Is innovation on your roadmap?: Wednesday’s Daily Brief

MarTech’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s digital marketing leader. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, is innovation on your roadmap?

Setting in place a strategy around innovation helps get different teams within your organization onboard. This tip, and many others, you’ll find from our writeup of a talk delivered by CX software company Bounteous, below. As digital transformation advances within an organization, people become more important than individual new tools you add to the stack. But of course, people also start the ball rolling to begin with.

Vendor roadmaps help marketers too and those who cover the space to see what innovations are on the horizon. As our editorial director Kim Davis observes, a little further down, Twilio’s acquisition of customer data infrastructure solution Segment last year, got the ball rolling for its customer engagement platform Twilio Engage.

Chris Wood,

Editor

Innovation through marketing technology  

“Leading companies will win digitally by continually innovating brand experiences that drive transformative results,” said Dave Mankowski, Chief Growth Officer for CX software company Bounteous, at our recent MarTech conference.

Many of these digital wins don’t come easy though. In Mankowski’s experience, he sees that innovation often comes slower than expected. Signs of a slow transformation can be seen even in the retail industry overall, where only 20% of retail is done digitally through ecommerce.

Both challenges to innovation and opportunities to advance it do exist within the organizational structure, however, and it’s up to marketers to understand the key drivers to get a transformational win.

“You can get transformational results by doing things better — by unlocking the potential that already exists within the enterprise,” said Mankowski.

“It’s not that companies are moving too early at this point, and it’s not because there’s not great potential for results,” he explained.

When a company has decided to invest in new technology, for example, failure or success can hinge on avoiding the following mistakes. 

Read more here.

Microsoft acquires iPaaS and business process solutions company

Microsoft has announced that it has acquired iPaaS and business process solutions company Clear Software. Microsoft customers who build their own business solutions with Microsoft Power Platform are expected to gain from stronger integration with outside systems as a result of the deal.

Clear Software will help Microsoft Power Platform users by providing strong connectivity into SAP and Oracle.

Adding Clear Software’s API access will strengthen and accelerate how customers use data and processes beyond Microsoft’s first-party services.

Why we care. Microsoft’s enterprise business customers, and their marketing organizations, obviously would like the most flexibility they can have with developing their own business applications and solutions. By adding Oracle and SAP integrations into the mix through this acquisition, the Microsoft Power Platform gives itself a shot at remaining relevant and useful to enterprises looking to maximize their data-driven business insights.

Read more here.

Twilio launches new automation platform  

Twilio, the customer communications service company, has announced the launch of a new component of its Customer Engagement Platform, Twilio Engage. The latest offering adds a marketing engine to Twilio’s existing Twilio Frontline for sales and Twilio Flex for customer service.

Twilio Engage leverages the capabilities of Segment, the customer data infrastructure solution which Twilio picked up for $3.2 billion last October. In addition to aggregating real-time insights into customer behavior, Twilio Engage will allow marketers to build micro-audiences and deliver personalized experiences to a wide range of channels through Twilio’s communications APIs.

Why we care. Two reasons. First, it’s interesting to watch Twilio building out its capabilities as a customer experience suite that is authentically omnichannel-first rather than email/website first with other channels added.

Secondly, the structure here echoes Real Story Group’s distinction between process-oriented and engagement-oriented CDPs with Segment acting as the customer data infrastructure part of the puzzle here, rather than being used for orchestration. 

Read more here.

Quote of the day

“On social media build trust by: 1) following up; 2) following through.” Gabriela Cardoza, corporate and personal brand consultant