Our 2020 2nd half Research Agenda for Marketing Automation

Our 2020 2^nd half Research Agenda for Marketing Automation

By Peter O’Neill, Research Director Research in Action.

I am really enjoying my market-research projects for Research in Action where I interview marketing practitioners on the software vendors and products they know for a particular business process. I always approach my topics from the business point of view – instead of a technology category/label which is often only familiar to product managers in software companies, or analysts at Gartner or Forrester, I name a business process (or family of processes) that I know marketers are thinking about. After all, marketing executives don’t sign cheques for software because they are collectors, they want to make their processes more efficient and expect an automation project will help.

Marketing leaders are rethinking their spending priorities considering COVOD-19 and its impacts on both the economy and on how businesses now communicate and transact with each other. Clearly, recent events have actually accelerating Digital Transformation efforts in all companies. So, marketers are increasing their spend in their own technology stack, but must also react to changes in in research and buying preferences in their target markets. This has led us to update our research agenda for the second half of 2020. 

We anticipate that the demand for digital marketing services will increase as marketing organizations run out of staff with skills and/or capacity to implement and operate new digital marketing programs. Financial executives will press CMOs to run their department as a business, creating increased interest in management systems such as MRM. Digital marketing will be even more data-driven and marketers will need to consolidate and collate their customer data on new platforms.  

Here is our research agenda for the rest of 2020 covering key topics in Marketing Automation: