2019 Marketing Trends & Innovations: Insights from Our Digital Partners
In my more than 20 years of working on the internet, I’ve seen a consistent priority to do more with digital. Topics like digital transformation, machine learning, and personalization are now dominating our conversations with clients. Through a combination of technology and business awareness, the time has come to act on these topics.
If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know that we love to share our thoughts on new and emerging topics. This time though, I’ve reached out to a few of our valued partners to get their take. Will “synergy” make the list of favorite buzzwords? Read on to find out.
Q: What does digital transformation mean to you in 2019?
Kevin Cahill, Senior Sales Manager, Digizuite: Digital transformation begins with thinking from the inside out. Digital transformation requires forethought for asset reuse – content, functionality, and themes – all of which live in multiple environments simultaneously. Planning for this begins with looking at the most basic element of content, creating digitally, and making it easy to reuse multiple times.
Nep Vijayaraja, Product Marketing Manager, Coveo: Digital transformation has become a ubiquitous term. A few years ago, the question was who owns the digital transformation: the CIO or CEO? And, whether it is important to adopt the Cloud. In 2019, it is clear and imperative that digital transformation becomes the business of every corporate function. People’s experiences (those of employees, partners, and customers) are at the center of digital transformation strategies.
At Coveo, we see the digital business as an ecosystem of interactions, forging the entire digital and lifelong journey of every employee, partner, and customer. Applied artificial intelligence is what will help organizations move to the next stage of digital transformation, providing relevant digital experiences at every interaction.
Joe Wykes, SVP Global Partner Channel & Business Development, Acquia: Cloud and open source have enabled unprecedented access to technology. This has led to every industry and business model being subject to reinvention, disruption, and change. Digital transformation is a way of describing this, as it can improve how you market, how you service customers, and how you conduct your business. Think of how digital has transformed how we apply for credit, how we seek entrance to college, or how we purchase items for our home. No industry is immune from the opportunities and threats related to digital transformation.
Q: How does the move to machine learning impact your space?
Kevin Cahill, Senior Sales Manager, Digizuite: In two ways. First, marketers need to meet the challenge of tagging large amounts of content that changes rapidly. AI and machine learning help them meet that “ingestion” challenge. Second, content consumers need to be able to retrieve content without having to follow a strict taxonomy. AI and machine learning enable that capability without requiring an organization to abandon taxonomy.
Nep Vijayaraja, Product Marketing Manager, Coveo: Machine learning is at the core of our business. At Coveo, we are obsessed with the importance of relevant digital interactions that drive business success, and machine learning is a quantum leap opportunity and a game changer that deliver relevant and personalized experiences at scale. Coveo harnesses the power of AI, search data, and analytics to drive success at every interaction. Coveo invests aggressively in data science to deliver out-of-the-box AI technologies to our customers.
Joe Wykes, SVP Global Partner Channel & Business Development, Acquia: Using both first- and third-party data to make intelligent decisions about what is the best next action makes it possible to accelerate and scale the kinds of experiences you can deliver to your audience. This is an area of tremendous opportunity, and it’s still in its infancy. As this technology develops and as computing power (quantum) becomes more accessible, the possibilities are very exciting.
Q: What are you most excited about with personalization / marketing automation?
Kevin Cahill, Senior Sales Manager, Digizuite: Once again, 2019 promises to have brands and companies provide targeted, relevant information. Someday, we’ll stop receiving CTAs on products and services that we *literally just purchased*.
Nep Vijayaraja, Product Marketing Manager, Coveo: Personalization has been around for longer than most people think, for a couple decades at least. For quite some time, the concept of providing specific content to a specific audience has been possible for certain, but the overall experience was still very limited as it was impossible for a development team to manage such a comprehensive platform. AI will allow us to mass-personalize a plethora of customer experiences. That being said, only companies that are able to integrate their customers' experiences across all channels will achieve digital success. We are thrilled to help organizations deliver what their customers need now and need next.
Joe Wykes, SVP Global Partner Channel & Business Development, Acquia: The ability to use lessons learned from one channel to automatically inform the best next action on other channels in real time is both powerful and exciting.
Q: What is the number one thing that you would want your clients to know about using your product / platform in 2019?
Kevin Cahill, Senior Sales Manager, Digizuite: DAM platforms by nature orient to the enterprise and are not just wedded to CMS platforms.
Nep Vijayaraja, Product Marketing Manager, Coveo: The number one thing that we would like our customers to know is that relevance transformation is the strategy they’ll need when it comes to pursuing any digital initiatives in 2019. Coveo unifies content and people’s interactions on customer owned digital properties in order to deliver a truly personalized experience for all – whether the individual is an employee, an existing or prospective client, or partners.
Joe Wykes, SVP Global Partner Channel & Business Development, Acquia: Speed matters; both now and once you are in production. Be prepared to be ready to turn on a dime and you will be able to deliver a highly-differentiated and relevant experience to your audience.
Q: What's your favorite buzzword in 2019?
Kevin Cahill, Senior Sales Manager, Digizuite: Atomic design (that’s two words, but you get it).
Nep Vijayaraja, Product Marketing Manager, Coveo: Personalization. It’s over-used and, as a result, it has lost all meaning. When thinking personalization, what it really means in 2019 is the ability to be relevant to each individual visitor. This is something that can only be achieved through the use of AI and machine learning.
Joe Wykes, SVP Global Partner Channel & Business Development, Acquia:
Buzzwords are harbingers of bubbles and inflated expectations. Be cautioned. With that said, I do not have a favorite. However, I am glad we have stopped using “pivot” in every sentence. I am concerned that we are now prefacing everything with “super.”
Buzzword Bingo
Chris Brady, Partner Alliance Manager, Velir: There are “a lot of moving parts” to “personalization,” but if you are “super” focused on a “crawl, walk, run” approach, you won’t have to “pivot” when your team wants to explore other areas of your site, like leveraging “atomic design.” Now that we got that out of the way, we can bid a fond adieu to those buzzwords!
The Road Ahead: Leveraging Content Marketing Innovations & Partners
We hope that you can make some space in your 2019 roadmap to explore how to leverage these ideas and our great partners, to do more with digital every day. These powerful technologies and ideas are poised to help you grow your business, retain members, work efficiently, and reach your audience. Reach out directly to me at [email protected] to learn more about how we, along with our partners, can help you embrace digital transformation to enable powerful business transformation or Tweet Us @Velir.