Happy Saturday, readers! This week, we’ll learn why a marketing mix is your best bet when it comes to content, will discover what research firm Gartner’s recent survey uncovered about CMOs, will find out which particular type of business is booming in the days before GDPR takes effect and will explore a few of 2018’s most interesting paid media trends.
Got a news item or tip you want to share? Let us know. In the meantime, here’s this week’s news:
The secret is in the right mix
“Variety is the spice of life,” and according to our friends and partners over at ReachForce, it’s also the key to producing content that engages your audience and keeps them coming back for more. While a blog is a great part of a content marketing strategy, don’t make the mistake of letting it be your entire marketing strategy—include other types of content, like video, live events and webinars to experiment with other ways to get knowledge into the hands (and brains!) of your customer. And make sure you consult your analytics to see which content best performs so you know where to focus future efforts.
Gartner says CMOs better sharpen their martech skills
The Gartner CMO Spend Survey is out, and as research director Ewan McIntyre reports in Forbes, only half of CMOs surveyed rate themselves as “effective” when it comes to acquiring and managing technology—but at the same time, spending on marketing technology averaged more than a quarter of the budget at 27%. The takeaway? Relying on manual processes, choosing the wrong technology, not taking full advantage of the technology you have or underperforming technology are all detrimental to marketing’s effectiveness and efficiency. Invest in proving marketing’s value to your business, or your marketing campaigns are bound to be looked upon as expensive “vanity projects.”
With GDPR on the horizon, CDPs doubled in 2017
While many companies have been dreading the looming May 25, 2018 deadline when the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR goes into effect, there’s one industry segment that not only doesn’t dread its arrival, but is welcoming it with open arms. eMarketer reports that the number of Customer Data Platforms or CDPs has more than doubled recently, rising from just 12 in 2016 to 25 in 2017. While CDPs do share some commonalities with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Data Management Platform (DMP) software, CDPs only handle first-party data.
Are you worried about what the GDPR means for your business? Forgive me a bit of self-promotion, but Perkuto can help—and not just with first-party data.
Paid media trends worth knowing
By 2019, 72% of all digital ad spending in the US is expected to be mobile. Google AdWords has a new interface that, among other things, allows you to see how your campaigns are performing across different household income segments. And companies must pay closer attention to the incremental value that ads have on the overall ROI of campaigns or face the consequences of drawing inaccurate conclusions about the value of their efforts. Whether you’re working with paid media every day or only interact with the paid side of things occasionally, Vertical Measure’s “5 Paid Media Trends You Should Know” is an interesting read.
