A while ago our CEO Jakob Löwenbrand had the honor of doing a podcast interview with Scott Brinker, the VP of platform ecosystems at HubSpot, a well-known keynote speaker, author of several books, and editor-in-chief of the famous Chiefmartech.com. If you want to know anything about marketing technology (MarTech), Scott is the person to ask. In this interview he shares his take on the new rules of the field as well as other MarTech insights. Keep reading to dive into some highlights of the podcast interview! You can also listen to the full podcast episode here.
Jakob: What should you look out for as a CMO or marketing executive at a B2B company today, in order to stay afloat and keep your pace at the same level as your competitors, at least?
Scott: Yeah, I really do feel like the scope of marketing, you know, has expanded so much over this past decade. It's not so much about any one leader and marketing, having all of it. It's more about getting really good at creating these teams that are able to collectively manage this. So if I'm a CMO, yeah, it's not that necessarily I have to become an expert, you know, in these marketing technologies. It’s that I want, you know, like a right-hand person who's going to be my head of marketing operations, my head of marketing technology, who can really help take responsibility for that set of capabilities. And then working with that person, you know, what I want to do is be constantly mapping the capabilities that the technology enables back to, the core marketing strategy, like, “Okay, who are we trying to reach? What's important to them? How do they want to engage with us, you know? What works? What's relevant?” and really just make sure that… I mean, as fascinating as all these technologies are on their own, they are still, at the end of the day, just tools in the toolbox, you know, and where the real value remains is, you know, for the CMO to be sort of fitting that back into the overarching go-to-market-strategy.
”…at the end of the day these technologies are just tools in the toolbox, you know, and where the real value remains is for the CMO to be sort of fitting that back into the overarching go-to-market-strategy”
Jakob: What are the big drivers you see, that will impact how we think about and set up marketing and marketing processes the coming years, from your standpoint?
Scott: Well, in the setup for this episode, you talked about the new rules of marketing, technology and operations in particular. And so, I came up with a framework a couple years ago that I keep coming back to, that really is about five rules:
Rule 1: Centralize everything you can.
So the first is this idea of centralize everything you can. There's so many tech-mediated digital touchpoints happening here in our businesses. We need to be able to have a strategy to centralize the data that's flowing in and out of this. We need the ability to put some sort of guard rails around this incredible creative engine that's happening out there, but we need to make sure it aligns with our brand and our strategy. So you want to centralize everything you can.
Rule 2: Automate everything you can
Second thing you want to do is you want to get really good at automating everything you can, because the scope of activities in marketing has just exploded, right? It's just not economically feasible, not practical, to be manually pulling all these levers and turning all these dials. You need to get really smart at being able to apply automation technology, whether it's internal workflows or certain high-level customer interactions. Get good at applying automation for efficiency and scale.
Rule 3: Decentralize everything you can
And the next rule is decentralize everything you can. And if you scratch your head and you're like, “wait a second, you were just telling me to centralize everything. Now, I should decentralize?” Well, it's not actually that you should throw out the things that need to be centralized. What we mean by decentralization is you need to be able to empower more people on the edge of the organization to be able to take more action and self-service more of their own needs. For instance,: it's great to have a centralized platform for your business intelligence and data analytics. But if anytime a marketer wants an answer to a question they have to file a ticket and wait for some analysts, you know, to eventually get to it right, It just becomes this huge bottleneck. Part of the reason you want to have that really good centralized business intelligence platform is you want to also be able to put a layer on it that allows more of the marketers on the front lines to be able to self-service a lot of their own analytical questions. And it's not that you won't have experts because you'll still have cases where, you know, there's deeper analyses that need to be done that really do require someone who's an expert in that field. But for a bunch of these questions that we have, they don't really require an expert for it. So, you can empower people on the edge of the organization to self-service more of their needs. This is a lot of what the whole “no-code-movement” is about. It's like helping non-experts be able to do more than they can on their own. So decentralize everything again.
Rule 4: Humanize everything you can
The fourth rule is to humanize everything you can. Which is now again like “wait, you said automate everything and now humanize?” But again, it's not that these things are as incompatible as they sound. It's like you want to automate the things that can be automated. Part of why you're doing that is because you want to free up human time to really be able to intervene in the interaction, whether it's collaborations inside our organization, helping customers, or working with partners. Really make sure that the human element, you know, remains front and center. I mean, we've got some wonderful automation and algorithm and AI fun stuff that lets us do all sorts of cool things. But they don't yet have the intelligence of the empathy around “okay, so how do we make this human both for our employees and for our customers?” And that's really a mission that, you know, the marketing leader needs to take to heart.
Rule 5: Embrace continuous change
And then the fifth rule, to throw one more thing on the pile. The last rule is embrace continuous change. Because however you define what you're doing in those other four rules this year, you can be pretty much guaranteed that the next year, and the year after that, there's going to be new changes in the market. There's going to be new changes in technology. You're going to need to enter a phase where you're just continually adapt and evolving.
Jakob: Another thing I was thinking about going forward in the complex world and with automation… How do you see the intersection between marketing departments and external agencies going forward the coming years? What do you see in trends and where do you draw the lines? How should we think about these things?
Scott: Yeah, that’s a big question actually. So, I feel like two things are true. Alright, so today I'm apparently going to be all about contradictions. So, I feel the situation for agencies in many ways is dealing with two contradictions:
1. One piece of the contradiction is that the old model in which most of the agency universe managed itself was through advertising, media placements and commissions on media placements. And for all practical purposes, that world is decimated. It's not that we don't do advertising or we don't do media placements, but the economic links of how that works now is, yeah, it just can't sustain the sort of creative power. You know that agencies basically use that economic model to be able to justify all sorts of incredible work. So on one hand it's been a huge problem for the agency ecosystem overall.
2. The good news on the other side of this is that you talk to marketers. They are in more need of help today than ever in the entire history of marketing. There are so many things going on. Part of is it just even understanding what's possible. But you know when you understand what's possible, there's all these aspects of what we need to do. Whether it's building up certain capabilities or executing certain projects. The way we think now, you know, it's much larger than advertising campaigns. It's all these things around like, you know, really experience campaigns that might have advertising elements to them. But they impact the website, mobile apps, when we're engaging people on social channels… it's huge. So there has never been more opportunity, but because that opportunity is happening at a time too when the economic models of, you know, how do agencies charge for this? How do they build equity in their businesses? It's still being sorted out. Some agencies are figuring this out beautifully and doing well. I think others are on the path but still trying to struggle with that shift from one phase to another. So yeah, I I remain very bullish on the agency ecosystem as a whole, but I think it is a very challenging time for agencies to like map out and define their particular business.
Jakob: And do you have any thoughts about where you see spaces where agencies might explore? Where we haven’t seen typical agency work before versus where we see them vanish, and where we traditionally have had a lot of business for agencies. Do you see any trends in these areas?
Scott: Yeah well, we can talk about some of the services that are relatively new that it becomes so valuable. For instance, the data analysis side that we were talking about here. You know, there is now so much data that is available around marketing campaigns and marketing programs. But still for a lot of businesses that just don't have the experience or the internal resources to even really be able to dig into that and to like craft new campaigns and new program in a way that are really designed not only to leverage that data, but then to collect new data that feeds into making those models over time. So that whole field has so much opportunity.
Certainly the the building of web experiences and mobile apps, you know, a lot of agencies have sort of moved into that already. But that's still a huge area. I mean, like the sophistication of the modern website just continues, the bar continues to raise. But, you know, I also see companies work that we used to consider in the domain of system integrators, like, “oh, okay, how do I get these different components in my stack to work together? Is there some custom software that I want to layer on top of that that's unique to my business?” These are things that traditionally, marketing agencies, it was just not a part of their world at all. But today that's a huge part and I actually think it’s interesting that you see this competition now, particularly at the highest levels of an organization: between traditional marketing agencies, management consultancies — like the McKinseys and whatnot of the world — and then the system integrators like the Accentures and whatnot. You never would have thought of these three kinds of companies competing, like, 10 or 20 years ago. It was a completely different business. They have nothing to do with each other. Today they are all sort of dancing around like “how do we help companies really thrive in this new digital environment?” So those are all opportunities.
To be honest, I think out of the group I am kind of betting on the marketing agencies because I think what they have, uniquely relative to those competitors, is that deep history and practice of understanding the customer. In management consulting, no offense to them, is a very internal thing. Systems integrators, no offense to them, but also again a very internal focus and culture. Marketing agencies were always the ones who are like, yeah, let's understand the customer, and so I think that is a very powerful culture to wield in competing in this space.
”…these are things that traditionally marketing agencies…It was just not a part of their world at all”
If you would like to learn more about Scott and his projects, you can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn, his HubSpot blog or check out his website Chiefmartec. You can also listen to the full podcast episode here. In December 2021 we hosted our annual event MarTech Day where Scott was the keynote speaker and talked more about these new rules of marketing technology. Get access to the on demand version of the event for free by clicking here.
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