by Anna Hakobyan
How do you navigate over 700 platforms and vendors?
The Martech (initiatives that use technology to achieve marketing goals) spending rose last March already by 28% and will continue to rise even more. At the same time the platforms that offer Martech services are increasing at the speed of light. They are branded with the phrases such as “Let’s shape this future together”. “We are in this together” and so on.
While it is true that we are in this together, every company has their individual journey and when making a decision we need to think ahead. Few things to consider from our experience when choosing a platform:
How easily will it integrate with your systems
How many vendors do you need to implement and manage that solution
How easy it will be to train your staff.
Additionally, as the physical distance in real-world increased we need to start offering our customers martech tools that will help them to eliminate the distance:
Behavioral distance – will customer interact with the product the way you thought
Emotional distance – does your product or service touch users’ hearts.
Lastly, work with the companies that understand the data. The key for the marketing world is data. If you see the marketing technology landscape for 2020, data is by far the fastest growing category, up 25.5% in comparison to 2019. You will need many things from management, commerce and sales, content, advertising, but all starts with data.
We see a lot of companies struggling with this. From our experience in those companies, the point where they fail is when they use their “expertise” instead of the reality. They prefer to do things based on their instinct instead of looking at the data, get insights and act upon that. So the first point could be something like “in data we trust”.
Once you get your partner right, your data right and your foundation, you can start having fun such as adding AI elements, automating boring stuff such as updating excel spreadsheets, having truly targeted communication to your customer and adapt to realities with excitement instead of fear.
