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Mobile Commerce World

06/24/2013 - 06/26/2013 San Francisco CA

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Gartner Says Cloud, Mobility and Open Source Will Drive Application Development Market to Exceed $9 Billion in 2012

Gartner Press Release

Analysts Explore Emerging Trends at the Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit in Sydney, 22-23 August and Las Vegas, 27-29 November 2012

The worldwide application development (AD) software market is expected to reach more than $9 billion in 2012, an increase of 1.8 percent over 2011, according to Gartner. In Australia, spending on application development software is expected to reach A$153.4 million in 2012, up 5 percent over 2011. Growth will be driven by evolving software delivery models, new development methodologies, emerging mobile application development and open source software.

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Marketers Flunk the Big Data Test

Harvard Business Review

The big-data explosion is driving a shift away from gut-based decision making. Marketing in particular is feeling the pressure to embrace new data-driven customer intelligence capabilities. No wonder a strong appetite for data is one of the most sought-after qualities in new marketers. And yet, a recent CEB study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition — while the few who do use data aggressively for the most part do it badly. Here are our key findings:

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Most Important Lead Management Practice: Align on Standards

IDC PMS4colorversion 1 300x99 Most Important Lead Management Practice: Align on Standards

By,  

Of all the lead management best practices a company can invest in, the one that stands out as most important is defining standards.  Recently, IDC interviewed technology marketing executives to learn what’s working and what’s not in 21st Century lead management. When asked for a description of their greatest success, many more companies stated consistent global standards (including a common language) than gave any other answer.

Why is standardization so important?  Variation is a main culprit in erratic and unreliable processes. No two leads are the same. No two geographies are the same. No two campaign tactics perform the same. Nothing in lead management is really the same. Though companies can’t hope to eliminate all variation in their lead management, the best practice companies get rid of much of as much unnecessary complexity and redundancy as possible. By reducing variation, companies gain better control and achieve more predictable performance.
Important areas of lead management standardization include:

Reinventing the CMO

ClickZ

The marketer’s rise into the C-suite has been an uphill climb. Over the past decade or two, the role of “Chief Marketing Officer” in senior management has been hindered by persistent questions about the value of marketing and how to better manage the investments.

It’s no surprise then that in a recent report, 80 percent of CEOs say they’re not satisfied with the work done by marketers – while in comparison, 90 percent of the CEOs value and trust the work of CFOs and CIOs. More specifically, CEOs have serious concerns about the ability of CMOs to measure and drive return on investment (ROI) of marketing programs. And CMOs acknowledge the problem, with 57 percent reporting that they don’t base their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis. Is it any wonder that the average tenure of a CMO has dropped to an all-time low average of 12 months?

But there is hope. The path to CMO redemption is grabbing hold of a data-driven, ROI strategy.

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Digital Tactics Most Popular For B2B Marketing

Marketing Charts

The most popular marketing tactics used by B2B companies are digital, according to [pdf] a survey released in July 2012 by Sagefrog Marketing Group. When asked which of 16 common marketing tactics they use, 94% of B2B marketers pointed to websites, followed by email (76%), social media (68%), and SEO (58%). More traditional tactics such as direct marketing (48%), tradeshows (46%), seminars (44%), and print ads (35%) appeared further down the list, though they are more popular than search engine marketing (30%), webinars (26%), and online ads (25%).

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B2B Email Marketing Best-Practices and Trends

Marketing Profs

Email is still an invaluable asset to marketers; however, only 30% of B2B marketers are using email marketing as their primary lead generation tactic, according to a study by Pardot. Rather, in today’s marketing environment, email appears to be more effective for nurturing prospects than lead generation, the study reports. In addition, most (65%) B2B companies are devoting less than 25% of their marketing budgets to email marketing, 27% are allocating 26-50% of their budgets to email, and only 9% are allocating more than 50% of their budgets to email efforts:
http://bit.ly/O5gkHV

For Marketers, Lead Gen Focus Is Trained on Digital

eMarketer

The web has provided marketers with an opportunity to develop leads early in a consumer’s purchase process, and marketers are turning to hard numbers to measure the success of their efforts. According to a January 2012 survey of marketing professionals worldwide conducted by research company MarketingSherpa, 52% of marketers said their top lead gen strategy for the next year was to meet or exceed quantifiable return on investment goals. That was followed by optimizing the marketing/sales funnel (51%), gleaning more audience insight (51%) and maximizing the lifetime value of customers (47%).

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Nielsen Launches Innovation Lab

Cable Fax

Nielsen has launched its Innovation Lab, a program to spur ideas and advancements in advertising effectiveness, and it’s looking for help from all. While Stanford Graduate School of Business is the first collaborator, Nielsen wants input from the industry, said Scott McKinley, Executive Vice President, Advertising Effectiveness, Nielsen.

“We will absolutely be working with all the parties at the table, particularly networks” he said. “While we’ve enjoyed decades of relatively stable, trusted measures for reach in television, [it] could be improved by figuring out outcome metrics for television so that an advertiser can understand how a television buy impacts sales. Television, let’s face it, is absolutely the biggest allocation of dollars today and as the measurement improves for digital there is pressure on TV to come up to par with where digital is going.”

The Lab’s main project is “solving the question of cross media advertising effectiveness,” according to McKinley. Other areas of import include studying advertising effectiveness for mobile.

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Digital + Traditional = Unified Marketing

MediaPost

According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers released in July 2012, the top concern of digital marketers is return on investment (ROI). Nearly two-thirds cited their inability to prove ROI in “new media platforms” as the main factor holding back greater investment in it, followed by having the right metrics to determine marketing mix across traditional and digital channels, and the lack of understanding of digital among management and key personnel. So, we continue to refer to digital vs. traditional channels and tactics. And there was good reason for this up till now. Digital was only just a tiny portion of the ad spend. And the metrics were entirely different.

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Can Display Get Emotional?

MediaPost

Four of the best brains in display advertising say it’s a format that has plenty of heart — and that it will continually improve its ability to resonate with customers, creating a bond as well as a click. OMMA’S Carrie Cummings gets Neal Mohan, vice president, display advertising, Google; Dean Harris, managing partner, Silvermine Marketing; Corey Gottlieb, managing parter, Targeted Social; and Ekapat Chareonlarp, vice president, IDG TechNetwork talking about display’s soft spot.

Will display ever evoke emotion in users? When? How?

EC: Yes. For a long time, display has become more like a guy handing out flyers on the street than a storyteller as it was meant to be. As part of the industry, we have put metrics to measure how many flyers we get out on the street rather than metrics around user experience and how the story connects with users. I see this changing as rich media becomes a standard for the display business. More beautiful content, more relevant and more pleasant experiences are being introduced via display in unique ways. iab’s Rising Star units marks the era where display gets smarter and more beautiful and begins taking advantage of more human senses rather than just visual (sound, interaction, etc). With digital video replacing tv (Netflix, ted, Hulu), I would say in about five years, we will see more display/video ads become more effective in connecting brand emotions with users and having standardized ways to measure it.

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