Editor’s note: In lessons learned from attending the MarTech conference for marketing executives, Technology Business Research Analysts shares lessons learned, including insight from best-selling author Seth Godin.

HAMPTON, N.H. – As team and technology integrations become integral to marketing success, distributed leadership and new personas emerge

For brands to compete for consumer attention in the real and digital worlds, historically siloed processes across marketing, IT and management must become integrated, from both a technology and cross-team communication standpoint.

During the recent MarTech Conference 2017 opening day keynote, Program Chairman Scott Brinker summarized this need, “An enlightened model has to be owned by everyone — a living network, swift to evolve in a disruptive environment.”

Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR) believes this means today’s businesses will benefit from embracing openness, starting with collaboration among executives and their teams, and extending to partners and clients. This shift toward complete integration will present opportunities and challenges for chief marketing officers (CMOs) and their C-Suite peers.

Importance of shared understanding

For example, for CMOs to fully demonstrate the value of marketing to CFOs, they need to measure the impact of each dollar spent. This shared understanding will enable forward-thinking enterprises to shift marketing from a cost center to a profit center, paving the way for ongoing investment.

TBR’s 1H17 Digital Marketing Technology Customer Research shows that 41% of market “outperformers” view marketing as a profit center, compared to 27% of market “matchers.” While marketing technology (martech) provides enterprises the ability to improve customer experience (CX), plus greater media and operational efficiencies, the amount of data and number of components required for omnichannel orchestration stretches the traditional CMO persona to the limit.

As marketing increasingly relies on IT leadership for purchasing and activating tools, specifically the chief technology officer (CTO) and chief information officer (CIO), shared martech budgetary responsibility necessitates a less direct sales path for vendors.

In TBR’s 1H17 Digital Marketing Technology Customer Research, the CMO is responsible for purchasing 42% of the time, highlighting the importance of C-Suite peers and value for vendors of a multipronged sales approach. In this vein, expanded marketing function duties create the need for a new persona to bridge the needs of marketing and IT.

This is where the chief marketing technologist and chief marketing technology officer (CMTO) add value — mapping business and technology needs of the enterprise.

As martech adoption accelerates, a fragmented vendor landscape includes enterprise heavyweights, specialists and data services players

The pace of innovation in martech could be categorized as “warp speed,” creating opportunities for new vendors to enter the market, with a relatively low bar for entry.

Today’s fragmented vendor landscape highlights the value of application programming interfaces (APIs), micro services and partner ecosystems. Despite startups having fewer resources than enterprise tech giants, this scenario sets the stage for startups to compete and scale business.

Best-selling author and entrepreneur Seth Godin [who will be speaking at the Internet Summit in Raleigh in November] stated during the Day 2 keynote that growth-minded businesses should forgo mass market approaches and instead “target the smallest possible market, serve them, gain trust, then they do the work for you.” Meanwhile, obtaining a complete view of the customer journey is critical to marketing attribution and media optimization, fueling marketer investment in advanced attribution tools.

  • VIDEO: Watch Travis Wright’s keynote at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwWmWuj38qQ
  • MarTech author Travis Wright talked about emerging technologies, tools, and trends to keep an eye on, as well as approximately 20 different MarTech tools that do very interesting things.

This niche segment has been an area of M&A activity among key martech vendors, as well as adjacent players looking to capitalize on Data as a Service (DaaS) opportunities.

For example, in 4Q16 SAP Hybris acquired Abakus, while in 3Q17 Visual IQ was acquired by media measurement specialist Nielsen (NYSE: NLSN) in 3Q17. TBR anticipates enterprise vendors will continue to acquire components to fill portfolio gaps, owning as much of the stack as possible. Enterprises are in the early days of assembling martech stacks, typically comprising dozens of vendors due to the diverse brand needs across a variety of devices, media channels and digital platforms.

Approximately one-third of enterprises covered in TBR’s 1H17 Digital Marketing Technology Customer Research have fully scaled vendor platforms. This creates opportunities for enterprise and startup vendors, as well as digital marketing services firms supporting enterprise clients via systems integration.

Each entity can drive revenue opportunities by understanding technology needs of the enterprise, and add further value by taking measures to ensure the full horsepower of vendor platforms is leveraged. To maximize engagement, marketing departments are leveraging a variety of martech tools from enterprise software or “mega vendors,” as well as specialists. This creates opportunities across key segments, such as customer experience clouds (e.g., Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], Oracle [NYSE: ORCL], and Adobe [Nasdaq: ADBE]), marketing automation (e.g., HubSpot, Marketo), and natively integrated marketing-commerce platforms (e.g., SAP [NYSE: SAP]).

Event overview

Content for the three-day event covering the intersection of marketing, technology and management was curated by Scott Brinker, currently vice president of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot.

Presentations and panel discussions were delivered by a range of practitioners and companies, including:

• Travis Wright, chief marketing technologist, CCP

• David Edelman, CMO, Aetna

• Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

• Neenu Sharma, VP of Product and Marketing Operations, General Electric Co.

• Sam Melnick, VP of Marketing, Allocadia

(C) TBR