Q&A: CMO Council’s Liz Miller on Marketing Tech Trends

With the marketing technology landscape constantly evolving, it’s a challenge for marketing pros to keep on top of the latest solutions and what they need to improve their programs and campaigns.

We sat down with the CMO Council’s vice president of marketing Liz Miller to sort through the biggest current trends in marketing tech, why it pays for marketers and IT departments to be on the same page and why it’s critical to do all of your homework before purchasing technology solutions for your team.

Chief Marketer: What are some of the marketing technology trends that you think will take center stage in 2014?

Liz Miller: Ad tech is always going to be cool and sexy because it’s that next step forward for advertising, and because it’s finally giving us a measurability and ROI that we haven’t been getting through agencies or other campaigns. We’re seeing omni-channel measurement technology tying in all channels—television, web and social—and connecting them to optimize the process. We’re seeing conversations around ad tech as it ties to the marketing mix. Marketers are looking for tools to help them optimize that media mix modeling, so that they can do it independent of an agency. The division between the agency and the marketer is getting more pronounced, and it’s requiring agencies to change the way they monitor and measure, as well. You’re starting to see agencies develop their own technologies to help with media mix modeling, and giving more transparency over to their marketing clients.

The number one thing that marketers are going to be looking for from a marketing and technology standpoint this year is customer data analytics. Marketers want to know what lever to pull to make sure that their most important customers reengage and are loyal, and how to identify their most valuable customers and prospects. The idea of precision marketing has been around for a long time with the concept of ‘right message right channel, right time to the right customer.’ Now that we have the tools to enable the delivery of that message and the re-optimization of that relationship, now we need to figure out if we have the right customer, segment, understanding what they’re going to do and how.

So rather than just being able to measure the back end of a campaign, they want to be able to measure predictively what’s going to happen, and then be able to track that. It’s a more forward look into customer data analytics. We’re seeing a lot of buzz around that space and how it can link into other data systems like CRM programs.

CM: With automated marketing technology solutions moving to the forefront, how are marketing and IT teams working together to make sure everything runs smoothly behind the scenes?

LM: It’s kind of a double-edged sword. There’s a struggle between marketing and IT, because marketers want solutions now and IT departments want to save money to get around procurement, and then beta-test new technologies for six months to make sure they work. The trouble is when we go around IT and buy a solution, then pull all this data and these great spreadsheets out of it, and it doesn’t integrate with the legacy CRM setup because the legacy system doesn’t have the fields that you’ve decided to export.

There’s a really funny cycle that marketing is going through right now, where we are so excited about the possibilities of all the things that we can measure, aggregate and move from place to place. What we’re not doing is paying attention to what we’re buying and how the technology will fit in. Are we measuring for measurement’s sake, or are we actually measuring to a KPI and a business case? These fundamental business questions are bubbling up to the surface—certainly for senior marketers—but now we’re figuring out how to reign in all of this technology excitement so that we can get back to what we’re supposed to be doing.

CM: How important is it to make sure that these different tech tools can communicate seamlessly with existing databases and CRMs?

LM: We tend to look at marketing technology as individual point solutions that can pull in data, aggregate, analyze, output—all of these things. When you look at them all together, they need to work together and make sense. In this race to automate everything, we’ve actually created this odd paradigm where we have forgotten about something that we were talking about in 2005—marketing performance measurement dashboards. That one dashboard that pulls up all of the critical things we need to know about reaching our end goals as a business. Instead we have to look through 100 dashboards that tell us 1,000 things about the individual campaigns we’re running, but we may have lost sight of where that end post is. It’s a really interesting time for marketing, and the most important role for the CMO right now is to focus on what we have to do, because these new tech solutions can do almost anything.