Committing to CommsTech

The chances are that if you’re a marketing director and reading this story, you’re taking a quick break from a CRM implementation meeting! Almost half of the people we spoke with during our customer survey mentioned their company was striving for closer alignment of marketing and sales to drive more value and rolling out either a CRM or an ERP system.

Charged with demonstrating return on investment and engagement - often in real-time - is now part of most senior marketing leader’s day job. Technology is facilitating those calculations and our survey also revealed committed spend or an intention to invest in some form of marketing and communications automation in 2018.

Seeing the wood from the trees

The marketing technology landscape is incredibly dynamic and despite a period of consolidation the range of software tools and services continues to snowball with over 5,000 platforms and solutions available… and rising.

More often than not marketing automation buying decisions are still made on gut instinct or personal referral. There are neither clear forerunners, nor a shift towards standardization. And there is certainly no perfect combination of automation tools. We urge you to shop around, compare and ensure whatever tools, solutions, or plug-ins you invest in, are compatible with your CRM or ERP system.

EMG's CommsTech products put client needs at its core - be that pipeline management to track trends, or content planning tools to develop stories and umbrella campaigns for individual business units, or tracking and measuring media coverage - by type and geography - we've always found ways to get the I/O right. Our tools integrate with the main social platforms, but we are also happy to work with your third-party tools, be that HubSpot, Falcon or any other provider on the list of 5,000.

We will keep extending EMG’s CommsTech solutions for insights and analytics, content marketing, audience segmentation and customer journey mapping. This month we started integrating with SharpSpring for our own campaign development. So watch this space.

AI and Robots

We don’t expect robots to replace human marketing and communications professionals anytime soon. However, we are already starting to think about how artificial intelligence and machine learning will impact industrial technology marketing and in particular PR. There is already some great thinking on the topic and a recent Salesforce survey of 3,500 marketers confirmed that 50% of respondents are today using AI or advanced machine learning in some way or form.

With budgets ever tighter, we are going to have to do more with less. Striking the right balance between what can be automated or outsourced and what requires a human touch is increasingly important as part of mid- to long-term strategic marketing planning.

It’s quite easy to get overwhelmed by the pace of marketing and communications automation, so get in touch if you want to talk through your strategy or need a point of view on CommsTech and MarTech.

But please don’t freak out. It’s highly unlikely you will be replaced overnight by a robot called Sheila.