The idea of one monolithic marketing cloud may be misunderstood.
Image Credit: Tom Small, Flickr
The idea of one monolithic marketing cloud may be misunderstood. Xero CMO Andy Lark joins VB’s director of marketing technology Stewart Rogers to look at the reality of cloud-based marketing solutions and how best to use them to break down crippling marketing silos.
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Xero is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies globally, and for two years running in 2014 and 2015, it was named number one on Forbes’ list of the world’s Most Innovative Growth Companies.
And Xero’s CMO Andy Lark calls the marketing cloud a myth.
“There is no such thing,” Lark says. “Largely the marketing cloud is a crazy notion.”
The marketing cloud, he argues, was built for large enterprise businesses with systematic funnels and pipelines and selling periods. Small to medium businesses, he argues, “exist in a world where we have to sell to customers every minute, and so it’s a radically different world that we live in. Decisions, psychology, and buying behavior are radically different in small businesses.”
Instead, Lark says, a smart company is fast, nimble, and has a marketing mix finely tuned over a suite of sophisticated technology stacks in the cloud.
For Xero, that includes the full Google stack for buying, optimizing, and assessing media performance; a full Adobe stack that runs the site, audience targeting, audience management, everything from landing pages through to buy/sell pages and more; Marketo, for building customer journeys, and engaging with people at the right place at the right time; and Simple, a marketing platform for internal collaboration and creative development.
“And you look at that and you go, is that a marketing cloud? ” Lark says. “And it really exposes the mythology, because it’s so much more than just a marketing cloud.”
And while most of these platforms are, out-of-the-box — or out-of-the-cloud — sophisticated solutions, the grim reality, Lark says, is that most marketing departments are ill equipped to deal with adopting and deploying cloud solutions.
We’re still just at the earliest days, Lark says, with very few marketers investing in the right tools and technology at scale, and too many not understanding the metrics they’re looking at. They’re chasing ROI, not understanding customer value or the true cost of customer acquisition, over-invested in LTV, or caught up in the metrics of one individual campaign or one particular medium.
“Just because they can track it, they think they understand,” he says. “But they never really understand the context across a number of channels.”
In the end, the real future of marketing, Lark says, is marketers who are completely passionate about marketing as an integrated suite of activities across multiple media channels.
What to learn more about amping up your marketing technology strategy? Check out our free webinar, “Marketing cloud: Enabling awesome user engagement across channels.”
Don’t miss out!
Register here for free.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to: Choose a marketing cloud solution that suits your operation size (whether small or enterprise level)
Determine the ROI you can expect from cloud marketing Engage users across channels more effectively Diversify your marketing strategy through unexpected SaaS possibilities
Speakers:
Andy Lark , CMO, Xero
Stewart Rogers , Director of marketing technology, VentureBeat
Moderator:
Wendy Schuchart, Analyst, VentureBeat
More panelists to be announced!