Part 4 of a Series on the Top 10 Trends You Need to Know as a Marketing Professional
Trend #7 – CMO Dashboards Get Real
2014 is the year that many marketing leaders decide that a CMO Dashboard is not a nice to have but essential. Collaboration with IT to pull together a dashboard for the CMO will fail, largely because marketing departments today tend to run on SaaS-based software. The future of CMO dashboards belong not to standalone vendors but to vendors who have architected their platforms as open systems, with connectivity hooks into other systems. One CMO we talked to said it this way: “my goal is to never be forced to login to Google Analytics again. Instead, I want one view of the truth that incorporates information from Google Analytics with information gathered across campaigns and across touch points. The metrics I want to surface are all about ROI, cLTV [customer lifetime value], and Net Promoter Score.”
Predictions
- CMOs start to get serious about developing dashboards that tie together the tactical (what am I doing in lead generation) with the strategic (how to do the campaign investments we make translate into sales opportunities and revenue).
Trend #8 – Personalization Gets Dicey
2013 was suppose to be the year that personalized web experiences started to dominate the landscape. Guess what. That didn’t happen. The why’s are complicated but come down to three words: Google, mobile, and the EU. Google is luke warm about personalization at best …which it tends to confuse with cloaking which is a known black-hat strategy.
Personalization is hard on mobile, where cookies are not possible. And cookies –the basis of most personalization – are increasingly a no-no in the European Union due to tighter privacy restrictions. So many companies are experimenting with alternatives to cookies.
Predictions
- Expect 2014 to be the year that vendors shift the conversation from “how do I take advantage of personalization” to “how do I leverage personas” as described in prediction #9 (to follow).
