Salesforce State of Marketing report promotes empathy, AI, and more focused KPIs

Salesforce has published its latest global State of Marketing Report, which has explored the rate of transformation within marketing and the data and organisational goals needed to achieve it.

The report, which collected data from almost 7,000 marketing leaders globally, had three overarching findings:

Marketing transformation is taking on new urgencyMore empathetic marketing is being achieved due to greater data and personalisationMarketers are doubling down turning...

By | 22 May 2020 | Automation

Aimee Stone Munsell, CMO, Contentsquare: On leadership, learning, and lateral job moves

Aimee Stone Munsell, chief marketing officer at digital experience software provider Contentsquare, is a firm believer in the adage that a leader is only as good as their team. "A leader's job is to make themselves obsolete," she tells MarketingTech.

Realising the bluntness of that statement, Stone Munsell (left) laughs and clarifies. "What I mean by that is my job is to create at each level of management and leadership, to make the people underneath you successful and the...

By | 18 May 2020 | CMO

Marketing and brand purpose in Covid-19: Getting social media right while social distancing

Call it a 'new normal', an adjusted reality, or whatever you will; for many businesses amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the show has to go on. But with it comes extra nuance; the standard off-the-shelf marketing messages may not cut it right now.

Or could they? Tom Goodwin, of comms agency Publicis Groupe, recently wrote on LinkedIn that 'by now, what [he] really wants in advertising is for [companies] to ignore the current crisis, rather than pretending to care about it.' "I don't...

By | 13 May 2020 | Content Marketing

Instagram and social engagement rises in lockdown – but influencers having less impact

More people are engaging with Instagram, but posts from influencers are on the decline as marketing budgets are slashed, according to the latest report from Socialbakers.

The company's Social Media Trends report, for Q1, specifically highlighted the impact Covid-19 was having on marketing trends. While many organisations were undergoing a natural change in circumstances amid the pandemic - take the travel industry as an example highlighted by this publication earlier this week -...

By | 6 May 2020 | Influencer Marketing

Carolyn Corda, CMO, ADARA: On empathy as a marketer – with Covid-19 hitting travel hard

Carolyn Corda, chief marketing officer (CMO) at data co-op ADARA, notes the importance of empathy in marketing. This is not just in terms of campaigns, but also in becoming a better marketer.

“What’s really worked for me is I understand the business not just from the marketing angle,” Corda tells MarketingTech. “I’ve been deep in the different elements of airlines.”

For Corda, who prior to becoming CMO at ADARA was managing director for digital travel and...

By | 5 May 2020 | CMO

Q&A: Ashling Kearns, VP EMEA marketing, Salesforce: Why AI can help marketers now

Artificial intelligence, as well as more general automation technologies, is impacting marketing in a significant way. The promise of getting more analysis done on marketing data - as well as gleaning greater insights from it - is an irresistible one.

Yet it is not merely a case of flicking a switch and letting the good times roll. Writing for this publication in January, Arun Mani, president of Freshworks Europe, warned of a 'significant disconnect' between what customers expect...

By | 4 May 2020 | Automation

Q&A: Nick Milne, Go Ignite Consulting: On data journeys and changing marketer – and vendor – expectations

The role of customer management at many organisations continues to evolve. Gone are the days when a simple CRM system would do the trick. With increasing data and workloads, alongside increased expectations for ROI, it is about balancing the requirements of multiple stakeholders and departments. 

Alongside this is the increasingly ludicrous martech landscape, which as of last year plotted more than 7000 vendors. Building out the...

By | 1 May 2020 | Customer Experience

Carol McNerney, CMO, Information Builders: Marketing through digital and business transformations

If you begin a career in marketing and have ambitions to go to the very top, you want to become a chief marketing officer (CMO). Or at least, in most companies you do. For others, it is a question of semantics.

IBM, where Carol McNerney, CMO at business intelligence software provider Information Builders, cut her teeth, had traditionally been cut up into silos, with vice presidents (VPs) in charge. Indeed, it was only 2016 that the Armonk giant ‘officially’ hired its...

By | 22 April 2020 | CMO

Anna Griffin, CMO, Smartsheet: Why curiosity, problem solving and knitting makes a great marketer

Anna Griffin, chief marketing officer (CMO) at Smartsheet, has a saying of which she is fond: you can’t have a new tool and push it in an old way of working. “It would be like having Netflix playing on a rotary phone,” she tells MarketingTech.

The launch of the iPhone more than a decade ago is a classic case in point. Industry analysts, for whom no term is too dull, called it the ‘consumerisation of IT.’ In other words, companies realised their employees wanted to work...

By | 17 April 2020 | Best Practice

AI retail software market set to touch $10bn by 2025, says Omdia

Analyst firm Omdia has predicted that the expenditure on AI software for retail uses across the world will grow to $9.8 billion (£7.96bn) in 2025, compared to $1.3bn in 2019.

The report, titled Artificial Intelligence for Retail Applications, also says that retailers will have invested $37.3bn on AI-driven solutions from 2019 through 2025 globally.

Plenty of use cases are driving the artificial intelligence market within retail, such as reducing cost and improving the...

By | 7 April 2020 | Automation