Do you find yourself wondering what to do with the 2020 marketing plan that you have so very carefully crafted at the end of 2019? Has the list of activities you’ve placed under the must-do list become obsolete?
Maybe influencer marketing, activation campaigns or activities to boost social currency was in your must-complete 2020 list. And just maybe, good ol’ email marketing was in the good-to-have list.
Come 2020, and everything you thought you knew about the marketing world; the exact path you’ve planned to take your brand to the very top of the game has perhaps been reversed.
Maybe it’s temporary; just a few months and we’ll all rebound. 1 month… 2 months… 3 months…. and it’s still bleak. Come mid year and reality sets in.
“The behaviors of understanding that this is a longer-term financial and budgetary challenge haven’t hit home.”
Ewan McIntyre
Gartner, VP analyst
The CMO Challenge
Faced with uncertain times when you’re barely able to predict the near future, how can CMOs and leaders in marketing survive this wave.
To get there, we must first truly understand the challenges we are faced with.
Marketing, in and itself isn’t just about pretty ads and sassy copies. It’s a jungle out there. For many companies, the marketing department is literally in charge of making headway for the business to develop.
In other words, to ensure the product and services sell and the company is profitable. As such, in today’s digital and tech driven world, we’re talking about marketers who are both tech savvy, number driven, yet still highly creative and amicable as they are the brand ambassadors. Definitely not an easy role to fill-in.
Here are some (just some) of the simultaneous challenges thrown at CMOs this year.
1 – Budget Constraint
2 – Brand Communication
3 – ROI (Return on Investment)
4 – Digital Transformation – Internally and Publicly
5 – Crisis Control
6 – Product Re-alignment
7 – Team management during uncertain times
Why Dub This Article as The MarTech Hyperdrive?
Given the list of challenges above, any marketing lead who attempts to handle all of that at the same time without the help of technology or automation is underestimating the magnitude of each challenge. Let’s take a look at how MarTech (Marketing Technologies) might help some of the challenges listed.
Role of MarTech to Drive Performance Regardless of Budget Constraints
Less marketing budget doesn’t necessarily mean diminishing results. It just means marketers are pushed to re-allocate budgets to alternative channels and look for different options and marketing plans to achieve results.
How does MarTech help? Here’s one example. We’ve seen many companies switch their focus from ad placements to SEO (search engine optimization), as a means to continue to rank on search engines without having to pay the hefty ad fees.
Apparently, SEO is one digital marketing channel that makes heavy use of marketing technologies, from keyword research tools, data analytics to spider simulations, website speed monitoring and test, to automated competitor comparison tools. And here’s we’re talking about tools only for SEO.
When we talk about less marketing budget, many of us turn our focus from TOFU (Top of Funnel) to MOFU and BOFU (Middle of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel respectively). Here we’re talking CRM (customer relationship management) with full range of tools from eDMs (email marketing platforms), to predictive analytic and personalisation tools.
How MarTech Supports Brand Communication During Crisis and Market Uncertainty
All us marketers have had our fair share of experience with crisis management. Social listening tools and command centres, whereby metrics such as audience sentiments and reputation scores are no stranger.
This continues to be the case. However instead of being used majorly for reputation and crisis management, social listening tools today are more valuable for marketers to identify opportunities and to tune in to what the consumers are looking for.
MarTech’s Role In Maximising ROI (Return on Investment)
Digital marketing comes with a multitude of new channels to offer your products and services. The challenge here is how to collect and combine the ROI information of the various channels. While the performance of each marketing channel, be it online or offline may be decentralised and handled separately, at the end of the day, you’ll want to be able to centralise insights from sales, production and operations to make informed decisions.
This is where MarTech comes in. From automated data collection for online channels, to having easy-to-use dashboards for salesmen to key in information.
Add in the more challenging market we are faced with today, having the right marketing tools for data insights, the right MarTech stack, can save you lots of time. Instead of spending precious hours manually combining, cleaning up and working with data to find the ROI of your products and services. The right MarTech or set of tools, can automate this, freeing your time up to do the more significant tasks on research, competitor analysis and making decisions on the ROI insights derived.
And these are just some examples of how MarTech is quickly becoming an important element of any CMO’s survival plan. MarTech has long been discussed as a core part of digital transformation. Come 2020, and this has simply been amplified.
If you’re not sure where to start, here’s an interesting MarTech chart that goes by function for you to refer to:
Or sign-up to our upcoming free webinar: The New Marketing 2020, which include a full session on how to Re-shuffle your MarTech Stack.
Register at: https://enable.enablerspace.com/enable-me-event/ or contact us to learn more about building your MarTech stack, from planning, budgeting to implementation.