TechBytes with Kevin Cochrane, SVP of Product Marketing, Acquia

Tell us about the Martech consolidation and compliance goals for 2021.

More than ever, marketing and IT leaders need to navigate not only accelerating demands for digital transformation but also the ever-changing regulatory requirements around consumer data protection and privacy.  This is a further accelerant to the need to consolidate the number of vendors in a company’s martech stack, and there will be an unprecedented collaboration between the CISO and the CMO around the proper use of customer data.

The CDP wars have begun. Where is the CDP industry heading in 2021?

In the past 10 years, marketers made the shift from brand marketing to demand marketing. In 2021, marketers will be focused on customer retention, loyalty, and lifetime value. Today’s marketers are in the midst of a new shift: revenue marketing.  To make this shift and drive customer lifetime value, marketers will need to analyze the data within CDPs, leveraging AI to optimize the experience and drive revenue. CDP isn’t just about having a consolidated profile alone. 2021 will be the year marketers realize the value of theCDP to drive revenue and make predictions on how to optimize CX.

Tell us more about the relationship between IT and Open Marketing.

Synonymous with open, composable architecture provides marketers the ability to take an integrated approach to rapidly assemble their marketing tools, data and content to compose a digital platform. Gartner Research predicts, “By 2023, organizations that have adopted a Composable Commerce approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.”  Similarly, enterprise IT will compose business services, a move that’s starting to take place as organizations adopt cloud, API-first and headless technology. Buyers – whether marketing or IT – will need to adopt this strategy in order to compose multichannel digital experiences, and move beyond ease-of-use thinking to ask if this approach is driving revenue.

Thank you for answering all our questions!