Global Marketing Alliance

The macro and the micro – comparing marketing predictions from a major analyst with practitioners’ plans

comparing marketing predictions, ideal customer journey, maximum basket revenue Marketing strategy article

Bruce Biegel

As January comes around, many in the marketing world eagerly await the annual review of the previous year and expectations for the new one produced by Bruce Biegel (pictured left) of the Winterberry Group. This is a magisterial ‘big picture’ look at the world of data-driven marketing performance and trends. CMOs and CFOs often use it to justify or explain both their budget process and early performance indicators.

Steve Lucas

No less valuable, but perhaps closer to the digital coalface, is the survey carried out by the Marketo team within their Marketing Nation community. It reviews what responders think about the challenges they expect to face this year. Steve Lucas of Marketo (pictured right) offers practical suggestions alongside the survey results.

Both are worth looking at in detail, and you will find them here (log in is free to view the full Winterberry report) and here. However, I am going to briefly summarise them and then pull together some common strands with thoughts of my own.

Comparing marketing predictions

This comparison should tell us whether marketing practitioners are equipped and resourced to deal with the major challenges ahead.

Let’s look first at the Winterberry Group. Bruce uses an impressive array of sources of both quantified (mostly US numbers) and qualitative research. This is what he says happened in 2017 (numbers are US unless otherwise stated):

And the expectations for 2018?

Bruce Biegel believes that email has been slow to integrate with the omni-channel world. Therefore, dynamic targeting, identity management (matching inbound responses with the database to facilitate relevant outbound communication), customer journey mapping and personalisation should be key goals for this year.

The research that he has gathered from multiple surveys from McKinsey, Accenture, Forrester and others indicate that 68% of marketers list personalisation as a priority, and 46% are putting money where their mouth is and allocating budget accordingly.

There is plenty more in the Winterberry guide – including forecasts for growth by media channel, e-commerce and loyalty trends, and the outlook for agencies, consultancies and adtech/martech. But let’s now look at what Marketo’s survey looks like.

Firstly, the good news. The questions posed by Marketo align pretty well with the landscape outlined by Winterberry. So, the analysts and experts are on the same page! Secondly, 50% of respondents said that their budgets were increasing this year. The money is going on, yes, personalised content, technology, account-based marketing (the survey will be skewed towards B2B) and analytics.

So far, so good. But the rest of the survey indicates both the distance that most marketers will have to travel to really tackle the main issues, and also how day-to-day issues and concerns are likely to be internal rather than external.

Marketo asked what percentage of content was personalised. Only 1% said all of it, 19% said most, 70% said some and 11% said none of it. But at least it seems that marketers know this is a goal that needs to be addressed.

I would have expected more progress – or at least responses that pretended that was the case – from the next question, which asked whether marketing activities tracked the buyers’ journey. Only 4% said very well, 33% said pretty well, 44% said OK and 19% said not well. And remember, the survey was carried out with Marketo’s community – so you would expect a high degree of familiarity with the potential of a marketing automation platform.

Only 20% say that they use artificial intelligence tools at the moment – although it is on the radar for almost all.

Marketo’s final question was: “Which activity will have the biggest impact on your business in 2018?” Here are the responses:

This result indicates, at least to me, more of an eye towards internal meetings and reports rather than a vision for marketing excellence. Martech integration, analytics and innovation score low – and they would all be drivers of effective personalisation, identity management and the other trends and aspirations outlined in Winterberry.

The diminished focus on IT is, well, interesting.

Here are some conclusions:

Have an opinion on this article? Please join in the discussion: the GMA is a community of data driven marketers and YOUR opinion counts.

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