A few points worth making:

1. Real enterprise marketing stacks are larger than you think.

2. The app explosion isn’t unique to marketing — or marketers.

3. Total cloud services used by an enterprise are 10X greater.
4. The fundamental structure of software is changing.

5. Resistance to vendor lock-in is now a top 3 criteria.

6. Serious security and compliance implications abound.

Growth in Internet population is slowing, but growth in online ads is accelerating.

Ecommerce growth is also accelerating.

Gaming continues to lead and shape the online experience.

Revenue in the music industry is rising again.

Digital health care is approaching an inflection point.

China is growing as a tech rival to the U.S.

Immigrants are core to the Valley’s DNA.

Reducing manual processes through integration frees up marketers’ time to concentrate on more strategic – and creative – activity. Critically, this activity is now inherently measurable; digital marketing can be tested at every stage, with real time feedback on messaging and content to enable continual refinement. Indeed, this is the second key benefit of the marketing ecosystem: the speed of information flow is radically improved, enabling marketers to respond quickly to customer behaviour and actions, creating a more responsive and relevant customer experience and driving brand affinity.

In addition, linking up to a cloud based marketing ecosystem provides access to valuable third party data sources, information that a marketer is now in a position to effectively use having joined up the customer digital fingerprint to gain deep insight into the customer base. Combining data modelling to define the ‘best customer’ attributes with these anonymised third party data sources supports very effective targeting, extending the company’s reach towards the ‘right’ customer type.

And this is key: while tech overload is clearly a concern, marketing departments cannot afford to stop investing, discovering or innovating. But this innovation must be focused and relevant – with a single, joined up marketing ecosystem, a company can extend its reach far more effectively than simply adding new tools for the sake of it.

• Machine Learning – Take large amounts of data and find patterns and actionable insights that just weren’t possible before. Machine learning is the ability for computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. Think of all the applications in marketing from improving campaigns to targeting the best-fit accounts.
• Account-Based Marketing – Target named accounts with the right message at the right time. With account-based marketing, marketers are able to proactively engage with accounts that haven’t come through the traditional channels.
• Customer Data Platforms – Marketing is more than campaigns to attract prospects. Marketers are now expected to help guide the entire customer experience from first touch to signing as a customer to renewing at a future date. Customer data platforms pull in data from all the customer facing functions — sales, marketing, support, customer success, etc. — and provide a holistic view of the account as well as next actions to take.

Regardless of where a new tool or piece of technology fits in the overall landscape it is it is important to ensure that it is visible across the organization for a number of reasons:

• To manage the security risk of implementing new technology that accidentally exposes or corrupts customer data.
• To enable teams to learn from each other’s experience with any given technology and to increase efficiency by distributing product qualification tasks.
• To reduce spend by identifying redundant products or opportunities to lower spend by negotiating a single contract for the enterprise.

This is where the marketing stack comes in.

Marketing stacks showcase the technology in use across the organization and their relationship to one another. Stacks can be developed at the project, team, functional or enterprise level. They can be used to track products in use, in test and that have been retired.

There’s no right or wrong way to construct a stack — each stack ends up being unique to the organization and the objectives it serves. You just have to look at the Stackies submissions for the last two years to see how unique stacks can be. Stacks are a great way to audit and manage the technology in place and ensure technology visibility across the enterprise.

Most companies use 6 or more martech tools or platforms in their marketing stacks, research finds. Fully 1 in 3 don't have a strategic plan for developing their stack. Check out more stats!

Get it here: http://core0.staticworld.net/assets/media-resource/122905/forecast_1117a.pdf

First and foremost, a framework needs to align to business goals. A framework aligned to business goals ensures that technology decisions 1) will support your organization's critical objectives and 2) will support the other technology in your stack towards the goal of achieving your objectives.

Customer personas and journeys offer a great starting point for building a marketing tech stack framework. Here’s why.

They align to your goals: Personas and journeys are the compass that guides the who, what, why and how of an organization’s work in reaching and engaging the reason it’s in business.

The structures are timeless: While some of the details within a persona may change, the overall outline generally won’t. A good framework can stand the test of time, being leveraged for the long haul.

This article is a quick read covering five marketing technologies that CMOs prefer to invest in –

Marketing Automation
Omnichannel Marketing
Analytics and Tracking
Optimization and Conversion
Programmatic

Last year, the Adobe Digital Trends report showed data-driven marketing to be the top priority for marketers, with 90% of survey respondents citing it as their number one choice.

"Any marketing department will benefit from a common measurement architecture—a decision-making framework used across the organization that matches a set of appropriate metrics (and by extension analytical tools and techniques, such as response modeling, brand tracking, and competitive benchmarking) with the most frequent marketing decisions. The measurement architecture helps sidestep another common pitfall: the tyranny of random facts, a common corporate phenomenon in which different marketing managers each cite a fact or data point revealed by some unique tool or model as ­evidence of the great job they are doing. It’s not that the facts are wrong; they may be totally valid. However, there is no clear way to compare one fact with another or even to know whether they are appropriate reference points for the issue at hand.

In our view, there are three types of marketing decision—strategic, tactical, and ­operational—that are typically made at ­different levels of the organization and ­according to different calendars. (See Exhibit 1.) Strategic decisions tend to involve the significant reallocation of marketing budgets and take place as part of the fiscal budgeting cycle. Tactical decisions typically occur many times throughout the year; they are course corrections for campaign spending levels, mix, timing, and messaging. Operational decisions, such as those concerning particular media or channels, can occur daily—or even hourly in today’s increasingly digital context. In addition, the availability of near-real-time data shifts much of a company’s focus to short-term operational priorities, which can upset the necessary balance between a short- and longer-term view of overall marketing ­strategy and objectives.

A measurement architecture provides marketers with a framework that defeats the tyranny of random facts by laying out which marketing decisions should be made at which time, based on which metrics, and fed by which tools and data. Once such an architecture is established, it becomes relatively straightforward to develop the analytical infrastructure to bring it to life across the entire organization. We find that many of our clients are increasingly able to focus on how to use software platforms to put data, tools, and insights into the hands of marketing decision makers at each level of the measurement architecture across brands and markets around the world."