This poses a serious challenge for us in the marketing space. And it’s being realized across the entire industry.

“A Q1 ‘17 survey by CMO Council and Redpoint Global revealed only 3% of respondents felt all of their automation, engagement and deployment tools were fully connected, with data, metrics and insights traveling freely between different technologies.” (Source)

It’s an alarming statistic, but not surprising. With so many solutions, there is an incredible opportunity to be more thoughtful in our approach to the design, organization, and management of our marketing stack. Let’s look at a few realities that will move us from not-so-managed to managed-magic.

Open Strategy: What does your marketing technology strategy look like? Is it focused on doing whatever is necessary to delight the customer? Or is it limited by what your technology allows it to do? If your strategy is not open to allow you to take unique and innovative approaches to connecting with your customer, then you should reconsider your approach.

Narrow Focus: With over 5,000 technology solutions it can feel like a daunting task to take an open strategy then narrow your focus. But this focus is not where you think it might be. The focus should be on your customers and associates. Clearly defining your marketing strategy with an open architecture, will allow your teams to take ownership of their place in the customer journey. This enables them to be hyper-focused on improving their processes and workflows and bringing value at each stage.

Manage Many: Regardless of the size of your business, effectively managing multiple technologies can warrant additional time and/or resources. With literally thousands of technologies to help organizations execute on their marketing strategy, it will require proper management to effectively deliver your brand message and promise.

Every business is at a different stage of marketing stack development. Some have had solutions for years and are currently reviewing how each improves their customer journey. Others are flexible enough to make changes to their stack to prepare it for the future of open marketing. Organizations that are successful will be able to address each of these realities in a way that meets the needs of the business and creates a meaningful brand experience.

Recently, Mautic announced the addition of Maestro. It offers powerful reporting capabilities, gives users more visibility into the success of initiatives across their entire business in a single dashboard. Companies can freely clone campaigns from other internal teams, and agencies can see a rolled-up view of campaign performance across all their clients. Regardless of your business, a holistic view of this data makes all teams and marketing initiatives more effective.

Working with both self-hosted and Mautic Cloud accounts, Maestro enables all Mautic users to clone campaigns across all their Mautic accounts. It also provides a single, unified view of all your campaign metrics, giving users the ability to understand marketing’s full impact on the business.

To get more information on Maestro and to learn how it can help you manage all your Mautic Marketing Automation accounts, click here!

As I reflect on that post, we find ourselves meeting and in many cases exceeding our expectations. We are indeed meeting the needs of small businesses, adding incredible features and gaining access to bigger markets. But this has not happened without the incredible support from our community.

With every update, we see individual names of people who are making incredible contributions to Mautic. Every time I survey the forums or Slack, there are passionate, driven people who have dedicated themselves to see this community and solution grow.

But this growth hasn’t been without it’s challenges. Developing a feature rich solution that meets the demands of a growing industry, while tackling the many bugs that gets in the way, can be trying. But we are as committed as ever to listening to you, responding to your needs and exceeding user expectations, every step of the way.

It’s clear to us that real focus is needed in the community. This is simply a reality of our rapid growth. We realize that more resources are needed to bring value, while creating a place where each member is represented and recognized.

To that end, I’ve been asked to lead the community management effort at Mautic. Since I began working at Mautic over a year ago, I’ve been working in a number of capacities, but have developed a real passion for engaging our community and fostering relationships that connect people to value, while equipping them to add their own.

There are a number of key growth areas that we’d like to tackle in the near term. But in order to be successful, it requires input and support from the entire community. To that end, we will be reaching out in a focused way to solicit that feedback regarding these areas soon. They include;

• Forums: One of the ways we engage as a community is by connecting with one another via our forums. Unfortunately the existing forum application limits us from accomplishing other things like recognizing contributors, up-voting specific problems and so much more. We’d like to explore other tools that will bring even more value to the community in this area.
• Onboarding: This continues to be an area we’re excited about further developing. The current onboarding process is challenging at best, and we recognize it needs to be addressed. Our goal is to make every new user to Mautic feel supported while setting up, configuring and running their very first campaign. We’ll be taking steps to assess, review, edit and develop more succinct tools.
• Marketplace: A community’s strength is found in how it brings value to every member. We continue to believe that Mautic’s greatest strength is in it’s people. The ones who contribute value each and every day. Whether it’s answering a question, or solving a technical challenge, we believe that the value chain should be reciprocal. So we’ll be exploring ways to bring the marketplace to life this year.

I have reached out to many of you already in an effort to ensure that everyone that connects with Mautic, feels supported to grow their business. But if I haven’t connected with you, I’d like to say “hello” and please feel free to reach out to me (via Slack: @jseevers or email) and introduce yourself, or provide a comment below. I’ll be working diligently to bring content, process and structure to the work being done in and around our growing community.

I want to personally thank each and every one of you for how you have come alongside us, supporting users, sharing your experiences and adding value. We could not do what we do without the best people in the world in our community.

We’ve just begun. Be on the lookout, there are incredible things ahead!

For all industries and business segments that want to use personal data to enhance their own customer experiences, it’s important to remember that customers are willing to share their information if they know you are using it to help them get what they want… (Source)

The responsibility is on us, as organizations to provide value with the exchange of data. We must assure our customers that we not only see them, but we know about them; and there is a significant difference. It’s critical that we seek to understand their specific needs at every step of the buying journey, from desktop to mobile and everywhere in between.

No matter what innovations businesses set in front of consumers, and no matter how they try to serve them, customer expectations will accelerate. (Source)

In the latest release, you will not only have access to more powerful information, but you can create a more connected, value-driven experience. From integrations to more effective communication tools, you will be able to know more about your audience, not simply know them.

Integrations:

• Workflow Integrations: There are 4 new plugins to integrate data from Citrix into Mautic. These include GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToAssist and GoToTraining. You can now automatically create contacts in Mautic when individuals register for your events in the Citrix tools from form data in Mautic. In addition, you can pull registrant and attendee data back from the Citrix tools into Mautic and trigger campaigns based on this information. The registration and attendance data is also stored as part of the contact’s timeline in Mautic, giving you more information at a glance.
• Data Enhancement: Data enhancement tools like FullContact and ClearBit can now be integrated with Mautic. Users of these services can enhance their contact and company data in Mautic by clicking buttons on the contact (or company) and bringing data in from those services.
• Accounts Integration: Data from Salesforce Accounts can now be synched with Companies in Mautic. In addition we have optimized the API to minimize the number of API calls Mautic makes. Data from a new field type – formula fields – is also now available for mapping data between Salesforce and Mautic. Lastly Salesforce users can now access the timeline for the contact in Mautic by clicking on a link on the page in Salesforce.

Campaign Management:

• Preference Center: You can now collect preferences for your contacts in Mautic including preferred channels, categories, timings and segments. This will help you manage delivery of more relevant messages, using channels the contact prefers.
• Account Based Marketing Update: We have added a number of new features to Account Based Marketing. Companies in Mautic can now be merged; you now easily change the primary company on a contact; and you can apply a lead score at the company level. These features are in addition to a new set of reports that are available to measure performance at the company level.
• Global Categories: You can specify global categories across emails, landing pages, stages etc to categorize groups of entities in Mautic. You no longer need to define categories individually for each entity in Mautic, helping you stay organized and save you time.
• Email/Landing Page Builder: We’ve created an all new view for those who want to go under the hood and adjust HTML when developing emails and landing pages. The Content tab has been replaced with the new Code Mode view. This view will provide users with 2 panes in the Builder, one to edit the HTML directly and another to preview. Simply select Code Mode to start building, or to convert your existing communications into this view.

Each of these enhancements is another step toward smarter marketing. But with these tools come a greater responsibility to not only know our audience, but know their preferences and their needs as well.

The Mautic 2.3 update has been made available to our Mautic Cloud and Self-hosted users. For more detailed information on this release, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions, please be sure to reach out to us via the Community Forums, Slack or our social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will do our best to help.