Identifying DX vendors is a challenge.
The last years has seen businesses in every sector accelerating their digital transformation plans in response to a customer base that clearly prefers to interact and buy digitally. This increased investment in digital transformation projects invariably results in a Digital Experience Management (DXM) project; either to replace the existing DXM or Web Content Management platform, or to consolidate the same across the company.
Modern DXM systems must support the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey, with real-time retrieval even needed for resource-intense media assets like video, even virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) images. The global market for DXM software and projects is therefore very healthy as companies replace their current older systems to ensure success in their digital marketing and digital selling.
Out of curiosity, I went through the 36 Martechstack examples published by Scott Brinker the other week and found these vendors named by various marketing organizations in their DXM (or similar) stacks.
- 6Sense listed under “Digital Experience” PathFactory, Mutiny, Wisia, and WordPress.
- Akamai has Adobe, Drift, Siteimprove, SDL, and Swiftype.
- IBM names Adobe, Brightedge, Contentful, Clearscope, and WordPress.
- Merkle lists under “Experience” just Adobe, Meta, and Salesforce.
- Verizon has Adobe and Medallia.
Almost every marketing software vendor will claim some element of DXM, so there are potentially thousands of vendors with DXM solutions. For historical reasons, (the stuff is already installed), many companies have multiple digital experience solutions in their stacks. So, the greatest challenge for them is integration. Which means that my new Vendor Selection Matrixtm research on DXM, to be published this week, is going to be more useful than ever for potential buyers of software for that process.
As usual, as the report reflects the view of the market, 1500 business decision-makers reported their opinions and ratings for the DXM vendors they know. That is quite different than the standard research reports from my old colleagues (remember, I am ex- Gartner and ex-Forrester) that focus on an analyst’s rating of the product, based on briefing presentations by the vendors invited to speak with them. Indeed, Forrester managed to put Oracle, Salesforce and SAP into the leader category in their report, though these vendors are hardly mentioned in other surveys, including our’s below.
The survey respondents named several priorities for DXM projects with #1 being system performance (meaning responsiveness) followed by customer experience. A new priority this year was advanced analytics and recommendation engines. On a global basis, 76% of the respondents told us they were consolidating numerous and disparate DXM systems; two years ago this share was 68%. 49% of those respondents cite “Achieving a 360-degree view of the customer” as their top reason for the consolidation.
These are the Top 15 vendors as selected by 1,500 users surveyed based upon their rating of product, company, and service quality (listed alphabetically): ACQUIA*, ADOBE*, BLOOMREACH*, CONTENTFUL*, COREMEDIA*, CROWNPEAK*, IBEXA, KENTICO, LIFERAY, MAGNOLIA*, OPENTEXT*, OPTIMIZELY*, ORACLE*, SITECORE, and SQUIZ*. These vendors* are the Market Leaders as they scored over 4 out of 5 in both the Strategy and Execution categories.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
DAM no longer back-office
Continuing my predictions for 2023, here are two further propositions focused on the more mundane topic of Digital Asset Management (DAM):
- Modern DAM administrators are no longer just assets managers, they are supporting the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey.
- The DAM is a cornerstone of digital marketing. Which means that the DAM process is now a high priority for the whole marketing organization.
DAM did used to be a backroom process that most marketers do not concern themselves with directly and cynics would say, “A DAM is where our creative assets are sent to die” – it was, historically, just a repository for photographs and other static images. And the people managing it were the ultimate geeks. But things have changed.
Which means that my new Vendor Selection Matrixtm research on DAM is going to be more useful than ever for potential buyers of that software. DAM software is being bought in three separate project categories:
- Stand-alone DAM is being bought to replace one or more older-generation systems with a more performant and extensive solution. Indeed, 74% of the respondents to our survey are consolidating their DAM, PIM (Product Information System) and other content management systems this year.
- More mature marketing organizations who want to personalize the offerings they render to website visitors as much as possible find they must replace their DAM to achieve their goals.
- Companies in industries most affected by the new demands of digital marketing, eCommerce, and customer preference systems, such as manufacturing, healthcare and business services must upgrade their DAM systems accordingly as part of a larger project.
As usual, as the report reflects the view of the market, 1500 business decision-makers reported their opinions and ratings for the DAM vendors they know. That is quite different than the standard research reports from my old colleagues (remember, I am ex- Gartner and ex-Forrester) that focus on an analyst’s rating of the product. Buyers much prefer to hear what their peers are saying about a solution, I would suggest.
Depending on how much you believe the claims, there are nearly 500 vendors with DAM solutions. These are the Top 15 vendors as selected by 1,500 users surveyed based upon their rating of product, company, and service quality (listed alphabetically): ADOBE*, APRIMO*, BRANDMAKER (now called UPTEMPO), BYNDER*, CANTO, CELUM, CENSHARE*, CLOUDINARY*, CONTENTSERV, DIGIZUITE, HYLAND, NUXEO, OPENTEXT, SITECORE and WIDEN (part of ACQUIA). These vendors* form the Top 5 in the matrix.
The vendor landscape is stable with several well-established independent DAM vendors now being challenged by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Adobe, Sitecore, and OpenText who sell larger digital marketing software portfolios including a DAM solution. We estimate that 35-40% of companies have automated, or will be automating, parts of the DAM process in 2023.
The link above connects you to the public version of the report, with the alphabetical list of market leaders and shorter vendor profiles. Watch out for several versions of report in full detail over the next months as several vendors distribute their licensed reprints.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
Buyers look for more than DAM
Just a few more days to go before I publish our Vendor Selection Matrixtm on Digital Asset Management (DAM)– the vendors are currently fact-checking the report details.
This year’s survey has made one point absolutely clear: modern DAM systems must support the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey, with real-time retrieval even needed for resource-intense media assets like video, even virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) images. Over 55% of the 1500 business professionals we talked to confirmed “We are now very focused on optimizing the customer experience and this requires change in the DAM process” as Very True.
We also asked, “Which three key anticipated benefits are driving your investment in the Digital Asset Management automation space in the next 12 months?”. After Improved Performance, the respondents chose Brand Management, Customer Experience and Improved Buyer Engagement as the next priorities. This reflects the strategic value of the DAM system within the new digital marketing standards expected in most companies.
Customers no longer need DAM, they crave for great DAM!
This is quite different from the same survey 3 years ago. Now, three times as many respondents see DAM in the wider context of “the entire buyer journey” (website, marketing content, sales content, etc.).
Also, 74% of the respondents confirmed that they want to consolidate their DAM systems. The top two reasons being “We need a single-source-of-truth” and “Achieving cost reduction”. But these priorities vary greatly by region – the Single Source reason is rated highest in North America (62%) while Cost Reduction is Europe’s top reason (61%).
DAM is a busy market, with many local project-based providers offering their experience as a software product. Indeed, the Capterra website lists 479 DAM vendors in its directory. We have found a vendor landscape of the Top 15 vendors and/or brands as selected by 1,500 business decision-makers, based upon their experience, or perception, of product, company and service quality.
These are the Market Leaders within the Top 15 (having both a Strategy and an Execution score of over 4 out of 5) as scored by the survey and myself (listed alphabetically): ACQUIA (WIDEN), ADOBE, APRIMO, BRANDMAKER, BYNDER, CANTO, CELUM, CENSHARE, CLOUDINARY, and OPENTEXT.
Watch out for the report in a few weeks’ time.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
Can’t Digitally Market without Great Digital Asset Management
I am working on an update to our Vendor Selection Matrixtm on Digital Asset Management (DAM) – the survey results are in and I’m now talking to the vendors named and scored in the survey over the next weeks before completing the report. The link above shows the 2021 report, and the list of vendors is quite consistent, just three out and three new ones in.
DAM is a backroom process that most marketers do not concern themselves with. Cynics used to say, “A DAM is where our creative assets are sent to die”. That is because, historically, it was a repository for photographs and other static images. And the people managing this process were the ultimate geeks. I well remember getting a client inquiry two weeks after I had made a speech at a Content Management Summit in Cleveland about getting more creative about tagging content assets with informative units like sales phase, customer pain point and other stuff. The client said that what I was proposing was impossible, he had tried and “my DAM coordinator told me “No way”, he uses the date and time stamp and that is all”.
But things have changed. Now modern DAM administrators know they are no longer just storing assets, they are supporting the delivery of compelling experiences across the whole customer journey. DAM systems are being used to store and manage rich media assets like video, even virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR) images, as well as text and documents. DAM is a cornerstone of digital marketing, just like Digital Experience Management (my next report project, survey is in the field).
Which means that the DAM process is now a high priority for the whole marketing organization. This was confirmed in our survey of 1500 business professionals familiar with their DAM projects where 55% confirmed “We are now very focused on optimizing the customer experience and this requires change in the DAM process” as Very True.
The survey scored these three objectives as their top benefits desired from their DAM system:
- Better system performance and responsiveness
- Brand management capabilities
- Delivering an elegant and intuitive customer experience.
Nearly three quarters of the companies confirmed they were planning to consolidate their DAM, PIM, and other content management systems (up from 51% in 2021). So, this is an exciting (or precarious?) time for the DAM vendors, an interesting mix of marketing suite and point solution vendors.
Watch out for the report in a few weeks’ time.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
Customer Data is Problem #1
Everybody is making predictions for the next year. Well, I see two certainties in marketing organizations for 2023.
- In response to both the recession and overspending over the last years, most marketing execs. will be culling their martech spend by shrinking user licenses and even cancelling some point solutions altogether.
- The one area they will NOT hold back spending is on Customer Data Management.
Marketing and sales professionals alike are saying inaccurate customer data is the biggest impediment to succeeding with data-driven marketing. According to a recent survey among 600 sales and marketing decision-makers in B2B or B2B-B2C hybrid firms by Dun & Bradstreet, some 34% of respondents cite accuracy of customer data as an obstacle to succeeding with data-driven marketing, and 30% cite the cost of third party data and lack of analytic capabilities as obstacles.
Which means that my new Vendor Selection Matrixtm research on Customer Data Management (CDM) is going to be more useful than ever for potential buyers of CDM software. Especially as the report reflects the view of the market, 1500 business decision-makers reported their opinions and ratings for the CDM vendors they know. That is quite different than the standard research reports from my old colleagues (remember, I am ex- Gartner and ex-Forrester) that focus on an analyst’s rating of the product. Buyers much prefer to hear what their peers are saying about a solution, I would suggest.
Depending on how much you believe the claims, there are over 140 vendors with CDM solutions, often calling their software Customer Data Platforms (CDP). The vendor landscape is actually quite stable with several well-established independent CDP vendors out there. These are now being challenged not only by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle, but also through increased competition from tools that enable in-house IT teams to build their own CDP equivalent. We estimate that 40-45% of companies have automated, or will be automating, parts of the CDM process in 2022.
Providing an optimal customer experience is impossible without having a unified Customer Data Management (CDM) process in place: a process that includes the consolidation and aggregation of all data collected in separate systems across the company. This is not an IT-centric data warehouse or data lakes approach, ideally it should be a Marketing-led CDM initiative, helping to ensure the data unification project is focused directly on marketing requirements.
These are the 11 vendors that qualified as Market Leader (having both a Strategy and an Execution score of over 4 out of 5) in the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Customer Data Management 2022 due to their scores in the survey and me (listed alphabetically):
ACTIONIQ, BLUECONIC, CROSSENGAGE, EULERIAN, EVERGAGE, LYTICS, NGDATA, REDPOINT GLOBAL, SALESFORCE, TEALIUM, and TWILIO
These are the vendor brands named spontaneously by the survey respondents. Some of the brands are part of larger vendor organizations (such as Evergage being part of Salesforce).
The overall Global Leader, as they were in the 2020 report, was Tealium.
The link above connects you to the public version of the report, with the alphabetical list of market leaders and shorter vendor profiles. Watch out for several versions of report in full detail over the next months as several vendors distribute their licensed reprints.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
Customer Data Management Projects Vary by Company Type and Geography
We are almost there. I’ve done my 2022 Vendor Selection Matrix research on Customer Data Management, the survey has been analyzed, insights and trends have been written up and the vendor scorecards/profiles completed. The report is now with those vendors for fact checking and we expect to publish later in November.
Providing an optimal customer experience is impossible without having a unified Customer Data Management (CDM) process in place: a process that includes the consolidation and aggregation of all data collected in separate systems across the company. This is not an IT-centric data warehouse or data lakes approach, ideally it should be a Marketing-led CDM initiative, to ensure the data unification project is focused directly on marketing requirements.
The global market for customer data management platform software is rising dramatically as companies invest in their CDM process to ensure success in their digital marketing and digital selling. IDC has sized the CDP software market at $ 2.2 billion in 2021 with an annual growth of 62%. The vendor landscape is quite stable with several well-established independent CDP vendors who are now challenged not only by the expanded sales efforts of enterprise software vendors like Salesforce, Adobe, and Oracle, but also through increased competition from tools that enable in-house IT teams to build their own CDP equivalent.
Our survey of 1500 business professionals included this question, “Which of the following processes do you automate, or plan to, with your CDM platform?”. The top six processes named were:
- Customer profile resolution
- Digital experience personalization
- Business reporting and analytics
- Mkt. execution testing/optimization
- Market segmentation
- Cust. lifetime revenue calculation
- Channel optimization analysis
When asked, “Which anticipated top 3 benefits are driving your investment in customer data management automation in 2022?”, well over one third of companies cited content personalization. But that varies across the regions. Real-time personalization and measurement of intent are more important in North America while European respondents are still focused on getting to a single customer database and/or single source of truth, a more basic CDM initiative.
These are the 15 vendors that qualified for the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Customer Data Management 2022 due to their scores in the survey and me (listed alphabetically):
ACTIONIQ, BLUECONIC, CALIBER MIND, CROSSENGAGE, EULERIAN, EVERGAGE, LEADSPACE, LYTICS, NGDATA, REDPOINT GLOBAL, SALESFORCE, SITECORE, TEALIUM, TERMINUS, and TWILIO
Although Evergage was acquired by Salesforce back in 2020, a significant number of respondents named and rated that brand unprompted. Indeed, the list above is a broad mix of vendors with a wide variety of claims: data consolidation, collecting entire clickstreams, creating a “golden record” through identity resolution, enabling intelligent engagement, and identity tagging, even ABM predictive analytics this time. The CDM challenge is different across the B2C and B2B spectrum. It also varies according to whether you are a medium-sized company or a large international enterprise.
Watch out for the final version of the report in full detail next month.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
Seismic Top Again in SEM
Sales Engagement Management (SEM) processes are transforming in most companies. B2B buyer behavior has evolved to become primarily digital, so traditional in-person selling is no longer the norm with 70% of business decision-makers now open to fully self-serve or remote purchases even if more than $ 50,000, according to McKinsey.
I’ve just published my 2022 Vendor Selection Matrixtm research on Sales Engagement Management which shows that increasing digital marketing and sales means that automated sales strategies and analytics have now joined the SEM process family. Indeed, in many companies, the sales organization includes a new generation of customer success managers, with different informational needs to the traditional salesperson. We estimate that 40-45% of companies have automated, or will be automating, parts of the SEM process in 2022.
Great SEM is now more important than ever.
The COVID-19 pandemic has set off a period of head-spinning change in many companies, even industries. Digital transformations are being realized faster than ever thought possible. Firms go digital in a matter of days, not years, and offer new services almost overnight. And one of the most drastic consequences of the move to digital marketing, selling, and buying, is on the role of that traditional salesperson (note that I co-wrote the Forrester report “Death of the B2B Salesman” back in 2015). Some of us analysts and vendors are starting to propose the broader descriptor Revenue Enablement or Revenue Management, where Revenue is an aggregation of sales and retention rate, most of which is automated and digital.
We asked why marketers need SEM.
We asked, “Which of the following processes do you plan to automate with your SEM system?”, providing a list of 17 possible processes. The highest NEW interest is in improving Guided Selling and Pipeline Management, followed by support for Video Selling (aka remote selling). The next two priorities are being able to provide data and analytics (including alerts and recommendations) to salespeople.
SEM investment drivers depend on geography.
Overall, nearly one half of companies are focused on sales content management while 29% cite integrating to other marketing asset systems as important. One quarter value the opportunity to support social selling. However, these priorities vary across the regions. Social selling seems to be more important in Europe, as is Content control. More American companies are still working on providing relevant content assets to salespeople and to integrate to other systems while the more strategic benefit of improving revenue operations is recognized by four times as many European executives compared to North American.
SEM improvement has a “sense of urgency” due to eCommerce.
As cited above, eCommerce has affected the sales process in almost all B2B companies. A resounding 98% of respondents expect the share of their products/services sold online to increase dramatically, reducing the dependency on a field sales force. But the Inside Sales (BusDev) function requires more, but also different, SEM functions.
Pure-play SEM vendors may not be able to keep up.
As part of an overall trend towards adopting more capable revenue management technology, SEM vendors will be challenged by existing Account-Based Marketing and Customer Data Management vendors. Many of these vendors will already have a strategic supplier relationship and can provide “just-enough” SEM capabilities to lock out a pure-play SEM vendor.
But what is the market saying?
The clear #1 Global Leader, as scored by the survey and me, is the vendor Seismic, who have won this leadership position for three surveys now.
This is the full list of all Market Leaders (having both a Strategy and an Execution score of over 4 out of 5) in the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Sales Engagement Management 2022 (listed alphabetically):
APPAROUND, BIGTINCAN, BRAINSHARK (now BIGTINCAN), CLEARSLIDE (now BIGTINCAN), HIGHSPOT, MEDIAFLY, PITCHER, SALESLOFT, SEISMIC, and SHOWPAD.
Note that the vendors BRAINSHARK and CLEARSLIDE were acquired by BIGTINCAN this year. However, the brands were named and scored, unprompted, in the survey.
The full list of vendor brands in the Top 15 vendors scored in the survey is completed by:
ACCENT TECHNOLOGIES, CLIENTPOINT, SALESPHERE, SAP, and PROLIFIQ
The link above connects you to the public version of the report, with the alphabetical list of market leaders and shorter vendor profiles. Watch out for several versions of report in full detail over the next months as several vendors distribute their licensed reprints.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
Sales is different now, so Sales Engagement Management must change too
We are almost there. I have now completed my 2022 Vendor Selection Matrix research on Sales Engagement Management, the survey has been analyzed, insights and trends have been written up and the vendor scorecards/profiles completed. The report is now with those vendors for fact checking and we expect to publish in October.
The need to automate elements of sales engagement management (SEM) was proposed many years ago (I would claim to be that analyst in question) but not readily adopted in all companies, especially those dominated by a Chief Sales Officer. But the COVID-19 pandemic has set off a period of head-spinning change in many companies, even industries. Digital transformations are being realized faster than ever thought possible. Firms go digital in a matter of days, not years, and offer new services almost overnight.
And one of the most drastic consequences of the move to digital marketing, selling, and buying, is on the role of that traditional salesperson (again, let me note that I co-wrote the Forrester report “Death of the B2B Salesman” back in 2015).
Our survey of 1500 business professionals on this topic shows the highest NEW interest in improving Guided Selling and Pipeline Management, followed by support for Video Selling.
The next two priorities are being able to provide data and analytics (including alerts and recommendations) to salespeople. SEM projects are mostly executed by more mature companies and based on our conversations with users and vendors, we estimate that 40-45% of companies have automated, or will be, their SEM process in 2022-23.
When we asked them about their 2022 SEM projects, nearly half of the companies were still focused on sales content management, the earliest implementation phase of SEM. Nearly a third say that integrating to other marketing asset systems is important, and a quarter value the opportunity to support social selling. However, these priorities vary across the regions which we explore in the report in more detail. The project drivers have also changed dramatically since our last survey in late 2020.
These are the 15 vendors that qualify for the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Sales Engagement Management 2022 due to their scores in the survey and me (listed alphabetically):
ACCENT TECHNOLOGIES, APPAROUND, BIGTINCAN, BRAINSHARK, CLEARSLIDE, CLIENTPOINT, HIGHSPOT, MEDIAFLY, PITCHER, PROLIFIQ, SALESLOFT, SALESPHERE, SAP, SEISMIC, and SHOWPAD
Watch out for the final version of the report in full detail next month.
Always keeping you informed! Peter O’Neill
MRM Earns a Boost of Interest, but is About to Change
I hope you had a great summer break. I was away for a few weeks myself and have returned to my desk refreshed and ready for more work as Research Director for Research In Action, Lead Analyst at B2B Marketing, as well as several individual client projects.
Earlier this month, I completed my 2022 Vendor Selection Matrix research on Marketing Resource Management and can report that there is clear increased interest in establishing a such a system to help marketing executives to plan, monitor, and control the usage of their most important resources: money, people, content assets, projects, and brand.
Marketing financials and calendars are the most popular processes being automated, closely followed by marketing performance management. Based on our conversations with users and vendors, we estimate that 55-60% of companies have automated, or will be automating, parts of the MRM process in 2022.
When we asked 1500 business professionals about their 2022 MRM projects, well-over one third of companies cited the need for data on marketing performance or return-on-investment as their major reason for MRM investment. Just over one third see it as a method to reduce overall costs and a significant 26% consider improved brand management as a priority.
The need for such a Marketing Resource Management process was proposed some years ago (I could probably claim to be that analyst) but not readily accepted by the user community. Now, the need for MRM is perhaps clearer, but the modern marketing executive wants more than just an asset management system.
They need a more dynamic solution that enables them to forecast, measure, model, analyze and even predict all their business numbers – to be fully empowered with control over their marketing processes and outcomes.
I anticipate the process name itself to mature in the next years. It will be interesting to see what thought leadership campaigns come out of the vendors and how quickly the user community can tune in to the new terminology.
These are the Market Leaders (having both a Strategy and an Execution score of over 4 out of 5) in the Vendor Selection Matrix™ – Marketing Resource Management 2022 as scored by the survey and myself (listed alphabetically):
ALLOCADIA, APRIMO, BRANDMAKER, BRANDSYSTEMS, CONTENTSERV, LYTHO, MARMIND, PERCOLATE, SITECORE, WEDIA, OPTIMIZELY (WELCOME), and WORKFRONT (ADOBE)
These are the vendor brands named spontaneously by the survey respondents. Some of the brands are part of larger vendor organizations (such as Welcome being part of Optimizely and Workfront part of Adobe). Also, BrandMaker acquired Allocadia earlier this year and have now rebranded completely to Uptempo.
Some of the marketers we surveyed saw MRM as just content or even digital asset management and so named and scored their vendors. Both Contentserv and Percolate (Seismic) have stated that they appreciate the great feedback from the survey but no longer promote their solution as an MRM solution and should be applauded for their honesty.
The link above connects you to the public version of the report, with the alphabetical list of market leaders and shorter vendor profiles. Watch out for several versions of report in full detail over the next months as several vendors distribute their licensed reprints.
Always keeping you informed! Peter
The Future of Marketing Events
We are about to publish my next B2B Marketing Propolis Premium Report, titled The Future of B2B events: Strategic Importance of Events Elevated by Two Years of Crisis
I enjoyed working with Steve Kimish, Propolis Hive expert, Execution & Campaigns, while the interviews were with senior executives in/around the B2B marketing event industry, to collect an appropriately deep insight into the topic.
Within the report I also cite from my Vendor Selection Matrix research on the same topic and list out the most significant Marketing Event Management platforms that we discovered in the survey.
Here is my final chapter entitled simply; “Recommendations”.
“Planning a marketing event calendar for fiscal or calendar 2023 is probably going to be one of the more strategic programmes for many B2B CMOs and marketing directors over the next months. Many in marketing used to see events as nice-to-have vanity driven exercises of corporate PR. In future, it will be an integral part of an overall customer engagement strategy.
Future marketing plans will include both physical and digital events as standard in customer engagement programs; to collect market/customer insights at scale and to maintain a buyer/customer relationship over a longer period than just a buying cycle. A B2B CMO I’ve met recently talked about plans as more of a ‘media strategy’ than a marketing strategy.
I know of several large tech vendors that already have concrete plans into 2024 for large scale, multi-media, highly branded events accommodating thousands of delegates and providing an outstanding conference, networking and banqueting experience for business partners and customers alike.
Virtual marketing events will become part of a new marketing channel, scheduled, and atomised across the whole calendar and much more numerous, impactful, and measurable than before.
The interviews documented in the body of this report contain a series of recommendations for you to take note of, but I would like to add a couple more strategic thoughts as a recommendation. You may not need to do it this year, or even next, but I suggest that you should be at least considering the following initiatives over the next two to five years:
- Recruiting media talent. The largest B2B companies will be creating their own ‘Netflix’ websites with full presentations and atomised videos of the speakers who have featured in recent marketing events, plus further thought leadership and educational content. Over time, the expectation among all B2B buyers will be to enjoy the same type of experience. So, when further recruiting content marketing staff, you should be looking for people with video management and editing skills or providing training for these capabilities.
- Configure event data into your customer data management strategy. As you extend your customer data management (CDM) processes and strategy, ensure that the CDM team can collect and collate event engagement data as well. This requires process design and ensuring that the selection criteria for new event platform software include this requirement.
- Don’t neglect the content expectations of your ecosystem members. While the intent to provide an entertainment and memorable experience in future marketing events is understandable, savvy marketing executives will also continue to generate content that provides deeper information to technical buyers and product or service user/consumer-personas.
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The report will publish to B2B Marketing Propolis clients next month and a shortened version to the non-premium members later in the year. Contact me if you would like to get more details.
Always keeping you informed! Peter