I recently taught some martech workshops (in person!) and received numerous fascinating questions from stack leaders. Clearly, 2023 represents another year of great change as omnichannel aspirations take on higher priority and leaders continue to revisit their platform choices amid growing hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Here’s my take on three clusters of questions and topics that arose:

• CDP programs as stalking horses for customer data modernization.
• Rethinking your engagement tier.
• Adtech-martech integration.

Each topic has its own value and some cases, urgency. But together, the answers reflect a broader reset occurring across enterprise martech stacks. Read more.

Enterprises want key services to operate omnichannel, yet outbound marketing platforms are becoming outdated. Here's how it might change.

The growing importance of omnichannel consumer engagement impacts all levels of the enterprise martech stack. Greater composability clarifies useful service boundaries, enabling enterprises to right-size their martech investments in nearly every domain. Outbound marketing has probably evolved the least in these respects.

Understood today as campaign and messaging management tech, outbound marketing represents a holdout against the broader evolutionary trend. Yet, vendors are not immune to structural changes taking place in martech — and this part of your stack may well become the least recognizable by the end of this decade.

Read More.

There's a case for and against using your data warehouse as a customer data platform. Here are three ways to make it work.

The advent of cloud-based data warehouses (DWHs) has brought simpler deployment, greater scale and better performance to a growing set of data-driven use cases. DWHs have become more prevalent in enterprise tech stacks, including martech stacks.

Inevitably, this begs the question: should you employ your existing DWH as a customer data platform (CDP)? After all, when you re-use an existing component in your stack, you can save resources and avoid new risks.

But the story isn’t so simple, and multiple potential design patterns await. Ultimately, there’s a case for and against using your DWH as a CDP. Let’s dig deeper. Read More.

One of those who have come the furthest in their work to actually create clear, practically applicable tips and support regarding work with martech is American Tony Byrne and the company Real Story Group. The name of his own consulting firm came when, for many years, Tony challenged Gartner and Forrester's more sponsor-supported and commercially produced ways of designating the digitization industry's best actors in various product and service areas in graphs (Quadrants). The underlying model was not end-customer friendly enough, from which he developed his own, straighter and more honest evaluation methods. Even his latest overview of martech is straightforward, realistic and very good. Read More.

With engagement technologies in place, marketers are now turning to the foundational layer for replacements.

“Enterprises have been in kind of a replacement mood,” said Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group,  at The MarTech Conference.

The changes in customer behavior during the pandemic forced organizations to improve and update their engagement technology. That’s what our latest MarTech Replacement Survey showed.

Now, marketers are looking below the engagement layer in their stack, evaluating and replacing the foundational technology that powers the other layers.

The foundational layer 
“More and more enterprises are investing in what we call ‘enterprise foundation’ services,” said Byrne. “These are systems that are not channel-specific. They live below your engagement platforms, and they help deliver a more omnichannel experience.”

Read More.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are rapidly becoming a foundational technology piece in omnichannel martech stacks. They can also serve as a key component in broader digital transformation and customer experience (CX) initiatives.

Unfortunately for you the technology buyer, scores of products call themselves a “CDP,” and perhaps as many platforms in other categories have CDP-like capabilities. Naturally, almost every vendor claims to be a leader, challenger, largest, first, leading, global or some combination of these.

With this much noise in the marketplace, several issues arise, including:

• Many prospective customers have the impression that most of these products are similar and there is not much to differentiate between them.
• When evaluating CDPs for your requirements, it becomes difficult to create an initial shortlist of tools relevant for your requirements. Read More.

A modern enterprise, particularly a large one, needs headless and coupled publishing capabilities.
Tony Byrne

Old-timers (like me!) in web content & experience management (WCM) will remember an early entrant called RedDot. Founded in Germany during the mid-1990’s, the platform originally had the somewhat prosaic label of “InfoOffice CMS.” Yet the plucky upstart boasted an important innovation: an in-context editorial interface showing the published page with the editable blocks marked off by a red dot 🔴that you would click to get a pop-up editorial window. Read More.

Let’s say you work in martech for a large, well-known enterprise. It’s a global firm, a recognized brand. Ideally, you’d want to follow a structured, test-based approach for how you bring new technology into the enterprise, and you’d expect participating vendors to follow your lead in the vetting process — out of respect, if nothing else.

Well, reality can prove itself quite different. In Real Story Group’s role as a buyer’s advocate for martech stack leaders, we’ve noticed a recurring trend where larger software companies often disrupt well-reasoned martech selection strategies through aggressive and frequently questionable tactics.

Of course, none of this is new, and perhaps vendor bullying today is more subtle than in years past — but it remains just as persistent. Read More.

When I started as an industry analyst 20 years ago covering the web content and experience management (WCM) market, I marveled at the plethora and diversity of vendor start-ups. Well, some elder analysts clapped my shoulders and intoned, “Yeah, but how many will be around in five years? The market will consolidate, so you need to pick winners.” No doubt they were extrapolating from their experience with other industries — notably ERP, but maybe CRM too — where vendor oligopolies did emerge.

Yet, the story of the WCM market, and the marketing tech space more generally, is that consolidation by and large has not happened. If you follow the progression of Scott Brinker’s famous logo chart you’ll note not just the expansion of categories, but also the almost vertigo-inducing number of logos within each particular box. What’s going on? And how should you the enterprise marketing tech leader respond to a world of highly fragmented marketplaces?

I can think of at least six reasons why “industry consolidation” has been less the norm in the martech world. Read more.

This first of three articles on personalization at scale explores the right place for personalization services in your marketing technology stack

Online personalization as a concept has been with us for more than two decades, but recent developments have elevated its importance for martech leaders:

• Greater attention to test and optimization leading to demands for more “always-on” personalization programs;
• Better access to customer data and segments, opening up possibilities for more targeted experiences in any digital setting;
• Emergence of AI and ML-based approaches for automating personalization logic; and
• Heightened customer expectations for relevancy, leavened by experience with major consumer platforms like Netflix.