Companies that do more personalization create less content, according to this WordPress VIP report. That’s easy to believe, since personalization lets companies repurpose the same content rather than creating new pieces for each customer group. Lots more here about content budgets, strategy, analytics, and planning.
The headline-grabbing conclusion of this INSEAD study is that ecommerce companies with tightly-integrated tech stacks grew more slowly under GDPR than companies with loosely coupled stacks. The academic jargon is nearly impenetrable but the authors seem to argue that tightly integrated stacks are harder to change, and this resulted in worse customer experience when GDPR enforcement began. It’s intriguing if not entirely convincing.
Content creation is a top pain point for many marketers. This Chief Marketer study for OneTrust finds it’s also the top martech investment category, presumably because companies are trying to do it more efficiently. Articles, videos, and reviews are the most effective content types, while influence marketing, images, and podcasts are the least effective.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.