To achieve the cohesiveness that customers expect from brands today, marketing is no longer a single function - it is now woven into the entire customer experience. In order to succeed, siloed channel-specific teams, such as service, app, marketing, commerce, and innovation need to be part of the larger org.

Organizations’ marketing technology stack cannot be siloed either. While marketing teams may be leading the charge for their martech improvements, this technology must go beyond marketing. Both the input and output of these tools often, if not always, become more powerful when incorporating other technologies, data, and insights from a variety of teams from marketing to sales, service, etc. It’s through these synergies that organizations can capture a holistic view of the customer. As Aristotle once said, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Let’s review some successful approaches that we’ve seen when it comes to leading initiatives around martech improvements. 
 

Building the Right Team

When building your team to drive martech improvements and advocate for their adoption across the entire organization, consider:

• Your stakeholders and partners (within marketing and cross-functionally)
• How data is being captured (Who owns that data? Where does it live?)
• Customer touchpoints (What teams are involved throughout the customer experience?)
• Existing technologies (Who owns them? Can they be flexible to meet your needs?)

Taking a step back and asking yourself these questions clarifies the common thread woven throughout the technologies within your organization. Moving forward, you can then weave a more tight-knit martech stack; leveraging both existing technologies and insights from your partnering teams.

The smoothest experience we see around martech initiatives, are with clients that lean into cross-collaboration. They are the clients that give a voice to key partners around the organization, beyond just marketing. These partners are brought into a smaller initiative team. They not only are people impacted by marketing technologies, but they are also influential in the synergy of technologies throughout the organization.

The brands that are more prone to hitting roadblocks are those that do not involve key stakeholders impacted by marketing technology or those needed to implement and maintain tools (eg: Information Technology team members). When initiative teams are siloed, there is often a lack of alignment on goals and advocacy around making the initiative a success.

Remember to look at the big picture and recognize that cross-collaboration is a driver of success. 

Identify Data Synergies

By looking at the big picture and understanding all the touchpoints in a customer’s journey, teams have an easier time identifying synergies in technologies and data.

Below are just some areas of customer data that can be captured throughout an organization:

• Account information
• Customer behavior
• Support & Sales interactions
• Commerce activity
• Communication and advertisement exposure

Identifying where and how customer data is captured and by whom, allows for greater insights for an improved customer experience.

Insights Derived from Technologies

Martech stacks that leverage technologies and data throughout the entire organization bring a new level of sophistication to marketing efforts in the holistic insights it collects. Pulling in data that encompasses all of a brand’s customer interactions, creates an environment for a more holistic understanding of customer and prospects’ behaviors that can be leveraged going forward.

For example, a retail brand can see in their commerce platform that Susie has an affinity towards 100% cotton dresses. That data is captured and visible to other channels so they can advertise more cotton apparel to Susie. This data sharing between teams provides Susie with a more tailored experience based on her preferences. One day, Susie called to complain about her recent order. In addition to addressing her concerns, this interaction was captured and shared with marketing, which resulted in Susie being added to an email audience for a coupon in hopes to drive retention and customer satisfaction. All these touchpoints and data can feed into the brand’s customer data platform (CDP) which helps provide a holistic view of the customer to better inform decisions.

Greater collaboration brings greater insights, leading to a more unified understanding of customers and their needs. This enhanced knowledge paves the way for a more personalized and seamless customer experience, one that is tailored to meet their unique preferences.