Brands in Australia are in love with the idea of MarTech, but utilisation is low. Arktic Fox’s study revealed that only 19.5% of brands believe they have semi or strong utilisation of their platforms today yet their spend on MarTech is at record highs. So, on the one hand Australian brands are investing more than ever in MarTech, but on the other there are lower utilisation rates, which hinders the ability to deliver on customer experience (CX) and other strategic objectives.

What’s behind low utilisation rates? Brands struggle with selecting and procuring the right MarTech solutions. It’s time to challenge the conventional thinking that prioritises channel-based buying and instead focus on tools to boost CX delivery.

This article will explore insights from the third webinar, Going beyond the MarTech hype to deliver CX success, in our three-part series with Arktic Fox, Mastering CX: Balancing strategy, data and tech to gain the competitive edge.

The shift from single-vendor solutions to a best-of-breed approach

 

When it comes to selecting technology, often the impetus is to address one key need at a time without giving enough thought to the broader ecosystem. For example, you might consider a solution for email and SMS, or a separate product for analytics for your website, as opposed to thinking about the end-to-end experience for the customer and working backwards to the right solution from there. When marketers only think about solving platform needs in isolation or through a department lens, it’s more likely to result in a lack of integration between platforms and an inability to ensure the effective delivery of one unified experience for the customer.

The adoption of a best-of-breed mindset over a single vendor mindset can help brands focus on CX. Today, 57% of brands are building out their tech stacks on the basis of best-of-breed technologies. This means they’re finding the best tools for the job as opposed to selecting a single vendor and their suite of products. This is a gradual shift that has been occurring in the market over the past five years. It’s been driven by the evolution in MarTech, which has offered greater compatibility between platforms and ease of integration, affording brands more flexibility to choose a best-of-breed path.

Brands are also looking to consolidate to reduce MarTech stack creep and to maximise return while also reducing costs in the process. While the shift to best-of-breed is on, it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach for a few reasons. MarTech maturity differs among organisations. Internal capability and resource availability should be a significant factor influencing MarTech decisions. Organisations with smaller digital marketing or tech teams need to be honest with themselves about the capabilities they have to leverage the tech over time and to support their ability to implement it effectively. 

While the industry is increasingly moving towards low-code and no-code solutions and Gen AI is doing more of the heavy lifting, platforms are still not plug-and-play, making it necessary for brands to make decisions based on their capability today, and what can reasonably be built and implemented tomorrow.  

Why it’s crucial to start with the customer when selecting a MarTech platform

 

How can brands create and nurture the right tech stack in order to power their CX goals? Selecting the right tech starts with strategy. MarTech can underpin the strategy, but it can’t be the other way around. Brands need to think beyond their silos. When selecting or evolving your tech stack, think about the end-to-end experience and how the tech stack will connect with other customer tech within your ecosystem to deliver on your CX vision. Defining clear use cases to solidify requirements cross-functionally will help brands to think beyond one department’s needs.

The other important consideration is to make sure that you’re balancing authenticity and brand voice with automation and scalability to build the emotional connection and continue to drive differentiation in your CX strategy. 

As MarTech evolves to increasingly capture emotional data cues that can be used alongside behavioral data to inform and drive experience delivery, brands can move to a different realm of CX powered by things like automated intelligence to help make smarter decisions that positively impacts customer experience. 

Proxima shares how they chose the right MarTech platform

 

Procurement of a MarTech platform is a personalised process for every organisation. For Proxima, an aggregator for real estate agents, they were thoughtful about choosing a MarTech platform fit for their purposes with the overall goal of ensuring an exceptional CX.  

Proxima brings together independent real estate agents acting as a marketplace for both B2B and B2C. With billions of dollars’ worth of listings of properties along with projects from house and land to apartments, and operations in other countries, they needed a MarTech stack that would meet the needs of both sides of the business.

To find the right one, Proxima mapped out their objectives to look at it from a country dimension, an audience dimension, and a department dimension taking into account the whole customer experience journey. From there, they realistically looked at the skills their team has. When you’re in a smaller and more agile organisation, an enterprise stack may not be affordable. After determining the skill set of the team, it was about looking at the stack, and what tools were available to manage the community and bring people together. They also considered how they’d collaborate and share content, and how data would be deployed, used, and managed.

A strong relationship with IT is one of the most essential relationships that a marketer has. It’s a relationship of trust, communication, and partnership. Proxima worked with IT to understand what they were trying to achieve with the data that exists in each point of their customer experience. They relied on their IT team to be the expert and share what is and isn’t possible.

Another key point was about integration. Some of the solutions have prepackaged integrations that might not necessarily work off-the-shelf for your use cases or your organisation. IT can help stress test these. If the off-the-shelf integration doesn’t work, they can help determine how it can be customised to meet your needs.

For more insights about optimizing CX, explore the other sessions in our Mastering CX webinar series or watch the full instant replay of session three, Going beyond the MarTech hype to deliver CX success. Also, be sure to check out our book, Charting a new course in CX delivery.