The reinvention of the marketer is the theme at the Adobe Summit Digital Marketing Conference in Salt Lake City this week. And reinvention means taking risks — calculated risks, at least.
Even the star of the day, actor Robert Redford, told the audience at the Salt Palace Convention Center that “not taking a risk is a risk.”
So how does reinvention occur?
In his keynote address this morning, John Mellor, vice president of Strategy and Digital Marketing for Adobe, said the right people, processes and products are the keys to success in digital marketing.
“You need people with the skills in digital marketing, but also with the desire to reinvent themselves,” Mellor said.
The People Challenge
But it's not always easy finding those people, summit attendees told CMSWire after the keynote. Organizations may purchase a tool like Adobe Experience Manager or other marketing cloud solution only to find they don’t have the right people with the right skill sets to implement it.
Jacob Tripple, business development director for global alliances at The Nerdery, spends a lot of time helping marketers implement new software technologies like Adobe and others. He said he sees the “people” issue all the time: organizations not setting themselves up for success with a platform because of a lack of people with skills.
Mellor said it is crucial to attract the right people into the organization to help drive what he calls “marketing maturity.”
But even with the right people, Tripple said organizations are often overwhelmed with 10 to 15 different tools, none of which “talk to each other.” Marketers are “sitting there with all these different tools trying to extract data,” he said, and, eventually, the question comes from senior leadership: What are we doing with all these tools?
What’s Most Important?
CMSWire asked Flipkart senior analytics manager Pravin Shinde how Mellor’s talk relates to digital marketing organizations. Ranking them in order of importance, Shinde told CMSWire success relates to people first, then products and processes.
To make sure his team has the right analytics people in place, his organization trains new analytics engineers for three to six months. Every marketer, he added, should have analytics capabilities rather than relying on the analytics team for everything.
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Knowing the Facts
As Adobe’s Mellor said today, people, products and processes are the things “that we see drive our organizations or create drag. They drive us or drive us nuts. There are things know we can do better at.”
And becoming better means knowing the facts. What tools work best for you, what processes will enhance communication between digital marketing teams and the rest of the organization and what people you need to have under your roof.
Seattle Seahawks defender Richard Sherman at Wednesday's Adobe Summit Digital Marketing Conference. Photo courtesy of Adobe.
Executives like facts, and facts are important, as Seattle Seahawks football player Richard Sherman said today.
After his team won the National Football Conference championship over the San Francisco 49ers earlier this year, Sherman, on national TV, called out a 49ers receiver he covered during the contest. "I'm the best corner in the game,” Sherman said. “When you try me with a sorry receiver like (Michael) Crabtree, that's the result you're going to get."
At the Adobe Summit, Sherman said of those comments, “I had evidence to back it up. If you present facts they can’t argue.”
CMSWire is onsite from Salt Lake City covering the Adobe Summit Digital Marketing Conference. For any news or tips, contact us @cmswire or @domnicastro. Check out our prior coverage: