• by Gary Griffiths , February 6, 2015

2015 promises to be one of the most exciting — yet challenging — years for CMOs in recent history. On one hand, there is an embarrassment of riches in the depth and breadth of technologies available to marketers. But on the other, literally hundreds of tools and applications can be overwhelming. How many tools are really required, and in which areas of marketing? How does one application really differ from the other? And then, with multiple technologies available for purchase, how do they work together — if at all — and who is going to do the integration?

This is the year in which “computing everywhere” — the Internet of things — becomes a reality, bringing with it unprecedented opportunity and daunting challenges. Analytics will be on everyone’s minds, and the means to develop increasing insight on marketing performance and prospective buyer behavior will reach new heights. Of course “the cloud” will continue the revolution that turned the way software is sold — and used upside-down.

I’ve taken a stab at highlighting five of my own predications as it relates to macro trends for marketers. 

1) The emergence of the marketing technologist. Of course marketing is digital — virtually everything today is digital. It’s not enough that marketers embrace new approaches to marketing by leveraging new technologies — 2015 will be the year of the marketing technologists — true gear-heads in the marketing organizations that are investigating and choosing new technologies that exploit the capabilities in our digital world. It will not be enough to send a few tweets about your brand — the marketing leaders in 2015 will be inventing new ways to automate and expand and enhance their online presence across all channels. 

2) Goodbye to “search, cut and paste.” And this new breed of marketing technologists’ time is far too valuable to be crawling around the web, battling SEO gimmicks, trying to find relevant third party content to share to their intended audience. The savvy marketers of 2015 will deploy emerging tools and applications that discover content for them, and make it extremely easy to schedule and publish to social media outlets and other end points, like mobile applications. Consider 2015 the beginning of the end of “BYOC” (Bring Your Own Content).

3) SEO begins losing its stranglehold. And as fewer people turn from hunting for content by opting for new methods of automated content discovery, the power of SEO will start to slip. Moreover, all of these new means of reaching prospective customers through social media are creating brand impressions outside of the domain of SEO, lessening its reach and power. 2015 will be viewed as the year in which brands began to “BYOE” (Bring Your Own Engagement).

4)Real time marketing measured in minutes and seconds. (Not days or weeks). While the days of pie charts and graphs showing last quarter’s marketing KPIs will certainly not end, the metrics will be shifting to “likes” and “tweets” and “pins” and “who-knows-what” new social phenomenon. The performance of content in real time will be essential for marketers to hone in on the right mix — content, channel and frequency. Marketers need to find those technologies that not only bring efficacy but equally important “real time insight” thereby maximizing ROI and impact. 

5) Unlocking the latent marketing power in employees. Today, we think of marketing as a department. In 2015, marketing leaders will begin to think of their company’s entire employee base as an extension of their team. That is, through a growing list of companies that offer “employee advocacy” solutions, a company’s workforce can be given the tools to share information that complements original content created by the brand and product teams. A prospective customer is more likely to trust a recommendation that is not directly associated with the company that is trying to sell something.

Moreover, the sheer volume of content that is required to saturate the multiple channels and end points where target audiences consume content outstrips the ability of budget-constrained marketing teams to satisfy these multiple demands. Enlisting a company’s workforce to supplement these efforts is attractive — assuming tools and applications are deployed to insure these employees are provided a stream of third party content that is consistent with the intended messaging.

As marketing-centric technologies accelerate, so also will the shift in power— and budget — from the office of the CMO to the CIO. Which is good news. But power shifts in the enterprise can be fleeting. It is incumbent on the CMO to take advantage of the proliferation of new marketing technology and capitalize on it, demonstrating real results through increased leads and more successful deals at the end of the funnel.