CMO’s Rapidly Evolving Toolkit

More than ever before, today’s chief marketing officer has exciting new tools to drive digital marketing campaigns and a seemingly endless list of vendors from which to choose.  Modern software toolkits and SaaS models help deliver speed, agility and simplicity of development with the cloud as a major enabler. One of those emerging and increasingly essential tools is mobile application marketing.  Enterprises will increasingly need to create and launch new mobile applications with rapid “get-to-market” programs and will need to integrate these with multiple backend sources. Companies will be spending more and more money to drive new user and existing user engagement in mobile and the rate of innovation in mobile marketing is accelerating at lightning speed, compared to developments on the wired web.

IT departments are going to struggle to keep up as marketing organizations are now able to choose from inexpensive-to-acquire and easy-to-deploy mobile marketing toolkits that are quick to implement with rapid ROI.  Companies will see mobile as a must have, and may even shift to a mobile first strategy at which point they have to evolve their thinking around mobile acquisition and retention.

After a number of big deals in the larger digital marketing space – Oracle buying Eloqua (9.7x revenue), Salesforce.com buying Exact Target (7.6x revenue) and the recently announced Adobe buying Neolane (8.6x revenue), we expect the focus to shift to a buying spree of some of the emerging technologies – led by mobile marking applications.