Collaborate and Innovate in the Land of Plenty: Inside the Marketing Technology Landscape

3 min read

I love Scott Brinker’s opening line in his recent blog introducing the 2015 version of his ever-growing, ever-popular Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: “There’s a lot of marketing technology in the world, my friend.”

He couldn’t have said it better, and looking at the “Supergraphic” (fantastic description, by the way) he’s created, you can clearly see how it has doubled in size in just one year. Marketing technology is a hot space and a huge market—a report by IDC forecasts the worldwide spend on marketing software in 2015 will be $22.6 billion — and by 2018, it will grow by nearly 50% to $32.3 billion. The good news is, all of these vendors are innovating to meet the needs of marketers they didn’t even know they had! Arguably, one of the goals of marketing technology is to enable marketers to use technology to optimize the way they communicate with audiences and customers. Do more technology options make it easier or harder?

Marketing Technology Landscape 2015 Marketing Technology Landscape 2015

Making it all Work Together is Key
Clearly, that depends on the organization, the marketing team, and how well they are able to make all of their marketing technologies work together to work for them. Cloudwords debuted on the Marketing Technology Landscape in 2014 and appears again on Brinker’s newest version as well, and, like many of the vendors represented on this graphic, our open API and developer platform makes integration possible with very little time and resources. Moreover, we provide native integrations with a number of the leading marketing tech platforms—Marketo, Oracle, Adobe to name a few—we’re like Switzerland, we want to work in tandem with the technology marketers use so they can more easily, efficiently and effectively market globally.

Like Brinker, we have a few of our own predictions for how 2015 might look for the world of marketing technology, particularly for global marketing.

Cloudwords Top 5 Predictions for Global Marketing Trends

1. Marketers will push the boundaries on their content: They will create global content plans, extending the reach and impact of their thought leadership, and will increasingly invest in the creation of smart, memorable, easily shareable content that ignites global conversations.

2. More personalized campaigns in every language: Marketing automation and globalization tools continue to evolve to help marketers more efficiently create personalized campaigns. This means they’ll be able to run more of them, in more markets, and reap more results worldwide.

3. More and more marketers will run truly global campaigns: Gone will be the days when sales teams, customers, and prospects have to wait for a campaign to be rolled out in their language in their market. Why artificially reduce demand or sales anywhere in the globe? Marketers are now better able to manage the localization process for a single launch in every relevant market. Treat the whole world as a first-class citizen for your content, and reap the demand gen or revenue rewards accordingly.

4. A more customer-centric approach to marketing: Localization is the ultimate personalization, and will be increasingly leveraged to enhance the impact of marketing dialogues. Personalization is a leading marketing trend, and the first step in personalizing content is making sure the recipient can read it in their native tongue. And as they continue to create more personalized marketing, marketers will adopt a more customer-centric approach to focus on customer's needs and wants specific to their region.

5. Increased ability to scale globally: Thanks to marketing technology innovators like those on Brinker’s Landscape, marketers are able create campaigns once and deploy everywhere across multiple communications channels, saving time and money and delivering consistent messaging worldwide – all to help their companies optimize growth on a global scale. Don’t succumb to the usual triage your competitors do… “I’d love to launch around the globe, but we’ll postpone Germany and France till Q3, China till Q4!” Instead, let the whole world receive your campaigns simultaneously and grab that market and idea-share before your competitors do.

Written by Scott Yancey