Marketing Technology or Martech, simply put, is a technology used to humanize marketing and automate operational to-dos. The modern digital consumer is evolved, intelligent, and aware. It is hard to capture their elusive attention. Consumers are looking beyond a transactional experience. They are looking for a distinguished experience.

Customer experience is not restricted to just sales or delivery but the entire lifecycle starting from the first impression to repeat purchase. Brands want to tap into every stage and deliver a consistent experience. To do that repeatedly, successfully - that's social engineering at scale. Martech helps accomplish exactly this.

The Martech Landscape - A Crowded Affair

The martech space is incredibly congested. There is a dearth of universal clarity. The number of operators offering martech solutions is increasing exponentially. Brands need to create value from Day 0. When there are 8000 martech players, we know it is not just the tech giants leveraging their scale of operation. There are several companies offering similar-sounding solutions, priced and marketed differently, making it a complex marketplace to choose from.

81% of marketers feel their current martech stack is effective at meeting their organization’s business objectives. Although 20% of this group also agree that they struggle to use their stack to its fullest capacity. Technology meant to ease marketing operations can become a challenge if it convolutes the process. Problems of multi-platform integration, data flow, complex management, and maintenance, not to mention the high cost make it a hassle for both small and large companies.

The chief solution would be to develop a unified solution that helps marketers take care of customer data w.r.t storage, security, and the ability to communicate with other platforms. Then, this data needs to be put to good use, which means a robust omnichannel campaign management system that allows for performance tracking and personalization. Lastly, all of this needs to be super easy to use, with multi-user access, high-performance capability, and not break the bank.

The Martech spend is projected to be 52.2B$ by 2021, a 46.2%growth from 2016

The pandemic fast-tracked digital transformation by a few years for a plethora of brands. If there was any positive other than emphasizing health and wellness, it was the digital evolution that happened in multiple industries.

The challenge is that the extent of martech adoption is not the same for everyone. The requirement will differ across brands, industries, large enterprises, and SMEs. The solution providers have to decide which puzzle they want to complete because too many cooks can spoil the broth. Modern-day Martech primarily solves three key challenges:

● Break data silos: Luxuriating on a deluge of fragmented data can alienate brands from their customers. CDP, a single source of truth, embedded in your martech stack can help integrate data from disparate sources. A 360-degree view of your customer behavior broken into targeted segments empowers you with actionable insights. These insights help supercharge your communication strategy.

● Prevent an unpleasant experience: Brands are trying to orchestrate a humanized digital experience. An ideal campaign manager bridges the gaps. It lets you build user engagement with cross-channel campaigns that let you track conversions, understand user actions and respond intelligently adding a human touch to the technology affair.

● Personalization: 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase when served with a personalized experience. Martech can utilize real-time data from several sources to engage with rich, contextual communication and speed up conversions. Running dynamic campaigns rife with logic and condition basis user actions will lead them to come back again for another purchase.

Why Should You Adopt Martech?

The 2020 pandemic has reiterated that customers are king. Marketers need to make sure that they stay abreast with new marketing trends and the enhanced focus on customers come first. The future of evolved consumer business is tied to customer delight and martech can enable that along with

● User engagement, critical for brands to build loyalty and create engagement loops that trigger repeat purchases

● Intelligent engagement, unlock new avenues of growth at a time where it is hard to invest more money in acquisition campaigns

Discern Unrestricted Growth With Martech

Martech has grown to encompass all aspects of a business because organizations are treating customer experience to be one wholesome journey. It is not only necessary for all touchpoints to be seamlessly integrated into the backend but also results in a coherent experience for prospects. Drive revenue from your users with the power of context. Detangle the complex web of challenges and adopt martech.

*The author is Anusree Saha, Assistant Manager - Brand Marketing, WebEngage