Every business leader knows that faster innovation backed by digital adoption and technological advancements is the catalyst to improve productivity and remain competitive—at least, they should.
Consumer behavior has fundamentally changed since the recent pandemic, forcing companies to up their game. According to Accenture’s global survey of business and IT executives, 90% of participants agreed that they must accelerate their digital transformation to become more agile and resilient. This is where a decisive investment in marketing technology can make a significant difference.
The beauty behind marketing technology—or MarTech—is that you can customize it to meet your brand’s needs and integrate it with tools such as CRM software, Salesforce, and user engagement tools. Embracing new technical capabilities allow businesses to change how consumers act, think, and feel about the products and services they use daily, improving their odds of success.
Leading Values of Marketing Technologies
The logistics information platforms like social media, CMS, and CRM provide to track audience growth and engagement is key to gauging success and areas for improvement. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t realize how much of a priority marketing technology really is. According to Gartner’s Marketing Technology Drivers of Genius Brand Performance report, MarTech only represents an estimated 26% of marketing expense budgets, yet brands use just 58% of their marketing technology stack capabilities. So not only is MarTech low on the expense budget list, but companies aren’t even getting their full investments yet because they aren’t using the complete features of their stack. Until there is a serious investment in marketing tech capabilities, businesses will continue leaving precious dollars on the table.
Accepting transformative change is required to compete in the digital world. As MarTech solutions provide access to consumer data to help make smarter marketing decisions, business and marketing leaders must tap into the full capabilities of their MarTech stack.
With the technology of the future already here, there’s no time left for companies to waste to survive in this online environment. Martech can optimize your campaigns to reach different audiences with a few key strategies: personalization, omnichannel engagement, and AGILE data management—to name a few.
Creating Personalized Experiences
Customers have already come to expect brands to provide personalized experiences across their marketing channels. Traditional ads, TV commercials, and short, basic emails won’t cut it these days. The marketing material that reaches them must feel intentional and specific to their needs. Customers need to feel as though they’re having a one-to-one exchange with your brand.
Marketing personalization is already widespread, but the future of MarTech will likely make it more effective, thanks to advancements like artificial intelligence. Targeted emails, social media messages, and other custom content that involves two-way conversations and interactions help build customer trust.
Tools like Webeo or other personalization technology ensure that prospects from specific campaigns have a customized experience on your website before they commit to a meeting. This increases the likelihood of a conversion happening on your site, which in turn, increases the pipeline you’re feeding to your Sales team. Using Martech tools for customer personalization delivers better returns on investment in the long term.
Omnichannel Engagement
Too many brands waste time and budget showing customers products they’ve already purchased. Marketing software provides insights to help shape the direction of future marketing efforts to help them complement each customer’s journey. Omnichannel marketing allows you to connect with your customers in a competitive digital landscape through a personalized experience that can turn them into lifelong customers.
Blueshift CEO Vijay Chittoor found that brands that deliver an omnichannel strategy benefit from nearly 90% customer retention compared to 33% for other brands. A few ways to execute omnichannel engagement are:
- Keeping your website and social profiles reflective of your value adds and message. If prospects come to the website and don’t understand how you can help them, you’ve killed the conversation.
- Experiment with what form of outreach works best to get engagement—associations, events, etc. Some associations will provide an email list, so send a message with a specific value prop and offer. You can also use that list as a retargeting list to serve social and paid ads and to create lookalike audiences for prospecting.
- Finetune your blog posts and social media posts with SEO keywords to deliver better results.
- Consider sending gifts or other swag to engaged prospects to build the relationship, and then share on social media! This gets your name out and into their networks and makes them feel valued.
Agile Data Management
Every element of marketing technology is based on data gathering and analytics. Good business decisions rely on data to comprehensively understand customers, supply chains, and the industry. Business leaders must integrate a data management design that makes valuable insights available regardless of where data lives to make impactful decisions for the best customer experience.
According to IDC’s Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide, customer experiences and engagement levels were key reasons companies spent $1.4 trillion on digital transformation efforts in 2020, highlighting the importance of MarTech tools and customer data interpretation. Using analytics software helps remove bias from marketing decisions, ensuring that data drives each tweak or adjustment to a strategy or campaign. When it comes to repeat customers, data analytics help identify customer behavior patterns and makes engaging at the right time easier.
Your MarTech Stack is an extension of your team.
As much as MarTech can augment your team’s marketing, your marketing stack should be seen as an additional employee when it comes down to cost. MarTech is currently only a small part of many companies’ budgets and is often underused. If maintaining your budget is a top concern, you must gauge what can be done by one person versus the technology you wish to implement. Consider if your marketing technology is doing more than a human can for the same cost.
Don’t think of it as another expense but an investment your business can use to get the biggest ROI and deliver on your goals. Without intentional investment and consideration, having a MarTech stack can result in the opposite effect of your initial goal.
In your pursuit to streamline and increase the success of your marketing efforts, for example, your business can end up with a technology stack with too many platforms, making it difficult to manage relationships and integrations between tools. You don’t need 10,000 different tech solutions, just platforms that will most impact your business’s pain points.
The acceptance of digital technologies has increased across every industry and won’t be going away anytime soon. As marketing technology continues to alter the future of consumer engagement, businesses will face new threats from tech-enabled competitors. Companies will increasingly rely on MarTech solutions to gain a 360-degree view of their customers and adapt accordingly. Ensure that you maintain a competitive edge in your market by taking advantage of your industry’s trends before they—and your business—become a thing of the past.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Samantha Avneri, Marketing Director at Regpack
Samantha Avneri is the marketing director at Regpack, an online payment management platform. She has more than 10 years of experience at a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company with the ability to manage partnerships, campaigns, and aggressive growth goals. Her background in program and payment management first led her to Regpack as a client, and then as part of the team. She brings to Regpack a wealth of experience in managing PPC and paid campaigns, SEO, and organic inbound content strategies. She holds a B.A. from New York University and an M.A. from Ben Gurion University and excels at collaborating with teams to take campaigns from ideation to execution.