We’ve got global brands talking one-on-one with Joe Schmo on mobile messaging apps. Guilds and alliances for trading mobile users. Marketing automated via Twitter and Facebook. Big data marketing platforms that predict the future, and big marketing platforms, period, that include everything including social, mobile, and apps.
It’s all coming in the context of a flood of new marketing tech companies.
Above: A flood of new marketing tech companies
What’s going on here?
What we’ve traditionally called marketing, the art of convincing people to consider parting with their hard-earned time, attention, or dollars for the sake of you, your product, or your service, is adding a hell of a lot of science. There’s science in knowing your prospect or customer, learning what he or she does with or around your offering, understanding how your users interact with your product, and endlessly optimizing what you’re doing, how your product works, what messages engage, and how you can be more relevant to your customers’ needs.
That’s growth. That’s marketing tech.
That’s what we’re talking about at our new GrowthBeat event, August 5-6 in San Francisco.
NOTE: Buy one of the first 50 tickets and save $300!
That growth in increasingly happening at finer and finer scale, with very granular data driving very personal conversations with individual users and buyers, and automation technology that allows a brand to scale one-to-many marketing to one-to-one marketing, at global scale.
It all takes data, and it all takes technology, and it all takes a basic re-wiring of what we think of as marketing.
Customer journeys have replaced marketing campaigns, Salesforce says. Conversations are the new clicks. Demographics about who and where are limiting, IBM says: The new demographics is what people do. And all that data which is pouring in is significant. In fact, it’s the difference between corporate life and death.
The bottom third of marketers achieve below two percent conversion rates, Adobe says. The top fifth hit nine percent conversion rates and just keep going, thanks to outsized investments in data, optimization, and integration with the entire organization.
In other words, marketing isn’t just about marketing anymore. It’s about product design. It’s about technology. It’s about the customer, more than ever before.
But that flood of tools and concurrent flood of data brings its own problems.
Without a single system to tie it together, like a Beckon or an Origami, marketers are bombarded with separate and disconnected chunks of data in Excel, in multitudes of dashboards, in PDFs, and on the back of yesterday’s lunchtime napkin. And the result is that drowning-in-data CMOs are actually using data less in day-to-day decision-making than they did a year ago.
That’s why we’re running GrowthBeat this year for the first time ever.
We’re bringing in some of the best and brightest in modern digital marketing to unclutter the landscape, simplify the functions, clarify the goals, and point the way to success. That includes the Chief MarTec himself, Scott Brinker. Salesforce VP of product marketing Gordon Evans will be speaking. VCs who invest in growth and marketing technologies will be there, as will Adam Marchick, CEO of the first mobile-focused marketing automation system, Kahuna.
(Maybe you’ll even want to speak at the conference — let us know!)
We’ll have sessions on user acquisition. Retention. Driving business on mobile. Using social for more than saying hello. Knowing what metrics to track, and which to ignore. Picking the right data to collect, and how to identify influencers who can unlock social networks’ vast potential for bringing you business.
Even more importantly, every attendee will be a growth focused marketer, product manager, or CxO who has his or her own story to share, compare, and provide insight and feedback for your marketing tech journey.
The event is on August 5-6 in San Francisco. Grab your tickets now and save $300.