#Chart of the day: The top technology trends that senior marketers believe will be impacting their strategy in 2020

The Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 499 CMOs and other senior marketers about how they saw marketing evolving up to 2020. One of the most interesting questions asked was what technology trends senior marketers saw as most likely to be having a major impact on how they conducted their marketing in 2020. The top trends are mobile marketing, personalisation and the internet of things. It's also interesting to see more niche technologies such as blockchain making this list of the most important technology trends for the next 3 years. Source: Economist Intelligence Unit & Marketo Report Sample Size: 499 senior marketers Recommended Resource: Strategy and Planning Toolkit …

Too Many Tech Options = Random Acts Of Technology

If you blink, a dozen more marketing technology providers show up. Just 5 years ago, about 150 providers could hang their hat in the marketing tech sector. Today, we count more than 3,500 marketing technology providers. With so many choices to choose from, it’s no wonder random acts of technology happen more often than not.

What’s A Random Act Of Technology (RAT)?

A RAT happens when companies throw technology at problems without a strategy. In sales and marketing, it’s one of the top reasons marketing technology ends up flopping. In research conducted in 2016, Ascend2 conducted research into application of marketing technology. They found insufficient strategy as a top barrier to achieving success with marketing technology.

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Chart of the day: In a recent study on customer sentiments on virtual reality, by Ipsos MORI, they find that over 3 in 10 don't care about VR at all, and many think VR is just for gamers

VR devices are currently too expensive according to 66% of respondents and the majority (86%) would like to try VR before buying. The key findings as shown in the chart above include: Over half have an underground of what VR is and just under half are interested in experiencing it 6 in 10 believe VR experiences are made just for gamers Most find the devices are too expensive even though there are cheaper options available The research also found that over 6 in 10 (63%) of 16-24 year olds are positive of the technology, compared to just over 3 in 10 (33%) of those aged 55-75. Over half of…

Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality will transform from interesting gimmick to core marketing channel

Virtual and Augmented reality tech has already started to make waves in the world of marketing, but you ain't seen nothing yet! According to research conducted by Goldman Sachs, the market for VR and AR tech is set to explode in size, reaching a combined $35 billion worth of revenue by 2025. This may sound like a long way off, but it's only 8 years away- which will go quicker than you think! For marketers the really juicy segments in the chart are the retail, video entertainment and live events sections, which combined account for more than eight and a half billion dollars in predicted market size. There are a myriad of ways this kind of technology will prove a boon for marketers in all sorts of different industries - augmented reality dressing rooms for retail, showing prospects around a…

2016. A Bot Odyssey

Bots are the marketing equivalent of drones, but a couple of years behind. A few years ago no one had heard of them and they didn't really work very well (except the sinister military sort), but now everyone and their mum seems to have a drone, and the media is a buzz with ways drones could transform different industries. All the big movers and shakers in the industry are agreed that bots will be the next big thing (we've had content marketing, marketing automation, big data, now bots are the buzzword of choice). MIT technology review told us that the bots are coming back in April, whilst in the same month Facebook opened up its messenger platform for people to build Bots. The little chart of the left shows interest in messenger bots recently according to Google trends. Are bots…

Top sources for comparing marketing software providers

As digital marketing has involved from being a niche activity to one at the core of most marketing plans, so too has the market for software design evolved to help digital marketing get the best results. From publishing tools, CMS, Social listening and content personalisation tools, there are loads of tools within each category, and it can be tricky to know which one will be right for your business. Just in case your not fully aware of the daunting size of the scale of the problem of selecting digital marketing software, this infographic from Scott Brinker does a good job of highlighting the massive variety of marketing technology available today. You won't be able to see without clicking for an enlarged version, but there are more than 3000 tools in the infographic! Hardly simple! So…

What do C-suite level managers think drives their growth?

In our new Chart of the Day feature, we  will share insights to inform your approach to digital marketing. This will include the latest benchmarks of results from digital marketing like conversion or clickthrough rates; consumer and business adoption of digital media and, as in this case, responses from businesses to manage digital transformation In this survey by Forbes Insights, 255 company executives, 65% of which were from the C-suite level were asked about which digital technologies were working best at attracting new customers for their businesses in 2016. Their response shows that social media, Marketing Automation and Digital Advertising all performed well. It is interesting how large the differences are between regions. For example, European execs found digital advertising far less effective than execs in other areas. This is perhaps because ad blocking rates are far high in France and Germany than they…