Evaluating technology options for innovation in marketing - do you know your Hype Cycles?
If you're involved in marketing strategy development, you will be constantly making judgments and reviewing with colleagues which digital technology innovations are most relevant to your organization. The Gartner Hype Cycle, which is published each year is a good tool to use to find out about both newly emerging innovations and more established marketing technology that could be relevant.
In this article, we compare different examples of the well-established Gartner Hype Cycle tools which serve to highlight the adoption of new technology services within marketing technology.
Gartner publishes many different hype cycles reviewing the adoption curves for different types of technologies, but as a digital strategist, I am most interested in those focusing on digital marketing technologies. A summary of the report with the infographic is published annually and I have been monitoring them and sharing them for over…
Audit your MarTech stack and quickly compare 30 different types of digital marketing tools available at different price points for businesses in 2024
As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost digital marketing tools to give us insight into our customers, competitors, and markets.
These strategic digital tools help us to compete to win and retain customers by delivering automated relevant, real-time marketing communications, integrated across digital devices and traditional marketing channels.
To help highlight the range of great options available, our updated essential digital marketing tools infographic recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category.
A new category for 2024 - we have included 5 Generative AI tools as well. As the original break-through AI chatbot, we've put ChatGPT in first place for our 2024 edition. But you can read a full breakdown of other recommended AI tools…
Grow your IT/high-tech business across the 'internet of things' by applying these latest industry strategies for technology product marketing
What is product marketing?
Product marketing describes the management of all processes involved in taking a product to market. This field of marketing involves working with R&D, manufacturing, logistics, comms, and sales. Since your role is so closely tied to the products in your category, product marketers take the role of advocating for the customer when product-related decisions are made (positioning, launch, development, etc). In this blog, we will explore what makes technology product marketing different.
What is technology product marketing?
Technology product marketing refers to product marketing when your products are IT/high tech. Typically sold in a B2B environment, technology product marketing is renowned for extended stakeholder relations and, currently, an increasingly competitive market. Of course, the nature of IT/high tech means many technology products will be software. The growing Software as a Service…
There are winners and losers from the recent fintech marketing shakeup in the financial services sector. The key is putting your customers first as we delve into the latest trends and innovations in the finance landscape
Financial Services marketers are working amidst an era of digital disruption. Those based in traditional financial services businesses are witnessing rapid digital change, whilst new digital startup marketers are looking for fast growth and shaking up the marketplace. On both sides of the spectrum, it is agreed that financial services martech and fintech marketing unlock great opportunities to get closer to customers when done well.
Smart Insights helps marketers and managers in a range of financial services businesses. We have dedicated startup and SME marketing tools and templates, plus full-team integrated marketing training for large global corporations. One marketing principle that rings true for all financial services marketing activities is ensuring a keen focus on the…
What benefits might deeper, actionable, aspect-based sentiment analysis offer for your marketing strategy and planning?
I have recently attended the Social Data Summit, which gathered prominent speakers from leading brands and organizations to discuss the latest developments in digital insights, social listening, and sentiment analysis.
The first speaker Dr. Jillian Nay, a founder of the Social Intelligence Lab, challenged the audience with her presentation “Social Data Intelligence is a Mess! Let’s Fix It”. Jillian highlighted some major challenges facing the social intelligence industry that need to be addressed such as lack of standards, transparency & accountability, insufficient support for social media intelligence roles, limitation of current tools, depreciation of social networks APIs, but also acknowledged exciting progress that industry is…
Chart of the Day: The popularity of different martech stack components
You will know that our options for using online services to manage marketing and get insight have increased dramatically over the past few years. Scott Brinker's martech landscape now covers over 5000 martech options.
Our own Essential Digital marketing tools wheel covers what we see as 30 categories that are essential to a medium or large transactional e-commerce business that is serious about growth. Smaller businesses with less budget and less need for information sharing can benefit from lower cost or even free tools, but are not likely to have as many tools, but can still benefit.
Given this opportunity, it's become essential to audit your martech stack as part of digital strategy development. So when we completed our joint research about Managing Marketing with the Technology for Marketing event, we were interested to see the popularity of using…
Audit your marketing technology stack with the 6Cs to refine its capabilities and prove its return on investment
Do you know the stackies? They're an informal contest arranged by Scott Brinker, creator of the marketing technology vendor landscape where different companies visualise their marketing stacks in different ways. Here are the latest martech stack entries. They're presented in vastly, different ways from this superbly visual example...
to this more structured approach of the 5Cs of Martech - which looks like the inspiration for the new 6Cs of Martech featured at the end of this article.
You can audit your marketing stack against any of these ‘stackie’ entries. The structure of some of the examples like the second one prompted us to think whether there was a simple, practical way of visualising or…
How to build the right marketing technology stack for your business
It's now a lot more common to talk about choosing 'martech stacks' and rightly so, given the impact that technology, data and insight can have on marketing today. The popularity of the concept of a martech stack has grown out of the categorisation of marketing technology based on Scott Brinker’s Martech landscape and others such as our Digital Tools wheel.
Businesses have always considered their portfolio of business IT applications for operations such as finance, logistics and marketing, but traditionally, they have been controlled by IT teams who have managed a limited number of ‘enterprise resource planning’ systems such as SAP. With the growth in cloud based SaaS, it has become far easier for individual departments and, in particular, marketing, who need to manage many digital marketing channels like search and social media marketing, to deploy their own solutions.
…
An honest and frank look at the often flawed digital procurement process from the [supplier] dark side
The software procurement process is fundamentally flawed. It's a waste of time and I'd go as far to say that neither the buyer nor the supplier ever really get the result they are looking for.
I hold this view as a digital director who has dealt with a fair number of tender processes over the years and, while I appreciate where this process comes from and why it is used, I just feel it's time to urge businesses to start shaking off this hugely out of date way of buying when it comes to digital. After all, it's a legacy of the advertising industry that operates in a totally different way than it does now.
So what's the problem?
Overall I think it's that…
