What are the biggest opportunities & challenges in marketing tech for the next 12-24 months?
I believe the biggest opportunity and challenge is around integration and context. Currently there isn’t enough contextual awareness of a client’s entire set-up and what they need to be successful. Marketers are also overwhelmed by the number of products and solutions available to them. While many can be interesting, and even useful, it’s often the case that relying on too many, and not focusing on a few, can get in the way of their success.
This leads to duplicative solutions or products that don’t actually connect together, which causes more manual work to make things successful. The real opportunity is to strategically integrate these solutions so they are able to meet their full potential and generate wins.
What keeps your clients up at night?
There are many things, but I think in a nutshell, it’s these three: execution, data and attribution. Clients worry about their ability to execute quickly enough, if they using their data correctly and safely, and if they are accurately assessing who and what is contributing to the success of any given campaign.
What’s the hardest thing to educate clients about?
It comes down to being able to educate them about how LinkedIn fits into their overall mix. We aim to expand the conversation so they have a holistic view of LinkedIn and understand how our entire suite of B2B products can help them naturally connect their enterprise.
What are some of the unmet needs in the marketing technology landscape?
The biggest unmet need is recognizing the user experience. We can all sit here and talking about marketing tech from the technology and integration standpoint, but we rarely talk about how important the customer experience is.
In the past, B2B brands used to only compete with other B2B brands and their customer experiences, which historically, weren’t that great. Now the reality is that we are all consumers.
B2B companies in turn have to compete with more consumer-orientated brands because B2B buyers, at the end of the day, are also consumers. Creating an amazing customer experience is still very much untapped in the B2B space, but the customer expectations are higher than ever. B2B companies aren’t just competing with each other anymore; they are competing with anyone who is delivering an unforgettable customer experience.
What social network do you anticipate accelerating growth in the next year?
I believe the success of one lifts the tides for all. I can see Facebook accelerating growth as it gets more into commerce, YouTube as it adds more professional videos to the platform, and LinkedIn as more people continue to look for economic opportunity.
