“Technology has the power to support and improve every part of the brand development and maintenance journey, more so every day,” says David Windhausen, president of Intouch B2D, “but only if we make it part of the blood flow of our organizations, a resource whose growth and value is looked after just as we look after the growth and value of the human talent in the building. That’s what technology maturity looks like.”
The greatest supercar in the world is just an accident waiting to happen with the wrong person behind the wheel. Conversely, even the most modest little hooptie can keep getting you there if it’s kept tuned up and in good shape.
Marketing technology isn’t that different. Brands that know what they need in their tech stack, and how to use it in the most efficient and effective ways, will be able to put their data to work, to move at the speed of their customers’ expectations, and to create more relevant experiences for them.
What Modern Consumers Expect
Modern consumers expect to be recognized across channels and devices, to receive personalized recommendations, and to have their preferences remembered. They expect increasingly relevant and valuable experiences at every point in their journey, which means that today’s organizations face unprecedented demands to deliver and scale omnichannel marketing capabilities at the enterprise level. To stay competitive, your marketing platform must be able to leverage rich first- and third-party data, allowing you to gain insights into individual behavior and deliver experiences that will satisfy modern customer expectations.
How well is your brand doing when it comes to meeting modern consumer needs? To get a peek at where you might be, check yourself against this scale of increasing levels of applied technology:
Siloed
You’re just starting out with martech. Your technology is selected and implemented within channel-specific tactics, and those are driven primarily based on cost-saving drivers. The will is there, but the strategy may be a little short-sighted.
Enterprise
Your technology strategies are aligned with your commercial brand experience objectives, as well as your business requirements. Your marketing strategy and vision are created at the enterprise level, and are adopted from there on downward.
Integration
You have the process, tools, and governance in place to enable marketing effectiveness and executional efficiency. Your change management plans maximize your platform capabilities, and are aligned to your business objectives.
Automation
Your marketing automation is facilitated by experience-based data, and this drives an orchestrated customer experience for each of your customer segments.
Intelligence
At this highest level, you have systems in place to foster intelligent and predictive decision-marking at the customer level. Predictive insights inform your work to optimize future content strategy, development and deployment across the entire experience ecosystem.
Every company’s brands, patients, and HCPs, are unique and have unique needs; yours might not require spacecraft-level capabilities in all three pillars for yours, now or ever. But what every organization does require is the self-awareness to know where they stand and the vision to know where they need to stand in the future – what level of maturity will be required to best interface your unique brands with your unique audience, given your unique resources.
So, what tech do you need to add? What tech could you be employing more usefully? Once you know your current level of modern marketing maturity, you can map out the smartest possible path to get you to the next level. At Intouch, we help our clients map out where they are on our modern marketing scale, and then build a plan to help them become a more mature organization, with the efforts that make the most impact for them.
Interested in bringing a modern marketing approach to your brand? We’ve made it easy to figure out where you stand now. Just pay a visit to https://www.modernmarketingvisionary.com and take our quiz, or reach out today to learn more.
Mike Strassberg is senior vice president of sales and marketing at Intouch B2D.