Our marketing tech is our lifeline. It’s what enables us to realize our strategy and connect with our customers fully. Still, less than half of marketers maximize their use of capabilities available within their technology suite, leading to an over-reliance on manual methods. Bottlenecks, such as spending hours creating lists, sending emails, and maintaining your other channels, naturally limit your team’s ability to provide personalized experiences.  

That is why it is so important to ensure your MarTech works to help you fully realize your marketing strategy. By analyzing your strategy and goals, you can begin to maximize your tech stack's ROI and create more engaging customer experiences.  

Build a Data-Driven Foundation

Throughout the past few years, many marketers have experienced data collection challenges. And with third-party tracking on its way out, that challenge continues to amplify. When you must wrestle dozens of tools together to provide a holistic omnichannel experience, it is easy to get lost.  

That’s what digital transformation seeks to change: Enable marketers to unify their data and technologies in real-time, so they can make sense of their data and provide more automated, personalized experiences.  

The direction you take to achieve digital transformation may be different from other marketing teams as goals and technology suites across teams can look dramatically different. There are even many solutions you could implement that are already available within your existing tech stack. Fortunately, many marketing teams have access to at least one digital experience platform (DXP) that promises to make marketing operations more efficient and effective across channels. The challenge is to determine how to use it since some platforms integrate better together than others.  

Ensure Your Tools Naturally Integrate Together

Not all integrations are made equal. If some of your tools require manual or middleware data integrations, you won’t obtain the real-time view of your data you need to make more informed decisions. For that reason, we recommend using cloud-based DXPs. Cloud-based DXPs, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Adobe Marketing Cloud, empower you to connect to multiple tools and channels using APIs (application programming interfaces). These APIs enable platforms from various vendors to communicate with each other.  

With a cloud-based infrastructure, you can merge data sources into one platform, so everyone can access the same data in real-time. And with your technology suite communicating with each other, you can begin to build journeys and procedures that execute across various platforms and channels. 

Analyze Successful Points and Friction Points Within Your Current Customer Journeys

By unifying your content, search engine optimization, ad performance, and segmentation data in one place, you can see your customers holistically: understand their pain points, what motivates them, and the content they are most engaged in. On the flip side, you’ll begin to notice where they are most likely to drop off during the customer journey.  

This is where analyzing your strongest and weakest advertisements, emails, web content, and segmentation journeys is useful, as it can help you better understand what messaging is and isn’t resonating with your audience. Data Intelligence Tools, such as Marketing Cloud Intelligence (Formerly Datorama), can be an immense help. These platforms automatically aggregate data sources and provide automated visualization tools that can help you make better sense of your data. 

In fact, we’ve helped many organizations create various dashboards, to better understand email, paid, social, and organic performance and how they correlate to cost per acquisition and churn. 

Prioritize Automating Data Streams to Enable Deeper Personalization

Unifying data isn’t the end goal; it’s all about how you use unified data to provide richer experiences. 42% of customers are frustrated by impersonalized content. With so many voices out there, there’s an expectation to personalize messaging.  

One way to personalize content is by fully embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). With personalization suites, like MC Personalization (Formerly Interaction Studio), you can provide personalized content based on the content they engage with, better segment to provide more intentional email offers, and adjust communication frequency based on AI recommendations.  

And through opening up your real-time, unified data to these tools, you can customize journeys based on any number of details, including but not limited to customer demographics and behavior across a variety of channels.  

Automate, Automate, Automate Manual Roadblocks

Your digital transformation journey is not over once you establish a cloud-based, API-powered DXP. It’s critical to measure, at least monthly, what operations take up most of your team’s time and provide a less effective customer experience. 

Challenges are going to come up as you continue to optimize your tech stack, so having regular conversations with your team is essential to identify gaps and produce a plan to optimize and automate manual workflows. Just remember to always prioritize how those proposed changes are going to impact your customer experience. Remember that the customers are who we are here for. As marketers, our goal is to help them solve their toughest challenges.  

We understand that drastically updating your martech suite can quickly become overwhelming, especially if you are a small team. Lev can help your team make your marketing tools work for you and become an asset in accomplishing your strategic goals. Discover how we've helped many marketing teams develop and implement creative solutions that reduce human error, increase efficiency, expand product functionality, and strengthen decision-making.