Brian Andersen (LUMA Partners) and Robin Bordoli (Marketo) gave a great presentation on the Marketing Technology Landscape. This area is to broad to get into details in one hour, so they presented an overview of the market and then suggested the following three tactics to cope with the vast amount of change going on:
- Accept that buyers are in control – it used to be that the buyers contacted the seller well in advance of a sale and the sales team took over to convert that buyer into a customer. Now buyers are waiting until way into the process, so marketers have to have several touch points with potential buyers to move them into and through the sales funnel.
- Measure Marketing Spend by Revenue Impact – marketers are under pressure to justify their budgets and struggle with matching marketing efforts to business impact. Robin suggested the best thing for marketers to do is really track and measure their efforts all the way to revenue generation. Naturally Marketo has tools to help with this.
- Take an ecosystem perspective – there is no one solution that is going to address all your needs, despite what many vendors will tell you. There is also no silver bullet. If you look at the Marketing LUMAscape chart created by LUMA, you will get a sense for the eco system.
To me the marketing technology area is fascinating. There are so many players and big players have been buying up cool companies to expand their presence. The portal, content and social technologies that we work with and blog about at Perficient are well represented in this ecosystem.
