Entries by 3 Created

Marketing to the Data Driven Customer

June 17, 2014 /in /by

Customers with digital DNA expect data driven valueThe digital native generation is bringing new expectations to brand relationships. They are mobile first, crowd sourced, and data savvy. Their first and most frequent interaction with your brand will b…

Call For Participation – IDC’s CMO Advisory Service’s 2014 Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey

May 28, 2014 /in /by
It is that time of the year – IDC’s CMO Advisory Service is in the field with our Marketing Benchmarks Study. This is our 12th year conducting this study that is used by leading marketing organizations to benchmark their marketing spend and organizational structures. Now it’s your chance to join in this important research; I would like to offer an invitation to participate in this survey. 

Below are the essential “need to knows” around our survey and further down I’ll dive into all the great value of benchmarking your marketing organization:

What are the benefits?

  • Complimentary copy of our 2015 Marketing Investment Planner to benchmark your company’s marketing data against industry data.
  • Receive an invitation to our exclusive client telebriefing held by IDC Analysts.
  • Access to IDC’s industry standard marketing taxonomy.

What is needed? 

  • Email me (smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com) to get our survey instrument and taxonomy.
  • A “lead” marketing executive with access to marketing budget and staffing allocations. 
  • Complete the survey by August 1st.

What is the Quality of Data and Confidentially?  

  • This is the 12th year IDC has fielded the Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey and will include participation from many of the 100 largest tech companies – this depth and expertise is unmatched. 
  • All responses are 100%, no questions asked, confidential. We take this part very seriously.  

Bonus to all Participants

  • All participants will be eligible for our 2015 Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix and will have access to their placement on the Matrix. A great way to easily compare your marketing progress against the rest of the industry’s. 


Need More Information: View this excerpt from Kathleen Schaub’s excellent post, IDC Tech Marketing Benchmark: Behind the Scenes. It explains all the intricacies (and value of benchmarking).

Why do companies benchmark? A benchmark provides context for decision-making. You spend a million dollars a year on social marketing. So what? If your CEO asks you this question, what will you say? Tech marketers tell us that they like to benchmark for the following reasons:

  • Improve the quality of annual planning: Last year’s program budget and gut feelings are no longer sufficient input
  • Gain insight into critical trends: Learn what industry leaders and competitors are doing – and how you stack up
  • Reallocate costs: Identify areas of overspending and opportunities for better value
  • Transform with confidence: Answer questions such as how much to invest in new areas like social marketing or how should I re-organize my department?
  • Drive with data: C-level executives increasingly expect marketing leaders to manage their business with the same level of operational excellence as other corporate functions.
  • Get an independent view: Benchmark data provides IDC analysts with a wealth of information that make guidance to clients personalized and accurate guidance

Feel free to reach out and let’s have a discussion whether it’s the right time for your organization to participate!

Email me at: (smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com) or find me on twitter @SamMelnick

Copyright 2011 IDC. Complete articles may be reposted. Reproduction in part is forbidden unless specifically authorized. All rights reserved. Please contact IDC for information on republishing or web rights.

Marketing as a Service (MaaS): The next wave of disruption for marketing tech

May 18, 2014 /in /by
Marketing technology has seen a remarkable innovation boom over the past 10 years — so much so that the market now boasts over a thousand vendors that IDC organizes into more than 75 categories. IDC believes this structure is unsustainable and over the next three years the forces of consolidation will exert fundamental changes in the way large enterprises provision marketing infrastructure and from whom they provision it. The marketing technology market, like much of the IT industry, will move to a cloud based service model which IDC calls the “third platform.” As the illustration shows, more than 90% of the growth in the IT industry will come from this model.
For marketers, the third platform means the advent of Marketing as a Service (MaaS), which will have transformative affects for IT, IT services, and creative agencies. Key indicators that MaaS is on it way include:
  • Unsustainable complexity: Point solutions have come to market independently leaving it up to marketers to assemble them into rational infrastructures. This is a highly inefficient market model for buyers and sellers.
  • Transition to platforms: The consolidation of point solutions into platforms has already begun. Many noteworthy acquisitions have been made by major vendors such as Adobe, IBM, Oracle, salesforce.com, and SAP. However, this phase of market development will not last long as markets move rapidly from platforms to “… as a Service” models.
  • Digital and creative coming together:AdAge recently named IBM the number one global digital agency in the world. IBM is rapidly hiring from the agency world to build out its creative services. Adobe has deep and long standing technology partnerships with many top agencies. The agency world needs a value proposition that will allow them restore margins and regain strategic relevance.
MaaS includes the fundamental technology, IT services, and creative services that marketing needs in a bundled offering. Bringing these services together delivers significant value to CMOs who have two key sources of pain: On one hand, their agencies cannot effectively execute omnichannel campaigns nor deliver real time attribution reporting. On the other hand, technology has added a great deal of cost and complexity to their operating environments. MaaS enables them to outsource much of the technological complexity, pay for it out of their advertising budgets and get better integrated marketing services from their top agencies. For tech vendors it means gaining access to the advertising budget which dwarfs marketing IT spend by orders of magnitude. As a result, IDC expects this model to be a major route to market for marketing technology in the enterprise segment. It is therefore an urgent action item for tech vendors, system integrators, and agencies — partner now or lose a major channel. 

For more information on this important trend please contact me at gmurray(at)idc(dot)com.

Copyright 2011 IDC. Complete articles may be reposted. Reproduction in part is forbidden unless specifically authorized. All rights reserved. Please contact IDC for information on republishing or web rights.

Why Business Executives are the New IT Buying Center

May 14, 2014 /in /by

Several times a week the IDC CMO Advisory Service gets inquiries from tech company clients about how to shift their company mindset to a new and different buyer.  IDC’s IT Buyer Experience Study shows that business buyers have 53% of buying influence in the earliest part of buyer’s journey and their influence stays high throughout the entire process.  The tech buyer’s influence, while still important, is comparatively waning.

A successful shift to a business-buyer approach will accelerate if you understand what’s behind it.

Front office automation has more business risk than back office automation.  The 2nd Wave (as IDC calls the client-server era) was mainly about automating things inside your company.  The 3rd Wave (as IDC calls the current era of cloud, mobile, social, and big data) is about automating your connections to the outside world (I call it the company “skin”).  When tech problems happened deep in inside your company, it was frustrating but not devastating.  The worst business tech problem of the 2nd Wave was being too slow to adopt new technology leaving competitors or upstarts to sail past you with business process advances.  That problem is still a concern today.  However, add the horror of screwing up in front of customers, investors, influencers, indeed, the whole world!  Just ask the CEO of Target.  Business executives are forced to pay attention to technology today – whether they want to or not. IDC forecasts that business executive budgets for technology will outstrip IT budgets.

Technology is easier and prettier now. Back in the day it took a real expert to understand the ins and outs of information technology products.  The products were intimidatingly gray and beige and filled with exposed wires and chips.  They hummed, got hot, and sparked out with regularity.  No wonder the finance and marketing execs wanted to leave those suckers alone.  Now most of those wires and chips are moving to the “cloud”.  Doesn’t that sound nicer?  Devices you touch are smooth and have pictures. Better design makes technology 99% invisible (to quote the title of one of my favorite podcasts).

Business executives are smarter and more confident about technology.  Back in the day, technology was a startling thing that business people in the prime of their careers had never seen, much less used.  I remember one intelligent, capable, and admired, C-suite executive who used to have his administrative assistant print out his email because he wasn’t quite sure how to use it.  Now, anyone younger than 60 came of age with PCs and programmable everything.  Information about technology is available at everyone’s fingertips and accessing opinions from your professional network is incredibly easy. While a portion of the population will always be skeptical or frightened about the next new thing – it’s not likely to be IT that they are scared of (drones, anyone?).

Here are some steps you can take to accelerate the shift to a business-buyer focus:

  • Bring focus on the business decision-maker up to par with the technology decision-maker.  This is the Goldilocks strategy – not too much but not too little. For most new tech installations, IT will no longer instigate nor approve nor pay.  However, at some point the business executives will want to bring in their IT partner to take over some aspects of the decision.  Keeping adjusting your investments in content, campaigns, training, etc. until you’ve reached a balance in results.  Because this is a change you will have to overinvest in activity to achieve new results.
  • Take clues from the shifts described above. Focus value propositions on front office business problems.  Build in cloud, mobile, social, and big data messages and capabilities (IDC says 90% of IT growth is coming from these areas). Make the “ugly” of tech 99% invisible – in your customer engagement, your sales discussions, and in the products themselves.  But that doesn’t mean be fluffy. Much of what is called “thought leadership” is astonishingly useless.  People are trying to solve real business problems.
The worm has turned as the saying goes. We are never going back to the old way.  Tech companies who succeed will be the ones to step up to investments they need to make to serve the empowered business buyer.
Copyright 2011 IDC. Complete articles may be reposted. Reproduction in part is forbidden unless specifically authorized. All rights reserved. Please contact IDC for information on republishing or web rights.

Is Search Engine Submission Necessary?

April 17, 2014 /in , /by

The simple answer is no – search engine submission isn’t necessary. The majority of search engines nowadays (most notably Google) crawl and index pages by following links. Using that logic, a single inbound link from any already-indexed page will identify your page to the engine. Subsequently, if that page links to other pages within your site, they […]

Can Any Inbound Linking Hurt My Ranking?

April 17, 2014 /in , /by

The answer is simple – inbound linking cannot hurt your search ranking. How is this known for certain? Well, for one, if inbound were to hurt your rank, your competitors would continually link to your site from link farms. Such a scenario is beyond your control. For this reason, Google cannot penalize your site for any […]

The Importance of Anchor Text in Back-links

April 17, 2014 /in , , /by

The importance of anchor text with respect to a linking strategy cannot be overstated. Back-links are a huge part of the search engine algorithm. When initiating a linking campaign, it is vital that external sites link using the appropriate keywords and terms in the anchor text. Almost always, linking candidates will use the company name as anchor […]