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One of the first things that jumps out from the year-over-year data is the consistency of the top five responsibilities. From martech staff and managers up to more senior directors and VPs, these are the core functions that these roles deliver to the organization: Research and recommend new marketing technology products. Operate marketing technology products as an administrator. Train and support marketing staff on using marketing technology products. Integrate marketing technology products with each other. Monitor data quality within marketing technology products.

It is disappointing that, for the second year in a row, performing data privacy and compliance reviews and performing security reviews both remained at the bottom of the list of martech responsibilities — and even dropped a few percentage points.

enior roles are much more likely — 37% to 42% more likely — to: Pay for marketing technology products from a budget, partially or fully (71%) Negotiate business terms for purchasing marketing technology products (68%) Approve or veto purchase of marketing technology products (68%)

In today’s fast-paced, multichannel world, marketers no longer have the luxury to spend months crafting large projects; they must innovate and produce on the fly and respond immediately to market disruptions. In their new report, the researchers explain, “Agile for Marketing (A4M) drives long-term marketing strategies with short-term, customer-focused iterative projects that improve responsiveness and relevance. It allows for faster creative, more testing, smarter improvements and better results.”

63% of marketing leaders indicate agility as a high priority, but only 40% rate themselves as agile.

The CMOs we spoke with needed a solution that would help them orient marketing activities around the constant change in the marketplace—a solution that allows them to be more dynamic and flexible in their operations, more productive, and more collaborative and integrated in their work product.

Research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs indicates content marketers with a documented strategy are: Much more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing Far less challenged with the many aspects of content marketing Able to justify why a higher percentage of the marketing budget should be spent on content marketin

Consider documenting one or more of the following goals as a starting point for your strategy: Improve brand awareness Increase engagement Generate more website traffic Expand the email list Increase marketing ROI Achieve higher customer retention, loyalty and referrals

A buyer persona reveals what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to solve a problem.

Optimization is a standard practice for most marketing channels. Not so much in influencer marketing, according the influencers surveyed. Influencers indicated that it is rare for marketers to ask for active campaign data and even more unusual that adjustments are made midstream.

One topic that the influencers strongly agreed upon is that longer engagements would produce better results. They believe their followers will see brand partnerships as more authentic and will become more familiar with the brand as they see it more. They also feel that micro-relationships, like one-post campaigns, are ad-like, which can discredit both the brand and influencer.

Many influencers provided anecdotes of high-performing content, especially on blogs, that lived long after the influencer marketing campaign ended. Examples of continued performance include content interaction, traffic generated to a website and appearance in search results. As an opportunity, marketers could engage with the influencer to amplify that content where it lives or extend it through paid support. At the very least, reengaging past successful partners or content should be top of mind.

86 percent of marketers say they will own the end-to-end customer experience by 2020. To accomplish this, the report found that marketing leaders must have a single view of the customer that allows them to engage in two-way, personalized conversations across technologies, locations, and physical objects.

Marketing complexity is growing: More than half of respondents believe the accelerating pace of technological change, mobile lifestyles, and an explosion of potential marketing channels via the Internet of Things (IoT) will change the field the most by 2020. This is driven by the billions of possible interactions these channels will create between a company and its customers.

The top marketing channels are those that can be personalized: The top channels to the customer in 2020 will be social media (63% of respondents), the World Wide Web (53%), mobile apps (47%), and mobile web (46%).

Why are marketers stuck in 2010? There are four reasons:The crushing pace of technological change — A feeling of helplessness about the pace of change leads to uncertainty about direction, effectiveness, and even personal relevance as a marketing leader. Marketers rely on what they’ve always done because they don’t understand the changing world.

Over-reliance on technology and automation — Today, marketing has become a glorified IT department. Marketing decisions are being made by statisticians and data scientists in ways that may increase efficiency – and maybe even sales leads — but drive us away from the heart of our customers.

Organizational paralysis — Companies formed departments and teams years ago to work on social media, content, and other initiatives that don’t work like they used to. Becoming “locked-in” to marketing tactics that simply don’t work any longer might be due to outdated agency relationships, organizational resistance, cultural obstinance, lack of skilled leadership, relentless bureaucracy … or some combination of these factors.

That all makes sense given separate results from the same survey indicating that 71% of company marketers plan to increase their digital marketing budgets this year.

Content marketing edges SEO (65%) and email marketing for engagement/retention (also 65%) as the most popular digital channel tabbed for a budget increase.

Other digital channels and disciplines to get a budget hike this year include social media investment (for engagement/retention – 62%), mobile marketing (for acquisition – 61%), and social media investment (for acquisition – 61%).

As might be expected in a difficult economy, lead generation topped all digital budget categories with almost 27% followed by display/banner at just under 20% and search at almost 19%.   As to what is driving digital media investments in 2012, audience composition, ROI and measurement capabilities, audience reach, and data targeting were selected by more than three-quarters of the respondents.By a wide margin, click through rate is the most important factor in campaign success with cost-per-engagement and interaction rate almost equal in importance.

Content marketing, which includes white papers, case studies, videos, custom websites, video and white papers, is among tech marketers’ top five spending priorities for 2012.  Led by collateral at 71%, followed by webcasts/virtual events at 61%, videos at 59%, research at 55%, and articles/features at 54%, marketers are investing in a wide variety of content marketing or custom programs.  Agencies are much mo

s for social media, YouTube and Facebook lead all platforms with LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter not as popular. Among BtoB respondents, 53% found social extremely/very valuable for finding relevant technology content on the Web, which is double the 2010 figure.  Not surprisingly, 18- to 34-year-olds are most active with social media.  According to all users in the IDG survey, 60% rely most on tech sites, 46% peers or colleagues, and 43% independent tech journalists/bloggers.

Where is the Listerine crisis management?It seems that the Listerine PR team have thrown Dixon under a bus. I can’t find any support for her situation.

Influencer advertising not influencer marketingInfluencer marketing is not influencer advertising. Influencer advertising is a subset of influencer marketing, but the subset does not speak for the whole category.The differences between Influencer marketing and influencer advertising have their roots in the differences between transactional marketing and relationship marketing.Influencer advertising is transactional and short-lived. Work is orientated around tent-pole campaign contracts between influencer and brand.

The important skill sets for influencer marketing are twofold: there are hard skills and soft skills.The hard skills are data-centric skills. That is looking under the bonnet and choosing influencers based on demographics, what they've produced before, their ratio between engagement of sponsored and organic content etc.The softer skills are crucial, too - building long-term and mutually beneficial, business-growth relationships.

They’ve abandoned the promise of helping companies genuinely connect with their customers. They’re not even very good at the model they’ve chosen, which is as a Web 1.0 ad seller.

Ads aren’t the focus on what marketers want from Facebook in the first place.

Facebook has completely gone back on what they originally promised marketers in 2007. It’s what they promote today. They sell this promise of connecting companies with their customers. Eighty-four percent of the time they don’t do that.

Marketing was built on Madison Avenue. It was built in a very specific era, marked by very specific limitations.

But, executing marketing in campaigns is suboptimal for a few reasons: It’s not focused on building audience/brand/love. It’s focused on “here’s what we’re going to say this month.” It implies that marketing has an end. It doesn’t. You never finish marketing, even if your campaign is “done”. It perpetuates the fallacy that marketing is the same as advertising. (Keep reading.) It creates bigger than necessary batch sizes.

around half of respondents said their marketing data and technology are either managed separately (10%) or that only some tools are integrated (41%). Just 4% reported having a completely integrated stack.

respondents averaged 36 different data-gathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts, with some using hundreds.

45% of B2C marketers have a dedicated content marketing group in their organization. 69% are creating more content now than they did one year ago. The use of blogs dropped from 72% last year to 67% this year; the biggest increase in tactic usage has been for branded content tools (from 37% to 47%). B2C marketers are using, on average, 7 social media platforms this year, compared with 6 last year. 71% of B2C marketers use print or other offline promotion, making it the paid method they use most frequently to promote/distribute content; yet only 46% of them say it’s effective. The method they find most effective is search engine marketing (57%).

Influencer advertising is a subset of influencer marketing, but the subset does not speak for the whole category.

The differences between Influencer marketing and influencer advertising have their roots in the differences between transactional marketing and relationship marketing

Influencer advertising is where BANJO influencers can be found. BANJO influencers are those people with a large social media following - whether bought, built, active or dormant - who Bang Another iNfluencer Job Out without any care for or affinity with the sponsoring brand or their audience. 

The increasingly technical nature of marketing means the marketing department has a closer relationship with IT than either is comfortable with.

We have found that aligning our organization along DevOps principles helps eliminate that friction. DevOps is a cultural and professional movement that is focused on building and operating high velocity organizations. The movement started in the software industry, but it’s more concerned with people and structure than with technology.

One key aspect of DevOps is the relationship between accountability and empowerment. The DevOps philosophy says that those who are most accountable for a specific change should be empowered to make that change themselves.

Most of your content is getting lost in the shuffle. Recycle it! Let the customer’s social activity tell you what they prefer. Engagement in social is good, but not if that’s all you get. Some top brands have made the transition to acting like publishers with dedicated internal and external teams cranking out content.

Top tactics used by savvy publishing brands are: Storytelling – high quality engaging content on an going basis Infographic Creation – relevant lists and how to’s Visual Content Marketing – compelling visuals eBook Creation – great for lead generation eMailer Personalization – targeting with relevance and being the information / education source Content Curation within an Industry – keep people coming to you because you find what’s hot and important to your customers, making it easy for them to keep current Webinars / Pod Casts / Google Hangouts – establishes authority Slide Share Presos – extends your corporate social graph and thought leadership Case Studies – SEO value and high share currency Videos to Motion Infographics – video is growing

Brands have a need for smart content routing and unique displays which enable them to maximize customer engagement and experience at every touch point, increasing site participation, and garnering higher social share just begs to get fracked.

“The days of the big bang campaign are gone. We don’t have time to spend months baking ideas and putting a big bang into market.” Article Highlights: The way we think about and execute marketing is in flux. Agile for Marketing (A4M) empowers organizations to be more responsive to the market.Now is the time to create a new competitive advantage through innovation and responsiveness.

CMOs adopting A4M have an unprecedented ability to tackle corporate and market realities with ease, speed, and intelligence. And our research shows that translates into stronger business performance and higher employee satisfaction.

agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than nonagile organizations.

That’s why 65 percent of brands are already participating in influencer marketing. Smashbox Cosmetics recently launched an incubator for YouTubers to use their studio space and products. Many brands are also teaming up with photographers on Instagram to reach new audiences.

An eMarketer study also that found that advertisers earned an average of $6.85 for every $1 they spent on influencer marketing last year.

what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.