Future-proofing Your Business with Open Marketing. By David Mennie, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Acquia

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1 Future-proofing Your Business with Open Marketing By David Mennie, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Acquia

2 Table of Contents Marketing the Open Way 3 The Rise of the Technical Marketer 4 What Is Open Marketing? 5 Open Marketing vs. Marketing Clouds 6 Thinking Ahead and Thinking Open 7 Maximizing Your Marketing Freedom 8 Conclusion 9 2 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

3 Marketing the Open Way Digital continues to revolutionize the way marketing organizations function. Gone are the days when marketing had complete control over the one-way monologue that defined a brand. Modern marketers have to battle harder than ever to win the hearts and minds of the well-informed, tech savvy, and very empowered consumer. Word of mouth is now electronically linked, amplifying a brand s reach tenfold, and the monologue is as the Cluetrain Manifesto famously predicted in 1999 a conversation. Consumers define what the latest digital trends and channels are, and marketers need to react and respond in real time or risk losing relevance with them. To keep pace with the ever-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams demand the best tools for their initiatives and business goals. They need to operate within a marketing model that can integrate those tools but still allow them to move and adapt quickly. David Mennie, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Acquia. With over 15 years in the tech industry and a background in both marketing and software engineering, David is a subject matter expert on marketing technology, personalization, and content management systems and focuses on delivering cloud-enabled digital experience solutions for some of the world s biggest brands. The promised vision, the ideal, is marketing owning the customer experience and delivering a highly tuned 1:1 relationship with the customer. This is evident in the growth of marketing technologies centered around concepts like personalization, optimization, and experiences. Marketing has taken ownership of the digital customer experience in its entirety, but that s not all. Marketing owns commerce as well. It has taken on the challenge of making Big Data more than last year s buzzword. As the company s resident experts on who the customer is, marketing not only has the mandate to own the organization s customer data, but also analyze, interpret, and find within those torrents the stories and insights that drive segmentation, messages, and new value propositions. Each of these different aspects of the business go hand in hand with the overall goal of building lifelong customer relationships. Consumers define what the latest digital trends and channels are, and marketing needs to react and respond in real time or risk losing relevance with them. 3 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

4 The Rise of the Technical Marketer The role of marketing has transformed in the past decade. Competition is as fierce as ever as industries continue to grow and innovate; but competitors are coming from unexpected directions. Today, every marketing organization is faced with assembling its own unique set of technologies and digital strategies to keep up with the consumer and stay ahead of the competition. No marketing team can predict what will be needed to assure success next. Marketers need for their own unique combination of technologies and a differentiated approach means the notion of a one-size-fits-all marketing suite, sold under the guise of integration and interoperability, will inevitably result in capabilities lagging behind demand. A modern marketing organization has two choices when it comes to ensuring it will have access to the right technologies and strategies at the right time: buy into a single vendor s marketing cloud, or build on an open model with the freedom to adapt continuously and be reshaped as the requirements of innovation demand. No single solution can give you an edge on the competition. Organizations are using multiple tools and applications to accomplish the challenging task of satisfying an increasingly sophisticated and demanding consumer. Although Steve Rubel coined the term Geek Marketer in his 2007 seminal blog, marketers have all had to become technically adept and forward-thinking. With the rise of the Digital Age and new technologies appearing daily, marketing has shifted into a world where digital is the landscape and metrics provide the signposts. From customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to analytics tools, your organization is probably using several different marketing technologies at any given time. Each system serves a necessary function but probably exists independently of the others with little data exchange between them. However, they are all important to the success of your business. Salesforce keeps track of your pipeline, Google Analytics is used for your reporting, and Marketo is running your campaigns. Marketing is investing increasingly more budget in technology every year. As predicted by Gartner analyst Laura McLellan, CMOs are poised to outspend CIOs on IT by On top of all your marketing technology is your content management system (CMS) your central application for site building and site delivery that these other tools must integrate with. Whether it s a legacy system or an open source platform, the CMS has been called the backbone of digital marketing by Forrester Research and is critical to the success of your marketing efforts. As the technological landscape and therefore the needs and desires of the consumer continues its rapid and constant evolution, new functionality and systems will be required. Predicting what will be required is difficult, maybe impossible. Who would have been able to predict the success of Facebook or Twitter, or the ascendency of streaming music displacing the mighty ipod? How can an organization face these daunting challenges and be positioned for success no matter what arises as consumers next must have device or technology? Open Marketing. 4 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

5 What Is Open Marketing? Open Marketing is conceptually based on the fundamentals of open source software. An Open Marketing Platform is designed to work best not with a small and limited family of compatible systems but instead is built from the ground up to thrive in an environment of endlessly changing integrations and an unknown set of future technologies. Open Marketing allows data to flow freely between all your systems, creating a unified view of your marketing efforts and, more importantly, your customer. This eases the distribution of content through multiple channels from web to to social but also enables you to adapt your content to whatever the future of personal technology may bring. Open Marketing allows data to flow freely between all your systems, creating a unified view of your marketing efforts and, more importantly, your customer. Open Marketing takes a more agile (and admittedly more comprehensive) approach that allows you to assemble a truly best-in-class set of marketing tools. This is important to provide the agility to respond to new opportunities or challenges, to take advantage of new opportunities quickly, and to give you the freedom to change or switch out marketing tools as you please. Open Marketing is about taking back control in this increasingly competitive marketplace, gaining real, actionable insight into your customers, and future-proofing your business. 5 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

6 Open Marketing vs. Marketing Clouds Some vendors offer all-encompassing, proprietary marketing cloud solutions. Each one has several different marketing technologies, but they vary slightly based on what the vendor has deemed most important. While this bundle of basic marketing tools might seem like a cost-effective, time-saving solution, often it s not. The typical integrated suite of marketing technologies is usually not built by the vendor but acquired. A proprietary marketing cloud is designed to encourage you to use a limited set of marketing tools instead of what you re currently using or patching together even though the vendor s suite of tools is not entirely integrated in the back end. First, this means that you may have to discard systems you currently use. Second, although they may have one or two products that are considered best-of-breed, one all-star does not make a winning team. If you d like to use the marketing tools you ve already invested in ones that best suit your business needs or can help you accomplish a new strategy you d like to try you ll likely run into one of a couple scenarios: The technology you d like to use, although on the marketing cloud vendor s roadmap of future enhancements, won t be ready for months, or even years. You can integrate the technology you d like now, but it will require expensive custom code and very likely much more time than you can afford if you want to remain competitive. The time vendors spend integrating these suites means time not spent innovating. So ask yourself: Do you want a future based on their roadmap, or one responsive to the reality being set by your customers? Although adopting an open approach means your team is responsible for shouldering the burden of integrating your preferred marketing tools, you have control over what gets added and when it gets added. Compared to a closed model, Open Marketing gives you back precious time, valuable budget, and the power to choose what s best for your business. 6 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING The time vendors spend integrating these suites means time not spent innovating.

7 Thinking Ahead and Thinking Open The philosophy of Open Marketing lets you leverage your current marketing tools, legacy systems, and software to maximize the value from your investment. If you have tools you like or want to use, you don t have to change a thing. If you want to modernize or replace pieces, you can do it at your own pace. If you find a tool you want to try, you might be able to deploy it with a plug-in, module, or code that already exists. If not, if it s something totally new, the time between launch of the new tool and the development of the code to integrate it into your system is dramatically decreased due to the platform s open architecture and technology. An Open Marketing Platform will never be outdated or left behind. An Open Marketing Platform will never be outdated or left behind. Because an Open Marketing Platform has the potential to truly integrate all its systems and data, it can allow an organization to more fully integrate its teams. By connecting all your systems, you can centralize your customer data and build a comprehensive customer profile that progressively compiles information. Knowing more about your customers and what they want allows you to align your digital marketing team your demand generation team, content marketing team, product marketing team, and commerce team around a unified customer profile. This improved profile informs all the teams interactions with the consumer, significantly enhancing the consumer s experience while visiting your site. Providing better service to your customer through insights resulting from improved data leads to improved customer loyalty and a significantly improved bottom line. 7 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

8 Maximizing Your Marketing Freedom According to Scott Brinker, editor of the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog, there are 1,876 vendors represented across 43 categories in the realm of marketing automation technology. That number nearly doubled from last year s edition. This explosion in options shows just how important it is to have a system in place that allows for the implementation of multiple marketing tools at a pace that keeps up with the growth of the industry and society s unpredictable adoption of new media, devices, and tools. Open Marketing doesn t force you to choose between past, present, and future technologies, but supports them all. Adopting an Open Marketing approach has three core benefits: 1 OPEN INTEGRATIONS Open Marketing gives you the freedom to integrate marketing technologies as you please. With a community of developers around the world who are always working to build new integrations, virtually any marketing tool integration, present or future, is available to you and on your timetable, not a vendor s. 2 OPEN DATA If digital is your main priority, then insights are a huge part of your business. As companies become increasingly insight-driven, it may seem as though there is a need for building a Big Data repository in house. However, that takes time and is expensive to maintain. With Open Marketing, you can leverage your most valid and valued data collected from your web logs, your point of sale (POS) system, and so on along with what analytics and reporting tools you want to use to process your data and gain insights into your customers. 3 OPEN CHANNELS Now that you have collected your customer data and you re rolling it into a unified profile, you can share that profile across channels, resellers, and affiliates; use insights gathered from one marketing initiative; and apply that information to other channels. For example, by leveraging personalization technology on your website, you can get a clear picture of the types of content your site visitors are most interested in. You can take those insights and apply them to an campaign for a much more targeted message and call to action (CTA). This is not limited to your existing channels, but also the possibility of future channels. With so much buzz and potential around new technologies, such as real-time personalized mobile experiences, wearables, and the Internet of Things, why limit yourself with a marketing solution based solely in the now? Open Marketing doesn t force you to choose between past, present, and future technologies, but supports them all. 8 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

9 Conclusion In the digital world, standing still is the fastest way to go out of business. And the pace of change is only getting faster. You know your business best. And your customer won t wait around while a vendor decides the pace of change. Open Marketing places the control of your organization s future back in your hands. Open Marketing places the control of your organization s future back in your hands. SKU EBOOK 9 FUTURE-PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS WITH OPEN MARKETING

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