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Marketing is one of the fundamentals of business, and its goal has always been to help enterprises understand and meaningfully communicate with their customers.
Customer experience has become the business imperative for enterprises looking to grow their revenue and obtain the greatest return on investment (RoI) with marketing expenditure. According to Gartner, 89% of companies reported that they expect to compete mainly on the basis of customer experience.
No wonder, businesses today are using everything from artificial intelligence (AI) to augmented reality (AR) to retain and engage their customers in a fiercely competitive market. And that is why the relatively young marketing technology (martech) sector is exploding in size as it continues to see astonishing growth.
At its core, martech helps businesses predict demand and conduct trend analysis to map a buyer persona and customer journey.
And India is not far behind in the adoption of martech as marketers are constantly on the lookout for the right martech tools and technologies to decode customer data, create seamless solutions and increase RoI.
As per the Mirum India MarTech Report 2021, the top verticals using martech are BFSI, retail, consumer durables, media & technology, and automobiles.
The global market for marketing technology and salestech is estimated to be worth $509.8bn in 2022 as per a report titled, The State of Martech 2022/23, produced by LXA.
Also, there are 9,932 MarTech solutions currently available globally, up from 8000 two years ago, reveals the 2022 Marketing Technology Landscape.
While a 2022 study by Gartner reported that marketing leaders planned to spend 25.4% of their marketing budget on innovative and intelligent technology in 2022 (down slightly from 26.6% in 2021).
Although martech continues to command a large share of the marketing expense budget, yet issues such as poor or no martech integrations, difficulty in making a business case internally and getting budget for implementation, managing a flood of data, trust and data security, training underinvestments, talent hiring hurdles and lack of technological expertise result in martech underutilisation and other RoI challenges.
How marketing teams reconfigure their marketing stacks remains a major hurdle for organisations. Such hurdles can take the form of overinvesting in unnecessary technology or letting the technology dictate a company’s marketing plan, rather than the other way around.
According to Amit Tiwari, Global Head of Marketing Demand Centre, Tata Consultancy Services, the hardest challenge that marketers face today is drawing up a fit-for-purpose martech roadmap. “While most marketers may be using more than 20 martech tools on a daily basis, most of those tools are not necessarily integrated with other tools. The consequence is a fragmented customer experience and the inability to link marketing expenditure to outcomes as well the pressure of managing multiple tools and their cascading flood of data.”
For Tiwari, an efficient martech stack should make information access more streamlined and transparent while reducing the need for repetitive processes like file format conversion and data extraction. “It should also enhance team collaboration, enable better, more knowledgeable decision-making and ultimately, provide an improved way to connect with the target audience.”
While 80% of the marketers expect to raise their martech spends over the next few years, a lack of expertise to operate the technology may hinder growth, as per The India Martech Report 2020.
That is why working with professionals who are experts on MarTech tools can help teams determine which tools are best suited for their goals and existing expertise while not overpaying for the marketing tech they need. “It is in this context that hiring and retaining top talent plays a crucial role. Without matching technology, talent and training, martech very quickly becomes a burdensome financial drain,” said Tiwari
It is also highly recommended that chief marketing officers (CMOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) should not work in silos with separate ideas and separate budgets.
“CMOs who cannot effectively partner with their IT and marketing data and analytics counterparts will fail to build the necessary digital capabilities, such as omnichannel journey orchestration and personalisation, needed to deliver a strong customer experience (CX) and achieve customer acquisition and retention goals,” said Aparajita Mazumdar, Principal, Research in the Gartner Marketing practice.
In this context, the CMO’s role is evolving to encompass digital as well as customer experience.
Elaborating on the changing role of the modern CMO as the executive accountable for customer engagement and the organisation’s growth, Yoram (Jerry) Wind, Lauder Professor Emeritus of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, states that for the CMO, it is critical to understand the total customer and their evolving needs. “One has to understand them as a human. It is now B2H i.e business to human as opposed to B2C or B2B.”
B2H focuses on what each individual needs rather than marketing just to a specific consumer or business. It’s about being focused on the person and building long-lasting relationships.
“The role of a CMO or the chief audience engagement officer is becoming more of an orchestrator of all the different functions whether within the organisation or outside the organisation that touch the consumer,” adds Wind.
As per Resulticks, a data-driven, and omnichannel marketing automation platform, organisations and marketers need a complete martech solution with the highest levels of functionality, security, and privacy—one that is capable of delivering, optimising, and analysing individualised omnichannel journeys in real-time.
(FinancialExpress.com is organising the FE Martech Innovation Summit 2022 on 25 November 2022 at Crowne Plaza, Gurugram. For details of the summit and how to attend CLICK HERE.)
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