B2B Marketing Features

If the past year has felt gloomy in the world of marketing, it looks like 2010 could be brightening up. Emerging from a sluggish few years, the technology that helps shape a marketer's day and more importantly increase ROI, is set to leap into the future.

Although the economic downturn has stifled budgets, increased scrutiny on ROI has meant marketers have had to be more efficient than ever before. The result has been an acceleration in the use of increasingly innovative marketing technologies, and from early signs 2010 will see more of this.

"There will be a substantial acceleration of an accelerating trend," says global practice leader, B2B marketing and CEO of North America at GyroHSR Rick Segal, pondering on the future of marketing technology.

"The refreshment of a positive economic environment means people will soon have the cash to spend on technology and I'm excited about the technology that has been created in this most recent economic downturn which will soon hit the shelves," says Segal. He adds that groundbreaking technology companies such as IBM and Microsoft have been born from challenging economic times.

Social inclusion
Marketers are expecting more from technology, including integrated, detailed and automated data about their customers at the touch of a button.

The integration of sales, social media and CRM is high on the agenda of Woodson Martin, EMEA vice president of strategy for Salesforce. "It's interesting to hear that it's not going to be the size of your database that matters, but your social media following and how you can leverage that following and insight to your advantage," he says.

Segal anticipates the increased use of audience aggregators producing profiles of website visitors which will help marketers reconfigure ways to reach customers.
Andrew Buckley, vice president, global marketing and strategy, American Express global commercial card, says the company is planning to integrate its online brand development with trade press advertising for its latest North American large-scale product launch and would like to see Eloqua's online lead nurturing and client engagement tool, in which the company invested heavily in 2009, integrate with its online community marketing activity.

"Historically we have used very traditional telemarketing channels and I want to use an online approach and create real demand generation and an interesting community around it," he says, "but there aren't many vendors yet capable of merging channels, and they seem to have difficulty in proving that it works."

Buckley and Segal are not alone in the opinion that marketers have to reassess their relationship with technology if they want to take advantage of its advances.

The third way
Kristin Hambelton, senior director of marketing at marketing automation firm Neolane, says that entering the ‘cloud' of software as a service is the only way forward for marketers.

"Three years ago it was hard trying to get people to wrap their head around the idea of the cloud and you still see it, particularly with large industries," she says. "Letting go of owning software can feel like a big thing, especially by IT people who feel it is just the ‘way we do things', but I predict a big uptake globally next year."

Neolane has created what it describes as a ‘third alternative' to either in-house or hosted applications. Called Mid-sourcing, the hybrid model combines the most system-intensive aspects of marketing processes while allowing marketers to keep control over high value areas such as data, campaign management and workflows by keeping them in-house, a compromise that "gives nervous customers a sense of security," says Hambelton.

Lack of confidence in cloud computing is something that Neolane hopes to conquer with this approach, "often we see customers who use Mid-sourcing in the first year then graduate to complete cloud computing in the second year."

Despite talk of a bright future for marketing technology Hambelton reminds us that the penetration of marketing automation is still low at around five-12 per cent, although she adds that is it predicted to rise to 40-50 per cent by 2015.

However, the future of marketing technology does not purely concern generic solutions for big business. Smaller, nimbler, organisations have the upper hand when it comes to exploiting the latest marketing technology says Ivan Croxford, general manager of digital marketing services at BT Tradespace, "because they can adopt them more readily."

Salesforce's Martin says he is shocked if small businesses tell him they are considering buying software, "it's not the capital expense, it's the cost of running, maintaining and implementing it," he says.

Buckley agrees, saying that given American Express' scale it cannot be an early adopter of cloud computing. As marketing is led globally at American Express Corporate it is focusing on global providers over bespoke solutions, and 2010 will see the firm increase spend on demand generation software, while keeping telemarketing budgets static.

Open minded
Hambelton recommends buying open standard based software to allow IT and marketing professionals to pick and choose tools and integrate with other data points in an organisation. But perhaps more exciting, for Segal, is the prospect that marketing departments will become software development departments.

"In marketing it's analogous to how desktop publishing enabled non-professionals to produce content," he explains. "Brands will begin to provide apps as services and create app-based experiences for their customers."

BT's Croxford goes one further saying, "Software development will be re-classed as marketing spend which is remarkable."

Segal concludes, "2010 is a blank sheet of possibilities. Over my 30 year career everyone has written of the death of advertising and marketing but the interesting thing is that the demand for creation is evergreen."