The future of enterprise experience management

We are approaching a tipping point in marketing technology. While the vendor landscape becomes more fragmented, best practice architectures and operating models are starting to standardise. As the industry begins to adopt common architectures, common operating models and common interfaces, technologies are becoming more interchangeable, more standardised, and more configurable. Greater standardisation means there’s less need to develop a bespoke technology stack to fit your organisation.

Marketers are here to manage the essential ‘P’s of marketing, not operating technology stacks. But in recent years, marketing teams have become focused on execution rather than strategy. We’ve become absorbed with ‘doing things right’ in favour of ‘doing the right things’. More standardised marketing technology architectures and operating models will change all of that. Instead of trying to own their own stacks, marketers will be concerned with having access to a robust and reliable ‘experience factory’ that can turn their marketing initiatives into reality. Instead of paying for the inputs, such as developer or designer days, marketers will be able to pay for measurable outcomes such as customers engaged, journeys completed, conversions made, and revenue realised. This is the ‘experience-as-a-service’ model. The differentiator is not the technology but the end to end process and the automation enabling intelligent execution at the scale and speed needed to personalise across any channel.

As a marketer you’ll no longer need to specify every element of a piece of marketing activity. You’ll be free to focus on specifying the audience, business rules and the desired outcomes. The experience factory will use data and insight to optimise your message, channel selection, content, design, and orchestration. It can even model your specifications and suggest how it could be optimised.

The ‘full-service’ claim often means the ability to do many things exists in one place but they sit in siloed teams within the agency. Typically, the work is managed through manual processes, and sometimes involves overlapping effort. In the as-a-service model, the workflow, governance, and measurement are transparent, and many parts of the process are automated. You gain the benefit of a best practice operating model that’s being continuously optimised. You can also plug your own internal teams or third-party agencies into the same model without breaking the process. Experience-as-a-service should make marketing faster, more automated, and more effective in a way that throwing bodies at the problem doesn’t today.