Gartner media analyst Marty Kihn is one who believes the industry is moving towards a time when brand marketing teams will execute everything — email, advertising, content, in-store signage, broadcast media planning — from a single, deeply-integrated data and technology stack. At the recent Adobe Summit, Kihn outlined his remarkably clear vision of what that would look like.
Kihn said that this all-in-one technology will combine all the data that a marketer collects, from retail stores, offline and digital campaigns, loyalty programs, third party partnerships and everything in between. Marketers will be able to activate that data for targeting and personalization across every digital and analog channel available, be it search, display, broadcast, outdoor, email, mobile apps, social media, push notifications, e-commerce, in-store marketing or user experience design.
There are a number of terms floating around to describe this capability: the cloud, platform or suite. Kihn thinks the best term is “marketing hub.”
“The way we define ‘hub,’ it doesn’t necessarily have to be [from] a single vendor,” he told an audience of marketers and engineers at Adobe Summit. “A hub is more of a state of mind. It’s something marketers need to get done, and it needs to have certain capabilities. It could be five different vendors all working together. But the point is, [it] is the whole, and [it] is greater than the sum of the parts.”
Despite the myriad platforms and solutions available to marketers, it’s still “early days” for this vision, Kihn said.
“Nobody has a perfectly functioning hub, although there are some that claim they do,” he said. Gartner has analyzed more than 2,000 companies in and around the digital marketing tech space, and of those, few vendors can deliver on the hub’s promise — though Adobe, Oracle and Salesforce are making strides.
So what does it take to make your tech stack into a hub? Kihn said there are four major components.
1. Master Audience Profiles: All your data in one place
Most CMOs say they have so much data they don’t know what to do with it.
Data onboarding tools and data management platforms (DMPs) are helping to solve that problem by ingesting huge amounts of information, but enterprise marketers still have to juggle a handful of databases that are siloed off from each other by channel.
With a “master audience profile,” each customer gets a single identifier, which ties together all the information the company has about them, and makes it available to every channel of the marketing plan.
Master audience profiles don’t necessarily require all that data to be in one place; sometimes it needs to be separated, like when personally identifiable information is involved. Kihn said he expects the solution will take the form of a federated database, a meta-layer that ties together each of the different platforms where data is stored and managed.
2. Collaborative Workflow: Everyone has access
Kihn said the most overlooked criteria for a marketing hub is that it has to understand how the team that’s using it is going to work together. More than one marketer, and likely more than one agency, is going to be involved in coordinating a marketing plan of the scope he describes. Everyone involved needs to be able to access the capabilities to execute their part of the campaign — and they need to be able to share data, assets, reports and lots more.
“Workflow is neglected and underrated,” he said. “Basically it’s a way to organize your team, your assets, whatever you’re creating, and make it available across your channels.”
3. Intelligent Orchestration: The algorithms to make it go
Coordination of so many different channels, data sources and team members takes more than dumb assembly-line automation. A hub needs to be intelligent enough to understand how results in one channel affect another, and what to do about it. Kihn calls this component the “conductor” of the marketer’s orchestra.
That same algorithm engine needs to be able to make decisions about which individuals see which messages when, and in what order. It needs to understand how customers behave and how to reach them. Kihn said this dual role also makes it the “end-point” of the hub, the part that comes into contact with the consumer.
4. Unified Measurement and Optimization: Turn analytics into better performance
It’s not enough to measure and report on a campaign’s performance. With today’s technology, marketers can be constantly monitoring their campaigns and making course-corrections in real-time. Intelligent marketing platforms can go a step further, and use that information to optimize the delivery and content strategy while still in-market.
Most marketers are still focusing on descriptive and diagnostic analytics, Kihn said — reviewing past strategies, drilling down on then, and learning from them. But a hub needs to be predictive and prescriptive. It needs to not only generate recommendations, but apply them, on an ongoing basis.
“I think it’s safe to say 1 in 5 marketers is doing some kind of predictive analytics. It’s at a nascent stage.” But the days of digital analysis and manual response are dwindling, he said. A hub will take that next step.
