7 Ways To Tell If Tag Management Solutions Are Right For Your Business

Kanban Tag Management Solutions

Every year, new marketing technology products enter the market. Some products fade fast, while others fill a marketing need and grow into their own. From analytics to ecommerce to A/B testing, marketing and ebusiness products and tools have become more prevalent and pervasive than ever, making the modern marketer’s technology stack an unwieldy web of code and interconnected, yet distinct software products.

Many of these marketing systems employ tags–a generic term for metadata, HTML and JavaScript–to integrate into your site code. These tags are typically the event messenger between the marketing systems and your website. Do you use site analytics, testing, personalization, video, surveys, ad networks, display media, social sharing, chat or paid search? Then you have tags, and plenty of them.

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Experience Optimization, Insights

Adaptive vs Responsive Web Design

The proliferation of devices available today has created a lot of discussion about how to build websites for those devices. It has also created confusion about the two leading approaches of website design: Adaptive and Responsive. Both are very powerful tools in modern web design that have their own purpose, but they are not the same!

Mobile websites used to be simple. Ten years ago, you created a separate WAP site for phones. More recently, a slew of mobile-only platforms supported phones. Today, it is no longer a question about serving a site to a phone. There is now a complicated combination of screen sizes, interaction models and resolutions across devices ranging from phones, phablets and tablets to laptops, large monitors and TVs. Soon, target devices will be complicated further by the Internet of Things. Everything from a car to a refrigerator will have a browser. Each device will have a different pixel density, interaction model, screen size, resolution and aspect ratio.

Screen Dimensions Responsive Web Design Graph

Figure 1 Web Trends Report Q2, NetBiscuits, 2014

Even within the traditional mobile market, devices vary greatly. Optimizing for an inexpensive smart phone supporting 800 pixels will provide a poor experience on new smart phone with a 1980-pixel screen resolution. A tablet–often considered mobile–renders desktop sites better than mobile versions. Furthermore, what defines mobile? Is a convertible laptop considered a mobile device or desktop computer? Continue reading →

Insights, System Integration

Unicorns, Tools & Innovation! The Marketing Technology Revolution

Marketing Technology At Kanban--Rare & Beautiful!

The platitudes and statistics are well-known and oft-quoted:

67% of companies are increasing marketing tech spend, according to Gartner.

Five of the top ten CEO priorities are focused on marketing technology.

And according to a recent eConsultancy survey, nearly 75% of participating companies had either just completed, were planning or were in the midst of completing a commerce technology overhaul.

But out of all the statistics surrounding the increasing unification of marketing and technology, perhaps the most compelling comes from a recent research report by Laura McLellan of Gartner. Within large companies — more than $500 million in annual revenue — 81% of them now have a chief marketing technologist role, up from 71% just a year ago. Another 8% expect to add that role within the next 24 months.

In Boston just last month, the conversation around infusing long-held principals of marketing and technology into one discipline with similar goals and challenges continued with the MarTech 2014 conference. MarTech is the first conference to focus exclusively on marketing technologies, corporate change management, org structures and even how to acquire or grow talent for the new marketing reality. Organized by Scott Brinker, a leading evangelist for today’s marketing technologist, the conference focused on tools, innovation and unicorns.

Yes, unicorns.

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