Marketo's Rise Of The Marketer E-book

Marketo released a new e-book, The rise of the Marketers: Driving engagement, experience and revenue. Here are my notes on the Ebook. Basically the premise of the extensive survey by the Economist on behalf of Marketo is that marketing departments are going to have more change to come in order to handle a digital transformation.

Key factors

1. Customer Experience has become a bigger factor in differentiating companies and products.
2. Extra or new people and resources for marketing operations.
3. Marketing structures need to change for cross-functional co-operation
4. Marketing organizations need to be able to scale.

To me the last point about scaling marketing organizations is the most important, marketing structures may not be in-place to handle the need for a digital transformation.  The biggest gap being the lack of skills and resources to execute on digital marketing operations. Companies need to expand and optimize their digital marketing to compete, yet existing resources are spread too thin. While larger companies with multiple brands face particular problems, it's not about increasing resources to each brand, but rather providing cross functional services across the company. If the existing marketing structure of people, skills sets and resources is incorrectly deployed, there are consequences for determining what's out of alignment and what needs to be done to get an organization ready for digital transformation.

Here are a few quote's from the survey that I thought support those four points:

"According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s survey of 478 high-level marketing executives worldwide, more than 80% say they need to restructure marketing to better support the business. And 29% believe the need for change is urgent."

 "75% of marketers say they will be responsible for the end-to-end experience over the customer’s lifetime."

"Nearly four of ten marketers (39%) want new blood in the two areas of digital engagement and marketing operations and technology. A close third, and not significantly different, is skills in the area of strategy and planning (38%)."