Building Intelligent & Integrated Marketing Technology Stack: From Pipe Dream to Reality
Before launching CloudSage, our founding team had been integrally involved in many digital transformation journeys. Most of these organizations had spent years assembling the building blocks of a marketing technology ecosystem. Those building blocks included tools like CRM, E-Commerce, Marketing Automation, CMS, and a variety of other systems and tools. However, they were still struggling in providing seamless customer experience that their consumers were demanding. The problem was that, while these tools worked well on their own, they didn’t necessarily function as effectively as part of a larger system. We had an up-close view of challenges in integrating those disparate systems and underneath processes.
Some organizations felt that following single vendor Marketing Technology stack strategy will be the solution. This approach does look attractive on paper – not only with the underneath assumption that different solutions from the same vendor will be able to play nicely, but also managing just one vendor relationship that provides for all of your marketing needs is simpler and more convenient than balancing a dozen different vendors for a dozen different services. However, the approach also comes with significant drawbacks.
For one thing, even a mid-size organization uses upwards of 50 different tools and systems across their sales, marketing and customer success functions. This number goes only up as the size and organization complexity of an enterprise increases. No single vendor can tailor each of those tools to your specific needs. Even the top 5 marketing technology stack vendors – Adobe, Salesforce, Google, IBM and Oracle — can each only provide a fraction of the tools and technologies that the average company needs for an effective marketing strategy.
Breaking Customer & Marketing Data Silos
Most organizations’ marketing and sales technology stacks evolve over a period of time. Different tools and systems are added based on a specific need. This allows those organizations more control over what tools they implement and how. They can find the best solution to meet each individual need or requirement. But this too comes with problems. When assembling your stack out of bits and pieces from all over, it’s difficult to have synergy between your different systems. They can’t communicate with each other effectively, resulting in a choppy, subpar customer experience.
Your MarTech stack needs to focus on the big picture. And that picture is of the customer’s journey. It includes all different channels and platforms, and a whole host of touchpoints, both online and offline. But they’re all working towards the same goal. And in order to do that, all of those tools need to be integrated, so they can work together seamlessly, within a single framework.
So how do you create that framework? Here are four steps:
1. Unify Digital and Offline Data:
There are more ways to interact with your brand than ever before. There are all different channels, each of which can be accessed on a variety of different devices. All of these different touchpoints create an explosion of marketing data. The problem is, that data can be jumbled and disjointed if you don’t organize it properly. Each channel or platform has its own separate data stream. If you want to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, you need to unite all of those streams. You need to find a solution that can integrate a range of marketing data of different types, and from different sources, to create a single, centralized view of the customer. This holistic approach is essential to building integrated marketing strategy.
2. Analyze Customer Behavior:
While data is at the center of an integrated marketing strategy, that data has no value if it’s not accompanied by actionable insights. To get that, you need the right set of analytics. Analytics can help gain better insights into user behavior as well as underneath context. They can identify areas where your marketing campaign is performing well, and other areas where it’s not living up to potential. With this information, you can optimize your marketing strategy and create brand messaging that truly resonates with the customers and drives them towards a sale.
3. Activate Data & Insights:
So you’ve managed to paint a unified picture of your customers across multiple platforms, and generated insights into their behavior on those platforms. Your next step is to implement those insights across your multiple platforms. By using the data you’ve gathered to orchestrate your marketing campaigns across multiple channels in real time, you can provide your users with a consistent customer experience that’s relevant to their particular interests. No matter what device they’re on, or how they’re interacting with your brand, you can provide the same, personalized experience, to cater to their specific needs.
4. Scale and Predict:
Building an analytical model on top of integrated data allows marketers to get insights into consumer behavior and create and deliver consistent and relevant experiences. But to scale those activities to your overall customer base, and create personalized experiences for everyone, you need a Machine Learning and Advanced Analytical platform. It can inject ‘intelligence’ into your overall marketing technology stack and even provide predictions around the likelihood of customer churn, lifetime value and campaign / channel performance.
Final Thoughts
Functioning effectively in today’s marketing world means moving away from the channel-centric mindset, and finding a more holistic approach. By implementing a solution that unifies all of your customer and marketing data into a single source and provides robust insight for actionable strategies, you can help make your dream of having an integrated, intelligent Marketing Technology stack a reality