A case can be made that even in an economic downturn, CMOs must continue to drive customer innovations through investing in the right martech solutions. But securing the budget for that technology requires working hand-in-hand with CFOs. The good news is that a top priority for CFOs in 2023 is driving value through technology-based innovation, according to Deloitte research. A column in Multichannel Merchant outlines three key insights for marketing leaders seeking approval of technology investments: pitch ideas supported by research, articulate the value of the proposed technology and understand your organization’s financial goals. Check out the full article here.

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Leveraging the full potential of your martech investments has been a challenge for the industry in recent years. Consider this stat from Gartner’s just-released 2022 Martech Survey: Marketers use just 42 percent of their martech stacks’ capabilities—and that’s down from 58 percent in 2020. Following are the survey’s key findings, gathered from 324 marketers in May and June of 2022, plus recommendations from Gartner on how to maximize the value of your martech investments.

Barriers to Utilization

CMOs are allocating a quarter of their marketing budgets to martech in 2022, according to Gartner research, making it all the more critical to ensure greater ROI from those investments. But challenges related to under-utilization of martech stacks are tied to numerous factors, including new business models and disrupted customer journeys, said Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst at Gartner Marketing practice in a release. Barriers to utilization include overlap among technology solutions (30 percent of respondents), identifying and recruiting talent to drive adoption (28 percent) and the complexity of the martech ecosystem itself (27 percent).

When it comes to purchasing strategies, the majority of marketers—60 percent—are investing in an integrated suite of products, or a set of various software solutions from one supplier, compared to 42 percent one year prior. Meanwhile, just 25 percent of marketers are taking a best-of-breed approach that’s more tailored to their organization’s specific needs, down from 44 percent a year ago. Marketers are more in control of vendor evaluation than previously, the survey indicates, with 61 percent of respondents saying that marketing and IT jointly collaborate on tool selection. Further, 27 percent say that marketing controls it entirely—up from 9 percent in 2020.

Adoption of Journey Orchestration

An important strategy that investment in marketing technology can support is customer journey orchestration, or the coordination of customer experiences across multiple touchpoints to encourage engagement. It’s a top priority for CMOs in 2022, according to Gartner research, but just 20 percent reported successful implementation across the end-to-end journey. However, 60 percent are preparing to implement or have partially implemented the strategy—and 94 percent expect to be pursing it within two years.

Emerging Martech Tools

In terms of new types of technology investments to support innovation, the survey found that streaming audio or podcast advertising was on the rise, with 65 percent of respondents saying they have deployed this technology or have already done so. Other tools include advertising within the metaverse (63 percent), social commerce (62 percent), streaming TV or CTV advertising (62 percent), in-game advertising (59 percent) and creating branded NFTs (57 percent).

To create more value for companies’ martech investments, Gartner recommends several solutions:

*Incorporate martech utilization into team performance objectives and allocate resources to resolve barriers to adoption.

*If an integrated suite approach is applied to purchasing, consistently examine and validate vendors’ ability to support your desired martech objectives.

*Collaborate more closely with IT teams to support customer journey orchestration.

*Pursue long-term, in-house development of emerging technology tools rather than allocating investment to agencies or service providers by default, and include this capability within your martech roadmap in order to improve ROI.

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Following are five ways a martech platform investment can facilitate your brand’s digital transformation, according to an article in Multichannel Merchant, from customer data management to marketing orchestration to AI-powered personalization and experimentation.

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Modernizing marketing operations within a 215-year-old global research and education company, itself comprised of 57 disparate brands accustomed to varying levels of marketing innovation, takes a level of commitment its customer base of researchers is renowned for.

Indeed, what surfaced when Wiley CMO Shari Hofer applied research, data and martech tools toward the company itself was the realization that it was not serving its customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey—which has the potential to begin during college and last until the advanced stages of their careers.

We spoke with Hofer about what Wiley’s rebrand entailed; how marketing technology tools helped support strategies for personalization; tactics used to maintain productivity across a global marketing organization during the pandemic, and more.

Chief Marketer: You’ve modernized marketing operations at Wiley since you came on board. What are some of the changes that you’ve made?

Shari Hofer, CMO of Wiley: We are a global leader in research and education, founded 215 years ago, so we have a pretty extensive legacy. Right now, we’re focused on driving forward the knowledge economy through scientific research, and then also using career-connected education. We work primarily with researchers, learners and employers.

When I started about five years ago, they were pretty far behind in their marketing delivery. Marketing was, at that point, an event-driven-type culture. We shifted the organization into a customer-centric organization. We’ve got about 57 brands that we’ve carried through that 215-year legacy.

We were on a mission to figure out how we could modernize and make those 57 brands relevant, and then do it how people receive marketing today. A big focus was getting the right people in the organization, upskilling them—because they didn’t have the type of skills that we needed to move the brand and organization forward—and then getting the marketing technology stack in-house that we needed to bring all of that to life.

CM: What strategies did you use to accomplish that?

SH: We had to take a moment and figure out the actual purpose of this brand. Why are we here? What’s our promise? What are our values in the organization? Then we were able to build what the identity looked like. We decided we were a hybrid and that Wiley was going to be the primary brand. And then we started looking at what our customers think of us overall.

From a modernization standpoint, once we had the brand and an understanding of what we needed the brand to do, we started to build a shared service demand center of excellence—because we knew we needed a way to activate it. That’s when we brought in the technology stack and formed an internal agency so that all of those elements of the brand could be delivered consistently to customers. We purchased the Adobe stack, for example, to transform this approach and make it more personalized.

CM: What’s an example of this new personalization strategy?

SH: Email was a big channel for us—in the late 2000s. It still is, but we weren’t getting to all the people in the ways that we wanted to. So, we experimented last year with TikTok, for example, which came to life through research when we figured out where people were. Videos were the highest-consumed piece of marketing from the audience we were trying to get to. And we did some experiments—believe it or not—on Pinterest. The results were eye-opening and tremendous. That led us to believe that we were not addressing the audience in a personalized way. So, we shifted a lot of our spend over to those two channels, and we’re still experimenting on them.

CM: What worked for you on TikTok? Where did you find your inspiration? 

SH: Our primary audience is individuals looking for education resources. They want to either advance in their careers or their personal lives. We created very short videos about how to find education resources and what Wiley had to offer. Step one was getting people to our website to see what was there. That’s not a way that we would go to market previously. As a traditional company, we would’ve given you a lot of information to digest. We would’ve led you to a lot of text to read. Instead, we did these quick little videos and got a huge amount of click-throughs.

CM: You manage a global team comprised of 600 marketers. What’s your approach to organizational culture and making it cohesive?

SH: We’ve had to change a lot over the last two years because we’re all at home. From a productivity standpoint, we put together a number of community-based programs, things like candid conversations. We held monthly firesides with my direct team of 130 marketers where we sat down and focused in on one team in marketing, what they did and why they did it, which then inspired people to cross-pollinate and talk and share ideas. It developed the culture that we wanted, along with upskilling digital marketing skills, to make people proud of what they do and continue to advance. And then we had a number of smaller programs that helped with mentorship, recognizing accomplishments and things like that.

CM: How did your marketing shift during the pandemic?

SH: Suddenly all of these researchers were at home and having more time to finish—maybe research that they hadn’t finished for years. We are competing with others to try and get that research. That’s where we flipped to looking at how we are actually engaging with them. We had a lot of always-on campaigns that were just churning out messages to individuals. But then we dug in deeper to try to figure out people’s motivations, where they were connecting and get involved in those channels and show up as a partner.

CM: With email now a less important channel, where are you reaching your customers now?

SH: It depends a little bit. We took a step back and looked at the personas, and then we dug into the motivations of the customers, which helped us figure out which channels that they were engaging with and interacting with more. On the personalization side with Adobe, it shed some light into where we get the best response. Email is still a big channel, don’t get me wrong. But it isn’t the only channel that we use, and we are doing more integrated campaigns and then focusing in on where we’re seeing better responses.

CM: How are you balancing consumer data privacy laws with personalizing experiences?

SH: As a global corporation, we do have to follow all of those data privacy laws. We have different ways of going to market in certain countries, depending on what the rules of engagement are in those particular areas. And we are pretty strict about that. When we put in double opt-in in some areas, we did see a decrease, which is why our focus on emails shifted. We needed to find other ways to do it where we were still compliant, but didn’t see that loss.

CM: You mentioned revamping your marketing tech stack. How are you leveraging the data that you’re collecting through new technologies?

SH: About 82 percent of our revenue comes from digital—people buying digital content from us. From the marketing and the data side, we engage with customers sometimes at the earliest moment of joining an education experience. Or maybe you are starting your higher education experience and an instructor tells you to buy courseware and it comes from Wiley. You may start with Wiley all the way through to when you’re advanced in your career and you might need to take a CPA exam again to keep your certifications for it.

We realized that we started with a customer at the beginning of their experience and we could work with them all the way through the end. And that new technology and data stack helped us understand when you were coming back and buying something from us, what stage you were in in your career. Were we doing the right things and delivering what you needed? This is now opening it up, bringing that product data, your purchase history and all of those data elements together. It’s helped us get a better picture of what we can do to serve our customers better.

CM: So before, you weren’t considering this lifetime customer.

SH: Well we considered it more by the brand. And then as we did the brand work, we said, well, wait a minute. This customer could be with us through the entire duration of their career or their education journey. And we’re not really serving them well. We thought about how we actually deliver the best for customers and make them aware that they can get everything they need from us.

CM: In the research and education fields, what are your biggest challenges from a marketing perspective?

SH: On the research side, we are moving to a direct-to-consumer model. But it’s not a model where we’re selling something directly, because your research goes in cycles. It might take you two years to write a research paper that you’re ready to submit. We looked at when you came to us last and submitted, and then we would check in with you over time, nurturing, constantly talking to you and making you aware of us for when you were ready.

Education is a little different, and we have to support the two models. If you’re in a course and an instructor tells you to buy something, you just need to know where to go to buy it because you need it for that course. We were really talking to the instructors, making sure they knew what we had to offer so they could offer it to their students. That’s why we brought all the marketers together to talk during these fireside chats, because the types of marketing they do are vastly different.

CM: And the types of marketing varies because the brands are so different?

SH: Very much so. Some of the research brands are very old. They’ve been around forever. They’re established brands that people have a lot of understanding of. And then on the education side, we have a lot of new, young or innovative brands that we’re starting up. So, it’s figuring out how to bring those two together so people don’t just see us in one way, but see us across the continuum of the journey.

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B2B marketers can learn a thing or two from the B2C world’s experience with customer data platforms before adding one to their tech stack, according to a piece in AdExchanger. Following are the essential requirements for a CDP that are unique to B2B organizations—from being people-based to allowing for data flexibility to enabling multichannel orchestration.

People-Based Systems

Particularly when it comes to B2B companies, CDPs should be able to facilitate meaningful conversations with all people of interest to the organization, including customers, prospects and anyone who might become a customer in the future.

Flexible Data Capabilities

A successful B2B CDP will support custom relationships and hierarchies from your data. They should also allow for both anonymous and known profiles and multiple use cases, such as marketing, sales and service.

Data Unification and Orchestration

The CDP should be capable of cleansing first-party data, supporting third-party data and integrating engagement data from multiple touchpoints.

For more CDP requirements for B2B marketers, read on in AdExchanger.

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A column in PRNEWS from Ben Chodor, president of Notified, takes a stab at technology predictions for 2022—from integrated data sets to virtual event platforms to marketing in the metaverse.

Enhanced Shareholder Input

Shareholder engagement has grown more complex in the past 12 months and will continue to be a focus for marketing teams. Non-traditional platforms will be used to find new ways to tell a brand’s corporate story using more immersive tactics.

Integrated Data Sources

Data silos will break down even further in 2022, giving marketers a more complete view of performance and ROI. Integrated data sets will be used to better collaborate between departments.

Marketing in the Metaverse

Marketers will begin to explore ways to engage audiences in the metaverse, through using avatars, gamification, extended reality and more.

For more technology trends for 2022, read on in PRNEWS.

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Investing in ecommerce channels to boost sales by marketing to consumers directly has a particularly useful byproduct: first-party data. Take Nestle as an example, which announced this week that it plans to take ecommerce sales from 13 percent to 25 percent by 2025, a move that will significantly enhance its analytics capabilities. Here are four ways that brands investing in ecommerce can leverage new automation technologies to drive conversions, according to a piece in Multichannel Merchant.

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In light of additional data sources fueled by new technologies, there’s a greater need to organize the information. Enter: customer data platforms (CDPs), which help marketers manage data compliance in the face of consumer privacy laws. But they also support a growing number of marketing use cases, including digital advertising, customer segmentation and email marketing. Read more about how marketers are using CDPs in this piece from AdExchanger.

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In-person experiences are getting an assist from a simple yet efficient technology that appears to be having its moment: the QR code. With touchless tech now a key component of IRL experiences, the codes allow consumers to unlock engagements safely while helping marketers collect data to inform their business strategies. From a Van Gogh immersive experience to a self-guided journey from HBO Max to a playlist download for an OGX car wash, read about examples of brands leveraging the codes with success in this piece from CM sister pub Event Marketer.

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* Taking a DevOps approach to machine learning and AI. By now it’s agreed that AI and machine learning provide organizations with more-sophisticated customer insights and predictions that allow for more efficient, more effective marketing. Yet only 42% of executives surveyed by Algorithmia said their businesses could deploy a single ML model in a month or less. For most companies, by the time they deploy their model, it could already by outdated. For that reason, Deloitte contends that more organizations will embrace MLOps, which takes a standardized, systematic approach to developing and implementing ML and AI solutions and models, just as tech companies use DevOps to streamline the workflow of software development. Standardizing the processes that go into developing and implementing ML and AI, and having an operations professional with data and tech experience overseeing them, frees up data scientists to focus on what they do best, allowing models to be deployed more quickly.

* Implementing no-code/low-code integration tools. The worldwide market for low-code/no-code technology is expected to hit $13.8 billion this year, according to Gartner, up 22% from 2020. And little wonder. Having to call on IT for development or deployment assistance is a speed bump on the road to agile performance. More and more marketing tools and platforms now enable users to automate workflow and complete tasks as diverse as building landing pages, segmenting databases, and creating apps without having to code, a development Accenture calls the “democratization of technology” and one that it expects only to increase. In his keynote at the March 2021 MarTech conference, marketing tech expert Scott Brinker said that the increase in no-code/low-code martech is giving rise to Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (IPaaS). As the name suggests, it enables marketers not just to use but also to integrate multiple tools and data without having to call upon the tech department.

* Accessing data clean rooms. PwC, among others, believes that the death knell of third-party cookies is making data clean rooms a marketing necessity. These “rooms” allow marketers to access customer data that has been stripped of personally identifiable information (PII). While they don’t provide the personal, individualized data of a third-party cookie, when used in conjunction with an organization’s first-party data, they allow for directional insight. Epsilon divides clean rooms into two categories: walled gardens, such as Google’s Ads Data Hub, where advertisers can get aggregated data about their ads on a particular platform, and multiplatform data solutions, which provide info from multiple platforms. The downside to the latter is that the data they serve generally isn’t as granular as that from walled gardens, which is why it suggests that major advertisers will want to use both.

* Focusing on campaign attribution tools. The decline of third-party cookies also makes marketers more reliant on campaign attribution tools to help determine what’s working and where to shift their spend, according to Bright Data. This is reflected in marketing budgets. Among the marketers surveyed late last year by Ascend2, 34% said their allocation budget was increasing moderately, and another 25% said it was increasing significantly. Only 7% of the respondents outsourced all their attribution efforts, while 30% used only in-house resources. The remaining 63% relied on a combination.

* Maximizing existing tools—and looking ahead. Ascend2 also reports that 69% of marketers were benefiting from an increase in overall martech budgets this year. That might not be the boon it appears at first glance, however, given that 58% of the marketers Gartner surveyed late last year saw their martech budgets cut due to the pandemic; only 24% enjoyed a budget increase. In other words, a portion of the marketers seeing an increase in their martech budgets might only be reaching parity with their pre-pandemic spending. So it’s not surprising that more marketers seem to be planning to make the most of their existing martech stack rather than looking to invest in new tools—at least for now. Of those who reported increases in their martech budgets during the pandemic, 37% said they were in the process of overhauling their stack with new tech investments, while 41% said they were increasing use of their existing tech rather than considering new investments. Among those who saw their martech budgets reduced last year, 35% were increasing the use of their existing stack versus considering new investments, and only 25% were in the process of adding new tech to their stack. That said, roughly a third of all survey participants said they intended to review their existing martech stack with the intention of later bringing in new tools.

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