Best of 2019: Our Top 10 Blogs on Marketing and Martech in 2019—With Bonus Updates

What’s your competition reading these days? And what fascinated and resonated last year with CMOs, marketing directors, digital transformation experts and data scientists? Last year’s Top 10 “most-read” blogs—plus a dozen or so honorable mentions from the 100+ we published in 2019—yield a lot of insight about what’s on the minds of those who deal daily with martech, data, and digital marketing transformation.

Here are the Top 10 blogs and honorable mentions our readers found most interesting and useful last year—as measured by unique page views—along with some trends in what readers really cared about this year.

1. The Top 10 Digital Marketing Skills Your Team Needs in 2019
2. The Forbes Personalization Survey: New Report Finds Enterprises Still Struggle with 1-1 Personalization
3. Think Outside the Funnel: How to Create a Customer Journey Map
4. From BOPUS to MOPUS to COPUS: What the Rise of In-store Pickup Means for Retail
5. New Look, Features Help All CDP Stakeholders to Work Closely Together
6. Treasure Data Recognized in 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management Solution for Analytics
7. 12 Essential Data Sources to Understand Each Customer Journey
8. Martech Trends for 2019: What Marketers Need to Know
9. Martech Report: What These Marketers Know That Every CXO and CEO Needs to Hear
10. [Infographic] 50 Years of Gaming: What’s Next?
11. How to Optimize Your B2B Martech Stack
12. The State of the Customer Journey
13. 10 Best AI Conferences and Shows in Q3-Q4 of 2019
14. The Marketer’s Guide to Identity Resolution: Is Your Data Hiding Things from You?
15. Customer Data Platforms: Should You Build or Buy a CDP?
16. What CDPs Are Good At: 5 Ways Marketers Get Better Results with Customer Data Platforms
17. Beyond Multichannel: The Benefits of an Omnichannel Customer Experience
18. 6 Gaming Trends to Watch Now: Get Ready for a Revolution
19. New Report: Omnichannel Retail Changes Shopping, But Will It Change the Way You Market?
20. Marketing to Millennials, Gen Z, and 6 Experience-based Strategies for CMOs
21. Bridging Martech and Adtech: DMP, DSP and CDP Best Practices in Targeted Personalization
22. [Infographic] Personalization Perfection: B2C Companies That Get It Right Are Poised for Growth
23. Bright Minds of Martech: 14 Visionaries to Read and Follow
24. 5 Geotargeting Success Stories and What You Can Learn from Them
25. Forrester TEI on CDP ROI: How a Customer Data Platform Paid Off in 4 Industries

Digital Marketers: Fascinated by Trends and Transformation

Top marketers—as well as promising up-and-comers—are clearly interested in getting the right skills in place to ride the digital marketing trend. That’s probably why our top blog last year, with thousands of unique page views, explained the best skills mix for high-performance marketing teams: The Top 10 Digital Marketing Skills Your Team Needs in 2019. (Check for a 2020 marketing skills update blog mid-January.) Ditto for our eighth-ranked blog on Martech Trends for 2019: What Digital Marketers Need to Know and twenty-second Personalization Perfection.

Trend pieces also accounted for some of the runners-up, such as tenth-ranked “50 Years of Gaming: What’s Next,” eighteenth-ranked “6 Gaming Trends to Watch Now: Get Ready for a Revolution,” nineteenth-ranked “Omnichannel Retail Changes Shopping, But Will It Change the Way You Market?, and “Marketing to Millennials, Gen Z, and 6 Experienced-based Strategies for CMOs.”

Hot Topics: Omnichannel Personalization, Customer Journeys, and BOPUS/MOPUS

Using customer data to get a good understanding of each and every customer—and tailoring personalized customer journeys accordingly—was also extremely popular, accounting for our  second-place article based on Forbes survey research about the state of personalization, as well as the third and fourth-place articles on creating customer journey maps and using customer data to upsell and cross-sell BOPUS/MOPUS customers, respectively. And it’s no wonder BOPUS, MOPUS, and even COPUS sales were such hot topics, with holiday sales expected to cap a two-year-long surge in “click-and-collect” sales. And using customer data from surprising sources was a strong finisher too, in seventh place, as was twelfth-ranked “The State of the Customer Journey.”

Using New Martech Profitably Always Captures Interest—Especially with Customer Data

Customer data platforms (CDPs) generated intense interest in new collaboration and security features. Particularly interesting to CMOs and other marketers is how CDPs relate to other martech, such as DSPs, DMPs, and other adtech. The fact that a CDP (Treasure Data’s) made it into the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Management and Analytics generated intense interest of its own. And “Is Your Data Hiding Something from You?”—a deep-dive into how identity resolution works—perhaps shows that marketers worry about what they might be missing when it comes to creating full-resolution identity profiles. You also want to know how to calculate ROI on CDP investment, boosting the recently published Forrester Consulting TEI on real-world CDP ROI a top pick.

So if you missed any of these most-read articles, now might be a good time to circle back to the ones that interest you the most. And on behalf of Treasure Data, we wish you a prosperous and happy New Year in 2020.