MarTech and Your Customer - Part 1

This blog post was prompted after a presentation I attended by Kirsten Newbold-Knipp a Senior Research Analyst at Gartner. This post was created as a guide for organisations who need support deciding on layers of technology required for today’s MarTech stack and demonstrate why technology selection should be conducted in parallel to stages in your customer lifecycle.

Starting with the Customer. Putting the customer first should be at the heart of your digital strategy and at the centre of the technology purchasing decision in order to execute a consistent and scalable customer experience for your organisation. Consistency is a must, right message, right time, to the right person no matter what channel. Scalability is important and should be assessed based on the organisations realistic needs, both current and foreseeable.

To assess the needs of the organisation, you can find widely published digital maturity models which are prolific on the internet. I use Sitecore’s as it is proven to provide a customers with an assessment tool which covers off the foundations with a lot of supportive material on how to measure and evolve digital maturity.

All organisations have customers and how they interact with your organisation over their lifecycle can be broken down into a customer journey, unique to your organisation. For this post, I’m referencing the first pillared customer lifecycle consisting of “Buy”. I’ll cover the other two pillars, “Own” and “Advocate”, in Part 2 and Part 3.

During the “Buy” stage there is intent which attract a prospective customer to your organisations website. Offline as well as online interactions will depend on the marketing and sales acquisition strategy of the organisation. Many organisations and marketing professionals I have worked with typically focus on the “Buy” stage as their success is underpinned by growth - growth in traffic, impressions, click-through-rates, leads, sales, subscribers, enquires, repeat purchases, shopping cart size/value. Customer journeys across the buying cycle can be mapped to your content and customer target strategy. In the ideal world, interaction between marketing and the customer will be based on customer intent. In a buying cycle individual stages dictate marketing activities. So how does marketing and your customer interact during these buying cycles.? MarTech of course! Let’s take a closer look.

1. Need - MarTech: Analytics Customer Insight, VoC
2. Discover - MarTech: Adtech, Search, Content, Personalisation, Mobile, Influencer, Social, Multichannel
3. Awareness MarTech: Adtech, SEM,
4. Evaluation MarTech: Ad,SEM, Content, AR/VR, Personalisation
5. Selection MarTech : Content, Commerce, Personalisation, Pricing, Web, IoT.

— Nick Jones