Takeaways from the Marketing Technology Summit

photo via P. Gilbert

Valley technology and marketing professional learned at Thursday’s Marketing Technology Summit 2011 in Scottsdale, AZ about the benefits of using QR codes for marketing, how to get a brand’s fans more engaged online and how to align a company’s CRM strategies with online activities.

A packed room of nearly 400 people attended the afternoon conference, hosted by Arizona Tech Council and Business Marketing Association. The summit featured two panel sessions, one exploring insights and experiences about what’s working in digital and mobile marketing, and the other on trends in marketing automation for sales and marketing teams.

Panelists and speakers included Christina "CK" Kerley, a B2B marketing specialist, CKB2B; Bob Rinderle, communications manager for GE Healthcare; Laura M. Ramos, VP, Industry Marketing for Xerox Corporation; Brian E. Kardon, CMO for Eloqua; Greg Head, CMO for Infusionsoft, and John Kennedy, VP of Corporate Marketing, IBM.

There were insights for startups (differentiate your company from the competition, and use smart SEO tools) and benefits for using QR codes (helps at trade shows, cut down printing costs, and helps potential customers get to URLs quickly). While discussing trends in marketing automation, Eloqua’s Brian Kardon and Infusionsoft’s Greg Head reflected on the rapid changes in web marketing (‘an explosion in the available marketing tactics to reach people’), using more video marketing rather than text marketing, and how marketers should look at the idea that marketing technology *is* business transformation, not simply tool implementation.

Kennedy put across some details about IBM’s recent applications of its Watson computer; how technology is transforming IBM’s business systems and marketing processes, and how IBM is connecting their system processes together and promoting new initiatives with instrumentation, interconnectivity and intelligence.

Overall, the theme that seemed to resonate most during the summit was that online customers want interactions to be unique/personal, and that marketers are encouraged to manage these interactions with the advantage of new and smart technology tools. Indeed, the roomful of marketing pros seemed fully subscribed to this thinking.