Newest jobs in Martech:

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ TigerConnect (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $89,500 – $189,500 (est.)
• Manage, maintain and continually evolve our lead scoring, lifecycle models and operational fundamentals.
• Maintaining data integrity and data governance through operational programs and automated processes.

Manager of Demand Generation Marketing @ WorldSync (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $88,000 – $112,000 (est.)
• Build and lead a marketing function that includes collaboration with Product Management, Sales Leadership, Customer Success Management, and Executive Staff. 
• Build multichannel campaigns (inbound and outbound) that align messaging to the target audience and buyer journey.

Growth Marketing Strategist @ NewNorth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Develop marketing strategies for clients that drive real, measurable results.
• Engage with clients and delivering your expertise with confidence, expertly managing expectations.

Marketing Manager – B2B SaaS @ Localize (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Contribute to the development and management of 1WorldSync’s global demand generation campaigns across channels (e.g., email, SEM, digital advertising, web, events.) including strategy, content planning, campaign setup, A/B testing, reporting, and optimization.
• Partner with Product Marketing Manager as well as Go-To-Market (GTM) and Sales teams to develop and optimize campaigns according to the product roadmap and 1WorldSync’s pipeline and revenue goals.

Director roles:

Principle Marketing Analytics Analyst @ Shutterfly Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $114,000 (est.)
• Answer measurement and data integration questions: define analytics approach, retrieve, and manipulate data needed to perform analysis, and deliver actionable insights to Marketing Management team. 
• Create and share out weekly reports to clearly communicate Email channel and campaign performance. Identify trends and draw insights and test results to help guide future planning. Dig into the category performance and drivers. 

Senior roles:

Sr. Growth Marketing Manager @ Backblaze (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $190,000 (est.)
• Lead growth marketing initiatives to ensure the best lead experience by creating awareness, promoting free trials or sales leads and ultimately converting leads to paying customers.
• Report out key performance metrics on a weekly/monthly basis and develop monetization trends and sales strategies to optimize our investment for ROI.

Global Lead Product Marketing Manager @ LiveRamp (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Collaborate with product management to ensure market needs are translated into new product capabilities, and new product capabilities are effectively rolled out to the commercial teams.
• Draw from deep expertise of the product to clearly articulate how a given feature uniquely addresses customer use cases.

Partner Marketing Manager @ Lambda (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $103,000 – $165,000 (est.)
• Field incoming co-marketing requests, identify new areas of opportunity, and prioritize activities according to impact and reach.
• Work closely with the Sales team to strengthen GTM execution around new and enhanced partnerships.

Sr. Marketing Data Analyst @ GameChanger (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $100,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Support the Marketing and Partnerships teams in tracking, reporting, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing and go-to-market activities through the entire marketing funnel from awareness to retention.
• Build reports, data visualizations, and dashboards that clearly communicate findings to stakeholders.

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ Cotiviti (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $94,000 – $115,000 (est.)
• Build and execute strategic, best-in-class, multi-channel marketing campaigns for enterprise and line of business audience segments.
• Perform workflow set up in HubSpot including audience selection, dynamic content, etc. to ensure accuracy of campaigns.

Sr. Consulant, Go-to-Market Strategy @ Shift Paradigm (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Execute on diverse client consulting projects, with a focus on strategic initiatives and their execution.
• Develop solutions for complex marketing, sales, and organizational challenges in collaboration with the support of specialists across delivery areas.

Marketing Operations Manager @ Britive (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $100,000 (est.)
• Proactively identify areas of improvement in campaign operations to continually evolve a best-in-class marketing automation system. 
• Own and improve supportive structure directly impacting a steady volume of campaign requests by creating and maintaining Hubspot program templates and documentation for Demand Generation and Field Marketing teams.

Associate roles:

Jr. Marketing Operations Associate @ Fictiv (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Manage, or assist with data cleanliness, database health reporting, normalization, data cleanup, etc. 
• Responsible for maintenance, troubleshooting and ad hoc improvements across Martech systems like Sales-outreach (Outreach.io, or Salesloft for example), Marketo, scoring, enrichment and deduplication tooling.

Revenue Operations Analyst @ Goldcast (U.S. remote)

• Salary:$57,500 – $72,000  (est.)
• As the first person in the revenue ops function, you will report into the Head of Sales and act as a connective tissue between Marketing and Sales.
• You will connect data and systems, build workflows, and generate insights and analytics to empower marketing and sales to drive more revenue.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

That said, I’m surprised how many CMOs still keep their distance from the tech part of their function. The days of a CMO delegating the martech strategy to their MOps team are at an end. The emergence of generative AI, particularly ChatGPT, has changed everything. 

This article explores why today’s CMOs should prioritize marketing technology strategy and create internal policies for using generative AI.

Why CMOs need to be technology aware

The case for CMO engagement in technology was already compelling:

• Technology enables everything that marketing does. Bad technology choices will impact marketing performance.
• Technology accounts for ~25% of the marketing budget and significantly contributes to customer acquisition costs (CAC). There is a direct relationship between spending and CAC and, ultimately customer lifetime value (CLTV).
• Technology is the source of business intelligence about customers and their behavior, critical information in formulating a marketing strategy. Inaccurate or incomplete information will make strategy formulation difficult.

Dig deeprer: Why CMOs must be the company’s biggest advocates for digitalization

The impact of ChatGPT on marketing

There is no longer a clear demarcation line between technology and content. It’s now feasible to leverage AI to create text, video and animations. More importantly, ChatGPT’s simple user interface has the potential to completely transform how companies engage with their customers and deliver information. 

For me, the simple video that HubSpot produced to introduce Chatspot.ai drove this home. In 19 minutes, Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot, demonstrates the power and potential of AI visually and understandably. Every marketer should watch this video and think about how this type of interface and technology might augment and improve the customer journey and experience. 

As vendors introduce new AI-enabled capabilities, it will require reevaluating the components of the martech stack and potentially replacing anchor systems that have been in place for a long time. It’s worth noting that historically, in times of great innovation, new technology leaders emerge and that’s likely to be the case with AI. 

What today might look like mature and stable technology categories (e.g., CRM, marketing automation) may look entirely different within the next five years. Today’s market leaders may not be the leaders of tomorrow. It’s often much easier to start building from the ground up than deal with the technology legacy (a.k.a., technology tax) of an existing platform when trying to provide a leap in innovation. It’s important not to be complacent and to stay on top of shifts and changes. 

Complicating the evolution of the martech stack is the normal cycle of marketing hype associated with “shiny new things.” Companies are adding AI to their product descriptions without actually delivering anything that leverages AI. 

The challenge is to separate legitimate from non-legitimate claims. A straightforward way to test is to look at the size of the data set a vendor is using to deliver their capabilities. Regardless of product category, if a vendor is not working with a large dataset, they aren’t leveraging AI. To be effective, AI needs a large training set of data in order to learn. 

In addition, if a product leverages AI, it doesn’t always mean it is a better choice than an equivalent product that doesn’t leverage AI. It’s important to understand what differentiation their use of AI actually delivers.

A further complication is that a lot of venture capital is going into technology companies focused on leveraging AI to deliver a broad range of new capabilities. There is already an extensive category of generative AI products and an equally robust category of AI detection tools. 

Not all of these companies will make it. At some point, the market will become saturated with investment, the venture capitalists will move on and some companies will implode. 

Dig deeper: AI in marketing: 7 areas where it shines and struggles

The CMO and ChatGPT  

The CMO’s job is to understand where AI, particularly generative AI, fits within the marketing strategy. 

Making that decision requires an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of the technology, the products that deliver those capabilities and the associated ethical and compliance issues that surround AI. 

Italy, for example, has banned ChatGPT (at least temporarily) over concerns that the training data OpenAI used contravened GDPR. Copyrighting AI-generated content is a grey area at the moment. The U.S. Copyright Office has said it will consider copyrights on a case-by-case basis. This is something that is going to evolve over time.

CMOs should consider internal policies around the use of generative AI. I’m more than happy for my team to leverage generative AI for inspiration around email flows and to create multiple versions of content for A/B testing. At the same time, I want to ensure that we proceed cautiously with AI-generated articles, blog posts and other content that may get flagged and penalized by the search engines for being AI-generated. 

While it’s not clear how well search engines can detect AI content today, it’s definitely an area of focus for them, particularly given the concerns related to spreading disinformation and deep fake imagery.

As generative AI gets more sophisticated, so will the technology for detecting it. There’s no point in investing in AI-generated content if it will be buried by a search engine. 

Dig deeper: How CMOs should respond to ChatGPT’s marketing impact

This is not the time to question the value of your content marketing team

One thing that ChatGPT will not eliminate is the need for human content creators — at least not yet. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools can be great content assistants and, at some level, content creators. But they are not a replacement for your content team. 

These tools look back at the data they have. Without data about your new product, they can’t effectively write about it or deliver the nuances of your value proposition and positioning. Marketing strategy, creative direction and decisions need a human touch and will for the foreseeable future. 

The need to articulate an AI strategy

At some point, in an executive or board meeting, CMOs will be asked to articulate how AI fits into the marketing strategy. While the CMO should be able to call on their technology head to talk about technical details, products and implementation, they should be the ones to talk about the overall strategy. 

To be clear, AI and ChatGPT are not synonymous. ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. It exists under the category of generative AI. AI technology as an enabler exists in many different algorithms. You can have a ChatGPT strategy, and that may be your starting point for embracing AI, but it shouldn’t be characterized as your overall AI strategy. 

AI has tremendous potential across many marketing categories. For example, it can be leveraged to define micro-market segments, adapt the customer journey and deliver a high degree of personalization. Many of the tools in your stack today may already be leveraging AI. 

Where does the CMO go from here?

Today’s CMOs should prioritize marketing technology strategy and work hand in hand with their technology lead. Advances in AI will serve as a forcing function in this regard. 

If the CMO does not own the AI and technology strategy, they cannot effectively create an overall marketing strategy. It is imperative that a CMO be able to articulate how they will achieve their marketing strategy, and technology is very much a critical piece of that.

CMOs do not have to be deeply technical. They do, however, need to understand the following:

• What’s in their marketing technology stack.
• How each technology product contributes to the marketing function and supports their marketing strategy.
• The relationship between their technology expenditures and customer acquisition costs.
• Where AI (in all forms) has the potential to add value and/or disrupt their marketing stack.
• Know enough about martech stack to manage the technology team and its performance effectively.

At the end of the day, it is the CMO who is measured on marketing’s success. If success is impeded by poor technology choices, the CMO is and should be accountable. 

For those CMOs who have not yet crossed the divide and immersed themselves in marketing technology, I recommend the following:

• Subscribe to the Marketing AI Institute newsletter to keep abreast of the latest in AI and its implications for marketing. The Marketing AI Institute also hosts valuable events and provides training on marketing-related AI applications.
• Read the CabinetM MarTech Innovation report. Each quarter CabinetM publishes a roundup of new MarTech products announced in the quarter. (Note: This is not a lead collector for CabinetM, it is provided as a non-gated resource.) Alternatively, task your technology team with giving you a quarterly update on technology advances and new products they believe will add value to your marketing plan.
• Reach out to your key vendors, request information on their AI strategy and plans, and then monitor progress against that.
• Ensure that your organization has a single source of truth for all the technology being used to support marketing and sales in a form that you can review and assess. You may need to request that additional data fields be added to their tracking and reporting to get at the information that is most meaningful to you.
• Establish regular review meetings with your technology head and use these meetings to:
  • Collaborate on developing a technology strategy.
  • Discuss current technology utilization, performance and spend.
  • Identify gaps and opportunities.
• Don’t be afraid to dig in and ask questions. As a CMO, you are not expected to know the details of the technology architecture and integrations. Your job is to translate that architecture and strategy into a plan your C-suite colleagues and the company board will understand.
• And of course, keep reading MarTech.

The post Why CMOs must cross the technical divide appeared first on MarTech.

But no matter the company size, moving from one platform to another is an intricate dance. You have to get all the steps right to succeed from the start.

Moving to a new platform can seem daunting because you don’t learn how to do it in college. You learn through experience. Not everyone has had that experience; if they did, it probably was bad. Every migration is different because every company has different needs and setups. 

COVID-19 spurred companies’ dissatisfaction with martech

Migrations are on my mind because more companies are now moving through the request-for-proposal process (RFPs) or migrating between platforms. 

Dig deeper: Download MarTech’s Annual Replacement Survey for the applications that are most frequently replaced

Many discovered their martech partners weren’t fast or innovative enough to support their demands for speed and flexibility in a changing COVID economy.

Pre-pandemic, companies switched martech platforms mainly because they were unhappy with the cost, features or support. Now their patience has expired with platforms that aren’t sophisticated enough. 

Getting realistic about migration

There exists the idea that migrations are simple and fast. I’ve had to counsel companies that think they can make a massive platform change in just four months. Sure, it can be done, but at four times the cost.

As I mentioned at the start, a migration has many steps, and you have to do them correctly if you want to succeed. You can plan on spending three to 18 months in a migration based on your program’s sophistication. Take that timeline into account in your planning. 

These are the four most common complaints from companies that want to investigate new technology. Which one applies to you?

• “My system is wonky.”
• “We need a lot of hacks, workarounds, and manual processes to make things work.”
• “I need Mary in IT to move data around for me.”
• “I need external processes to get the reporting I need.”

These happen because somebody hurried through the migration.

4 focus areas for successful migrations

Although every migration is different, at a minimum, you should focus on these four areas when you migrate your systems from one martech platform to another:

1. Discovery

This is the most important step and often the most overlooked. That’s because nobody ever thinks to look at internal systems first. I will spend a fair amount of time on this step because your success hinges on it.

Sure, you’re excited because you just signed a contract for a new shiny tool. You’re dreaming about everything you want to do with your new email service provider (ESP). And you can’t wait to start sending emails. But to use your new tool effectively, with all the features you drooled over in your demo, you must know what to do first as you migrate to your new platform.

Your first critical step is to inventory all your martech systems, using your team, consultants with your ESP or a third-party agency. This means deep diving into where your data lives, how it gets there, and your processes, APIs, data fields, access, and governance.

Ask many questions. Talk to everyone who touches your email process, from your data and creative teams to the people who push “Send” and your CMO. 

Don’t skip this step or rush through it. An effective discovery process ensures you can get the most from your new tool because it will reveal unexpected strengths, weaknesses, gaps and other things.

A proper discovery takes a global perspective of the entire operation. It’s not just individual teams in their silos and responsibilities. 

Also, document everything in a manual. This will identify your important integrations, what’s useful and what isn’t, what has to move to the new platform and what doesn’t. 

It takes time, and it must be comprehensive, but it’s critical for the success of your next steps.

Dig deeper: Martech stack documentation is vital, here are some tips to do it right

2. Moving to the new platform 

Your new ESP can use the manual you created in discovery to define business cases and identify processes to move. The discovery process also reveals the order in which to move things over. 

Migrating to a new platform isn’t about chucking all your triggers, templates and lists into your new platform and then hitting “Go.” It’s a systematic approach not driven by an IP warm-up plan. 

I laugh (to myself) if the first question I hear from a client after signing a new martech contract is if the ESP mentions an IP warm-up plan. That’s step 325 in the migration. We’re at step four. Let your integrations and planning come to fruition first before you plan your first campaign.

Maybe you think your new ESP will handle all this for you. Surprise! It likely can’t get into your current ESP to do any of this work for you. Your internal teams or external companies do the work, not just to meet migration timelines but also to avoid disrupting business during the move. 

Every business unit affected by the migration has its own objectives and KPIs. Migrating to a new platform means you’ve added to their work. You’re ripping data out of one place and putting it somewhere else. That takes planning, agreements and negotiations.

This becomes a systematic and precise orchestration of moving systems, processes and creative content from one platform to the other. Each element must be moved in the right order. I cannot emphasize this enough. Migration is not about speed; it’s about accuracy.

A good discovery process pays off here, too. If you do it well, you will have those things in place. Migration is a team effort, like an orchestra, and you’re the conductor.

3. User acceptance testing

This is another often-overlooked step. When you move from Place A to Place B, you must test to make sure everything is working correctly, with your old ESP as a backup if it doesn’t. That means you will need to have some runway with your soon-to-be old ESP. That gives you time to move everything over. 

Develop a plan for user acceptance testing that shows what’s being tested and approved. Test all 1,000 of your triggers. Test all iterations of your templates and all of your inbound APIs.

A disciplined testing regimen keeps you from breaking things on your new platform. User acceptance testing is a big step that gets you closer to pushing that “Go” button. But you’re still not ready to push it. 

4. Send an email campaign — but only at the right time

You might send an email early in the process to test the system or have a proof of concept. But don’t hurry this step. Do it when it’s safe and makes sense, not because a timetable says you should.

When sending an email campaign, don’t try every new feature on your platform all at once. Patience is a virtue in migration. Wait until you get to parity, or a bit beyond parity, when you do things you did on your old platform but do them faster, better or cheaper.

A new platform brings changes everywhere in your email operation. Phase in your new implementation, and rely on your new ESP partner to help. Pushing “Send” is the last step in this process, not the beginning.

Wrapping up

In the last 23 years of being involved in RFPs and migrations, I’ve seen just about everything. Three key concepts get overlooked:

• It takes a massive, coordinated internal effort.
• Plan your cutover from the old platform to the new one, and that means possibly renewing with the old ESP for a short time. 
• Give yourself enough time between the RFP and the end-contract date.

In our work with enterprise client migrations, we recommend a minimum two-year process between running an RFP and shutting down the old platform. ESPs are not great at extending contracts if the migration process takes longer than expected. It gets expensive, and it can be cumbersome.

Planning and partnerships can help you understand the innovation arc you want to be on and recognize the potential for your new program.

The pandemic showed us we must pivot quickly to stay ahead of changing business conditions. Maybe you saw right away that your old technology couldn’t meet the challenge, so you can be forgiven for wanting to step on the gas to switch platforms.

Don’t try to make the migration process from RFP to pushing “Go” move just as fast. 

The post 4 steps to take before hitting go on your new martech platform appeared first on MarTech.

There were quite a few enhancements to the landing page UX — with the biggest callout being the removal of the toggle switch (in other words, the Classic Experience will no longer be available). 

Leverage inferred attributes in operational programs

Many businesses rely on inferred attributes to identify when GDPR or CCPA compliance is required. Inferred attributes allow you to remove fields on forms and can reduce friction, yet there are downsides. 

Inferred attributes aren’t able to accurately capture VPN data. Some legal teams may prefer keeping these fields on forms to avoid any compliance issues.

Why we care: Even if the best practice for data governance policies is to request the country of new people acquired, plenty of companies still rely on inferred data to trigger processes (lead assignment, consent management, etc.). If your company uses that data for any operational program, inbound leads from Dynamic Chat would be included in the operational programs.

Roles and permissions enhance security and control

Roles and permissions were added to Dynamic Chat, enabling admins to limit functionality based on selected user types. 

It sounds trivial, but controlling your team’s roles and permissions is undervalued. Many organizations experience issues resulting from team members having too much or too little access. 

Why we care: Security starts with providing the right access to the right people. Permissions can often be neglected, so this is a great step toward security and control. Allowing admins to assign roles provides a layer of security while still enabling your team to view past chats and data records.

Unlock the ROI of Dynamic Chat through enhanced reporting

Like Email or Engagement Programs, users can select a “Dynamic Chat” program that allows them to track the success and performance of their Dynamic Chat dialogue.

Reporting on the success of Dynamic Chat, in addition to that of other marketing programs, gives users a more comprehensive view of their marketing activities. In addition, users will be able to better gauge the ROI of Dynamic Chat to their business.

Nine additional languages are now supported 

Dynamic Chat users can choose from nine additional languages to display static chat content: French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. 

Marketo sunsetting Classic Experience on landing pages 

Classic Experience on landing pages is being sunset. The new experience offers increased functionality without toggling between the two views, offering a more seamless and integrated experience. 

Why we care: The new UX provides enhanced details for individual assets, particularly the versioning of the asset. This provides a clear ability to view the current live and approved assets while working on an update in a draft version. Users will also have the ability to see in one view key information and settings about each version of the asset (approved vs. draft). 

In addition, the “Used By” tab was enhanced this month. It now lists all assets using a particular landing page template or form template. 

Asset lists in Marketo instances that use landing page templates and global forms for all assets can be long and tedious. The ability to sort assets quickly can speed up an audit or troubleshooting process.

View the complete set of March 2023 Marketo Release Notes here.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE, a marketing operations consultancy.

The post Marketo’s March releases: A manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

In this article, we will explore the significance of marketing and sales alignment for business success, discuss the benefits of alignment, such as increased revenue, enhanced customer experience, and efficient operations, and provide actionable strategies to ensure your organization operates cohesively.

Building a collaborative environment

Establishing a collaborative environment is fundamental for marketing and sales alignment. A shared sense of purpose and mutual respect can bridge the gaps between these departments. A workplace where both teams feel valued and supported fosters trust and boosts overall performance.

Developing a service level agreement (SLA) is one way to stimulate collaboration. An SLA clarifies expectations, outlines roles and responsibilities, and sets key performance indicators (KPIs) that both teams can strive towards. This promotes accountability and simplifies expectation management.

Frequent check-ins enable both teams to communicate openly, exchange insights and data, address challenges, and realign goals and strategies. This continuous dialogue facilitates improvement and fortifies the relationship between marketing and sales.

Aligning on the buyer’s and workforce’s Journey

Synchronizing marketing and sales efforts around the buyer’s and workforce’s journeys is crucial for delivering outstanding customer experiences. This shared understanding allows for identifying key touchpoints where marketing and sales teams can collaborate, providing a consistent experience for prospects and customers while addressing the needs and concerns of the employees serving them. Considering both aspects, you can craft a seamless experience for prospects, customers, and your internal team, resulting in higher conversion rates and a more unified organization.

Developing detailed buyer and workforce personas is an effective way to understand and target the right audience and shape your internal culture. Marketing and sales teams can pinpoint their ideal customers’ common characteristics, pain points, and motivations, crafting personalized and relevant messaging that resonates with prospects. Simultaneously, comprehending your workforce’s personas enables you to cultivate an environment that promotes employee growth, engagement, and satisfaction.

Streamlining processes and leveraging technology

Optimizing processes and employing technology can significantly enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing and sales teams. Adopting the appropriate tools and implementing well-defined processes empower both teams to collaborate more seamlessly, ultimately driving exceptional customer experiences.

Defining the lead qualification and scoring process is a critical area to address. Establishing the criteria for qualifying leads enables marketing teams to pass high-quality prospects to sales, saving time and increasing the chances of closing deals. Sales teams can then prioritize leads based on their likelihood to convert, ensuring their efforts are focused on the most promising prospects.

Implementing CRM and marketing automation tools is essential for keeping both teams organized, sharing information effectively, and maintaining alignment on their goals and strategies. Integrating these tools into workflows streamlines processes enhances communication, and fosters collaboration.

Measuring and analyzing shared key performance indicators (KPIs) is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of the strategies in place. Regularly tracking these metrics allows both teams to identify areas for improvement, adjust their tactics accordingly, and ensure their efforts are aligned and focused on delivering the best possible customer experiences.

Crafting consistent messaging and content

A consistent and coherent brand story is vital for building trust and resonating with your target audience. Sales and marketing teams play a crucial role in shaping this narrative by aligning their messaging and collaborating on content creation.

Both teams should collaborate to ensure their messaging is consistent across all channels, including emails, social media, website content, and other touchpoints where prospects and customers interact with the brand. Maintaining a cohesive and compelling brand story can create a solid and memorable impression that sets you apart from the competition.

Sales and marketing teams should also join forces in content creation. Collaborating on developing relevant and engaging content enables both groups to leverage their unique insights and expertise better to address their target audience’s needs and pain points. This not only helps to nurture leads but also aids in closing sales and fostering long-term relationships with customers.

Lastly, it’s essential to encourage a culture of feedback and continuous improvement. By maintaining an open line of communication, marketing and sales teams can learn from each other’s experiences, adapt to new challenges, and continually refine their approach to deliver the most remarkable customer experiences possible. Regularly reviewing and updating strategies ensures that both departments remain aligned and focused on achieving their shared goals.

The key to marketing and sales alignment

Marketing and sales alignment drive business success and create remarkable customer experiences. By fostering a collaborative environment, aligning efforts around the buyer’s journey, streamlining processes through technology, and maintaining consistent messaging and content, mid-market and enterprise sales and marketing leaders in B2B companies can achieve better results and drive growth. Implementing the strategies outlined in this article will equip your teams to face the challenges of today’s competitive landscape and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

The post How to align B2B sales and marketing teams appeared first on MarTech.

“Best of breed has jumped the shark. The concept that a CMO has to buy 250 different technologies and try to figure out which is actually giving them the intent signal that they need — that ship has sailed.”

Rob Tarkoff, Oracle EVP and general manager of CX, knew he was mixing his metaphors. The message was nonetheless clear. Marketers don’t need more standalone tools, they need a platform.

This is not a new message from Oracle. Back in 2015 the late Mark Hurd, then Oracle CEO, predicted that by 2027 two marketing suites would command 80% of the market. He clearly thought Oracle was one of them.

Since then, however, we’ve been through several phases, including the proliferation of “Frankenstacks,” — poorly integrated custom stacks patched together from multiple sources — as well as the model of a central marketing solution with countless partner apps available to plug in and play.

For Tarkoff, none of this works.

Dig deeper: Marketing attribution: What it is, and how it identifies vital customer touchpoints

One streamlined process

“What needs to happen today,” he said, “is that all of those [marketing] flows need to be unified into one streamlined process, one data model, one set of interactions, one clear end-to-end process to build a campaign that has multichannel touch.”

Oracle claims to have built precisely that through the development of Oracle Fusion Marketing, a solution that supports the execution of multiple campaigns across advertising, email and other channels. “We’ve built this system,” he explained, “to take out this crazy concept of continuing to add point applications.” Another breakthrough, Tarkoff said, was integrating the Oracle Unity CDP with the marketing orchestration, content and advertising platforms.

Although Oracle does indeed fuse CX and advertising, Tarkoff acknowledged that the work they’ve done serves primarily B2B marketers. “We’ve written a lot of code over the past few years,” he said.

Dig deeper: Oracle Fusion Marketing reduces the role of traditional CRMs

App marketplaces don’t solve the problem

Some obvious competitors like Salesforce and HubSpot seek the best of both worlds, offering extensive proprietary suites of solutions, but also running huge app marketplaces featuring best of breed solutions configured to integrate with their platforms. Tarkoff, however, thinks of this approach as less the best of both worlds than a way of hedging bets.

“I think that’s a way of hedging bets that doesn’t really solve the problem,” he told us. “Sure, we have partners — but just bringing a marketplace and saying it’s your job to orchestrate the marketplace, that’s not solving the problem. Make it simpler.”

Simplicity and efficiency are his watchwords. “I haven’t seen a model where having an app marketplace actually improves the effectiveness of marketers. It sounds good on paper. We want people to see the power of the unified suite. It doesn’t mean that we’re closed; it means we’re complete.”

Doesn’t it also mean that it forces an Oracle customer to become, in effect, an “Oracle shop,” locking them into the Oracle suite rather than allowing “composability”?

“Truthfully, in SaaS, we’re providing it as a service. We’re not deploying any software on premise, so you’re not locked in. As long as the service provides value for you, you’ll keep it; if it doesn’t, you’ll switch.”

Machine learning is baked in

Another differentiator between Oracle and prominent competitors like Adobe and Salesforce is that it doesn’t have a tag — Sensei or Einstein — for its AI capabilities. Nor has it made any splashy announcements about its adoption of generative AI; no equivalent to Einstein GPT or Sensei GenAI.

Tarkoff says there’s a reason for this. “Oracle has always taken the approach in development that AI and machine learning are built into all of our applications. It’s always been a deliberate difference in how we market AI — rather than having a Sensei or an Einstein or some extra layer of AI, we build machine learning into all the core flows.”

One example, he said, is in the “completely revamped” conversational UI called Redwood. “In that UI we have enabled a lot of machine learning flows to be captured in a conversational fashion.” I think the big difference with large language models is that you get a response in the form of a written statement or some narrative as opposed to a set of directions.”

This doesn’t mean Oracle isn’t paying attention to generative AI. “Like a lot of people, we are experimenting with what that means across marketing, sales and service concepts. How good is it at helping you to optimize the right kind of marketing message? How good is it at helping you figure out the right interaction for a chatbot? We’re doing all of the same experimentation. The difference with Oracle is that we just don’t believe in hyping things we don’t think are true innovation. It’s just a different orientation altogether.”

He also points out that, at an enterprise level especially, good governance is needed. He referred to the inadvertent leak by Samsung engineers. “Some of the engineers put their code into ChatGPT to try to debug it — and it was proprietary code.” Feeding proprietary customer information to a large language model would also be a significant problem.

“It’s in the hype phase,” he concluded. “It’s a new toy for everyone and it will have productivity enhancements but I think there’s a lot that has to get figured out.”

The post Marketers need a unified platform, not more standalone tools appeared first on MarTech.

These opportunities contribute to high satisfaction among those who work in the thriving field. 74% of those surveyed reported being at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs. 

“Given that one-third of our respondents were promoted or got a new job in the past year, relatively high happiness levels seem justified,” said Scott Brinker, VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot and editor at chiefmartec.com. “Overall, great to see martech pros are feeling good about their jobs.”

Increased salaries. Survey respondents had a wide range of experience in marketing. Nearly half had more than 10 years of experience and 60% had more than seven years in the profession.

When looking at the average compensation for various levels of experience, the survey found that compensation increased, on average, consistently at each stage after the third year. 

After seven years, the bump in pay was most dramatic, climbing from $118K, on average, for marketers in their sixth and seventh years, up to $154K for those in their eighth and ninth years.

Dig deeper: Marketing technologists earn more on average than marketers

Promotions. More than three-quarters of respondents were promoted in the last two years, either within their organization or as a result of changing jobs. This was true for marketers at all management levels.

At the managers/staff level, more promotions came in the first year. For directors and above, more promotions were awarded after the first year than for lower-level marketers.

Why we care. The vast majority of marketers report that they are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs, and the data about pay increases and promotions support these sentiments.

The opportunity for advancement in a competitive job market also explains the high churn rate. In this context, switching jobs isn’t a result of job dissatisfaction so much as on way by which employees gain promotions.

Churn accelerated in 2022. More than 70% of respondents said they noticed an increase in churn at their organization in the last year.

Nearly a third said that the increase of churn was significant, as opposed to a moderate increase.

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The post Frequent promotions and salary increases contribute to thriving martech careers appeared first on MarTech.

It’s time to prioritize a strategic and holistic view of your company’s martech stack and create a lean, efficient, results-driven marketing technology infrastructure.

Learn how a marketing technology optimization framework benefits marketing organizations, enhances the customer experience and drives real ROI. 

Marketing technology optimization: A paradigm shift

Marketing technology optimization (MTO) emphasizes:

• Evaluating current marketing technology tools and platforms.
• Identifying gaps or redundancies.
• Making data-driven decisions on eliminating existing or implementing new martech solutions. 

This approach helps align the martech stack with the company’s overall business, marketing and customer experience goals, creating a streamlined and efficient set of tools that drive real ROI.

Further, MTO integrates ongoing optimization with the maintenance of the martech stack, preventing unnecessary spending and fostering maximum utilization of the tools. By adopting MTO, marketers can avoid the pitfalls of an unwieldy and bloated martech stack and focus on driving results with lean and efficient tools and platforms.

Dig deeper: The secret to building a useful martech stack

MTO benefits for the C-suite: More than just marketing

Marketing technology optimization offers unique advantages for CMOs, COOs and CFOs in driving ROI and improving customer experience.

For CFOs, MTO enables more effective budget allocation towards marketing technology, ensuring higher ROI and optimizing company performance. For COOs, MTO can lead to cost savings, enhanced team collaboration and reduced resources required for maintenance and support.

In addition, MTO supports compliance with industry regulations and data privacy laws. It empowers CMOs to adopt a proactive approach to compliance rather than reacting to data breaches or regulatory violations after they occur.

Change management and organizational buy-in for MTO

Creating a culture of marketing technology optimization within an organization requires effective change management and buy-in from key stakeholders. Strategies to foster a culture of MTO and obtain organizational buy-in include:

Establish clear goals and objectives

Set well-defined objectives aligned with business, marketing and customer experience goals to foster a shared understanding of MTO’s purpose and value.

Communicate benefits consistently

Share MTO’s advantages with stakeholders to build momentum, engagement and commitment. Emphasize improved efficiency, ROI, customer experience and compliance.

Involve stakeholders in decision-making

Actively engage stakeholders in assessment, strategy development and implementation for a sense of ownership and support, leading to better decision-making.

Provide ongoing training and support

Equip team members with skills and knowledge to manage the martech stack effectively. Demonstrate commitment to MTO and continuous improvement through training investments.

Celebrate successes

Acknowledge and celebrate MTO achievements to reinforce their value, motivate team members and encourage ongoing innovation and improvement in marketing technology optimization.

Budgeting and resource allocation for MTO success

Allocating financial resources and personnel to support MTO initiatives is crucial to ensuring ongoing optimization and maintenance of the martech stack. Best practices for budgeting and resource allocation in MTO include:

• Align budget with overarching goals: Focus on the business, marketing and customer experience goals to direct financial resources towards impactful initiatives.
• Consider the total cost of ownership (TCO): Account for acquisition, implementation, training and maintenance costs for comprehensive budgeting and informed technology investment decisions.
• Allocate resources for continuous optimization: Dedicate resources to regular assessments, updates and refinements, ensuring up-to-date marketing technology and sustained ROI.
• Invest in training and development: Equip personnel with the necessary skills to maximize marketing technology investments and contribute to MTO initiatives’ success.
• Assign “owners” for each tool or platform: Enhance accountability and encourage ongoing optimization within the martech stack by designating responsible leaders.
• Establish cross-functional teams: Collaborate with members from marketing, IT, data analytics and other departments to optimize the martech stack, improve decision-making and boost organizational performance.
• Monitor and adjust budget/resource allocation: Use data-driven KPIs and metrics to make informed decisions, adapt investments and maintain a cutting-edge martech stack that delivers sustained success.

Measuring and reporting on MTO success

To measure the success of MTO initiatives and demonstrate ROI to stakeholders, C-level executives should track key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics aligned with the organization’s overall business, marketing and customer experience goals. 

Some key KPIs and metrics to track include martech stack efficiency, marketing campaign performance, integration and data quality, compliance and data security and customer experience.

Embracing marketing technology optimization

Adopting a framework like marketing technology optimization becomes increasingly important as businesses evolve and adapt to the ever-changing digital environment. By embracing MTO, organizations can foster a culture of continuous improvement, stay ahead of the curve and maintain a competitive edge in digital marketing. 

Focusing on efficiency, agility and alignment with organizational objectives can help marketers unlock the full potential of their martech stacks, maximizing return on investment and enhancing the customer experience.

Dig deeper: 3 steps to building an effective martech stack

The post Marketing technology optimization: The path to peak martech stack performance appeared first on MarTech.

In Part 1, I covered new features you should use, including Lightning Web Runtime, Salesforce payments and enhancements to Salesforce CMS. This installment features recent enhancements to Sales and the Customer Data Platform. 

Sales: Analytics, Account Discovery Dashboard, AI and more

The latest sales updates are, in my opinion, a game-changer. They will make your sales process more efficient and easier to manage, which will help your teams close deals faster. Here are the highlights: 

Analytic efficiencies

Sales Analytics now provides filtering and faster access to data points, which gets you exactly what you need without sifting through irrelevant data. Sales managers (and reps) can determine which of their sales strategies are most efficient, which products are performing best and pinpoint areas that need improvement. 

Account Discovery Dashboard, now with AI

Account Discovery Dashboard now uses artificial intelligence with Einstein’s Discovery, which will help your business improve sales prospects and identify new growth opportunities. This feature can also analyze data to help your sales reps identify accounts with the highest prospective revenue returns while keeping your teams updated on the health of their accounts. 

Mandatory multi-factor authentication

Reps loathe multi-factor authentication, but it’s an extra layer of security to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your account. Turning it off is no longer an option. 

Quick promotion set-up

A quick promotion setup option now simplifies loyalty management and promotions programs. Instead of building a system from scratch, you can choose from predefined eligibility, rewards and criteria such as product, order and account-based criteria to help streamline the eligibility process. 

In addition, promotions managers can select from rewards options such as percentage discounts, fixed amounts, or free items and apply them to specific products or the entire order. This setup option can also be customized and will ultimately save everyone time — something we all need more of in our lives.

Salesforce CDP 

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) aggregate data from different sources such as CRM, email marketing and social media. In addition, you can activate data profiles to run more targeted content across both Google and Meta. 

Using Salesforce’s CDP, you can track and analyze customer engagement across all channels, which will help you create more targeted campaigns. The more you understand what resonates with customers, the more efficient your campaigns will be. That should yield more conversions/sales. 

The Account Engagement Optimizer will help you: 

• Identify improvements to your marketing automation system (think sales process and email campaigns) that will increase your ROI. 
• Identify risks to your marketing automation system to improve overall marketing efforts. For example, the Account Engagement Optimizer may flag a campaign to inform you that your click-through rate is lower than the industry average and prompt you to make changes.
• Prioritize recommended changes based on what is most important to your team. These recommendations will focus your team on changes that will make the biggest difference.

The post Salesforce spring 2023 release: The business executive’s guide, part 2 appeared first on MarTech.

This article explores the most sought-after skills in digital marketing and what they mean for marketing professionals and the industry.

Top skills marketing leaders look for when hiring

Up to 57% of marketing leaders prioritize analytics experience when hiring new talent, according to the State of Marketing 2023 report. As brands grow and become more data-driven, marketers who can effectively navigate and interpret data are highly valued.

Other skills that marketing leaders are hiring for and prioritizing are:

• Social media management (12%)
• Copywriting (9%)
• Video production (7%)
• Graphic design (6%)
• Search engine optimization (6%)
• Google Ads (2%) 

Although marketing analytics is specified, the ability to use data when managing social media communities, producing content and managing paid search marketing is also critical.

This shift towards prioritizing analytics experience reflects a growing recognition of data’s vital role in marketing strategy and decision-making. This makes sense for a few reasons. 

The need to demonstrate business value

Companies are tightening budgets to weather the current economic storm. At the same time, CMOs have been demanding that their marketing and PR teams demonstrate ROI from their programs. This is a trend that I’ve seen over the last 5 to 7 years.

Marketers were asked about their KPIs and how they plan to measure their programs’ performance in the same report, and 26% said that cost per acquisition/sale was the number one KPI, followed by:

• Social engagement (19%)
• Customer lifetime value (17%)
• Cost per impression (9%)
• Customer retention rate (9%)
• Cost per click (8%)
• Cost per lead (8%) 

These data points clarify that marketing leaders prioritize metrics that prove value. Outside of social engagement, these KPIs are all aligned with financial metrics.

Third-party cookie deprecation

Google plans to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2024. Aside from rethinking audience targeting and focusing on first-party data, marketers must up their analytics skills to use the data effectively and draw meaningful insights.

Consumer privacy is also a significant consideration. Legislation, like the GDPR and CCPA, require companies to obtain explicit customer consent before collecting and using their data. Still today, 75% of marketers rely on third-party cookies.

Dig deeper: Why we care about compliance in marketing

Marketing budgets are on the rise

This year, over 50% of marketing leaders plan to increase budgets, but just 14% will make substantial investments, according to the same report. This is likely due to the uncertain financial times that have characterized the last 12 months.

However, despite these budget constraints, marketing leaders are still investing in data-driven strategies, such as:

• Investing in analytics tools.
• Hiring talent with analytics experience.
• Other initiatives to help them better understand their customers and engage them on a deeper level.

The demand for analytics skills will likely remain strong as marketing teams continue leveraging data to improve customer experience, drive sales and maximize ROI.

Per Gartner, almost 30% of the digital marketing budgets are being allocated to analytics across three functions: 

• Marketing data and analytics (9%)
• Customer analytics (8.8%)
• Marketing insights (8.3%)

While each function serves different purposes, all require an in-depth knowledge of data and analytics.

Marketing data and analytics is about performance

Hiring marketers with an analytics background is necessary to measure marketing performance better. Marketers should be able to analyze data from various channels such as paid search, email, display ads and social media to identify opportunities for improvement and provide actionable insights.

Knowledge of conversion rates, budget optimization, clickthrough rates and other performance metrics are critical. One mistake in reporting can result in millions of dollars of loss for brands.

Typically, someone working within this function would review the data and provide actionable insights after the campaign has ended.

Always-on customer analytics

Customer analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data about customers to better understand their behavior, preferences and needs. This involves using data sources such as customer transactions, demographics, web and social media metrics and customer feedback to identify patterns that inform business decisions.

In most cases, initiatives that require in-depth customer analysis using survey data happen quarterly or bi-annually. In large companies, this is usually outsourced to a research firm managed by an internal staff member with expertise in analytics.

Bringing the outside in with marketing insights

Marketing insights refer to the actionable knowledge gained from analyzing third-party marketing research from firms like Gartner, Forrester, Global Web Index, Kantar and Nielsen. These insights can help marketers and PR pros understand the current macro trends, consumer behavior and competitor activity in their industry.

This might be similar to customer analytics, but it’s more focused on industry trends and macro-level insights. Again, this helps marketers plan their strategies and understand the broader industry landscape.

Cultural trends and insights can also come in other ways. In the report, 31% of the marketers surveyed have designated cultural insights teams in-house. This approach is more expensive, given the cost of salaries and the current economic climate. But having an internal team can be beneficial in speed to insight and data ownership. 

Invest in the right resources to drive marketing ROI

Data and analytics are essential tools for modern marketers. Investing in the right talent, tools and processes helps you keep up with the competition. Building a team with different functions specializing in customer analytics, marketing insights and data and analytics is key to success. With the right talent and resources, brands can tap into valuable insights, drive revenue and maximize ROI.

The post What are the top skills you need for digital marketing? appeared first on MarTech.