Who Are The Marketing Technology Three-Percenters?

The results are in. And they are grim.

A new study from the CMO Council finds that, while 30 percent of the CMOs who manage and integrate technology into their overall marketing strategy are experiencing tangible business results, only three percent of the survey respondents reported that they were doing extremely well at integrating marketing technologies (MarTech) across functions.

The survey compiled results from conversations with 150 senior marketing executives for a report (and subsequent webinar) called “Quantify How Well You Unify.” The 38-page report was designed to discover how well CMOs unify digital systems and the success they are seeing from such unification.

As we all know, true marketing technologists are rarer than unicorns. But 3%?! It is possible CMOs are simply being humble. But more likely, the true potential of marketing technology is still being discovered. How will your marketing team find the gaps, pivot and get to market unscathed?

This study has us asking: How do you become a Marketing Technology ‘Three-Percenter’? How do you become one of those marketers so comfortable in their abilities that they are ready to shout it from the rooftops? Addressing the issues below is a good place to start. Continue reading →

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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The Marketing Technology Office

Perils Of Open Source Software

We here at Kanban love Open Source code and attempt to use it wherever possible. This is much easier on the frontend (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) than it is on the backend (Depending on your platform of course). In almost every frontend project we have worked on we have automatically included one Open Source JavaScript library: jQuery.

In a recent project, one of our goals was to speed up page load & rendering time on the product listing and detail pages (The product detail page used to take 15 seconds to render). One way to do this is to dynamically load in data/DOM only when it is needed. Doing so either required the backend to learn how to render data for each section separately, or to use frontend templates. With the particular backend system we are using, making it learn how to render each section individually would not be worth the effort, so we settled on jQuery Templates_[1].

Even though it was in beta, it was being officially backed by the jQuery team and Microsoft. Though we understood that beta software would have bugs, it was an acceptable risk.

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The Marketing Technology Office

Delivery Best Practice: Single Comment Repository

This is Part 1 in a series on Kanban’s delivery best practices.

Much of a project manager’s job requires a wrangling of tiny details. The more complexity there is in the design, the more details will come out over the entire course of the project. Every touch point adds to our understanding of how the client expects their functionality to work.

Some project managers keep a record of everything that occurs in every meeting. This serves a CYA purpose, but it can create too much documentation to take action on. A comment repository only tracks decisions and remarks about the functionality of what is being built. We use it for creating and updating our functional specs and for refining our QA test scripts.

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Insights, The Marketing Technology Office

POV: Six Principles of a Software Development Process

Kanban development process ensures that the enterprise software it develops is robust, reliable, and bug-free. The following six key principles of Kanban’s software development process are core to our engineering and software architecture philosophy.

Design Patterns and Object-Oriented Design

Kanban emphasizes the importance of solid object-oriented design though the implementation of design patterns. Object-oriented design helps architects to map a software system’s required behavior to structures or objects within that system and to define how those objects will communicate. This promotes greater flexibility and maintainability of the software. Software architects familiar with design patterns can easily identify recurring problems and their corresponding solutions. Object-oriented design and programming enables the reuse of those solutions and avoids the duplication of effort by system architects and developers.