Micro-Marketing Services will accelerate growth for agile marketing teams

Matt Miller, partner at Sequoia Capital, recently penned an op-ed titled “Innovate or Die: The Rise of Microservices” where he describes a new software engineering paradigm of microservices, “an approach where large applications are broken down into small, loosely coupled and composable autonomous pieces,” that are radically changing how software is built, deployed, and maintained.

While web-scale companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have been running microservices for years, three key technology developments are facilitating the current mass adoption in companies large and small:

1. Containers (standardization of services that simplifies the often difficult integration process in software infrastructure — e.g. Docker)
2. APIs (“application programming interfaces” that help facilitate integration between otherwise distinct applications — e.g. REST, JSON)
3. Scalable cloud infrastructure (Cloud Service Providers, have aggressively cut the costs of their computing platforms — e.g. AWS, Google Compute)

These developments, however, are not limited to engineering and IT teams.

It’s been well documented that online marketing is not only changing; the change is accelerating. CMOs and their teams are working in overdrive to uncover and exploit new tactics to give them an advantage in acquiring new customers and retaining their existing ones. At the same time, the lifecycle of effective marketing channels is decreasing as each channel becomes saturated at an ever increasing pace.

Established channels like SEO, Email, Facebook, Display are undergoing substantial structural changes. Nascent channels like messaging apps, Instagram, and Product Hunt have created new distribution opportunities. Pinterest & Snapchat are beginning to monetize their services by opening up to advertisers (both services already provide ample organic reach.) The re-emergence of podcasts, promise of VR, and more will provide marketers continually refreshing green fields to sow for prospects.

“The lifecycle of marketing channels is accelerating. It’s good to understand that every successful channel is a dying channel” — Peter van Sabben

To succeed in an environment of rapid change, marketers must adopt a growth mentality, an agile processes to guide their workflow, and effectively utilize the latest technologies and tools. Mozilla CMO, Jascha Kaykas-Wolff captures this sentiment:

“Marketing and innovating for new opportunities is a series of adjustments to many small failures, where even a 5% success rate could be considered an A+, not 90% or better!”

Legacy marketing suites have long promised integrated tools to allow marketing teams to unify their analytics, a/b testing, marketing automation, and reporting under one banner. The promises of unified data and seamless integrations are often oversold by enterprise salespeople and leave marketing teams in rigid systems unable to adapt.

Enter Micro-Marketing Services.

Micro-Marketing Services are beginning to see widespread adoption inside marketing teams thanks to similar technology developments as their neighbors in engineering.

1. Tag Managers: Any developer who’s been tasked with “tagging” their website or product has felt the pain associated with instrumenting analytics and other marketing code. Active demand generation teams fill backlogs of tasks for their dev teams who spend hours placing, testing, and removing tracking pixels and other custom code for every new service, ad-network, and marketing tool that comes along. Google Tag Manager, Tealium, and Segment work like Docker containers for marketers and simply the integration process.
2. APIs: Marketing services and applications have lagged behind engineering tools with public APIs; but have recently begun to catch up with major players like Optimizely opening up APIs to allow developers to turn what began as a simple A/B testing platform into a delivery tool for personalized content tailored to users’ customizable attributes. Other tools like Zapier allow marketers to string together services that wouldn’t be able to otherwise connect.
3. Data Warehouses: Large enterprises commit substantial time and money to centralize data from multiple systems to establish a “single source of truth” for customer records. New services like Lytics‘ Customer Data Platform or Looker provide a repository of customer data like email, web, and social to create real-time profiles of your users. This data can be segmented, parsed, analyzed, and acted-upon by marketers or business analysts that doesn’t require teams of developers, data-scientists, or IT specialists to implement.

Legacy enterprise technology providers must change how they build and deliver software or they will be eclipsed by their more nimble startup competitors. They will have to stop selling a nebulously defined “Product Cloud” and instead begin to offer distinct apps; much like Facebook has broken out Messenger and maintains separate, distinct identities for Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp in an app constellation.

Marketing teams are already doing this, often going around their in-house procurement departments and paying for many of these services with corporate credit cards (as individual services are often in the $50–500 a month price range and are under the limits required of purchase orders.)

Micro-Marketing Services are further enabling marketing organizations to be more agile and adapt to the latest changes in customers’ product research, evaulation, buying, and using behavior. Marketers must utilize growth frameworks like Agile Marketing to provide structure for their experimentation to continually innovate with their use of tactics & technology or be left behind by their competition.