Define a clear roadmap for your martech stack
4 MINS READ
Services
- TCS Interactive
Humanizing Technology to Create Iconic Experiences
Highlights
- Many CMOs are not entirely sure their investments in martech—although exciting—are working out.
- A plethora of martech stack options is available in the market, while existing marketing stacks are often underutilized and siloed, making it crucial to decide which one works best for your business.
- To drive value with your martech stack, it is best to take a customer-first approach. Don’t start with technology, but with better customer experience—the only proven driver of high ROI from martech investment.
In this article
The martech landscape
Marketing technology is a multi-billion-dollar sector underpinning the modern, digital marketing ecosystem.
Enterprises spent a staggering USD-120 billion on marketing technology solutions that increased to 8,000 from 150 in less than a decade.
While much of this technology innovation is exciting, many CMOs are not entirely sure their martech investments are working out. In the past year, 83% of marketers have swapped out at least one marketing software application, which is not surprising as most brands and marketers only utilize 58% of the capabilities of their martech stack. It’s like the old advertising adage: “Half the money I spend on marketing is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”
Make CX your North Star
Customer experience (CX) is a differentiator in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace and mandates razor-sharp precision in targeting the right customers and delivering a world-class experience.
Your customers increasingly expect you to know who they are, what they want, and deliver contextual experiences.
That said, how do you create and deliver personalization that matters and leads to differentiating journeys? What martech do you need to make it a reality?
Start by defining the desired CX—uncovering required customer insights and turning them into real-time actions that can be scaled—making every step of the customer journey more engaging, valuable, and productive.
While martech stack is a vital enabler, a truly personalized CX requires enterprise-wide commitment and collaboration. Successful brands make their entire business customer-focused because the customer journey spans from product design and development to marketing, sales, service, support, and finance.
Martech for your CX transformation
CMOs across the globe face the same challenge with martech—it is underutilized, siloed and there is an ever-growing abundance of choice.
A siloed martech stack makes it extremely difficult for business functions to work together, create and respond on actionable data for a seamless, personalized customer experience across the end-to-end customer journey. Here’s a simple, three-step process to help you tide over this problem:
- Clarify overall business and marketing strategy and tactics.
- Assess and evaluate the existing stack in terms of business fit, maturity, and how it matches up to that of competitors, performance, and scalability.
- Recommend a high-level roadmap for execution based on strategic business goals and mission, including talent and processes
With many martech stack options, marketers might have a hard time to decide which stack works best for your business. A few crucial questions to consider when evaluating options include:
Have the current investments evolved with time to meet the changing needs of the business?
What is the impact of a martech platform on CX and the operational efficiency in the organization?
Does the organization have the right use cases to take advantege of the full potential of the martech platform?
Is there any overlap of capabilities across technologies?
Is it worth buying new stacks or renewing the contract for existing ones?
Demonstrate realizable business value
When evaluatiing your existing martech platform for its operational gains, you also need to consider the value it will deliver for three, key stakeholder groups:
Marketer: Self-serve capability to enable the build of an automated marketing ecosystem that executes personalized customer experience at scale and speed.
Data experts and analysts: Ability to turn data into actionable insights.
Business: Ability to accommodate any change in marketing strategy, data source and execution, without disruption.
Every brand is unique but they all need to quickly demonstrate a measurable ROI. By adopting a holistic evaluation approach, coupled with a critical view of existing capability, companies will be able to unlock the inherent value of their martech that delivers superior, unmatched customer experiences.
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