You write a lot about the importance of strategy. A report came out recently that suggested strategy, not integration, is actually the most challenging part of martech. That’s interesting because strategy is the one thing that you can’t really “solve” with technology. One of the arguments I hear in favor of giving more control to the algorithms is that marketing has become so complex that a human has a very hard time managing all these different levers. Yet at the same time, consumer data is so important for different marketing functions. For most marketers, content marketing is a necessary part of what they’re doing. Do you think content marketing software will be swallowed up by big players, like Adobe, or will continue to grow as maybe its own niche sector within the martech landscape? It’s a huge resource for a lot of people, yet at the same time, there’s a lot of talk about the death of blogging. I feel like there are these legacy models in the industry where we think of publishers that publish largely news stories, or maybe they do (relatively light) features. I think that’s a tremendous opportunity for people who are in marketing and marketing technology to think beyond the campaign and to think much more holistically about what the future digital business relationship with our audience looks like.
As much as marketing has changed in the past 10 years, it’s no exaggeration to say it may change even more in the next five. The marketing technology industry has exploded, which has disrupted traditional notions about the role of the marketer at an exponential rate. At this point, human marketers are at risk of being replaced altogether.
Data, optimization, and automation have now become central parts of marketing strategies. In many cases, software gets implemented across a variety of functions to help handle the increasing complexity of the digital world.
Put simply: It’s a complicated time to be a marketer. Luckily, there are people like Scott Brinker to help navigate it.
Brinker—the founding editor of Chief Martec, program chair of the MarTech Conference, and co-founder of his own martech company, ion interactive—has been a leading voice in the space since 2008. I spoke with him about martech’s automated future, where content fits into the marketing stack, and what marketers get wrong about martech.
You write a lot about the importance of strategy. A report came out recently that suggested strategy, not integration, is actually the most challenging part of martech. That’s interesting because strategy is the one thing that you can’t really “solve” with technology. So how can marketers up their strategy game?
Strategy is one of these words that means different things to different people. A very high-level business often wants clarity around position in the marketplace, its value proposition, how it compares its positioning to competitors, and so on.
If I’m looking from a content marketing perspective, you have to think strategically about, “Okay, which keywords do I want to dominate in search engine results? What sort of influencers am I looking to connect with in social media circles?” It’s work to really go through that process of identifying “where do we think the best investments are for what we want to achieve?”
Then, once you have that clarity at different levels within the organization, you start looking at technology as a way of solving: “Okay, how do we achieve that? If we know search engine optimization is incredibly important for us, what are some of the tools that we can use to support better SEO efforts?”
What are your thoughts on attribution and tagging? There seems to be a lot of pushback against it lately—Chief Martec even had a post about that. Do you think that pushback is warranted?
The guy who wrote that guest post on Chief Martec was making the case that, scientifically, it’s impossible to ever have perfect attribution. There are too many variables that we don’t have the data on. We can’t quantify what went into everyone’s decision-making process.
His point was that it’s very important to have realistic expectations. If we’re looking for this magic machine that we press a button and it tells us, “Do X, Y, and Z, and you’ll be guaranteed that people are going to buy”… We’re just not going to get there. It’s very damaging for the profession as a whole because we’re going to miss the bar.
“Few things in marketing are about achieving perfection.
They’re largely about doing a better job than your
competitors.”
This is not a knock against data-driven marketing. One of the places where he indicated there’s tremendous success is using partial attribution as a way to do things like media mix modeling, designing how much budget is best spent in different channels, and going after different segments and different messaging ideas that have been tried.
It’s not perfect, but few things in marketing are about achieving perfection. They’re largely about doing a better job than your competitors.
It seems to me like a lot of people buy software and then expect it to solve all their problems.
[Laughs] It would be nice if it worked that way. Unfortunately, it does not.
Another thing you write about a lot is consolidation and expansion within the martech industry. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think it’s still expanding, or is it contracting?
I think it’s a combination of both, which is what makes it such a tricky space. You certainly do see some consolidation. There continues to be a fairly healthy [mergers and acquisitions] market in the martech sector.
We’ve got two challenges in the other direction. One is there continues to be new startups that enter the space who think they can do better. Second, the boundaries of marketing seem to be expanding, particularly as we talk about things like digital business transformation. Marketing isn’t just about running campaigns independent of the rest of the company. Increasingly, marketing gets built into these new kinds of products and services that companies are offering.
Same thing with additional channels. We’re starting to play around with things like Amazon Alexa, or IoT, or augmented reality. All these new things that keep appearing on the horizon, they all become new opportunities for new kinds of software that marketers can leverage. That keeps the field large and vibrant.
Another thing emerging recently is artificial intelligence. In martech, there’s Einstein (Salesforce), Watson (IBM), Sensei (Adobe), and more. Do you think AI will ultimately be supplementary, just giving recommendations, or do you think it will actually take over a lot of the marketing processes?
Some of that will be our choice.
One of the arguments I hear in favor of giving more control to the algorithms is that marketing has become so complex that a human has a very hard time managing all these different levers. At that point, maybe the only way you can manage the complexity is to turn more of it over to a computer.
“The sense of control having been lost is very
uncomfortable….
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