Earned media budgets may indeed be growing fastest, but the bulk of the spend is on social media, not conventional public relations. Sagefrog’s eleventh annual B2B Marketing Mix Report found social media tied with email as the most implemented marketing tactic (79%), while conventional public relations ranked ninth at 29%. Read this to see how your marketing mix compares with the Jones’.
The line between customer-facing and back-office software is rapidly vanishing. GK Software mostly builds retail Point of Sale systems, but they’ve expanded to other channels and adjacent functions such as merchandising and promotion management. They just announced they’ll be using artificial intelligence to generate personalized product recommendations, dynamic pricing and promotions, smart shopping lists, and individualized newsletters. These can be delivered via POS, mobile POS, and self-service channels. You can bet there’s a customer database lurking somewhere underneath.
Snark aside, I think Forrester is right. Accenture agrees: they found that 44% of consumers are frustrated by lack of personalization but 49% worry about privacy when they subscribe to data-driven services. More than half (58%) would switch to a company that personalizes without compromising trust.
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.