As we hit the big 1-0, we look back at how Marketing Automation has changed over the last 10 years and how, subsequently, we’ve changed as a business.
What started out as 4 people around a kitchen table 10 years ago, has grown to a 50+ team of multi-certified Marketing Technology experts, reaching new heights as Marketo’s International Partner of the Year for 2018 and a 2-Star Accredited Best Company to Work For.
So, what’s changed in that time? And how have we at CleverTouch adapted with it?
10 Years of Marketing Automation
Back in 2009, Marketing Automation (MA) was a largely unknown discipline adopted by just a few innovators and technology companies. Now it is an established as a fundamental marketing technology and the giant of MarTech alongside CMS and CRM platforms.
As the market’s adoption of MA has evolved, it has matured from a technology for digitally savvy tech firms to reaching global enterprise adoption and mature users across all industries. We are now even seeing its adoption by Luxury B2C Brands and those looking for lifetime customer value.
10 years’ ago, MA was all about filling the funnel and demand generation. Now, it is focused on nurturing relationships, customer experience (CX), preference management, compliance and GDPR.
For the platform pioneers, Marketing Automation is extending its reach to new initiatives such as client and staff onboarding, customer satisfaction, NPS programs, business intelligence and ABM – something we recently covered in our new State of Marketing Automation Report.
Today, businesses rightly want to bring their Marketing Automation skills in-house, but face a scarcity of competent skills - a War For Talent in the job market exists. To stay ahead of the ever-changing digital and CX landscape, businesses are looking to develop hybrid models of in-house training and development and partial outsourcing to competent MA partners.
10 Years of CleverTouch Consulting
CleverTouch first started out within the technology industry, helping a small number of clients drive lead and demand generation through their MA platforms.
Today, our client base extends across a diverse range of industries within the UK and EMEA – from small businesses to global enterprise corporations like Fujitsu, VMWare and PayPal.
We still see huge growth and opportunity ahead despite more and more companies entering the MarTech and MA consultancy space. And as the SAAS market evolves we see an increasing part of our revenues coming from Software to support our services capability.
In the last year alone, we’ve seen fantastic performance across the business.
- New clients joined the CleverTouch community including the Financial Times, Adecco Group & Robert Walters.
- Marketo recognised us as their inaugural International Partner of the Year… beating off 15 other contenders in the process.
- … and we became a 2-Star Accredited Best Company to Work for, just a whisker away from the top 3-Star award, in our first year of applying!
Across the innovation side of the business – DevLab – we noted a few ‘world firsts’ for our own software development.
We launched the world’s first Simplification Suite – Momentum – to drive richer adoption and MA platform usage. This was shortly followed by the Pardot Data Extractor, aimed at helping Salesforce users extract rich data and reporting. And finally, we launched the Simple Event Manager designed to simplify on-the-day event management and processing.
It’s exciting to see our software now being used by the likes of Fujitsu, London Stock Exchange and VMWare – and where we can take these opportunities as the business continues to grow.
Where do we go from here?
We will be carrying out the first stages of ‘Project Utopia’ (our mission to continually make the CleverTouch office and culture an invigorating and enticing place to work) with the purchase of our new offices. 15,000 square feet of MA and digital thinking.
And finally, our focus on services and software development will continue to grow and evolve as we introduce more technologies around the three key pillars of MarTech – Integration, Simplification and Intelligence.
