The intersection of marketing and IT represents huge opportunities and challenges for organizations. Over the last several years, there has been plenty written about the need for CIOs and CMOs to collaborate and cooperate. Some studies show that up to half of IT buying decisions now originate from the CMO.
While the use of marketing clouds, cloud-based marketing analytics and other functions is continuing to grow, there’s a greater focus on predictive marketing capabilities. The results of a just-released study from EverString, The 2015 State of Predictive Marketing Survey Report, notes that 98 percent of the most mature marketers surveyed, one-third of the total respondents, revealed that they are either fully committed to deploying predictive marketing or are currently implementing predictive marketing in some capacity.
Among other key findings:
*91 percent of marketers who reported that they are defining the future of the company and leading the charge into current and new markets are either fully committed to deploying predictive marketing or are already implementing predictive marketing.
*67 percent of marketers using both behavioral and firmographic attributes to score their leads are fully committed to deploying predictive marketing.
*53 percent of marketers actively engaged in account-based marketing strategies are fully committed to deploying predictive scoring and 82 percent of those marketers are researching predictive marketing.
The takeaway for CIOs and other IT leaders is that marketing is now at the center of the IT universe. Blunt force techniques used in the past no longer hack it; there’s a need to move to greater precision and incorporate personalization and context. Within today’s digital business framework, attributes such as trust, engagement and personalization are critical.
Yet, today, marketing also extends beyond marketing. There’s a growing need to possess a 360-degree view of customers and think about data and relationships more holistically. Marketing data becomes sales, operations and finance data. In the end, the old silos and walls need to come down for innovation to flourish.
To be sure, CIOs must reach out to CMOs and an emerging group of marketing technologists in order to drive more sophisticated analytics, address evolving buyer habits and expectations, and coordinate and orchestrate new technologies. Almost half of those surveyed, 47 percent, stated that they are aware of predictive marketing and are currently investigating how to use it but only 25 percent of respondents said that they are currently using a predictive tool. In addition, 24 percent stated that they don’t use the technology and the concept is completely new to them.