5 Trends Driving The Marketing Cloud Revolution

Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes courtesy of John Bara, the President and CMO of Mintigo, an enterprise predictive marketing platform and proud Oracle Marketing AppCloud partner. John specializes in fast growth marketing with 25 years as an executive in Silicon Valley, including CMO and SVP of Marketing roles at companies such as XenSource, Interwoven, and Genesys Telecommunications Labs. You can follow John on Twitter at @John_Bara.

Big data and marketing clouds require modern marketers to further embrace analytics. For some marketers, this means getting out of their comfort zone.

The stereotype of marketers is that they are in marketing because they are not good in math or science. That myth is not exactly true. Most marketers choose the career because they enjoy the energy of a dynamic environment, and have skills in creative, planning and project management. Increasingly, people come into the new world of modern marketing because they enjoy math, science and analysis.

The explosion of big data across all market segments has led to the need for a more analytical approach to marketing. Understanding the big trends behind the cloud and big data phenomenon and some of the resulting major trends in marketing will empower the CMO of the future.

I believe there are five trends that are driving the marketing cloud revolution:

1. Computing is now a utility. As a cheap utility much like electricity, cloud computing is enabling a whole new breed of uses, applications and appliances. This is perfect for marketing because it enables rapid iteration, experimentation and, ultimately, more success. It also enables pay-as-you-go marketing services for software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis that is friendly to a marketer’s budget.

2. Mobile is everywhere. Mobile computing is cheap, pervasive and increasingly high performance. Now, even menial tasks such as ordering food (Door Dash, Order Ahead) or getting a ride (Uber, Lyft) are being mobilized and showing remarkable growth rates. Expect more of these revolutionary apps just as we saw when the Internet first became ubiquitous. Marketers are building “mobile first” or “mobile only” websites to optimize for the new demand.

3. Big Data is expanding yet accessible. With much of humanity now having cheap, connected mobility combined with new cool apps and a tech savvy millennial demographic, big data is exploding. Big data means a big opportunity for companies who are gathering new outputs from new users and new uses. Tools are needed to analyze the flood of data pouring into the enterprise. Savvy CMOs recognize this and are investing in data analysis and marketing cloud technologies. Some are even hiring data scientists within the marketing group.

4. Enterprise marketing technologies are moving to the cloud. According to Scott Brinker from ChiefMartec.com, there are now close to 2000 marketing technology vendors. With the big data explosion and Amazon Web Services enabling cheap, easy-to-spin-up machines as a utility, smart technology vendors have shifted their business models to the cloud and built new enterprise application clouds.

5. Predictive marketing helps tie it all together. Marketers need to embrace the math and science behind what powers the new marketing clouds, and not ignore lead generation or treat marketing automation as a “black box”. By leveraging the combination of both public and private data, marketers can create models to automatically identify trends such as lead scoring, fit, and buyer intent before the sale occurs. Intelligence and predictive analytics stand as keys to the new enterprise marketing clouds to empower the CMO of the future to embrace their newfound love of math and science.

To learn more about “Data, Predictive Analytics and Marketing Clouds: The Platform For The Modern Marketer”, join John Bara (Mintigo), Jay Famico (SiriusDecisions) and John Stetic (Oracle Marketing Cloud) in an upcoming live webinar on Wednesday, February 25, 2015. Register here to save your seat!