human analyst will compensate for poor data quality using experience and gut instinct. A robust data model using the results of multiple customers can do the same thing. It can apply the data trends of successful organisations with good data quality to a low quality database. Over time vendors have been able to broaden the market for predictive scoring beyond just the Fortune 500 to businesses of any size. More recently, they have also extended the scope of their services beyond scoring to full data management. In the process, they have rebranded themselves as Customer Data Platforms (CDP) ### Account Based Marketing The rise of Account Based Marketing (ABM) was the cause of this trend. A successful ABM strategy relies on a strong alignment between sales and marketing, and good data about your target accounts. AI vendors can't help with alignment but are ideally placed to help with data quality. Most vendors have offered account scoring since their earliest days, so are already integral to the process of target account selection. ABM is about more than just accounts. In an ABM model, the funnel is structured around demand units - the individual teams in the enterprise that have the need and authority to purchase products and services. Most enterprises are comprised of multiple demand units, due to different divisions or different regional or national subsidiaries. Modelling this relationship in a typical CRM or Marketing Automation platform is challenging. It requires a structure more complex that of the traditional contact and account separation, and needs information about individual responsibilities and corporate hierarchies that few databases have. Customer Data Platforms are the solution to this problem. CDPs have seen growing adoption in B2C for several years as a consumer-centric alternative to CRM systems. Aggregating all customer activity and profile data in a central database allows the detailed segmentation and one to one personalisation required for successful consumer marketing at scale. The leading CDPs such as [Tealium](https://tealium.com/) then integrate directly with ESPs and Marketing Automation to launch campaigns on the back of this data. The more in-depth personalisation requirements of ABM mean that the predictive data platforms are now expanding their capabilities, just as existing CDPs are adapting their platforms for B2B. It's a natural progression. They have all your data already because they use it for scoring and target account selection. They have all the available information about individuals and businesses too, as they use it as the foundation of their scoring models. What they lacked until now is the ability to organise all this data into a comprehensive single customer view organised by account, contact and demand unit listing the full profile and activity history of each across all channels. To do this manually is a massive undertaking requiring teams of data analysts pulling in information from multiple sources, deduplicating it and aggregating it into a data warehouse. Data vendors have been able to tune their existing scoring algorithms to do this entire operation automatically in real time at scale. In doing so, they are offering the holy grail of marketing operations - a genuine single customer view that tells Marketers who their customers are and who their next customers will be. ### The Real Revolution Marketers can collect activity data across web and social channels, and then use it to drive highly personalised outbound campaigns. Abandoned basket emails are a classic example of the capability this provides. Website activity such as an abandoned basket in a web store is tracked by the CMS powering the store as part of its normal operations. This data is then passed back to the CDP in real time, and then onto Eloqua or Marketo so that opted-in customers can be sent an email listing the contents of their basket. This is a revolutionary capability that gives enterprise marketers the ability to achieve true personalisation at scale. B2C marketers already use it to dynamically calculate the detailed demographic profiles of their customers based on activity data. Now it is being used to determine the specific interests and pain points of individuals within businesses to drive highly targeted messaging as part of an ABM strategy. Modern marketing has always relied on a strong data foundation, yet in practice, few companies have the database to match this aspiration. Building and maintaining a clean B2B marketing database is hard. AI is going to make it a lot easier. ### Marketo Spring 18 Release Overview URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketo-spring-18-release-overview/ Last updated: 2020-12-31T18:11:53.000Z It's been a big quarter for Marketo. It started at the end of April with their annual Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco, where they made several major product reveals that are now beginning to see the light of day. It concludes with an otherwise quiet Spring Release that marks the launch of two major releases. ### Sales Engage Last week saw the GA of [Marketo Sales Engage](https://uk.marketo.com/education/training/sales-integration/#mse-for-sales/learn), their new Sales engagement tool. Sales Engage isn't actually a new product. It's the latest version of ToutApp, a sales automation tool they purchased last year. At summit it was given a rebrand and a fresh lick of paint, but Marketo are doing their very best to pretend that Sales Engage is a totally new product. This insistence is purely for marketing reasons. ToutApp already works pretty well if your business uses both Marketo or Salesforce. It is deeply integrated into both Salesforce and the Marketo core product, requiring both to function to its full potential. This is due to its signature feature, the live feed, which pulls in all the information both systems have about each contact and displays them in an easily digestible view for reps to follow up on. This is going to be enhanced over time with interesting moments and scoring capabilities similar to the Marketo Sales Insight plugin. The other prominent feature that Sales Engage brings to Marketo is playbooks and multi-step Sales Campaigns. These are created within the app and can be integrated with Marketo marketing campaigns for end to end automation of the entire funnel. Many sales reps struggle with the marketing-centric UX of the equivalent Sales Insight functionality, so it is hoped that the marketing first nature of Sales Engage will result in higher adoption for the campaign integration features of Marketo. ### GDPR Compliance The enforcement deadline may have passed, but the main features in Marketo's spring release relate to GDPR compliance. ToutApp and Sales Engage have gained a [compliance card](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Sales+Engage+and+GDPR+Compliance) on their contact screens, allowing reps to specify the legal basis for adding or updating data in the tool. It's a small thing, but the need to track the consent status of self-sourced contacts in CRM systems was a discussion point in most companies GDPR planning. This nicely solves this requirement, or it would if the fields were mandatory and used sales-centric terminology rather than the somewhat dry legal terms that few non-lawyers genuinely understand. Hopefully, this will be updated in a future release. Marketers are also getting two critically important GDPR compliance features in this relief. Both relate to Marketo's munchkin website tracking capabilities: IP anonymisation and contact opt-out. The [opt-out](http://developers.marketo.com/javascript-api/lead-tracking/#opt%5Fout) is query string based, and relies on 'marketo\_opt\_out=true' being added to the end of the web page URL. This is a useful first step for organisations with strict compliance requirements, but does not cater for brands with strict opt-in requirements surrounding tracking in the same way that Eloqua's strict mode does. In practice, the IP anonymisation is probably more useful, as it mirrors Google Analytics preferred solution to the tracking consent dilemma. GA has had the capability to mask the IP of the visitors it tracks for a while. The concept is that without an IP address or a known contact association, website tracking doesn't require an opt in as it's not possible to link the data with a person's details. Some lawyers may disagree with this view, particularly with changes to European Privacy laws in the pipeline, so check first. However, it certainly doesn't hinder compliance. ### Other Updates Marketo's [ContentAI](https://uk.marketo.com/software/content-ai/) functionality gets a significant update too. Previously, the technology that drives this feature used clicks as it's success metric. Now ContentAI can be optimised to maximise Opens or Conversions instead. This is a small but significant milestone in the journey to developing a truly flexible automated content journey. Marketo's new Performance Insights reporting suite gets some updates following customer feedback, with the aim of enhancing usability and making the data presented more flexible and relevant to users. Details are in the [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Spring+'18). Along the lines of the existing [Slack integration](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Add+Slack+as+a+LaunchPoint+Service), Marketo is getting an integration with Facebook Workplace. It allows Marketo to post notifications and Interesting Moments into a customer's Facebook Workplace. A fairly popular feature, and a useful way of updating Sales and the wider marketing team on Campaign Activity. Also related to integrations is a small but important addition to the API. The ability for the API to create, read, update and delete static lists makes data upload tools and event integrations significantly more flexible. ### Marketo Sky Lastly, by far the most prominent update in this release actually rolled out last month. That being the Open Beta of the brand new [Marketo Sky Next-Gen UX](https://help.marketo.com/hc/en-us). This has attracted a lot of interest in the Marketo user community, but it's still early days. Beta is probably an inaccurate term for the current state of Sky, as it is far from feature complete. However, Marketo have moved their entire development focus from the existing UX to Sky, so updates are expected frequently. In the meantime, it is worth Marketo admins taking a look at Sky, even if it isn't yet ready for end users to use. At this stage, there are still too many missing features for anything beyond testing and providing developer feedback. The excitement is justified though as the new UX definitely has potential to be a significant improvement over the current UI. *The Spring '18 release of Marketo is scheduled for June 29th. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details can be found in the official [release notes](https://docs.marketo.com/display/public/DOCS/Release+Notes%3A+Spring+'18).* ### How Flexible is your Brand? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/how-flexible-is-your-brand/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:36:53.000Z I've seen a lot of brand guidelines in my time. It's inevitable working agency side. Generally, they're pretty predictable affairs. You might occasionally get a brand whose guidelines aren't an enormously long PDF, but instead are the topic of an entire website. They all look as though the designer spent more time on the brand guidelines than anything customer facing. As an agency staffer, I'm generally looking at 3 things from the brand guidelines: 1. Brand Colours 2. Brand Fonts 3. Tone of Voice Of these, Tone of Voice is merely useful, and can be worked out from the company website. The rest is irrelevant to me, and exists only to indicate to designers which sections of the guidelines can be broken and which can't. ### The Cardinal Rule Then there is the one firm rule applied consistently across every brand I've worked with: don't mess with the logo. Almost all brands devote the first dozen pages of their guidelines to introducing the logo, and a long list of restrictions about it's usage. Sure, this is important. Nothing upsets brand owners more than incorrect usage of their logo, and with good reason. The logo is the most visible mark of brand identity. It's the one thing that customers instantly recognise about you. Having a clear and unmodified logo across all marketing collateral builds a connection with the audience and proves ownership of the message. But do brand guidelines really need to repeat all this stuff, given that they're virtually the same for all brands? If you've ever read a brand guidelines you'll know the score. Those dozen pages boil down to three things: - Don't modify or transform the logo - Make sure the logo is distinct and prominent, with a set amount of spacing around it. - Don't change the colour of the logo ### Permitted Variations Then there's Lenovo. If you go to their website, the logo changes orientation and style depending on the screen size. On desktop, the logo is vertical. On mobile, it's horizontal. If you scroll on the page, it's replaced completely with a brand icon. At least the colour is consistent. At all screen sizes the logo is red. Except when it's green, or blue, or orange. In the settings app on my laptop it's green. I'm led to believe that there are rules about which colour variation should be used when. However, I've not read the guidelines which detail the usage of each colour. Logo variations are not a new idea, almost every brand has them. However, the sheer number of logo variations available to Lenovo is dizzying. The brand pages on their website include a zip file with 28 different logo variations. Plus a similar number of brand icon variations. ### Brand Impact The multiple variations don't seen to harm them. They're still a successful and instantly recognisable brand. I doubt your average consumer or corporate IT buyer would have trouble identifying them on the basis of variations in the logo colour. They might not even notice. Which raises the million dollar question. Is there a difference in conversion rates or email click rates as a result of the different colour schemes? It's widely believed that colours do have an impact on brand perception, and thus conversion rates. There are plenty of studies which claim to prove them. If Lenovo do have numbers on this topic, I am curious to see them. I doubt we ever will. We can only judge this by whether they remove some off the logo variations from public usage. ### Microsoft struggle to escape the past URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/microsoft-struggle-to-escape-the-past/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:46:53.000Z On Monday, a leading maker of software for developers announced they were acquiring the world’s largest service for hosting and managing source code. The internet exploded in outrage. Large numbers of developers proclaimed that the acquisition was a plot to destroy open source software, and that the new owners were trying to kill their acquisition. Many migrated their projects to competing code hosting services. I am referring to the news that Microsoft is purchase GitHub for $7.5 billion. The strategic logic for the deal is strong. Microsoft were founded as a developer of technologies for other developers. This continues to be an important business for them. Their Visual Studio product is widely used across businesses of all sizes, even when using non Microsoft development languages and frameworks. The latest versions of Visual Studio have GitHub integration built in, providing an end to end toolchain for software developers. GitHub is also widely used by businesses of all sizes. It is the first place developers of all types consider when deciding where to host their code. This includes Microsoft, who are now GitHub’s largest customer. Last year, they killed their competing TFS product and moved the source code of all their software to GitHub. In doing this, they discovered that the technology behind GitHub didn’t scale to the requirements needed to develop Windows or Office. To fix this, they worked with GitHub to extend the underlying git platform that powers the service to scale to even the largest software project. This will allow other enterprises with similarly complex requirements to adopt GitHub for all their development projects. Most importantly it provides a path for the hugely unprofitable GitHub to stop bleeding red ink and make money. ### Past Reputation The backlash against the deal comes from the fact that GitHub is a lynchpin of the open source software community. The source code for the majority open source projects are hosted on it, and the company has been a champion of open source development methodologies from the very beginning. GitHub was designed first and foremost to be used for open source. Allowing non-open source projects onto GitHub was intended originally as a means to make money. All code on GitHub is visible to everyone by default. Developers have to pay to keep their source code private. On the other hand, Microsoft spent the late 90s and early 2000s trying to kill open source software and the movement behind it. In 2001 their CEO, Steve Ballmer, famously described Linux, the poster child of open source, as a cancer. Their attitude to open source had since changed dramatically. Microsoft have in recent years open sourced a number of their development platforms including the .net development language and the PowerShell scripting language for IT admins. They now host thousands of Linux servers on Azure. In 2017, they even released a Linux version of SQL Server, one of their core products. ### Legacy Costs It appears that not everyone has noticed this change. On tech sites every news story about Microsoft is accompanied by comments recounting the sins of the past. To this minority, every piece of positive news is forgotten or explained away. Microsoft have rebranded but, many developers remember the old hegemonic behemoth of the past and still hold a grudge. The new open collaborative company has escaped their notice. When Microsoft say they have new values and a different culture not everyone believes them. People remember mistakes. This is a problem familiar to many social media users. It is impossible to escape that offensive post or embarrassing photo. Just ask politicians. Journalists regularly trawl through Twitter histories and Blog archives from years gone by looking for the latest scandal, then publicise them to get clicks or sell newspapers. Brands are treated no differently. ### Key Metrics Yet, Microsoft are one of the most successful companies on the planet. They have adapted to the cloud revolution far more successfully than many of their competitors. Every new product launch is welcomed by far more people than criticise it. References to the new Microsoft and praise for CEO Satya Nadella abound on tech blogs. The critics are a vocal minority, but one with little impact on the bottom line. Microsoft have accepted that they’re never going away. You can’t please everyone. Nor do companies have to. Marketers only need to delight their customers and prospects. Microsoft have an expanding number of both so the critics don’t matter. In the end, it’s only the numbers that truly count. ### Marketing on the Right Side of History URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/marketing-on-the-right-side-of-history/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:37:22.000Z HubSpot marked the beginning of GDPR with an internal email welcoming the new regulations, calling it the ‘right side of history’. They also noted that it would encourage marketers to switch from outbound marketing to inbound marketing tactics. This is undoubtedly true, and is something that Hubspot are well placed to take advantage of. They have long been one of the leading advocates of inbound marketing within the industry. It is not surprising therefore that they are promoting this message, and the fact they believe that this is positive for all marketing. The only problem with this argument is that GDPR does nothing to address the primary challenge that all Marketers face when promoting their brands. People just don’t want to be marketed to. The method used to reach audiences doesn’t matter – the default position of any individual is that marketing is an annoyance to be endured, rather than something to be welcomed. There is no distinction between inbound and outbound channels in this. It’s certainly true that outbound marketing has taken a hit with GDPR trimming mailing lists. The impact of this on budgets and ROI is still unknown. However, GDPR has affected inbound too. Restricting targeted advertising was a key goal of the regulation, as publishers and media companies will attest. Furthermore, the restrictions introduced by GDPR have done nothing to help address the other major threat to publisher’s business models: ad-blockers. Perhaps, in the days that follow consumers will decide en masse that ad blocking is no longer needed. However, this is vanishingly unlikely. For as long as advertising has existed people have tried to avoid it. One of the attractions of VHS was the ability to record shows and then fast forward through the ads. Email marketing was popular for a reason – it had higher ROI than many other tactics. ### Price of Engagement The truth is that people only seek to engage with brands they trust, and only on their own terms. This has always been the weakness of outbound marketing. The gleeful reaction on social media to the avalanche of opt-in campaigns that hit European inboxes in late May proves this. Marketers aim, among other things, for engagement and audience reach. However, actually achieving them is far from easy. Demand generation is difficult and always has been. However, the results of a successful demand gen strategy on revenue can be spectacular. Brands wouldn’t bother investing in complex demand generation strategies or major lead generation programs otherwise. Over the last 15 years, new technology and lack of consumer awareness about this technology have opened up a range of demand generation tactics that didn’t exist previously. The backbone of this has been consistent tracking of consumer behaviour online. This technology has allowed an unprecedented level of reporting and analytics – down to the level of the individual. This has allowed Marketing to become a data-driven science. ### The Forgotten Stakeholder Yet rarely in their planning have Marketers considered the consumer impact of all this technology and the data it generates. There was no malicious intent in this, Marketers are consumers too. It was simple oversight from Marketers eager to achieve results and meet their targets. Instead, pervasive tracking has been taken for granted, with no consideration as to whether usage was either wanted or appropriate. The backlash against this trend has been growing for some time, as evidenced by the steady increase in the usage of ad blockers and privacy extensions in browsers. Finally, this year the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Facebook’s reaction to it brought the issue into the mainstream. People are now aware of the imbalance between consumer rights, and the power that technology gives Marketers. GDPR was drafted to redress this imbalance, and so far it has succeeded. In doing so, it has restricted a range of tactics that marketers took for granted. Fortunately, there are plenty of other tactics for Marketers to adopt. It’s just that many of them are harder, or more difficult to report on. If adopting these tactics increases consumer trust in marketers and the brands they represent then perhaps the claim that inbound marketing represents the right side of history may be proven right. ### GDPR is Here: What Next for Marketers? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/gdpr-is-here-what-next-for-marketers/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:37:33.000Z Your opt-in campaign has been sent, your preference centre has been refreshed and your brand new GDPR consent management workflows are now live. What now? There’s no avoiding the issue. Your database just took a hammering. Your mailing list now has a lot fewer contacts than it used to. You may even be wondering whether you have enough contacts to run some types of email campaigns at all. ### Here’s the good news Your email engagement stats are about to go through the roof. You’ve just lost the section of your database who never opened or clicked anyway. The rest of them are still there, waiting for the next email. So, take a look at who they are, who they work for and what they’re interested in. Then write your next email for the potential leads among them. Design it in a way which appeals to them, and reference them personally, as well as the issues they care about. Of course, this is all Marketing 101\. You’ve been doing this anyway right? However, in a world where every subscriber is special, relevance is more important than before. Personalisation is now key to a successful email campaign. ### Target It’s important to use the right personalisation approach, targeted at the right audience. To do this, you need to be scientific. Take your database — both subscribers and customers — and get your data wizards to discover why they are. If you don’t have a data wizard, I know a few. Build a firmographic profile of your customer base and the successful opportunities you generate. Look at the trends, and the sectors or company types where you’re most successful. Then find more companies which fit the same profile. Run campaigns targeted at these companies. Also, look into your activity history and discover the job role and demographic profiles of the people at each customer who first engaged with your brand. Now use the targeting capabilities of your preferred ad platforms to target other individuals with the same profile. Use the AI and lookalike matching capabilities of your platforms to enhance this. ### Promote Then speak to these individuals and find out where they heard about your brand, why they engaged with you, and how they interacted. Now post content or place ads on the channels they mention. Direct your ads back to a landing page. Don’t use your website as a destination, because you need to focus the experience towards serving the content the user wanted, and more like it. The goal is to facilitate content consumption and ultimately conversion. You‘re aiming for an email address and an opt-in. Your website is a barrier to this, as it will contain a lot of irrelevant links and product information that will distract from encouraging conversions. ### Engage In the past, you could just add every new form fill to an email nurture. This isn’t possible anymore as forms now need to ask for an opt-in before you can do this. You need to be realistic and acknowledge that the majority will not opt-in. However, you can still send an auto-responder email thanking them for their download even without an opt-in. This is the perfect opportunity for providing the prospect with more content matched to the content that they just consumed. Make the email as relevant as possible, as it may be the only email that you can send them! Even better is to build out the entire journey online. Map out the entire nurture using landing pages, or a dedicated content platform such as PathFactory. The moment someone finishes consuming one content piece, the link to the next one should be available on-screen. Also, don’t forget to provide a discrete CTA to contact Sales, for when someone wants to take the next step. There’s no doubt this is a lot harder than batch and blast emails. GDPR forces marketers to reach out and have conversations with prospective customers on their terms. Yet, designing and building cross-channel customer journeys are exactly what many successful marketers are already doing with strong results. Remember, this is exactly what Marketing Automation was designed to do. So, stop worrying about your next campaign. It’s time to follow the advice of Marketo and become a fearless marketer. This post was also published on [crmtechnologies.com](https://www.crmtechnologies.com/insights/gdpr-here-what-next-marketers). ### And the winner is... URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/best-opt-in-campaign-2018/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T18:02:11.000Z I've been surprised at how few opt-in campaigns I've received so far. Although, I know from my day job that a lot more are incoming. However, I think we already have a winner of the best email award. This actually made me laugh out loud when I went through my inbox this morning. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/55/cc/55cc6544-14f5-43be-8e47-d10e9a7fe6d6/content/images/2020/12/Screenshot-2018-5-18-https-lp-lookbookhq-com.png) Image Copyright © 2018 PathFactory Inc. 174 Spadina Ave, Suite 600, Toronto, ON M5T 2C2 Yes, I am a massive Star Wars fan. I'm a big sci-fi fan in general. However, there are a lot of Star Wars fans out there, so it's a good audience to go after. It's interesting actually, how many campaigns I've received from companies who I've have never had emails from before. I've even opted-in to some of them. The runner-up prize goes to one of those companies that I'd never heard of before. Bottomline Technologies sent a pun-filled aquatic number several months ago. I opted in despite the fact their products are well outside my area of interest or responsibility. P.S. One small quibble with PathFactory is that they got the send date of their campaign wrong. Star Wars Day was two weeks ago, on May 4th. Although, given that was around the time they rebranded away from LookbookHQ I'll let that one pass just this once. ### What is a Content Activation Engine? URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/what-is-a-content-activation-engine/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T17:37:56.000Z OK. I'm confused by LookbookHQ's announcement from Sirius Decision Summit. LookbookHQ have rebranded themselves as PathFactory. That's not what I'm confused about. The news is a surprise, but it makes sense. The SEO on their old brand was horrible, and got in the way of explaining what they do. The new name is a much better description. My confusion is that they've announced a revolutionary new Content Insight & Activation Engine, when in fact all they've done is changed their name. I can't see anything that's changed about the product in the announcement. PathFactory have had AI and non-linear journey capabilities in their enterprise versions for a while. The issue with PathFactory has always been that the elevator pitch sounds like something a good developer can put together in a day. What distinguishes them from the homebrew solution is their analytics. They have the analytics capabilities of a best of breed content marketing platform baked into their product. There's a lot more depth to the LookbookHQ product than many people realise; the sheer number of options available surprised me when I first started building journeys with it. P.S. Word from the show floor at Sirius Decisions is that the summit is less about promoting new frameworks, and more customer experience. This is positive. Sirius Decisions have frameworks for pretty much everything already. As the number of available frameworks have grown there is an increasing divide between their new research and the practical realities on the ground. Hopefully, the change of focus will bridge the gap. ### New Tools for Fearless Marketers URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/new-tools-for-fearless-marketers/ Last updated: 2024-03-15T20:04:10.000Z It's finally coming. This month too. The news from Marketing Nation Summit is that Marketo Sky, the new UX for Marketo announced last year, is going in to open beta in May. It looks great, and I'm really looking forward to actually using it. The demos that had at their summit last year were excellent, and it seems like they've developed it significantly since. There are a ton of new features coming in Marketo Sky. There's an infamous thread on Marketo's community about Marketo's so-called minor missing features, and many of them are going to be added into the release. ### Bizible That's not even the biggest news from Marketo's customer conference. That particular accolade goes to the announcement of Marketo's newest record acquisition - Bizible. Bizible are an analytics vendor specialising in attribution. It's an interesting acquisition, but one which enhances an area of relative strength rather than addressing their weaknesses when it comes to reporting. Marketo already have multiple add-on modules dedicated to BI and business reporting, but they're used inconsistently. Many Marketo customers prefer to do ROI reporting out of other tools, frequently BI tools or Salesforce. This is often because Marketo's out of the box reporting is limited, and their add-on modules do not have the feature set of a dedicated tool, of which Bizible is one such example. ### Audience AI This is the other announcement which got significant press attention. It's a lookalike service to identify potential hot prospects you may be missing out in your Marketo database. It's based off Google's machine learning algorithms, which implies there's more to that partnership than initially presumed by many last year. Whilst it looks cool, other data platform vendors already claim to have similar functionality. Ultimately, this is going to succeed based upon the accuracy of the AI, and they're working with the right partner on that side of it. ### Sales Engage This appears to be ToutApp rebranded with parts of Marketo Sales Insight thrown into the mix. This allows them to sell ToutApp to their customer base, which is positive. Their ToutApp acquisition was a good one, and I've had conversations with customers about it since. Integrating the Sales playbook tools more into Marketo works best for both Sales & Marketing. The most notable thing about Marketo Summit this year is the branding. The fearless marketer tagline has got attention. Are Marketers terrified at the moment? Absolutely, GDPR is causing sleepless nights for everybody in the industry. These tools have potential to help Marketers in the post GDPR world, but the proof is in the end product. ### Welcome to Marketing via Technology URL: https://marketingviatechnology.com/welcome-2/ Last updated: 2024-01-02T18:01:58.000Z I've had a personal blog for years on WordPress. During that time, I have made a point to never write about marketing or enterprise tech. That was the day job, and this blog is a hobby. The end result is that I ended up not writing anything at all. I didn't want to write about my other hobbies, I prefer to actually do them. I've now decided that writing about work stuff is preferable to not writing at all. I enjoy writing. My friends and colleagues tell me I'm good at it. So here we are. By the time you see this, I'll have launched my new site with a new domain. Why is it called Marketing via Technology? Well, the original plan was to call it marketing with technology, but that domain was taken. This site is primarily about digital marketing, marketing automation and marketing technology in general. However, I will sometimes cover enterprise technology beyond that relevant to Marketers, such as Office 365 and G Suite. I have to keep up with what Microsoft, Google and other enterprise application vendors are doing anyway. I got into marketing through technology. My first job was as a junior database administrator. I was IT Manager at CRMT for many years alongside my work building campaigns in Eloqua and Marketo. The name of the site reflects this. However, I've created enough campaigns, worked alongside enough marketers and learned enough about marketing to be trusted to talk about demand generation and other marketing topics. However, on this blog my tech background may sometimes show through. You will notice a link to [crmtechnologies.com](https://www.crmtechnologies.com) in the footer. This does not mean that the site is any way to linked to CRMT, or endorsed by them. I put it in because the contents of this site are directly relevant to their core business, and I work for them. This is a personal blog, written in my spare time. I'm not writing this to earn money or win business for CRMT. As such, all views expressed on these pages are solely the opinion of the author. In most cases that author will be me. If CRMT do happen to agree with something I write, then you may find a revised version of that article on their site several days later. They have my permission to republish any articles they like on their blog. Finally, I will occasionally post off-topic content too. I will try to stick to uncontroversial topics when doing this. However, I do have a degree in politics and philosophy. There is a significant gap between political philosophy and political reality, but when the actions of the political classes become too controversial or incompetent, my commentary may step into the realm of the political. I promised long ago to never write publicly about the domestic politics of a nation other than my own. However, current events on both sides of the Atlantic mean that my reticence has been sorely tested. I do not expect that to change in the near future. I apologise unreservedly for any offence that may be caused by my posts, both on-topic and off-topic. **Update 14th June 2018:** Don't go looking for my old blog. I took it offline. You may also notice that this is not a WordPress site. I'm using a different CMS for this one. WordPress is a really powerful and flexible CMS, but getting it configured as I wanted was more hassle than it was worth. I was able to set up Ghost and code a basic theme in a weekend while still getting the functionality I wanted. It's definitely come a long way in terms of features since the early versions I experimented with in the past, all without sacrificing ease of use. P.S. Thanks to the great customer service of my web host in getting this installed, and fixing the install when I broke it.