In the 21st century, successful organizations know that customers are everything and their experience with the brand matters. They treat data as currency, and the value exchange between the brand and the customer holds more value than mere transactions.
Big brands like Apple, LG, and more have always believed in building relationships with their customers. Now they can recognize and assist the customer at every point in their journey. They can offer individualized experiences that benefit both the business and the customer in every customer life cycle stage. It is this mutually beneficial experience that fosters lasting value and loyalty among customers.
Organizations are now spending a significant amount of their budgets on marketing technology and helping drive their digital transformation. Amid this complexity, marketers end up spending years and months evaluating new tools and vendors and auditing their current tech stack. They compare core differentiators and feature sets and kicking the tires with a proof-of-concept to see if it’s good enough.
As part of a vendor selection or tech stack evaluation, it is essential to assess how various marketing technologies differ from each other. Marketers are often asked questions like how the data management platform differs from the customer data platform, the campaign management platform, and the master data management platform that comes before it. However, where customer experience is the ultimate competitive differentiator, you should ask how this technology will transform marketing and understand and interact with consumers. In short, MarTech decisions should be beached in operational efficiency.
Assessing the value and efficiency of marketing technology means understanding how it will be fundamentally changing the marketer’s job. It also helps them in transforming customer relationships.
1. Data to Customer-Facing Engagement
As the business gets closer to its customers, they engage more with the brand. Marketers need tools that provide them with immediate and direct access to unified and actionable first-party data. Hence, they require a ‘single customer view’ that is designed for marketing purposes only. Data lakes, CRM, or MDM, are typically optimized for non-marketing priorities. There are specific architectural requirements for a marketing database that can handle data activation and unification with equal ease and power.
2. Eliminating inefficiencies and dependencies
Marketing’s dependency on internal IT resources, data science specialists, or even over-worked marketing operations teams creates unnecessary and structural barriers for accessing data in the form of cost, time delays, and other inflexibility. When access is granted to comprehensive, real-time, and accurate customer data, it drastically improves the manifold’s marketing performance.
3. From insights to actions
Marketing is a judicious mix of both science and art. It tends to favor one side over the other for an extended period. Earlier, it was all art; with digitization, it is science. However, the hallmark of a legendary brand is to strike the right balance between the two. Giving data to marketers when they need it and in the form they desire helps them spend more time on their art and take science as and when required.
4. Increased business agility and resilience
The year 2020 reminded the world leaders about unpredictability. Also, it makes a massive difference if you have the tools and teams that give speed and flexibility in response to market changes. It’s a matter of whether the business increases momentum, plays along or, thrives and survives. Without a doubt, marketers are at the forefront. They doubling-down interaction and customer engagement, and it is a perfect winning strategy.
Summary
Technology helps in putting the customer in the center of a brand’s data and marketing infrastructure. It provides marketers with a broad range of value and efficiencies that can significantly impact the business. When biggies like Apple, Nestle, and more become customer-obsessed, they embrace the process, the technology, and the people that provide excellent customer feedback.
Brands must ensure that each dollar spent on marketing technology will pay off. By focusing on the strategic value of adding a new tool, operational efficiency and brands can empower their marketing organizations, liberate their data, transform their customer relationships, and drive their business forward.
