Software Marketing Advisor Blog

Here’s what I believe will be the top trends affecting B2B marketers in the upcoming years:

1. Consolidation of Disparate Marketing Solutions

   ---

   If you haven’t noticed, big software vendors like IBM, Adobe, Oracle and Saleforce.com are buying smaller, point-solution marketing vendors with the goal of a consolidate marketing solution. This is a big win for marketers as buying integrated systems for marketing automation, lead management, content management, social, marketing resource management, etc. makes deploying these capabilities much easier… perhaps at the expense of increased costs and vendor lock-in.

2. Responsive Design for Email and Website

   ---

   Mobile is big and only getting bigger. To manage the complexity of devices and screen sizes, B2B marketers will have to contend with this complexity. The key solution is responsive design, allowing emails and web pages to display appropriately based on screen size and device.

3. Big Data Moves to the Cloud

   ---

   Big data is moving to the…

Is Technology Breeding Boring Marketing?

We live in a time where there is more data about customers than ever before. Marketers are flooded with data, more than any single human could ever hope to sort on their own. In response to this valuable information, scientists have developed new techniques for finding trends within customer data so that marketers can reach and engage customers more effectively and close more deals.

But is that all consumers are to marketers now? Just a collection of data points? Has marketing been reduced to a boring science? Absolutely not. There will always be a place for creativity within marketing.

The Wall Street Journal published an article recently that raised the question “Does Intuition Matter in a Big Data World?” The conclusion is yes. “Even as quantitative analytic techniques become ever more powerful, they will never supplant the need for human intuition and creativity,” writes WSJ’s…