"PWAs were introduced in 2015. Because they use less data than a regular mobile app, they first took off in emerging markets that suffer from poor internet connectivity.

Now they’re taking off around the world. Hundreds of global marketers use them to create more seamless mobile user experiences.

It’s not hard to see why leading brands would embrace PWAs. They realize the need to provide the best mobile experience for users―regardless of platform."

Source: www.thinkwithgoogle.com

The best page for more information: https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/

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Today’s digests of curated articles summarized for your quick review: 

• Is marketing technology entering a post-platform era? - Chief Marketing Technologist
• How to Make Your CRM and Your Marketing Automation Get Along - DestinationCRM
• Maximizing 2017’s Digital Marketing Success Using Project Management Tools - HuffPost
• Managing Digital Marketing in 2017 Report - TFM Insights
• Marketing Operations Value Gap – Gary Katz
• How Email Is Accessed in 2017: Top Devices, Platforms, and Clients - MarketingProfs
• The Major Flaw in Today’s Marketing Automation Solutions | G2 Crowd
• [FREE] Litmus State of Email Deliverability Report - Litmus
• Is Blockchain the New Frontier? | G2 Crowd
• When and How Blockchain Will Affect Marketing - DMNews
• How agencies are paving the way forward with marketing automation - Smart Insights

• See ALL Top Curated Marketing Technology Articles here.
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Source: www.scoop.it

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iPaaS (integration-platform-as-a-service) and similar kinds of integration services were built from the ground up to be hubs. You plug all your marketing applications (particularly SaaS products) into the iPaaS service — most of which have hundreds of application connectors ready for you to pick from a simple menu — and then it handles piping data between them via their APIs.

Most iPaaS solutions initially focused on making it easy to integrate all your different marketing cloud services. They were the Data Plumbing layer in the above diagram. Many then added Data Parsing/Routing Logic that gave their users — “citizen integrators” — the flexibility to create more intelligent, multi-step recipes for reacting to events from any one connected product and triggering actions in response through other connected products.

The reason I call iPaaS solutions “virtual platforms” is because as long as they focus only on the Data Integration layer, they don’t serve as a System of Record for the data that passes through them, and they don’t provide Marketing Execution or Marketing Intelligence.

Indeed, this is exactly what customer data platforms (CDPs) have done. Many of them have an iPaaS-like background or capabilities, but they also serve as a System of Record, storing and even normalizing the data that passes through its engine. Several have now started to implement their own built-in Marketing Execution and Marketing Intelligence capabilities too — while still making it very easy for marketers to plug in alternate execution and intelligence services.

Source: chiefmartec.com

The definitive review! This is the heart of marketing technology.

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Once your process is laid out and both teams are in agreement, it’s time to put the technology in place that will enable your strategy. As noted in the example above, it is essential for marketing automation platforms to be natively integrated with the sales CRM.

Without this integration, it is difficult to create a consistent experience for your prospects and customers. And on top of that, too much time and too many resources will be drained trying to coordinate activities to ensure leads don’t fall through the cracks.

Companies can drive 5 to 36 percent of growth simply through alignment, according to SiriusDecisions, so integrating your platforms from day one without using third-party tools makes sense. From the first day of your MAP and CRM integration you can:

• automatically push leads to CRM and assign to sales at the right time;
• sync all activities between the two systems so sales can track each lead’s engagement;
• help prioritize outreach to create efficiency in the sales cycle;
  provide full visibility into each lead’s digital footprint so sales can customize conversations around interests;
• give sales influence over the buyer’s journey from inside the CRM—sales can add leads back to marketing campaigns from inside the CRM if they need further nurturing; and
• capture marketing’s impact on closed opportunities with built-in reporting. 

Source: www.destinationcrm.com

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In a nutshell, project management tools provide an easy, all-in-one solution for ensuring that your team stays on task until each project is completed. A prime example is Project Nucleus, which is an SEO project management platform. This tool is the first of its kind to offer truly robust pre-loaded SEO templates, along with video training for your employees.

Specialized project management tools are available for almost any industry and task you can imagine. SEO project management is one of the most critical aspects of digital marketing, which makes this particular option a must-have for many businesses.

The previously mentioned Project Nucleus joins a very small list of project management platforms that have been customized specifically for digital marketers. Other examples include Brightpod and ViduPM, but these tools need some catching up to do.

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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"This report, written in partnership with Smart Insights explores approaches businesses use to plan and manage their investments in digital marketing.

• Digital transformation is still popular as 63% of companies surveyed are either planning on embarking a transformation programme or are currently working on it.
• However, nearly 50% of the businesses do not have a defined digital plan or marketing strategy, which makes it more difficult to achieve positive impact that aligns with marketing and business priorities in the long term.
• Integration appears to be a challenge again this year as the majority of the businesses are either trying actively to integrate digital and traditional marketing, or having limited or no integrations.
• SEO was identified as the best channel for delivering greatest ROI, followed by Email marketing and content marketing.
• The most popular approaches for testing different variations are customer personas, customer journey mapping and AB testing, with websites and emails being the most effective channels to carry out the tests."

Source: insights.technologyformarketing.co.uk

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As mentioned previously, we are severely lacking in professional education, accreditation and skills development. Thus, the sources for professional development are very limited. What do we have? MarTech, Sirius Decisions Summit, a few analyst and vendor events. None truly focused on the holistic practice of MO.

So how are pros getting trained on MO? Well, just like a dozen years ago, MarTech companies are providing most of it. They need to be masters of MO to drink their “own champagne” so this makes sense. However, those technologists who have been around awhile are the first to admit that their ability to train customers beyond the capabilities and requirements of their tech is limited — and compounded by both escalating technology feature complexity and growing marketing function scope. Not surprisingly, this ever-growing gap is jeopardizing their customer success delivery.

Source: www.business2community.com

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Most emails in 2017 are opened via mobile devices than webmail clients or desktop software, most webmail email opens are via Gmail, and half of desktop opens are via Apple Mail. See the details.

Source: www.marketingprofs.com

Huge change since 2012...and even before. CT for more stats.

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"However, these are the questions I can’t answer with today’s tools:

• Why did this person buy?
• Who did they compare us to when it came to us vs. looking at competitors?
• What features are important?
• How will they define success with our product?

With all of those things, I can look at all the data available today and still have no idea.

The way that it’s built today, that type of stuff only gets there if a rep enters it into a field. “Here’s why this person decided to buy.” And in that case it’d be totally anecdotal, assuming they even bothered to do it.

Source: www.g2crowd.com

Authored by the CEO of Drift, which sits on the Slack platform.

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"

In our first annual State of Email Deliverability report, we look at the deliverability ramifications of marketers’:

• Subscriber acquisition sources
• Permission practices
• Authentication
• List-unsubscribe and encryption usage
• Deliverability and list hygiene tools
• Inactivity management
• Deliverability monitoring and analytics

This 29-page ebook explores each of these findings and much more, with 25 charts providing data-based evidence of current practices and trends that impact email deliverability."

Source: pages.litmus.com

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Blockchain, as a concept, is still a difficult-to-encapsulate buzzword. When asked, the majority of people can confirm that blockchain has something to do with bitcoin and that the name itself is indicative of the technology’s capabilities: Data is stored in blocks which are connected in some sort of chain system. Essentially, blockchain is disruptive. Which is great, but what does that mean for the industries where blockchain can be used?

Different industries are taking note of blockchain and investing in blockchain technology. And these aren’t just financial-adjacent industries like insurance; there’s news of music and healthcare companies — even the French government! — investing a whole lot of dollars to research and support both startups and engineers that are leveraging blockchain.

Source: www.g2crowd.com

Again, CT for industry applications.

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A blockchain is a massive, decentralized ledger. Entries in the ledger are generated by transactions using a particular “cryptocurrency.” This digital money is an essential, but separate, element of blockchain, as no entries (and no data) can be logged to the blockchain without transactions taking place using cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.
Transactions in a blockchain are associated with “keys,” strings of numbers that correspond to a user, and that user's digital wallet. A user's private key can only be accessed by the user in question (securing the user's wallet behind an impenetrable wall of cryptography), but the user's public key is used to reference the user's activity in the blockchain.
The last bit is crucial, because in a blockchain, every party has equal access to the same data. Everyone can see who bought what and when, and can from there develop the same targeting infrastructure we see today, only now the data isn't governed or owned by any particular entity.

Source: www.dmnews.com

CT for the marketing applications.

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Source: www.smartinsights.com

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Today’s digests of curated articles summarized for your quick review: 

• Predictive Analytics: Why it is the Smart Science for Smarter Business - Economic Times
• The Newest Email Design Trends of 2017 – Really Good Emails
• AI for Marketing on the Hype Cycle: A Long Journey to the Plateau? - Gartner
• Top 10 Tools for Maximizing Business-to-Business Sales - Entrepreneur
• Does Your Channel Run In A Silo? · Forrester
• Marketing Disruption: Role of the CIO - CIO Review
• Marketing Cost Optimization - Your Summer Essential - Garter
• eMarketer Releases Latest Estimates for Worldwide Messaging App Usage - eMarketer
• Marketing Persona vs UX Persona - GetResponse Blog
• 10 Essential Templates for B2B Content Strategy - Kapost
• Evolution of Sales Ops: How to Get Strategic Fast | CallidusCloud Blog

See ALL Top Curated Marketing Technology Articles here.

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Source: www.scoop.it

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Predictive analytics is the science of making predictions about the future. Data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are components of predictive analytics that help to analyze current data to make predictions about future buyer behavior. It charts out patterns of behavior that show buyers' next steps while making purchase decisions. In any business, predictive analytics helps to learn the entire customer lifecycle journey and unearth important information about them.

Through predictive analytics, companies engage with buyers in many ways to enhance their business. It is a precursor to a new form of customer engagement, applied after an empirical learning process about customer behavior. It has replaced earlier business decisions that were only repeatable strategies based on preconceived opinions or assumptions about complex business situations. Through predictive analytics, marketers gain hitherto concealed and great insights to make precise, effective business strategies. Buyers have high service-level expectations and look for compelling customer experience in their buying process. It is precisely for this reason that businesses' investment in predictive analytics becomes important.

Predictive analytics is different from buyer segmentation analysis because assembling customers' buying information is complicated. Buyer segments are relatively constant over time, but an individual buyer's purchase behaviour keeps shifting. As the reasons for purchase by customers change, businesses should align their offers that best suit the customers' requirements. But though there is wide acceptance that data is important to organizations, most business decisions still do not leverage the information about customer data when it comes to engage buyers. Here lies the importance of predictive analytics.

Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com

It's a strong case.

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