Why Marketing Technology
Marketing technology (MarTech) is a category of technology that improves the effectiveness of marketing customer experience, and digital teams. As a proven driver of growth, MarTech is central to organizations’ engagement, experience and digital transformation agendas improving:
- Customer Experience and Audience Engagement
- Marketing Performance
- Revenue and Audience Monetization
- Data-Driven Decision Making
- Marketing Efficiency & Effectiveness
Our MarTech Unique Expertise
Our unique expertise bridges the gap between strategic vision and marketing technology. We closely track the MarTech landscape and how marketing technology advances association, education, publishing, and B2B media use cases. In addition to our knowledge of industry-specific use cases, we are well-versed in emerging marketing technology trends and cross-sector modern marketing innovation.
Marketing technology projects are complex. Too often, organizations spend insufficient time on the marketing vision and strategy and as a result select the wrong tools and technologies. In addition, inadequate time is spent on supporting strategy, processes, and organizational design to ensure the successful adoption of the chosen technology. Drawing from our proprietary framework, the 12Ps of Marketing Technology ©, our services that support the entire marketing technology journey from strategy to benefits realization.
MarTech Services:
We offer a suite of interconnected services designed to help organizations select and succesfuly adopt the right technology for their needs.
Marketing Technology Capability Audit & Roadmap
We are the bridge between your strategic goals and the successful utilization of marketing technology. We link your ambition with a practical blueprint for elevating marketing, customer experience, and audience engagement.
Our framework anchors marketing technology in business value. Through our process, we document your organizational priorities and current marketing technology capability. While we deeply engage with the marketing team, we spend time with all functions that benefit from marketing technology capability. The goal is to identify and prioritize high-value use cases.
After discovery, we map your strategic priorities to your current technology capability and C&E’s proprietary capability framework. Through this process, we show critical gaps, redundancies, and inefficiencies in your existing MarTech stack. The final output is a prioritized marketing technology roadmap that connects business value to MarTech strategy. We do not think in terms of any single tool but how your entire MarTech and Data stack needs to work in harmony to deliver value. Our roadmaps offer the agility organizations need to generate value quickly and keep moving forward.
Critically our recommendations not only focus on the technology, but the change needed within the marketing team to select, adopt, and optimize the technology.
The Marketing Technology Business Case – Size of the Prize
Investing in marketing technology is necessary to keep up with the ever-evolving digital landscape and customer experience expectations – but it is important that your organization goes into such an endeavor informed and prepared. We work closely with our clients to create Size of the Prize business cases to help organizations see if added investment in technology (and potentially human capital) is justified. We help make sure you have all of the right information when planning for MarTech projects so that everyone involved is confident they are making a smart decision.
Marketing Technology Vendor Selection (RFIs)
With over 14,000 thousand marketing technology solutions available, clients need experts to guide them through the daunting selection process. Our detailed and comprehensive RFI (requests for information) evaluations pinpoint which options will best suit a client’s specific needs by assessing the vendor’s functional capabilities, technical capability, and their ability to meet client use cases.
Beyond the solution assessment, we are dedicated to helping clients understand all associated costs and effort that come with implementation, adoption, and maintenance – vital considerations when making a decision.
Our services include running the MarTech RFI process and facilitating shortlist vendor evaluations. Our comprehensive process promotes collaboration between business and technology teams. It also drives cross-functional alignment across all functions by anchoring the evaluation of what will drive the most business value.
Our proven RFI approach goes beyond just evaluating marketing technologies. It is designed to align solutions with your specific needs while setting you up for effective implementation and adoption.
A well-run RFI is never just about comparing vendors. Our RFI process leverages a proprietary framework to:
- Highlight a solution’s true capabilities and limitations, ensuring alignment with your organization’s specific use cases.
- Explore how the technology fits into your existing tech ecosystem, identifying gaps/redundancies and mapping a holistic solution.
- Facilitate collaboration among stakeholders from various business units, enabling shared ownership and prioritization of critical requirements across various teams.
- Manage expectations by uncovering potential challenges, allowing you to set realistic goals around the solution’s capabilities, timelines and resources required.
- Help marketing teams understand functionalities and use case applicability which is critical for successful adoption and change management.
- Our impartial, cross-functional approach ensures the technology you select will meet the needs of your entire organization while positioning you for successful implementation and change management.
Marketing Technology Implementation Support
We believe the focus for MarTech must be first and foremost on successful adoption. While the vendor can help with technical training and leading vendors offer advise around best practices, the real work is in the marketing team. Strategies, processes, and ways of working all need to evolve to capitalize on what the tech offers.
Proof of Concept and Adoption Strategy
Post vendor selection, we partner with clients to advise on the strategic and organizational changes required to adopt marketing technology successfully. While it is important to choose technology that is future-proof, it is essential not to “boil the ocean” with MarTech implementations. We help sequence and prioritize use cases with the highest value. Furthermore, we are a trusted advisor to marketing, digital, and technology leadership to define and manage Proof of Concepts.
Fractional Agency Enablement Services
We parachute an expert into your organization for a defined period to help with the onboarding and early days of using the tool. This hands-on support focuses on the strategy and nuts and bolts of adopting your new tool, including:
- Strategically mapping the components of campaigns to be delivered in the tool
- Building the campaigns – This role can fully deliver campaigns and/or can co-create and train up an internal resource.
- Defining key strategies needed to make the tool sing (e.g., testing agendas. segmentation maps, core reports)
- Documenting new processes for how various teams use the tool
MarTech Advisory Services & Workshops
We provide advisory services at different stages in the MarTech process. Our understanding of association, education, and publishing, and B2B media use cases and the evolving MarTech landscape enable us to provide insight into MarTech visions and projects.