7 ways to unleash value and drive growth from your MarTech and teams

After heavily investing in MarTech, brands still struggle to scale in growth and profits. It’s time to look within.

Three questions to ask

• Why are marketers frustrated with their marketing investments?
• How can marketers get more value out of existing MarTech investments?
• What role will generative AI play in marketing?

Regardless of your business model, your organization has likely prioritized investing in marketing tools and capabilities, such as customer data and MarTech.

Perhaps you changed gears during the pandemic when digital became the only channel to conduct business. Or, given the renewed focus to improve customer experience (CX), maybe you committed to collecting and utilizing customer data and analytics.

Whatever the reason may be, marketers are finding themselves heavily invested in a plethora of point and/or integrated marketing solutions, only to be met with frustration: the inability to maximize returns on their MarTech investments and scale efforts to drive growth.

According to Gartner, Inc.¹, more than 50% of senior marketing leaders were unimpressed with the results received from their marketing analytics investments, possibly tarnishing the perceived value of these investments — in turn exacerbating the challenge of realizing business value and organizational growth.

Additionally, there are recession and inflationary concerns, which have and may lead to more highly scrutinized marketing budgets.

As daunting as it seems, this is a great time to optimize previous investments to find both cost savings and opportunities for growth.

Below are seven considerations to look within for paths to scale and optimize your marketing investments.

2. Orchestrating the customer journey

Now that you have your golden record and your CDP prepped to continue enriching your data, it’s time to elevate your customers’ experiences with your brand through customer journey orchestration (CJO) and decisioning, which fuel purposeful personalization.

In its simplest form, CJO involves the collection, coordination and management of data, across various touch points and channels, that customers leave behind when interacting and transacting with your brand. When the data is powered with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) and further enriched, the stage is set for decisioning.

The data empowers you to understand your customers — their preferences, what content resonates the best, how they want to be engaged, and when they want to be engaged. These insights drive smart decisioning, enabling you to pinpoint the most relevant next best action (NBA) to orchestrate for your customers.

For instance, based on previous actions, you may need to target a specific segment with recommended products or follow up on a customer query before a second query is warranted. Smart data-based decisioning and CJO enable you to enhance and personalize every interaction, accurately and in real time.

3. Developing a connected technology landscape

Customer data, smart decisioning and CJO must be connected and integrated into all channels and here’s why.

Let’s say you have a golden record for Customer A. Through smart segmentation and previous interactions, the NBA is to send an email or SMS to include a birthday promo code.

You need the ability to seamlessly send those communications to the “connected” and “integrated” channels and either prompt automatically or alert a human to take an action. A disparate set of marketing technologies in your MarTech stack will only make this integration more costly and less resilient.

Having a connected ecosystem not only supports efficient and effective delivery of NBAs, but it also allows you to meet the demands of your customers for fluid, personalized experiences everywhere they engage with your brand.

5. Rationalizing your marketing processes and MarTech

As mentioned above, all channels within your MarTech stack should be connected and integrated to gain the most value. Organizations should avoid allowing siloed teams, based on product or function instead of the customer, to build individual solutions without considering MarTech capabilities overall.

However, many times, organizations utilize a proliferation of spot solutions that are not connected or integrated into common processes and have no overarching market resource management (MRM) capabilities, leading to overspend, errors and inefficiencies with increased complexity.

The following steps will help you address these issues through re-evaluation and rationalization of your marketing processes and MarTech to help you focus on delivering demonstrable, attributable results for your brand.

7. Adopting a future-forward mindset: generative AI

Prepare your generative AI strategy now. The technology is here, and as it matures, generative AI will continue pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the world of marketing. Put another way, it’s a game changer set to unlock a new frontier of opportunities for marketers, creating capacity for marketers to do less blocking and tackling and more testing and optimizing.

One of the biggest hurdles to effective personalization has been the lack of capacity to produce the volume of content required for personalized experiences. Generative AI removes this hurdle as it can create hundreds or thousands of content variations almost instantly and automatically in service of personalized engagement. Look at tools such as Adobe Firefly, which are set to automate the content supply chain, while offering marketers a number of possibilities.

When powered by a better understanding of patterns in customer behavior and data to segment and pinpoint relevant audiences, generative AI can unleash highly tailored campaigns and purposeful personalized experiences that would have previously taken too much time at too high a cost.

With the power of generative AI to create a new volume of experiences, it becomes even more important to measure and test effectiveness to create a closed feedback loop that results in greater impact at speed.

Generative AI is evolving at lightning speed; this is the time for organizations to explore, test and create policies and strategies to harness the promise of its power.

Key takeaways: be bold and execute

Especially during times of market headwinds when budgets are more highly scrutinized, it’s critical for companies to unleash more value from their existing investments to maintain and drive growth.

For marketers, these pressures mean it’s time to:

• Continue to evolve your organization’s ability to collect, resolve and enrich customer data.
• Advance the ability to orchestrate customer journeys, scaled and intelligent, through AI and ML to truly deliver the next best action.
• Integrate your technology landscape to enable true engagement across channels, in real-time, in the channel of choice.
• Appreciate loyalty as more than a “program,” building trust through each interaction and finding opportunities for the exchange of value for data.
• Carefully evaluate opportunities to rationalize your organization’s MarTech stack, remove complexity and invest in continuous advancement of capabilities from existing tools, where possible.
• Transition to a customer-centric operating model, fueled by multidisciplinary teams, empowered by clear governance, and driven by agile principles of delivery and an optimized mix of in-house and agency execution.
• Define your strategy for generative AI now, identifying strategic use cases that will create capacity for your teams to elevate personalization, testing and optimization.