The Marketing Cloud: Broken Promises or a Work in Progress?

The past several years have been characterized by a constant shift of marketing budgets from the offline world to the online world, which in turn has created opportunities for giant tech players to tackle the needs of the markets by creating the marketing cloud.

Further appetite to build cloud-based marketing offerings are supported by a Gartner 2012 report, which shows that by 2017, chief marketing officers (CMOs) will buy more tech marketing products than chief technology officers (CTOs). The introduction of cloud computing is also changing the way CMOs and chief information officers (CIOs) will interact.

The promise we heard in the early days was that the technology stack would answer all the needs of the digital marketer with one seamless integration. Sounds great in theory, right? Onto this bandwagon jumped Salesforce, IBM, Adobe, and Oracle, starting a shopping spree of companies who will all begin to build their stack. But the question now is whether this promise has even started to be fulfilled.

The marketing cloud typically includes the following components:

1. Multi-channel automation – which automates the process of marketing and delivers content to different channels like email, social, mobile, and Web.

2. Content tools – where the content creation is being centralized for distribution, usually with a CMS.

3. Social media tools – where the marketing manager can manage the communities (listen and communicate), advertise, etc.

4. Analytics – where campaign results are being analyzed, and customers’ behavioral information is being presented. Mid-market companies can’t afford the time and resources to collect and connect all the pieces together, hence the Holy Grail aspect of the offering is understandably appealing. But a deeper observation into the technology stack and how it actually connects and integrates together reveals quite a different picture. Once you actually analyze the integrations of all the technologies you will find that none of the players managed to build the Holy Grail solution that would cover all the needs of the CMO, and the offerings are actually built from different tech pieces that sometimes do not even “talk” properly with one another.

Further (see the chart above) technologies are ever evolving with new channels emerging almost every year. This constant change leaves the space open to disruptors who are specializing in specific technology areas where they can be the “best in class,” while the larger companies either can’t, or decide not to, address the new needs.

An example of this is that these companies have chosen to bet on the area they believe will make most value to marketers: Adobe on content and data, Salesforce on social CRM, Oracle on multi-channel, and IBM were always geared toward commerce. Whether they are right to bet this way, or if the disruptors will end up taking the market in a completely new direction, is still not clear.

My point is if the term “marketing cloud” remains no more than a buzzword, and there is no strong strategy and execution in connecting all these technologies together, then the promise has not been fulfilled.

I think it is a work in progress and there is not enough evidence to support the view that clients can yet benefit from the entire tech stack.

Are digital marketers better off with a native platform that was designed and created to deliver a truly integrated solution, and to open themselves up to partners in order to complete their offerings? It is a very good debate and I think that the guys from The Hub did a really good job in covering this topic.

What I would like to leave you with is a table that highlights some of the areas you should be considering. I am sure there are additional elements, but this should provide you with an overview on where you should be concentrating your discussions.

Watch this space, it is moving very fast. Until next time, stay tuned.