2015 Predictions: Value to Marketers Will Come Via Consolidated Solutions

This post is based on insights from the Sailthru ebook “2015 Marketing Technology Predictions: The Future of Marketing” available for download now.

Today’s leading marketers want their technology in one place. Right now we’ve got a variety of stacks, but very few consolidated solutions. 2015 is the year when marketers will realize greater lift and revenue from end-to-end providers than stand-alone solutions.

The big legacy software providers haven’t actually had a consolidated solution to offer – but they’ve had the financial might to buy lots of specialized companies and attempt to stitch them together. Since different groups within the same company often use different stacks, this can misalign KPIs for the business as a whole.

It has never made a ton of sense for different teams within the same organizations to be using disparate tools to collect and analyze data that is closely related, when the end goal is a seamless customer experience. These hodgepodges of tools arose by accident, simply because in many companies, data has only recently become an organization-wide priority. When these “solutions stacks”were purchased and implemented, individual managers weren’t thinking about how they might have to collaborate and share data with colleagues in marketing, sales, information technology and even finance five years down the road. The idea that a marketer could generate a single customer view, enabling true omnichannel marketing, still seemed a bit hazy.

Now this fragmentation is impeding business objectives. It increasingly makes less and less sense for each team to use their own specialized stack with a few bells and whistles bolted on to it. And as marketers align around creating a single customer view and following a continuous customer experience, their technology needs to change. To meet these new needs, marketers and CIOs will seek out flexible, natively built solutions that will bring together customer relationship management, personalization, and big data seamlessly under one roof.

Neil Capel, CEO & Founder of Sailthru

–

RELATED POSTS

• Mass Customization Will Come to Marketing Tech

• Consumers Will Expect a Better Experience the Longer They Interact With Your Brand

• The Promise Versus the Reality of Legacy Vendor Integrations Will Be Exposed