Build Your Own Marketing Cloud. Five Reasons to Unify Your Marketing Technology Stack

Transcription

1 Build Your Own Marketing Cloud Five Reasons to Unify Your Marketing Technology Stack 1

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Marketing and Technology : The New Bedfellows Game of Marketing Clouds Modern Marketing Is About Relationships Introducing Tag Management Five Reasons to Unify Your Marketing Technology Stack How to Unify Your Technology Stack On to the Next Marketing Frontier Tealium. All rights reserved. Tealium is a registered trademark and Tealium iq and AudienceStream are trademarks of Tealium in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks referenced are the property of their respective owners.

3 Marketing and Technology: The New Bedfellows Marketing is at a tipping point so close to leaping into the next exciting frontier, yet under constant danger of getting crushed under the weight of increasing complexity. Technology is completely transforming how we think about modern marketing. Almost everything we do to acquire and convert customers now revolves around the use of some type of marketing application, whether it s for social media, search engine marketing, retargeting, measurement, advertising, or more. According to Scott Brinker, a leading authority on marketing technology (chiefmartec.com), there are more than 1,000 cloudbased digital marketing solutions. Depending on what is considered commercially significant, My guess is that it s probably closer to 2,000, Brinker says. Whatever the exact number, it s clear that the use of technology in marketing is here to stay; they re entwined together forever, as Forrester Research Analyst Sheryl Pattek put it in a recent blog post on how savvy CMOs must embrace their inner technology geek to thrive in today s competitive landscape. It is also clear that marketers feel overwhelmed by technology. Beyond the sheer number of solutions that are now being assimilated into proprietary marketing clouds, nearly every application is a virtual island unto itself, using its own data syntax and language. This situation makes it supremely difficult for marketers to connect the points of the customer journey to provide more personalized and profitable customer experiences. Marketing is at a tipping point so close to leaping into the next exciting frontier, yet under constant danger of getting crushed under the weight of increasing complexity. What can you do? In this guidebook, we outline how marketers can use a foundational and core technology to build their own marketing cloud and gain control of their technology and their ability to maximize marketing ROI. 3

4 Analytics Marketing Automation Testing & Optimization Advertising Analytics Social Media Search Marketing Analytics Customer Experience Management Advertising Search Marketing CRM Data Management Social Media Marketing Automation CRM Social Media Marketing Social Media Monitoring 4

5 Game of Marketing Clouds Just as we ve seen the growth of individual point solutions, we ve also seen major providers, such as Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and others, rush to create their own proprietary marketing clouds, often through acquisition. These players are engaged in an increasingly contentious battle for market dominance. As fans of HBO s uberpopular series Game of Thrones, we jokingly refer to this battle as the Game of Marketing Clouds. So why the cloudbuilding boom? For these vendors, it s about capitalizing on the redhot technology boom. They want to be a onestop shop where marketers can buy their missioncritical marketing technologies. For consumers, there is a perceived yet unrealized advantage gained from buying through one vendor the ability to have a suite of products that seamlessly work together to improve marketing. This unfulfilled promise, this Game of Marketing Clouds, has left marketers confused and on edge. They wonder: Which vendor should I choose? What do I do about the technology I already have that cuts across clouds? What about the thousands of best inclass point solutions that I may want to use? Can these cloud vendors truly deliver on the promise of integrated marketing? 5

6 The modern marketer needs to focus on building longlasting customer relationships by delivering more consistent, personalized experiences 6 across all digital touch points.

7 Modern Marketing Is About Relationships Traditionally, marketing has consisted of branding, positioning, and selling. Increasingly, modern marketing is about building relationships. To build those relationships, marketers need to deliver consistent, relevant messages and experiences to customers whose journey is more complex and dynamic than ever before. Today, marketing is about more than communicating value: Marketers need to have the tools to understand individuals and what they care about, then provide relevant experiences, says Andrew Jones, an analyst for Altimeter Group. To accomplish this lofty goal, marketers need superior tools. So far, though, technology has largely failed them as they reach for that brass ring of unified marketing; that is, the ability to deliver streamlined and consistent omnichannel marketing to a visitor based on his or her historical activity. Ironically, this is accomplished through using one more piece of core technology: tag management. 7

8 Tealium iq is an awardwinning tag management solution that helps marketers bring order to chaos and increase marketing efficiency and results. Tealium iq also serves as the foundation for building 8 your own marketing cloud.

9 Introducing Tag Management Pioneered in 2008, tag management is a new class of application that helps marketers more easily manage their disparate digital marketing solutions. Tags are snippets of website code that nearly every major digital marketing vendor requires its customers to embed in the pages of their web sites (mobile sites and apps too). The tags are most often used for measurement purposes. The problem with these datacollecting vendor tags is that they require IT resources to deploy. So, even though it s marketers who buy and use these solutions, they depend on an already overburdened IT staff to deploy and manage them. Tag management eliminates that friction point by providing a single master tag to control the other tags. Marketers can then manage their solutions by themselves, quickly and easily, through a webbased interface. Deploying tags with ease only speaks to the tactical value of tag management. The real star of tag management is the the data layer, which creates a common, standardized language between all of your tagbased digital solutions. The significance of a data layer is that it allows your previously siloed marketing applications to share data and become truly integrated for the first time. The data layer also allows you to snap in any marketing solution you choose and essentially create your own custom marketing cloud. Using a Tealium solution, you can power an entire marketing cloud, any number of bestinclass point solutions, or you can mix and match to best fit your business needs. The data layer is, without a doubt, the most strategic layer in the digital marketing technology stack. It was developed out of simple necessity, given the growth in siloed marketing applications and the amount of fragmented data being flung across web and mobile channels. 9

10 Five Reasons to Unify Your Marketing Technology Stack Why should you strive to better manage and integrate your siloed marketing applications and fragmented data sources? Here are some core reasons. 1. Leverage BestinClass Solutions No matter how big it is, a major cloud vendor cannot be all things to all marketers. It simply cannot cover all of your needs, regardless of how many (nonintegrated) solutions it acquires. Unifying your applications gives you the flexibility to use the very best solutions in the digital marketing ecosystem, whether they are from the major cloud providers, or from bestinclass point providers spanning a variety of key categories. 2. Unify Marketing Applications and Data Integrating your technology stack also enables you to do something marketers have aspired to do for years: Break down silos. For the first time, via a foundational data layer, you can unite your applications and data. You can share visitor profiles across your marketing stack, and information in one channel can be used to inform action in another. In addition, you can do this across the entire marketing cloud, not just one proprietary vendor s products. 3. Deliver RealTime Interactions Once you ve seamlessly connected your applications and unified your visitor data with pointandclick simplicity, you can begin to move fast really fast in taking action to improve results. The hard work has been done for you, allowing you to cast aside the chains of traditional and highly expensive data warehousing techniques that typically provide usable data within 24 to 48 hours. 10

11 1000s of bestofbreed point solutions Advertising Advertising Advertising Advertising Affiliate Marketing Analytics Analytics Analytics Analytics Content Testing Content Testing CRM CRM CRM CRM Marketing Marketing Marketing Marketing Marketing Marketing Automation Marketing Automation Marketing Automation Marketing Automation Marketing Automation Retargeting Social Social Social Tealium Tag Management Through Tealium, marketers can easily build their own marketing cloud, leveraging the best solutions in the digital ecosystem. This includes bestinclass solutions from each of the major cloud providers, as well as solutions from thousands of point providers. 4. Drive More Profitable CrossChannel Campaigns Marketing unification might be your key in taking that leap into the next frontier of marketing. Via segmentation, profile enrichment, crossdevice visitor data stitching, and seamless cloud integrations, you can begin to drive more personalized and significant customer experiences across ALL digital touch points with your existing solutions. Feed your CRM system, chat application, or retargeting solution with historical visitor data spanning multiple channels and devices. 5. Maximize Marketing Investments Finally, you can maximize your marketing investments in many important ways: 1) You can make your applications work together and leverage synergies never before possible; 2) you can eliminate expensive, laborious backoffice integration projects; and 3) you can fuel the performance of your existing marketing applications. You can also unify your teams, and reduce friction points across the organization. Unifying your technology stack also enables you to do something marketers have aspired to do for years: Break down silos. 11

12 Tealium AudienceStream is a realtime segmentation and action engine that enables marketers to drive more profitable and relevant customer interactions across touch points using their existing applications. 12

13 How to Unify Your Marketing Applications There are two main approaches to integrating your solutions. One way is to try and initiate an expensive and lengthy I hate you, marketing data integration project with your IT staff. This involves buying data back from each of your vendors and trying to piece it together to get a comprehensive customer view that can be acted upon. Unfortunately, many of these projects deliver backwardlooking data at an extra high cost. The second way is a little more selfserving, but it s much faster and more cost effective. In addition, it allows you to partner with your IT team to work on business innovation. It involves signing up for the best tag management solution on the market and implementing what s called a Universal Data Object (a fancy word for the data layer) and you re off and running. To make things even easier, Tealium has developed the industry s first data layer wizard, which provides a graphical, stepbystep tutorial for setting up that allimportant data layer. 13

14 In your organization s view, what are the primary advantages of unifying digital marketing applications and data? Check the top three. Have better ability to target and optimize for specific customers (personalization) 73.60% Have better ability to segment customers 59.70% Achieve higher conversion rates 50.00% Better predict customer behavior/needs 41.70% Improve customer service Better create and automate multichannel marketing Have ability to add new marketing channels and capabilities as they emerge 6.90% 22.20% 27.80% Econsultancy, % 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Organizations anticipate improved segmentation and being able to offer more personalized customer experiences through marketing unification, according to a new study from Tealium and 14 Econsultancy, a thirdparty research firm.

15 On to the Next Marketing Frontier Some things won t change: death, taxes, the need for caffeine and the everexpanding glut of marketing technologies. D igital marketing investment will exceed 50 percent of an organization s total marketing program budget by 2016, up from 39 percent in 2013, according to a report by analyst firm IDC. Translation: There s a need for more technology to manage and maximize that increased investment. Love it or leave it, marketing and technology will forever be entwined from this point forward. Marketing professionals need to figure out a way to make technology work for them. Those who do will find themselves crossing that chasm and stepping into the next frontier of marketing. What Tealium allows us to do is standardize the definition of our segments across all of our marketing channels and create a truly unified view of the customer for the first time. Mark Fiske, Sr. Director, Global Digital Marketing 15

16 US HEADQUARTERS Torreyana Road San Diego, CA TEALIUM +1 (858) tealium.com AUSTRALIA Suite 2201, 101 Grafton St. Bondi Junction, Sydney NSW NETHERLANDS Zilverenberg 36, 5234 BM shertogenbosch netherlands@tealium.com FRANCE 9 Rue du Quatre Septembre Paris + 33 (0) SINGAPORE 14 Mohd Sultan Rd 0302 Singapore GERMANY Neuer Wall Hamburg UNITED KINGDOM 20 Hanover Square London, W1S1JY +44 (0)