Marketing now fully embraces technology

One of the blogs we like to read most is Scott Brinkers’s Chief Marketing Technology or Chief Martec. It’s a neverending source of inspiring analysis about what’s going on in Marketing Technology and Marketing itself.

Today, we got inspired by something that Scott poste about a new research done by DataXu. They have created a quantitative study on the state of marketing technology management: Modernizing the Mix: Transforming Marketing Through Technology and Analytics. Both Scott and us recommend you to download it; you will get a complete update on where martech and adtech are at this moment.

In the study, over 500 marketers were interviewed, to produce a thorough studies of how companies are managing marketing technology at this moment. 

Here are several findings from the report that will most likely stand out for you as a Marketer:

1. Technology is a fundamental part of marketing strategy

Marketing is acknowledged as a technology-powered discipline at this moment, albeit more in the US than in Europe (the two areas of research). Just only a fragment behind the skill of creativity, marketers (78% in U.S. vs 63% in Europe) claim marketing technology is a critical skill for senior marketers (not assistants!) to be successful. At VEMT, we could not agree more. Not mentioned in the report: the expected changes in these skills sets in the coming years, is also interesting. We expect the data-literacy skill to grow quite fast and to climb in the coming years, swiftly becoming more important than the skills mentioned between ‘Understanding Marketing Technology’ and ‘Being data-literate’ now.

2. Marketing technologists are part of the marketing leadership

According to the report, 70% of Marketing teams have at least 1 person responsible for marketing technology (usage). That is an amazing result, which creates a good starting point for the development of Customer Experiences like VEMT does. Although Marketing Strategy should always be leading, Marketing Technology does more than enabling (and far beyond facilitating), which often is not recognized in Marketing Teams in our opinion. This report shows the shift taking place in how marketing teams look at the role of technology in their business.

Considering the fact that an additional 15% state that they are looking to recruit someone for such a role within the next 12 months, we can surely expect this to grow fast in the coming year, leading to a firm position for Marketing Technology in Marketing teams so teams without it become rare occurrences. For this finding, we’d like to see the split between Europe and the U.S. as well; we’re afraid that the gap is a bit wider in Europe still, but we hope to contribute to solving that fast.

Interestingly enough, Europe does seem to be ahead with with positioning Marketing Technology at board level having in 73% of the cases a CMT, while the U.S. stays behind with 66%. From our experience, this seems to be quite high. Our VEMT client base is relatively highly focused at Marketing Technology, but doesn’t approach 73% anywhere close, so the definition of what a CMT is could be the cause for this high number. But even if the definition is a bit off, the trend seems to be very positive.

3. The Marketing team is responsible for marketing technology purchases

This seems to be a  new thing. In many companies, in our experience, marketing was still fighting (ok… discussing) with IT on who has the budget to purchase technology. According to Gartner’s predictions this would change this year, and this report confirms that prediction. This enables a much faster set up and development of loyalty projects and customer experience infrastructures, something we think will bring a lot of value to companies willing to do something with customer influencing strategies. 

Read the report yourself, you will see more interesting developments that can shape the future of your marketing department. And prepare for that.