The digital transformation era brought a lot of challenges, opportunities, and responsibilities to marketing professionals. Now, the global pandemic set the difficulty level up a notch and the average marketing department has had to juggle with budget cuts, reorganizations, and drastic changes in their strategies. The faith of most has naturally transitioned to Martech.
Yet, even with this increase in popularity, it’s worth pointing out that Martech is nothing new. It’s been a few years since personalization, automation, big data, customer experience, and many other marketing stack technologies made their way into the business world. That said, any company that has previously invested in Martech is probably sweating much less than those who didn’t.
The increasing investments in technology have given Martech the momentum to push companies through and out of the crisis. Let’s take a look at how things have changed.
#1 Data is King
Data matters more than ever now. And not just from a marketing perspective, but rather as a company-wide resource. The current ever-changing and hardly-predictable scenery requires marketers to constantly collect, store, and mine data to reveal actionable insights. Organizations with a “culture of analytics” are the ones who will sail the smoothest through the storm.
Right now, data is king because it makes it so much easier to remove biases from decision making. It’s just not smart to try and manage operations in a pandemic without using the right tools for the job. IT outsourcing services are so accessible today that any company could immediately benefit from real-time data streams, e-commerce development, IoT, AI integrations, and many more CX data drivers.
The surge of information has also put a huge emphasis on customer data platforms (CDP) due to its ability to unify data from multiple sources and create single data profiles regarding individual customers. That’s exactly what differentiates CDPs from CRMs—a CDP will actually gather data from a CRM, along with other sources like social media, sales, and website data.
All in all, the recent efforts in Martech software development has always kept one goal in focus: to gain a clearer and more informed picture of evolving audiences. Nonetheless, with only 13% of companies feeling confident about their data collection and analysis processes, there’s still a lot of work to do.
#2 Automation as a Lifesaver
A few weeks ago, Martech Today published quite a frightening prediction: by the end of 2021, marketing teams will reduce their budgets by $222 billion and their staff by 30%. But regardless of how hard the pandemic hits, businesses need to maintain a strong and dynamic presence in their markets. Automation, then, becomes a necessity.
In Martech, automation solutions allow companies to sustain contact points with their audiences while producing stable results on a budget. Pandemic or not, personalization is still a huge part of modern marketing and a crucial element for brand survival. Without the superhuman capabilities of AI and machine learning, managing personalization in multiple channels would just be terribly slow and inefficient.
Although getting into Robot Process Automation (RPA) isn’t a particularly easy feat, now is the time to move beyond traditional marketing lines and embrace automation across all processes. Generic automation doesn’t work well enough anymore, mostly because of a lack of scalability and cloud integration. There is a new balance that will depend on a million new factors.
#3 Future-Proofing is Next
As mentioned before, any company that has previously invested in Martech is probably having a better time than those who didn’t. This reflects on the fact that Martech investments will continue to grow through 2020 and most likely in 2021. Hopefully, every company out there has learned its lesson when it comes to falling behind. It’s unlikely that any business would ever consider putting digital marketing, sales, and communications at the bottom of the agenda again.
Digital acceleration is all the fuzz now. It’s because of this concept that Martech has gone from a “complex” way to increase data efficiency to a business must-have. In many cases, implementing Martech solutions has been the only way to reach entire customer bases that are restricted to their homes. And not just that—it has been the only way to maintain a meaningful relationship with them. But we will talk more about that in a bit.
All in all, future-proofing is important, but not as relevant as keeping your head above water right now. As market fluctuations, the economies, and the demand for goods and services stabilize over time, companies will start looking more and more into which technologies will give them a better ROI tomorrow.
#4 Relationships are Hard
Social interaction has plummeted. For the foreseeable future, people will not be able to access experiences as easily as they did before. This is likely to continue even after a vaccine is made available. In a context like this, everyone is looking for a deeper level of connection—and they can get it from your brand or from anywhere else.
Martech has proven to be a great way to maintain a constant level of interaction with audiences of all sizes, which ultimately heightens the CX level, even when people aren’t going all the way down the sales funnel. Negative or unsatisfactory sales conditions are not an excuse to leave your target demographic hanging. And, with Martech, the average budget for relationship campaigns is significantly lower.
This isn’t just about now, either. This is about putting one foot in front of the other today so that your company keeps moving forward. Taking little steps in terms of customer relationships right now will sow the seeds for success tomorrow.
