How martech rookies can keep the customer front-of-mind

What’s your main reason to invest in martech?

Is it because you feel you’re failing your customers? Do you feel left out when everyone is talking about their new tech acqusition? Are you left in the dark when talk turns to marketing automation or personalisation?

Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Get Stacked – The B2B Marketing Technology Conference had a whole stream dedicated to early-stage martech offering advice to those just dipping their toes in the ever-increasing martech pool.

It’s all too easy when you’re starting out to focus on the tech and forget what’s behind the investment – your customers. We’ve collected advice from the experts at Get Stacked to help you keep them at the front of your mind.

1. Put the customer ahead of new technology

Stuart Ross, MD at agency Hallam, had a revelation – the acquisition of new tech in his business was coming at the expense of the quality of its marketing and its customers. Having recognised this, the business took a step back to create a seven stage digital marketing process that had the customer at the centre. This aimed to achieve three things: full customer journey marketing, automation, and personalisation. This is how the customer remained paramount at each step.

Brand: This is the emotional connection you’ll have with your potential customer, so it’s important you understand it. Stuart suggests asking five questions:

• What is distinctive?
• What are the benefits to your business?
• What values does this bring to the brand?
• What type of personality does this give your brand?
• What statement summarises your brand vision?

You should also understand how each of your customer personas would answer these questions to understand their motivations and frustrations.

Strategy: You need a strategy that will snatch your customer and prospect’s attention away from your competitors. To decide how you can compete, compare yourself to competitors in five areas:

• Be a product leader: It’s costly, but you’ll become the automatic choice
• Cost leader: Wow on value
• Convenience leader: Make yourself easy to buy
• Service leader: Provide advice and support
• Solutions leader: Provide a solution around customer needs

In each category, decide whether your business is uncompetitive, competitive, distinctive, or a breakthrough. Pursue the strongest category – this will be the category scored ‘break-through’.

Create: If you want cut-through, you need to provide customer value in the form of good content. “Content needs to be 10 times better than it was two years ago, so the importance of getting great creative is critical,” Stuart explains.

Be found: If you want to get noticed, prospects need to be able to find you. Stuart says this means you need to focus on seven areas: SEO, influencer marketing, content marketing, social media, predictive analytics, PPC (pay per click) and CSS (cascading style sheets, a form of coding language used to design web pages).

Nurture: Once you’ve been found, you’ll need to continue to give prospects and customers attention to encourage them through the purchasing journey. “If you haven’t already planned a customer journey map, spend some time doing it,” says Stuart.

Convert: You’ll have to think about converting your prospects to customers. This means using tech such as CRM and data sources to identify the customers that are ripe and lucrative.

Engage: It’s imperative you continue to build engagement with customers. Stuarts suggests you could use apps, email marketing, social, CRM, and gamification to achieve this.

2. Understand your customers and their decision-making processes

The martech you require will depend on your customers’ needs. This means your platform research needs to look at what technology would be best for both of you, and how to meet those desires.

Peter O’Neill, analyst at Marchnata, says take the time getting to know your customers to inform your martech strategy. There will be four personas that your customers could fall into. Each one of these will require different tech to reach them.

• The ‘show me’ customers: These customers have complex projects but simple decision-making processes. To target these people you’ll need inbound marketing, social listening, predictive analytics, and search optimisation.

• The ‘enlighten me’ customers: This persona has complex projects and complex decision-making processes. To target these people you’ll need to focus on content marketing, account-based marketing, and sales engagement.
• The ‘serve me’ customers: To target those with simple projects and simple decision-making processes you’ll need initial lead capture, data augmentation, and predictive analytics.
• The ‘guide me’ customers: These customers have simple projects but complex decision-making processes. To target these people you’ll need advocacy, content marketing and tech for personalisation.

Ensure your tech follows the customer journey

Tech can be the means to track and digitise the customer journey, but implementation can be tricky, meaning crucial steps may be missed. “A problem we all encounter is setting up a system before we know it. Like any good system you can’t just click and it goes,” explains Amy Grenham, marketing manager at Desynit. She recommends five steps to ensure your tech remains parallel to the customer journey.

Set SMART objectives: It’s imperative to initiate any martech implementation by deciding what you actually want to achieve. You can do this by setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timebound) objectives. Doing this will help outline priorities and prevent the implementation going off track. An example of a SMART objective could be to increase the number of leads that result in a Salesforce opportunity creation by 20% in the first year.

Plan the content for every step of the customer journey: Tech may help you improve your engagement with customers but you will providing core value to them through the content the tech is working with. Before beginning to consider tools, think about the content you’ve got. Ask whether this content meets the customer’s needs to ensure you don’t leak leads along the customer journey.

In the marketing automation platform Pardot for example, you can create a flow chart which monitors customer interactions and responds accordingly. If a customer doesn’t interact they will be sent a softer piece of content and email. Each time they don’t respond, they’ll get a step closer to being put on the cold list. If they do respond they’ll be added to a nurture list, which will be given attention and served content based on their keenness.

Have name conventions for assets: When your assets and files for digital campaigns start to build up, things can get lost causing some to just make do. Amy recommends using a name conventions generator to keep track of all your assets. These can be found free online and there’s also a function in Excel. “It’s really simple, but you’ll start naming things on the fly and it will become unorganised,” Amy warns.

Score leads: Before you begin with tech, make sure you understand how you’re going to score your leads. When you finally implement your chosen piece of martech, double check the settings to see that it will be scoring on what your business views as important, rather than just the default.

Design with GDPR in mind: If you’re tracking the customer journey there’ll be personal data involved. As you’re starting anew with your tech, you’ve got the opportunity to set up a fully- GDPR-compliant system. By thinking about GDPR at the beginning you’ll future-proof your business and prevent any difficulties in trying to reconfigure your tech in the future.