Examine this analysis of 2018 Blogging Research to improve your blog and related content marketing. Includes charts, examples and tips.
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Want to be a B2B marketing smarty? Check out these MarketingProfs B2B Forum authors. These experts provide the B2B know-how you need to succeed.
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Need to increase content marketing distribution on the cheap? This content syndication guide has 7 marketing steps, 7 types and 5 actionable tactics.
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The race to get a product or service in front of a customer, or the desire for a customer to want or need a product or service has been running for thousands of years.
Around 2700 BC, China mastered the ability to create silk from silkworm protein fibers. Sitting on this monopoly (the emperors of China refused to share the secret of silk production), China traded silk with other countries, creating a luxury “brand.” Demand for silk was so high that it became a catalyst for new trade routes across Central Asia and into Europe, colloquially known as the (original) “Silk Road.” The demand for silk created massive trade routes for all kinds of goods.
Back then, the Romans were the largest buyers of silk. Eventually, they were able to crack the secret of silk’s beginnings and began producing their own—after being dependent on trade with China for centuries.
Leaked secrets destroyed the silk monopoly, but the trade routes persisted. Over time more and more ways to trade emerged. In fact, today’s multifaceted digital trade routes present products to customers on four or five different devices using apps, social media and chat to name just a few. For all that sophistication, as new digital routes accumulate, the foundational technologies on which they depend become overstretched. They can barely support two trade routes, let alone four.
How have we come so far and yet failed to address the importance of the commerce foundation?
One thing most of us can relate to is a commercial vision. That vision may come down from the C-suite, it may come from an industry thought leader, or it may come from you. The vision is to create a product or service and sell it; along with, creating buzz, a website, developing a multichannel experience for your customers, you have to make it all happen.
Everyone believes in the vision and gets excited. The design team begins working on next-level experiences. AWS instances are spun up. The development team begins working with the product manager who is now responsible for delivering this vision and generating hundreds of JIRA tickets.
Ready to go! Well, not quite.
What we are seeing is a fundamental shift in a couple of areas of IT. Through the 1990’s and into the 2000’s, projects started with core systems like Oracle, SAP or IBM as cornerstones. These systems were used out-of-the-box or modified to solve unique business problems. Although the “Big 3” are still in the game, innovation and technology has evolved and there is a myriad of other solutions. And, point solutions for departments may do a better job than a suite, but here’s what happens:
VP #1 has a job to do, so she brings in platform A, VP #2 has a job to do, so he brings in platform B. Then VP #3… well, you get the picture. Through acquisitions even more technologies are added to the mix. Eventually, there are multiple systems throughout the company, including numerous CRM’s, reporting tools, application stacks, coding practices and standards.
The big mess underneath
It’s easy to point to communication as the culprit, and of course it is, but let’s leave that discussion for another day. Even with disparate systems, “the vision” still must be implemented. But now the implementation strategy has shifted from the top (e.g. UI) to the bottom (core infrastructure). Working with the foundation is harder than working with the UI because the technology dots are simply not connected to provide a consistent customer experience. Customer information is almost always strewn across multiple CRM’s. Customer or partner assets are not centralized. Product data is stored in multiple repositories. Information is all over the place internally, and it’s possible only a few people can make sense of and normalize all this data. The underlying foundational technologies have left a mess.
Now, with a promised “vision” delivery, what do you do?
It is possible to deliver “an” experience even with the current back-end state, but there is very little overall focus on what the impact of that is going to be on the company or, more importantly, the customer. “Tech-debt” is a hot buzzword. At what point should businesses write down this debt? At what expense do we carry it along? Do any of us go back and address it? And if we do, what’s the ROI versus just addressing it from the get-go? Twitter is a great place to read customer complaints and many times I can guess that reluctance to deal with tech-debt ended up with “a” customer experience, but maybe not the “right” one.
So, why do we continue to operate in this way? Are we just falling prey to the perception of growth using new and glitzy technologies for us to tell new stories to customers? Is looking to the glitz before the grit ever worth it?
How to overcome this? Start from the bottom-up
Sure, there are solutions out there like MuleSoft or microservices, that attempt to stitch up a unified architecture so that delivering on the vision is possible. But is that the right thing to do? Even if it is, stitching still involves time which a lot of us do not bake into promised delivery dates. It will take courage, but we need to reverse our promises of delivery in too short a time. We need to make sure the foundation is solid before we start the work up top. Building on a solid foundation will pay off for customers and the company. Customer experiences will be more targeted and more relevant. Those two things alone would increase growth and build corporate reputation.
I recently went through this situation with a scratch build out of a commerce site, but our vision was severely hampered by the current state of our foundation systems. It is difficult to explain to upper management the “why” since most likely they’re business minded and expect the results. They are not interested in the technical challenges of where data may be hidden, or the lack of any API or connector to that data.
The build has progressed tremendously since launch, but what if we had done it right from the beginning and made sure our foundation was poured? We’d be way further ahead.
I’d love to hear your input if this is something you’ve experienced as well. Or maybe I’m the only lucky one…
The post Foundations of Commerce: Grit before Glitz appeared first on Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog.
In an effort to differentiate and compete, top brands are choosing a best-of-breed architectural approach due to the inherent limitations of monolithic commerce applications. As a result, headless API-driven commerce is gaining momentum and traction across many industries.
So why it is OK to lose your head now? Here are the top monolithic challenges to consideration:
Challenge 1: Lack of control over front-end experiences
Traditional full-stack commerce platforms limit companies to a particular presentation or front-end experience throughout the entire commerce system. As a result, customer experiences are driven by the system’s capabilities and constraints, and do not necessarily represent the way a company wants to do business. Customizations are challenging to implement and maintain with future product releases. Over time, single-stack solutions grow larger and become overly complicated for developers to understand or make changes to without breaking functionality.
Headless advantage: With headless commerce, the front-end layer is separate from the core commerce logic and offers maximum flexibility of the experience that is being presented to the customer. Customizations are containerized and don’t need to be rebuilt with each new upgrade. Any front layer is game, be it custom development, content management system or digital experience platform.
Challenge 2: Inability to experiment with new touchpoints 
Single vendor, full-stack solutions can provide adequate implementations when only one or two touchpoints are required, e.g. web storefront and mobile-friendly sites. When adding more touchpoints to the experience, some companies replicate or use separate commerce solutions to support every new touchpoint. This approach creates commerce silos which cannot be easily connected back to systems of record. With business logic spread across silos and systems, this increases the potential for inconsistent customer experiences. Modifications to the systems are required to reduce these inconsistencies. Over time, this results in an unsustainable system with a high risk of failure.
Headless advantage: With headless commerce, decoupling the front-end from the back-end allows companies to innovate without needing to replicate the commerce logic for each touchpoint. Leveraging rapidly emerging touchpoints, such as IoT, bots, point-of-sale interfaces, screenless devices becomes easier than ever. This allows back-end systems to evolve as time and budgets permit.
Challenge 3: The risk of tightly coupled, full-stack solutions
When the front-end and the back-end are tightly coupled, every change to the front-end impacts the back-end and vice-versa. In this type of architecture, the front and back-end software are too heavily reliant on each other. Even with an API layer in between, changes to the experience layer often require changes in multiple places, by different developers making them costly, time-consuming and error-prone. At the end of any development, major parts, and sometimes the entire system, must be redeployed. If the back-end of the commerce platform experiences a performance issue or, requires maintenance, this can create downtime for the live site. A single bug can quickly bring down the entire system. Because full-stack systems are slow to change, they limit the ability of a business to respond to market opportunities and meet customer expectations.
Headless advantage: With an API-first approach, the changes in the back-end don’t impact the front-end. The change is needed in one place only and doesn’t require reset of the entire system.
Challenge 4: Unify selling across business units, channels and geographies
Gaining business efficiency and transparency across business units, lines of business, channels, brands and geographies is top of mind among many business executives. Legacy full-stack platforms make it more challenging than ever to gain a 360-degree view of the customer and pivot the business towards a customer-centric model. Many enterprise brands with a global footprint find themselves with multiple siloed instances of commerce platforms and a siloed approach to commerce. With mounting maintenance costs for each platform, delivering one brand experience is harder than ever.
Headless advantage: API-first commerce offers unparalleled flexibility when it comes to sunsetting legacy systems and creating a unified selling platform. Replacing one commerce functionality, e.g. pricing, shopping cart after another, unifies the selling with minimal risk to the business.
To sum up: Headless, API-based commerce solutions provide business users with the power they need to create new ways of interacting with customers, and new ways to monetize customer experiences without requiring back-end development. Seize this opportunity, starve your monoliths to death and lose your head.
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