The Secret Sauce to Making a Smart Digital Marketer

By Smriti Misra posted 10-14-2019 02:19 PM

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Driving digital martech initiatives effectively.

Technology has today become an indispensable part of daily life and is used for even the simplest of things like reading the morning news or navigating to work. Consumers are using technology at every step of their purchase journey to make more informed purchase decisions. Today, a typical consumer could be checking a product in-store while browsing online for reviews, prices and offers on the same product using their smartphone.

The need to keep up with the new tech-savvy consumer has led to the transformation of marketing into a technology-powered discipline. Companies like Amazon are at the forefront of this transformation with focused investments in marketing technologies like email marketing, marketing analytics and others. Marketing technology (martech) has emerged as the single largest area of investment when it comes to marketing resources and programs¹. Over the last few years, the average data analytics team size has grown from a couple of people to 45 full-time employees (FTEs)².

However, despite this concentrated investment by CMOs, most marketing analytics teams have yet to realize the full potential of martech. The good news is that teams now spend less time on ad hoc reports compared with 2016, indicating that process improvements are underway². Yet, expensive, talented analytics resources are still spending more time polishing and preparing data than actually deriving insights.

So where are businesses going wrong? There are three dimensions to the challenge of making martech effective —

First, there is the technical challenge of selecting, integrating, and operating all these systems and their data through the lens of traditional IT management.

Second, there is the process of implementing martech. As organizations rush to implement analytics in their marketing functions, they are creating the data first and then deciding what to do with it. This is counter-productive. Organizations must start with a vision for the purpose of data and then obtain the data required to satisfy that vision. This vision should be aligned with the organization’s core principles and values.

The third and bigger challenge is transforming the way Marketing uses these tools and changing how they think and behave, given the capabilities that these new tools enable. Companies don’t always make a conscious effort to align their data strategy and data analyst talent to realize the potential that analytics can bring to marketing managers.

What then is the secret sauce to becoming a Smart Digital Marketer?” Here’s a recipe.

Successful martech implementation is a long-term journey that depends on effective management of technology, process, and people. Here are the key ingredients —

Clear and Precise Marketing Goals: Take time to talk to each other about goals. The Smart Digital Marketer certainly does not rely on guesswork to make decisions on marketing strategies. Take your key people out for a cup of coffee or for lunch to initiate such conversations. Try to understand their challenges and brainstorm on ways to address them. Conversations like these can be valuable inputs during the goal-setting process. Successfully following this part of the recipe will mean a better integration between marketing and IT to develop systems that address the information needs of the marketing team instead of creating a culture of “capture data and pray.”
Create a 360° View of the Customer Purchase Journey: In the age where businesses are striving to create consistent, omnichannel customer experiences, a Smart Digital Marketer understands the value of a holistic 360° view of customers. An integrated view of the customer is one that considers every customer behavior from the time the alarm rings in the morning until they go to bed in the evening. Every potential engagement point, for both communication and purchase, should be captured. Only then can firms completely understand their customers and their journeys via analytics. Creating this 360° view will allow marketers to develop customized experiences that surprise and delight.
Make authentication crazy simple: Customers who have a reason to voluntarily make themselves known to you will be easier to analyze and market to. Hashed IDs can serve as primary keys that tie data sets together. Customers often find it too hard to authenticate at a digital or store experience and so they give up and check out as a guest, for example. And then analysts and marketers are left without the key data points they need to make their customers feel valued. There are two parts to this recipe: 1) give the customers value in exchange for their logging in and 2) eliminate all possible friction in the sign-in or password reset process. Of course, it is critical that customer data is secured and that customers know this.
Personalization is Key: Digital-native millennials, who are now becoming a major portion of the consumer base, have come to expect choice and personalized shopping experiences. A Smart Digital Marketer uses data and analytics to know - Who the consumers are, How they engage across media channels during a purchase journey and What they say about your product or brand. With this part of the recipe done right, marketers can successfully deliver the right campaign, to the right consumer, and at the right time.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Analytics: While a data scientist can help generate reports, we still need the right talent to interpret the results and build insights in the business context. Now there are a wide range of emerging technologies turbocharging the marketer’s ability to scale the delivery of market and competitive intelligence. But insight from data and information is only intelligence if it’s actionable. Artificial Intelligence can help us cover this last mile. Emerging analytical capabilities like natural language querying, natural language contribution analysis and prescriptive algorithms can give us real-time, meaningful and actionable insights at almost real-time speeds. For example, Machine Learning algorithms can sift through and map billions of ad impressions and hundreds of millions of device identifiers to provide marketers with greater confidence that the right message is reaching the right person.
Drive Adoption: Adoption of analytics all the way, in everyday business, remains a major industry challenge. In order to truly take advantage of the benefits of marketing technology, companies need to work towards a cultural change. Along with executive commitment and clear goals from the top, you need change to happen from the bottom-up by hiring new talent, training people differently, and acknowledging and rewarding the behaviors you want. With this part of the recipe done right, CMOs can realize the promise of data-driven marketing.

With the power of data, businesses have an unprecedented opportunity to delight their customers. However, they need a proactive and strategic approach to data-driven marketing in order to grab this opportunity. Start first with internal discussions to decide on a common vision and goal, followed by the technology selection and implementation. This needs to be followed with organization-wide change management programs with strong leadership buy-in to drive adoption among users and realize the full potential of marketing technologies.

Citations

*1. Gartner CMO Survey 2018-19: https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/insights/articles/8-top-findings-in-gartner-cmo-spend-survey-2018-19

*2. Gartner Marketing Analytics Survey 2018: https://blogs.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/key-findings-from-gartner-marketing-analytics-survey-2018/

This blog was originally posted to the Course5 blog.

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Comments

Tracy Gardner

01-28-2020 09:29 AM

Thank you Smriti for your thorough and helpful response! I am between jobs now, so I don't have specifics to share with you. Could I reach out to you after I've landed in a new job? I'm also wondering if there are any books you'd recommend to help me learn the consultative / internal sales process? Thank you so much for your time and help! Tracy Gardner

Smriti Misra

01-28-2020 02:16 AM

@Tracy Gardner Thank you for your question.

I like to think of analytics teams as having an internal sales role, ideally not limited to being delivers of data. And like the best sales people, analysts can be partners in their stakeholder’s success.

In my experience, business stakeholders often wait to approach their analytics teams until there's a burning issue that is causing problems. But there is a better way.

As analysts, a consultative, partnership-minded internal selling mindset is key to building trust with business stakeholders. The idea of asking your colleagues out to coffee helps create a relationship built on mutual understanding. This works because it fosters communication and empathy. If we ask people what their problems are in formal meetings, we may not get the best answers. As you correctly mentioned, we often receive either no response or a “boil the ocean” wishlist.

These “Boil the ocean” comments aren’t bad. They provide a decent place to start because they can help identify the problems that are at the top of their mind.

Schedule a Follow-up: One can then have follow-up discussions to refine requests to specific, solvable problems. To aid these discussions, we at Course5 use our proprietary Phase 0 framework to unpack insight gaps and needs.
Use an Insights Funnel approach: Drill-down and check if there is an insight gap. These insight could be factual, causal, predictive, or prescriptive in nature.
Define the specific use cases to be solved: Start building specific use cases then go on to articulate the business value of the use cases and build a roadmap for the prioritized use cases.

This can happen within the construct of a typical meeting or whiteboard session, but are also improved greatly when both sides of the conversation understand each other. A chat over coffee often helps facilitate this understanding. I have often found that coffee conversations, break room conversations greatly facilitate the initial spark of idea that is needed. A simple “Hey, what have you been working on lately” could yield better inputs than a blanker “What pain point of yours can I solve”. The idea being to co-identify the gaps together.

However, when we get vague answers, it can mean one of the following –

Lack of trust in analytics or the perception of value in analytics
Lack of trust in technology or the perception of value

In my experience, the best way around this is empathy building - first understand the business. What do they do? What are their success measures? Then I can go on to design questions in a structured manner to get better responses in terms of their insights gaps which will enable them to achieve their success measures..

We have been using this approach to help our clients solve specific use cases. For instance, we've recently done this for a technology company and a CPG company where we're trying to improve speed to insights by 50% and then trying to increase revenue capacity.

This is still a very high-level response to your question, however, if you can help me with a little more context and potentially join me on a call, I would be happy to loop in a couple of my colleagues for a joint discussion.

Tracy Gardner

01-09-2020 05:19 PM

Regarding your first bullet point, create clear and concise goals, you suggest to take marketing colleagues out to lunch and ask them about their pain points. Could you please elaborate on this? Whenever I tried to ask marketing about their goals or how I could help them, I either got vague or boil the ocean answers that were not helpful at all. Please share your approach. Is there a specific list of questions that you ask? Do you help marketing develop their goals? If so, how. Thanks for clarifying.

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