So what s next? We re living in the future of marketing

Back to

the future

The two hottest trends in marketing today are

storytelling and data. But what happens when

you combine right-brain creative strategy with

left-brain number-crunching? You get great

stories that land with the right audiences at the

right time. Welcome to the new data-driven

future of marketing: programmatic content,

enabled by data culture.

We’re living in the future of marketing

So what’s next?

Three or four years ago, marketing conferences were all about the

impending digital transformation and the great potential of big data, content marketing, mobility, and new customer engagement models. New! Futuristic! Disruptive! Transformational!

Congratulations, marketers. You made it to the future. You’ve got

accessible analytics, marketing automation, better tools for omnichannel management and measurement, content everywhere, beacons and sensors to turn locations smart, screens of all sizes to target for mobile—just about everything but jetpacks and flying cars.

The problem is, if you go to a conference or read the trade publications these days, it’s all about … big data, content marketing, mobility, and new customer engagement models. And that’s not the future anymore—in fact, it’s about to become the past.

In 2013, Microsoft commissioned a study on the future of marketing that produced a series of reports on the multitude of ways that data was transforming the industry, from customer engagement to the future of the CMO. The centerpiece of the work was this forecast map, identifying the various trends that were starting to emerge, and where they might lead.

The map extends from the “present” (2013) on the left, out towards a future on the right labeled “sooner than you think.”

The endpoint is a forecast we called “Connected Customer”—a scenario where marketers are able to use everything they know about customers, including social, transactional and third-party data, to create a personalized experience in any context—in person, online, via calls to a service center, or through social media. All those engagements would be quantified and measurable, giving companies enough insight to anticipate customer needs and interests, and exceed

customer expectations at every point of contact. OK, maybe that future is still a few years down the road, but the path to it is clearer than ever.

This forecast map from 2013 shows how emerging developments in digital technology lead to increasing capabilities for marketers around brand awareness, customer experience, and personalization.

STUFF GETS REAL

Technologies that allow us to physically interact with the digital world and vice-versa.

BY THE NUMBERS Information from mobile devices, sensors, social media, public and third parties, combined with enterprise data.

THE BIG PICTURE

Data, media, automation, and personalization combine to provide an immersive, quantified customer experience. CROWD POWER

Giving customers a greater voice and providing new ways for user-created content and ideas to come to the fore.

STORY RULES

Delivering brand imagery, stories, and information to customers through traditional and digital channels.

CONTENT FINDS YOU

Offering personalized experiences at the precise time, place, and format that are most engaging to consumers. Video Fluidity Brand as Publishers Transmedia Storytelling Quantified Experience Real-Time Brands SOCIAL Social Analytics Gamification Geo-Social Networks Predictive Analytics Expertise on Demand BIG DATA Location-Based Analytics Kinetic Interfaces Multi-Screen Analytics All-Media Metrics Consumerization of JIT PHYSICAL/ DIGITAL BLEND Smart Spaces Augmented Reality Anamorphic Ads Curated Curation CONTENT Inverted Search Interruption Interrupted CONTEXT App-Me-Not Apps Everywhere Location-Aware Offers Agents and Proxies CONNECTED CUSTOMER Personalized Pricing D2D Commerce 360-Degree CRM Open-Source Brands CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

How brands interact with customers and create differentiated experiences.

PERSONALIZATION AND MEASUREMENT

Ways to create custom experiences and 1-to-1 relationships with customers, then measure the results.

BRAND AWARENESS

How brands expose audiences to content and imagery to create emotional connection, awareness, and demand.

THE NEW NOW NEXT SOONER THAN YOU THINK

The rise of programmatic content

Content marketing sits at the intersection of brand awareness and customer engagement.

As we’ve all heard for years, content marketing isn’t about making a transaction, although it can include information that encourages customers to take a closer look at a company’s offerings and capabilities. It contributes to brand identity in the sense that content communicates the company’s voice, attitude, and ideas to a market where consumers increasingly expect brands to relate to their values, but it’s not perception-shaping in the big sense like advertising is.

Recently content marketing itself has been evolving into something richer. Say it with me everyone …

storytelling.

Storytelling emphasizes the human, the approachable, the relatable aspects of the brand and aspires to wrap them into a complete narrative with an emotional payoff for the audience.

Story may be big, but data is bigger.

According to a recent study by the analyst firm IDG, the number of organizations with deployed/ implemented data-driven projects has increased by 125 percent from 2013 to 2014, with even greater growth forecast for 2015 and beyond. In the world of marketing, CMOs are looking to use data to better understand ROI on their channel strategy, target customers more precisely, forecast trends in their market, and align more closely to the customer journey.

Though cold, hard data may seem like the opposite of warm and fuzzy storytelling, they are opposite sides of the same coin—one that can pay off for marketers who can get them to work together. It’s no surprise that what’s really capturing the imagination of marketers is the blend of data and storytelling to create a new engagement strategy some are calling “programmatic content.”

Combine data and

storytelling to create

a new engagement

strategy.

CONTENT

DELIVERY

CONTENT

CREATION

ANALYSIS

METRICS

Unstructured data analytics

Aggregation of information about hard-to-analyze data types: what photos, videos, and narratives are popular, and what makes them popular?

Automated curation

Automated collection and presentation of pre-existing content based on what we know about the content and how people categorize it.

Measurement

Granular analysis of audience

consumption and response to content: who’s reading and sharing what, and what engages them most or least?

Microtargeting

Delivery of content in context to the precise audience segments at precisely the right time and format. Data-driven storytelling

Using content and audience data to shape the creation of original content for maximum appeal.

Amplification

Understanding the right leverage points and timing to maximize the reach of content through social channels.

Visualization

Aggregation of useful and actionable insights for marketing professionals to anticipate and innovate future campaigns.

Personalization

Aggregation of everything we know about the audience: who are they, what do they like? How, when and on what device do they consume content?

$

11.5

BILLION

$

11.5

BILLION

Marketing pros are excited over the potential of programmatic content, and for

good reason. Creatives spend months crafting and testing stories designed to resonate with customers and hit the right emotional notes. But the channels for reaching

customers have become more fragmented and specialized.

Adding elements of data-driven targeting not only maximizes the value of both paid and earned media by promoting the story to people and venues where it is most likely to be socially shared, but also enables the development of more personalized stories that strike exactly the right notes with the niche audiences who have proven to be the most effective brand ambassadors.

Prashant Kumar, CEO of UM Malaysia and president, world markets, Asia-Pacific for IPG

Mediabrands, sums up some of the prospects in an enthusiastic column from AdWeek entitled “Programmatic Content Will Bring Human Happiness, if Great Storytelling Is Behind It”:

“Smart hybrid planners will use data to identify microclusters displaying homogenous behaviors, discover their drivers and barriers, and craft content based on keen insights and shareworthy ideas. These ideas will be prototyped and survival tested in real-time environments. They will be seeded into relevant affinity groups and egged on by catalysts, co-creators and propagators to unleash viral impact.

Intelligent algorithms will fingerprint individuals and their individuality across devices, platforms and sales channels—both offline and online. Data-driven multitouch attribution models will define bottlenecks in the consumer journey and will be able to schedule the right channel and content mix to address them. Real-time attributions will maximize marketing ROI.”

Now that’s a fresh vision of the future of marketing that moves the conversation a step beyond the familiar catchphrases. But what will it take to get there?

90

80

Hitting the target

Audience targeting is becoming more widely adopted, now used by more than 8 in 10 advertisers and 9 in 10 agencies, ad networks, ad exchanges, and DSPs.

—Xelate and Digiday, 2014

Content creates customers

Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less.

—Demand Metric, 2015

Big bucks for big data

U.S. marketers will spend $11.5 billion this year on data and related solutions, an increase of a half-billion dollars over last year.

—The Winterberry Group, 2015

Content

Marketing

62% LESS COST

3X THE LEADS

The potential of programmatic content and all the other benefits that allow marketers to create better customer relationships and experiences come from a common source: data, and the ability to use it. It’s what Microsoft calls “data culture,” and it’s rapidly becoming the key competitive advantage for today’s businesses.

In addition to the direct benefits of mining for data, there is huge potential in the “data exhaust” generated by ubiquitous digital computing as the fuel for ambient intelligent system that can power better experiences, understanding, and interactions. Getting to this point requires more than a few small investments in tactical solutions. It comes from a platform capable of knitting together diverse data sources and intelligently sifting through them well enough that anyone in the organization can use the tools at hand to discover insights that can take the business to another level.

Data culture for marketing

For marketers, embracing data culture can help realize far-flung visions like the Connected Customer and Programmatic “Big Story” Content, which rely on a powerful combination of human intuition and machine learning.

There are three main elements to a data culture for marketing, represented by the three layers of the graphic above.

1. Business and insight: gather and measure the data from across your entire business. 2. People and tools: give employees, partners, and customers great ways to visualize,

experience, share, and co-create stories based on the data.

3. Connect the layers: invest in systems that unite people and data using the power of

the cloud and cloud-based services.

“Data exhaust” is the fuel

for intelligent systems that

can bring marketers closer

to customers.

DEVICES

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PEOPLE

BIG DATA

INSIGHTS

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The first step in bringing data organically into the creative/storytelling process is gathering data from every customer touchpoint and every segment of your operation that influences the customer experience. This includes structured data from CRM,

ERP, and financial management systems, data gathered from marketing automation platforms, customer service center data, retail point-of-sale data, and anything else that can be measured.

Advances in machine learning technology make it easier for companies to sift through this data to expose meaningful trends and correlations that can point the way to better strategies, including better storytelling.

Understand what drives your customers and you can tell the stories that matter most to them.

Insights & data

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Stories are a product of human imagination. Data can inform and amplify your stories, but they must begin and end with people.

That’s why a fundamental element of data culture for marketers is the tools that

enable people to make sense of huge volumes of information, discover hidden patterns that influence strategy, share those insights, and open up the process to the whole brand community.

Today technology is giving us better tools than ever to identify and measure social

sentiment, collaborate within and outside our organizations, measure and share data from our daily lives, and create and consume experiences on a wide variety of digital screens. Data culture for marketing means facilitating personal interactions across all those touchpoints.

People & tools

DEVICES

PEOPLE

PLATFORM

MAGIC

INTERNET OF THINGS

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SOCIAL

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Connecting the layers

Technology is the glue that connects data and people. A few years ago, we’d be

talking about data center servers and enterprise solutions, but more than ever, today it is services in the cloud that cuts the intimidating volume of Big Data down to human scale. The cloud has evolved from a repository of data and an enabler of tactical capabilities to a full platform for business. Analytics and machine learning systems harness the massive scale of the cloud to help marketers connect the dots between trends and outcomes— and between stories and their audiences.

The cloud also enables the rapid distribution of new content and new experiences.

Developers and storytellers can deploy once to the cloud and reach users on any screen, any platform, and in nearly any environment. The cloud is the point of integration

between mobile users, their location and status, and their data.

As marketers embrace programmatic content as a way to amplify their stories, the cloud is the key.

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Toward the new future of marketing

The predictions that experts made at the start of the decade

have largely come true, and the face of marketing is already

changing to reflect the rising importance of data in customer engagement, content, social strategy, and metrics.

Now we’re taking the next step toward deep integration of data culture into organizations, helping to make businesses more nimble, more responsive, and better able to make every transaction and brand touchpoint a personalized experience.

Does this vision inspire you? Learn more at www.microsoft.com/marketing.

How close is your organization to embracing a data culture? Here’s a simple scorecard of key principles.

Data that connects across the business and an infrastructure that brings data

together rather than isolating it in silos.

Security and policies that inspire trust, because the power that data confers

also comes with the responsibility to respect customer privacy.

Meeting of the minds between Marketing and IT to make sure technology

investments not only meet the needs of modern marketers, but are strategic, cost-effective, and secure.

Analytics for the masses, with accessible and familiar tools to help

non-technical business people spot trends, generate insights, and act fast based on reliable data.