Peter O’Neill says, “At last October’s B2B Marketing Forum,Ryan Skinner, senior analyst at Forrester, delivered one of the more resounding messages — and gave us a serious wake-up call on our content marketing work to date. He told us, “Too much, not enough quality.” And our greatest quality issue is in our content distribution strategies. This is indeed a serious challenge for B2B marketing organizations, which spend an average of 12% of their budgets on content marketing. We dedicate three times as much headcount to this as our cousins in consumer marketing. But Forrester’s... [...]

Emily Collins says, “In the realm of multichannel customer communications, email is still king. It’s the easiest to send, it’s inexpensive and it’s the channel on which most marketers rely to connect with all kinds of customers. Email marketing is ingrained and inexpensive, but as a result, many marketers abuse it, defaulting to a routine batch-and-blast approach. In 2015 alone, U.S. online users received 3.7 trillion emails. Today’s email practices fail loyal customers because they treat everyone the same way and struggle to deliver basic relevance. Over-emailing is a persistent... [...]

Kristopher Arcand says, “Customer service departments in all industries are increasing their use of chatbots, and we will see usage rise even higher in the next year as companies continue to pilot or launch their own versions of the rule-based digital assistant. What are chatbots? Forrester defines them as autonomous applications that help users complete tasks through conversation. While Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data reveals that 60% of US online adults already use online messaging, voice, or video chat services, there are challenges to widespread adoption. We reached out... [...]

Jessica Liu says, “Much ink has been spilled over United Airlines’ latest public incident and social media’s role in rapidly spreading video of a passenger being dragged off an airplane. Today’s consumers are more polarized than ever and increasingly expressing their opinions and showing their own values in the way they spend their money. Brands worry about making missteps on social media and falling out of favor, prompting them to ask: “How can my brand respond to a social crisis?” In reality, the question they should be asking is: “How can my brand plan... [...]

Xiaofeng Wang says, “Forrester predicts that the future of mobile wallets will go far beyond mobile payments. In the West, this vision is still a work in progress. However, Chinese digital juggernauts Alipay and WeChat have morphed their mobile wallets into rich customer engagement platforms. My latest report, “Engage Customers With Mobile Wallet Marketing,” tells what global players can learn from Asia’s digital leaders. Alipay and WeChat show marketers the future of mobile wallets. While mainstream Western mobile wallets primarily focus on payments, pioneer mobile wallets in China... [...]

Milan Hanson says, “The Earl of Greystoke would have grown up in an idyllic English manor, sipping tea and munching on clotted cream biscuits, were it not for a rather unfortunate turn of events that left him orphaned in equatorial Africa, being raised by a she-ape. At the heart of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of Tarzan, which have captivated audiences for over 100 years, lies an elemental question: what makes us who we are – nature or nurture? In my last blog post (Marketing’s Dirty Little Secret), I discussed the biology of behavior and how we are wired to ride the express-lane... [...]

Milan Hanson says, “Back when I worked in I&O we weren’t very popular. Not personally, mind you, but as a team. Why? Because we seldom satisfied user requests quickly, and sometimes not at all.  We were the defenders of stability, resistant to change.  Just maintaining the technology every day – “keeping the lights on” – took a lot of manual effort.  We chased down a lot of defects, and then we struggled to get fixes created and put into production. Sometimes the fix created a worse problem. It wasn’t a lot of fun, the pressure was grueling, and one by one we moved... [...]

Peter O’Neill says, “Sick of scouring sector landscapes with thousands of vendor logos organized into loosely defined categories?  I mean, do you really need to know the names of scores of predictive analytics vendors out there? What’s the total Martech ecosystem going to tally this year – 7000+ vendors? Actually, yes. Yes it is. As my colleague Joe Stanhope wrote in a recent blog: “it’s hard to remember a time when there was such an unhealthy and unsustainable technology ecosystem.” At Forrester, we’ve covered marketing technology and the now overused term – “left-brained... [...]

Collin Colburn says, “If you’ve been following Forrester’s search marketing research over the past few years, you’d know that we talk a lot about search marketing evolving to a broader discovery marketing strategy. As a refresher: a discovery marketer creates programs that help users find your brand in their preferred medium and during their moment of need. Some marketers, especially retailers, have begun to take on this new and challenging charter and are looking to new channels and websites to increase their discoverability. Enter: Amazon, Google’s newest, and biggest,... [...]

Reineke Reitsma says, “Australians are often seen as laid-back, taking things as they come. However, this doesn’t translate to their need for great customer experience. When we analyzed the Australian results of Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™), we found that the vast majority of companies in Australia are still providing only mediocre CX. In his report “The Australia Customer Experience Index, 2016,” my colleague Tom Champion shows how companies in more CX-mature markets in North America and Europe have turned their attention toward making positive emotional connections... [...]