Dreamforce Panel: The Future Of The Marketing Cloud Is All About Integration

Over the past few years, Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event has evolved into something more than just a conference or a trade show. With well over 100,000 people in attendance this year, and celebrities such as Al Gore and Hillary Clinton crowding the keynote bill, Dreamforce has turned — for better or for worse — into a cultural phenomenon for the tech industry.

Look past the traffic jams and Hawaiian music, however, and there’s still a lot happening for anyone interested in marketing technology — especially in terms of how the industry is pushing towards tighter integration of the cloud-based marketing technology stack.

The Rise Of The Programmatic Marketer

This was a theme that surfaced repeatedly during a Monday session on the “State Of The Marketing Cloud,” featuring a panel of executives from Adobe, SAP, Google, Oracle, Salesforce and Demandbase. It was a group of sometimes bitter rivals (one of whom jokingly expressed surprise that Salesforce even let the session happen) that ended up agreeing on a number of important trends.

“We’re starting to see marketers pay an ‘innovation tax’ where best of breed tools don’t always work well together,” said Omar Wawakol, General Manager, Oracle Data Cloud.

“The cloud is emerging to solve those integration challenges,” Wawakol said, noting that every panelist in the session works for a company that offers some form of marketing cloud solution, in addition to integrating and interoperating with others’ clouds.

Chip Hall, Director of Programmatic Media and Platform Sales at Google, added that the term “programmatic” — normally associated with ad-buying technology — actually describes the essence of any modern marketing technology stack. “Marketers can now program a lot of the work they do — they can take the manual activities out of their lives,” Hall stated.

Moving B2B Marketing Towards The ‘Identity Graph’

This convergence, said Adam Blitzer, SVP and CEO of Pardot at Salesforce.com, extends to the B2B marketers who made up the bulk of the audience at the session. “B2B marketers might feel like second-class citizens,” Blizer stated. “They traditionally haven’t gotten to do all of the ‘cool stuff’ the B2C marketers get to do. But as these clouds come together — as the marketing tech and ad tech come together, and you can track how your ad tech is performing all the way through the funnel — it’s becoming possible to close the loop on tracking results.”

Looking ahead, Oracle’s Wawakol said one of the most interesting capabilities for B2B marketers will be what he referred to as the “identity graph” — the ability to identify and track buyer behavior across any channel, at any time.

“What we have today isn’t truly omnichannel; we don’t have complete propagation yet between channels,” he said. “Linking all of these is a race that will take another five years. Even linking email to cookies today only gets about a 40% success rate, and linking in social handles and other elements will take a lot more work and integration.”

Riding The Marketing Analytics Wave

Blitzer also highlighted predictive analytics as another area of innovation in the marketing cloud. “Rather than marketers coming up with their own lead scoring, wouldn’t it be great if a [predictive] system set up the scoring for you?” he asked. “None of the marketing automation vendors do that yet, it’s more the pure-play analytics guys.” Before long, Blitzer predicted, integrated, cloud-based marketing solutions will be able to analyze and identify attributes associated with buying behavior, rather than forcing marketers to do that analysis themselves.

The analytics tie-in echoed one of the bigger Salesforce technology announcements of the week: the launch of Wave, an analytics cloud designed to give users a turnkey solution for performing complex analytics and data visualization tasks. Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, confirmed in a Venturebeat interview last week that Wave would integrate with the company’s marketing automation technology.

How that integration performs in the real world will be interesting; useful data analysis depends as heavily upon the ability to ask the right questions as it does upon being able to visualize the answers. If Wave lives up to its promise, however, it’s likely to put heavy pressure on other marketing automation vendors to close the gap between their offerings and other, typically stand-alone, data visualization tools.

Getting Organized For Success

Finally, many of the panelists urged B2B marketers to look at integration as a combination of the right technology and the right organizational changes — a mix that they say too many marketers will fail to achieve.

“The marketing department is changing,” Hall stated, “and the question is whether marketers are going to fight the changes or embrace them?” If marketers are going to take advantage of integrated, cloud-based technology solutions, he added, they are going to have to be more aggressive about exploring their options: “You can’t wait for someone to tell you.”

Blitzer also urged marketers to be more willing to use technology to identify and track marketing contribution to revenue – and to combine that knowledge with a sense of shared responsibility for the results. “Anyone involved in demand gen should have a bonus or incentive tied to revenue or pipeline,” he said, noting that “organizational inertia” is often the biggest barrier to achieving that sort of alignment.

“You need both the technology and the culture to make that happen – and to know it’s happening through tracking and attribution” added panelist David Welch, VP at Adobe.

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