We spend a great deal of time looking at the market, evaluating adoption trends, and otherwise looking at the key inhibitors and accelerators of continued adoption of advanced marketing technology. Marketing automation takes a platform approach in linking up lead capture, prospect tracking, lead scoring, email marketing, social marketing, and advanced analytics all in one package. This often is too much for a marketing team to digest out of the gate leading to under-utilized systems and, at times, frustration.
As we look towards the future, we mapped out our version of the “B2B Marketing Technology Adoption Curve.” This leans on research conducted by awesome Aberdeen Group analyst Trip Kucera along with our own quantitative and qualitative input. We chose a technology adoption curve as the best way to present this information so it resembles a bell curve with innovators on the left and laggards on the right – so it is not a cumulative curve but more a representation of where marketers are on the adoption journey.
Key takeaways:
1. Most marketers, at this point, understand that email marketing must be part of their playbook. Newsletters, bulk email campaigns, etc.
2. As you work from right to left, capabilities become more advanced and adoption becomes less so. This is the land of lead nurturing (rules based email campaigns), lead scoring, and dipping into the land of social media.
3. Innovators are trying and seeking tools that allow them to better identifies “signals” of demand and want to used advanced analytics to tap the promise of predictive data.
4. We cover this curve from end to end including our ability to do email campaigns to our Nearstream social campaigns pieced designed to identify and engage around social demand signals. We are doing some additional things around activity streams and predictive analytics that will see the light of day soon as preview features.
