Marketing Operations secures overall top spot

Marketers are at a turning point. Demands to accelerate growth are increasing. More data and sources of data are available through an explosion of channels, but those need to be translated into personalized customer journeys—and also translated into business results and ROI. No marketer (or their teams) can go it alone. The continued reliance on the right partners is critical.

Making the right choices at this turning point hinges on tapping into the power of partners who have evolved and kept ahead of the market. Traditional operations at scale are table stakes. Today’s marketers seek an end-to-end value chain across areas including creative production, media, customer experience management, commerce, design thinking and data science. Translating data into insights is critical. If marketers can’t get all this exactly right, any marketing activation will be in jeopardy.

One assessment of these partners has just been released: the Everest Group’s PEAK Matrix® Assessment 2022 for marketing services. We at Accenture are proud to have been named the overall leader, both in terms of vision & capability and market impact. We are also a leader in every geography assessed.

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Turning pain points into growth

I want to take a closer look at these Everest Group results, first placing them in the context of where marketers are especially challenged today. How can companies take advantage of the most effective, proven services to drive growth? Here are some key insights:

• • Marketers need better agility and control, and that is partly about transparency. Companies want to see exactly what is happening, why and how, and what they can do about it.
  • Companies should no longer try to focus on either efficiency or effectiveness. Balancing both across content types, channels, dimensions is needed to achieve the ultimate customer journey personalization.
  • The choice to go with partners rather than building your own ultimate internal marketing machine is partly about having access to innovations at speed. Seek partners that continuously push the boundaries to improve the status quo.
  • Value delivered should focus on customer experience excellence and performance outcomes.

You’re probably aware of the old saying, “I know that 50% of my marketing budget is working; I just don’t know which 50%.” Believe it or not, that’s still an issue today—perhaps even more so with partner and service fragmentation. Brands have had enough of this challenge, and they are increasingly aware there is a better way. Accenture is providing that way for some of the world’s leading brands.

End-to-end, innovative services

This means that our high rating in both the “scope of services” and “innovation” categories is important. For example, we continue to innovate and advance content, particularly in terms of metaverse-type experiences—dynamic content, augmented reality content, virtual reality content and digital twinning. Additional examples include personalization of content throughout the customer experience and media activation, including a voice activation platform, across all addressable digital channels.

This is underpinned by sophisticated data intelligence and analytics within an end-to-end activation platform. As the Everest Group report says, Accenture “extensively deploys AI and ML to enhance its platform capabilities. It continues to invest in its proprietary marketing activation platform, SynOps for Marketing.”

Our relentless focus on innovation is reflected in our acquisition strategy, also highlighted by Everest Group.

The real leaders are the marketing innovators driving change every day for our clients. Everest Group highlights what we consider our greatest strength: We have over 27,000 marketers around the world, making us one of the largest providers of digital marketing services, offering (as the report puts it) “faster and more innovative solutions to clients.”

An emphasis on growth

I can talk about innovative marketing with our clients for days. It’s important they leave the conversation understanding the value Accenture can deliver, how we deliver, and importantly the future we can create together. We often explore the next frontier and the implications of brand purpose. Gone are the days where marketers are only looking for extra FTEs, or even just improving one marketing measurement. What marketers really want to know is what’s helping them drive growth. Marketing ROI, business outcomes, business growth—those are keys to driving value with a marketing services provider.