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Technology is the building block of customer-centric marketing by acting as the foundation to provide highly personalised customer experiences. Marketing Technology enables marketers to engage with the right customer at the right time with the right message and through the right channel.
Today’s marketers use many tools to get their work done. Hence, coming up with the right MarTech stack is important. This involves starting with the business objective, understanding the current tools, identifying the gaps, investing in the right complementary tools, creating appropriate processes as well as getting the people ready. All these are continuous activities that need to be performed by a core cross functional team with clearly identified roles and responsibilities. With multiple teams involved with cross functional dependencies, MarTech governance is highly critical and requires executive sponsorship. With all these in place, MarTech can help unleash the power of data and technology to provide a seamless connected customer experience.
Does this sound like a familiar scenario?
You’re a marketer looking for technology solutions to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns or to better manage certain processes. You ask a few people you know in other companies for references to good tools. You then go ahead and decide on one of these tools. After implementing it, you find that there’s a lot more that needs to be done to get the best out of the tool. Perhaps you simply did not need as advanced a system since data is not available to the depth that is needed. Or there’s a key factor that you need to get your IT team to enable before you can fully utilize a functionality, but guess what, IT will take weeks to make that happen.
If you’ve nodded along, or have similar scenarios that you can think of, you are not alone. I don’t believe that there is a standard tool with a definition of “good” or “best” when it comes to MarTech. What is the objective being fulfilled? What are the use cases? What sort of integrations are required? Is there a separate housing of golden records? What’s the scale needed in terms of customers and platforms? What level of customisation is required? How often are the products updated? What level of support is provided? What kind of resources does the company have to manage the tool? There are a lot of questions to answer to find a solution that best fits a company’s needs.
Apart from this, hurdles that companies face post-MarTech adoption often come down to not thinking through company culture and structure. Typically I find these issues:
| 1. | Lack of clear role differentiation between Marketing and IT so there’s a struggle over who does what. MarTech tools are customer oriented so Marketing has a much clearer idea of how they are to be used while IT has more experience with integration & technical usage. No-code tools are taking away this some of these pain points. |
| 2. | Lack of people planning before taking on a tool so now there’s no one who can dedicate themselves to understanding it well enough to use it strategically. It needs an understanding of business needs, not simply literal tool workflows. |
| 3. | Not budgeting for additional training or not working with the SaaS cos’ specialists who can help get the best out of the tool. It’s always better to budget for a tool and continued training in it. You don’t want to be left with a situation where it’s been months and it’s still not being used right. |
| 4. | Decisions taken only at a senior management level and trickling down to the team when it’s time to take action. Involving teams in the process gets them prepared for what the tool does and how they could use it. |
| Thinking through post-implementation scenarios is important as your conclusions will also influence the tool that you choose. | |
| There is no one size fits all. You need the best tool after accounting for all variables in play. Simply asking for references to tools is not enough to take these decisions as every company is different. Choose wisely! | |
| Namrata Balwani MMA India MarTech Advisor; Digital and Customer Experience Consultant |
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Hansa Cequity is India’s first data-driven marketing consulting & services company with a focus on Consulting, Data Management, Analytics, MarTech, Data-driven digital solutions and Customer Relationship Centres for different clients across key verticals like BFSI, Automotive, Media & Entertainment, Retail, Travel & Hospitality and E-Commerce.
It is a part of the R K SWAMY HANSA Group, India’s leading Integrated Marketing Communication services provider.
Hansa Cequity is a leader in India providing data-driven marketing solutions & services for blue-chip companies across India. It holds and analyses over 100 million unique customer profiles in private & public cloud infrastructure with more 100 terabytes of data & manage over 750 million one-to-one customer-intelligence campaigns in a year. Hansa Cequity has a team of more than 1000 consultants and associates in their key client engagements & programs.
Comprised of over 800-member companies globally and 15 regional offices, the MMA is the only marketing trade association that brings together the full ecosystem of marketers, tech providers and sellers working collaboratively to architect the future of marketing, while relentlessly delivering growth today.
Led by CMOs, the MMA helps marketers lead the imperative for marketing change – in ways that enable future breakthroughs while optimising current activities. The MMA is committed to science and questioning and believes that creating marketing impact is steeped in constructively challenging the status quo, encouraging business leaders to aggressively adopt proven, peer-driven and scientific best practices, without compromise. The MMA invests millions of dollars in rigorous research to enable marketers with unassailable truth and actionable tools. By enlightening, empowering and enabling marketers, the MMA shapes the future of modern marketing propelling business growth.
Anchoring the MMA’s mission are four core pillars; to cultivate inspiration by driving innovation for the Chief Marketing Officer; to build marketing capabilities for marketing organizations through fostering know-how and confidence; to champion the effectiveness and impact through research providing tangible ROI measurement; and advocacy.
Members include: HUL, P&G, McDonalds, ITC, L’Oreal, HDFC Bank, Mondelez, Kraft, Diageo, ICICI Bank, Flipkart, Reckitt Benckiser, Perfetti Van Melle, Autumn Grey group, Aditya Birla Group, GroupM, DAN group, Lodestar, Httpool, Godrej, SonyLIV, Kantar, InMobi, AdColony, Spotify, JioSaavn, Google, Facebook, Intel, Disney+Hotstar, MX Player, DoubleVerify, SAS, Twitter, Netcore and many more. The MMA’s global headquarters are located in New York with regional operations in Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) and Latin America (LATAM).
The MMA AMMP Community is a credible industry resource centre for everything one needs to know on modern marketing.
The circumstances of 2020 accelerated digital innovation and adoption by several years hence for MMA it becomes the best time to showcase growth frameworks, opportunities in the space of modern marketing.
With this in mind, in 2021, MMA brought together a high-powered ecosystem to ‘Accelerate Modern Marketing Practices’ (AMMP).
The MMA AMMP Community is a specialized taskforce with elite leaders across the below six core councils:
The key objective of the taskforce is to enable resources, tools, evangelism and education to accelerate modern marketing practices in the ecosystem.
Below is an overview of our taskforces that enable AMMP:
The E-Commerce Council seeks to build an overall understanding of the ecosystem and address cluster-specific issues, build capability in the Omni Channel Marketing and streamline the ecosystem through building a common vocabulary and enable industry standards.
The objective is to enable pioneering marketers to understand the dynamically evolving nature of modern marketing. The Council seeks to add value to marketers by helping them to assess & adopt the right MarTech stack, enabling business transformation and optimise marketing KPIs.
The Voice & Audio Council seeks to create leadership & evangelism for marketers to better understand the dynamically evolving nature of voice marketing and enable e-Guidelines, use cases, expertise to exploit the platform.
The Council works on enabling best practices, standards & e-Guidelines for brand marketing & performance marketing by driving compliance at various levels in the ecosystem amongst stakeholders to deter ad-fraud.
The Creative council works extensively in building e-Guidelines and best practices for effective short-format advertising content.
The council seeks to enable POV on cross-media reach and mobile effectiveness versus other media & assess the impact of new media on business outcomes.
Bharath Vaidyanathan
Senior Director -
Delivery Solutions
Vijay Raghavan
Director – Technology
Sayed Naushad
Director – Marketing Solutions
Zaved Akhtar
VP - Digital Transformation
& Growth, Unilever, South Asia
Rajeev Soni
Chief Revenue Officer-
Domestic Market
Netcore
Sara Khan
Head - Campaigns & Customer Insights
Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC Ltd.
David Raab
Founder and CEO of
The Customer Data Platform Institute
Namrata Balwani
MMA India MarTech Advisor;
Digital Customer Experience
Consultant
Moneka Khurana
MMA India Board Member;
Country Head - India,
MMA India
The information contained in the Modern Marketers e-Guide to MarTech Maturity (“Playbook”) provides the readers a comprehensive overview of the MarTech landscape in India and how organizations should go about their MarTech journey. It also attempts to decode the changing transformation of marketing today and the increasing role played by Technology, assisting marketers in selecting the right stack. The information contained herein is purely for reference purposes only and we assert that no business or investment decisions be made solely based on the information presented in the Playbook. If any such decisions are made based on the contents of the Playbook, the same shall be entirely at the cost and consequences of the decision maker alone.
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