With host Darrell Alfonso
This blog was adapted from BrandMaker’s: “Marketing Ops Now” podcast. Each instalment discusses valuable ideas for both management and marketing executives. You can listen to this 20-minute podcast here.
“Software Is Eating The World”
Marc Andreessen, August 20, 2011
Martech has been eating marketing for the past decade. Looking at the explosion of martech from 150 solutions in 2011 to well over 8.000 solutions in 2020, marketers need a plan to deal with this expanding landscape. It certainly has become harder to answer the question: ‘What marketing capabilities does the company need to succeed?”
When looking at technological opportunities for marketing, there are two views:
Before evaluating tools and technologies take a step back and take a look at the customer journey. It is surprising how few people actually take that exercise to the level of actually mapping the journey.
Plot out the different touchpoints that customers have with the company along the journey – such as exploring, discovering, evaluating your product, purchasing, or sales negotiation. Don’t forget about dealing with after-sales challenges – like adoption, support, lifetime engagement, renewals, etc..
It could be a multi-week process, but it’s so important. At each touchpoint the customer has evolving needs. For each touchpoint, you should provide the answers to these questions: “What are the customer’s expectations r? What would make the customer happy? What would delight them? To what extent are we actually fulfilling those expectations today?”. It is essential to marketers to know the answers or to (continuously) find them.
As a next step, have a look at the technologies that deliver or live up to critical touchpoints or expectations. This mapping exercise makes it really clear as to what tools are already in place, which ones need an upgrade, and what is missing?
Individual data points do not bring your customer alive, but personas do. You might overlook pivotal triggers in the lives or behavior of customers. Data points without context, will not enable you to surprise and delight the customer.
In many companies personas are long documents with generic information about the customers’ daily life. No wonder those are left unused. It is important to combine those with real life data and experience.. We are talking about the same customer. And there is tremendous power in combining both views.
With the external view in place, it is time to take a look at the solutions that are available and that satisfy the customer journey. What kind of capabilities do we need? We should start with a high-level overview of the martech market, the marketing technology supergraphic. Just 6 letters will take you there: AIDARI.