"Business has only two functions -- marketing and innovation." - Peter Drucker
When last I spoke with IDC's Sam Melnick, the IDC CMO Advisory Service had just published their 2014 Tech Marketing Barometer Study, revealing a strong and growing optimism within the tech marketing world. Last week, Gartner confirmed that optimism with their survey report, Digital Marketing Budgets Will Increase By 10 Percent in 2014. How do marketers plan to apply their expanded budgets? As part of the IDC study, Sam asked senior technology marketers to tweet their views on the future of marketing. The marketers designated their tweets with the hashtag #FutureMKTG.
Sam summarizes this crowd-sourced project with three tweets that represent the entirety of the responses.
1. The future of marketing starts and ends with data, technology, and measurability. #FutureMKTG
2. Digital marketing is more than a type of spend or channel - it is an organizational frame of mind. #FutureMKTG
3. Eat, sleep, and love your customer. Repeat. #FutureMKTG
Here is the future of marketing as tweeted by senior technical marketing leaders:
If you've been keeping up with my most recent articles about Digital Transformation and the Digital Customer Experience and Gen-C and the Future of Social Business, you would expect (correctly) to see digital called out in senior marketers' views of the future, including big data, social media and marketing technology. At Extreme Networks, we're implementing digital technologies to build community, provide contextual content, and drive inbound traffic. Digital marketing also lends itself to a new set of key performance indicators and digital metrics - here's a list of 50 digital marketing metrics. It's looking more and more like IDC's projection that digital marketing will account for 50% of the B2B tech marketer's program budget by 2016 will be right on target.
This post was co-authored with Sam Melnick, Research Analyst with IDC's CMO Advisory Service. You can follow Sam on Twitter at @SamMelnick.