Marketers often get excited about the latest MarTech in the market and regard technologies such as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), CRMs, marketing automation, and other platforms necessary to enable data-driven digital marketing. In the blog on Unlocking Personalized Customer Experience with Data, we also demonstrated how MarTech can help segment and activate consolidated data points.
But how do you succeed in ensuring that the MarTech investment meets your ROI and is this what you actually need or are ready for?
The rule of thumb is to invest in what’s suitable for your organization and not any shiny new solution.
Here are four guiding principles to help you with your decision-making when investing in new MarTech:
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) can provide significant value, but only if you apply them in proper situations and with a thoughtful approach to integrating them into your overall MarTech stack. After all, a CDP is only a part of the overall marketing data management ecosystem.
CDPs enable personalization, but not without a plan to connect audiences, content, and orchestration. The core of data-driven marketing is to keep your customers at the center of everything you do.
Ask questions like “why are we buying a CDP?”, “how well does a CDP solve our integration needs?” and “how does a CDP support our use-cases as marketing evolves?”
Is your organization ready? Do we have clarity on your use cases? Make sure that all teams are prepared, and choose first adopters wisely.
Understand your organizational and technical constraints, be aware of competing priorities, and pick the right use cases to demonstrate value.
You can’t just buy it and forget about it. Instead, think about how you will support and operate a CDP moving forward, and understand the roles and skills required to maintain one.
Based on the digital maturity framework, determine where you are on your digital maturity journey and what challenges you are trying to solve?
Source: ‘Digital Marketing Benchmark’, Google/BCG
Understanding your current state will allow you to understand what you can work with and what restrictions you need to workaround?
During the discovery session, an agency like Merkle Singapore can help you identify key findings, the opportunities and provide actionable recommendations. It also helps tremendously to measure these recommendations against the effort impact matrix below. As marketers, we have too little budget but too many priorities, so it’s important for us to identify which quick wins are tangible to hit the ground running to show tangible results.
Lastly, it is essential to identify and prioritize use cases. Use cases are not just descriptions of what you want to do but are well-thought-out processes to provide clarity on the objectives and the results, the benefits to the organization, what success looks like, and what assumptions need to be taken.
There can be many use cases so prioritizing use cases is critical. Here we introduce a use-case prioritization methodology by looking at three different factors:
Are there resources available and ready to activate use cases in your organization and among your agency(s)?
Do the use-cases require extensive integration with other platforms? If this is a requirement, do we have the capabilities to do it?
What is the MarTech’s contribution to your brand’s long-term vision of data-driven marketing?
What are the long-term applicability and sustained benefits of the use cases?
How are your stakeholders scoring the use cases based on usefulness and visions or business priorities?
How committed are your stakeholders to sustaining and scaling the use cases?
Merkle can help you to: