Rohit Prabhakar

I build agentic revenue systems for Fortune 50 companies

AI Impact on Digital Marketing Strategies

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The world of digital marketing is rapidly evolving, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role. AI technology has the potential to revolutionize how brands engage with their customers, predict customer behaviors and preferences and optimize content delivery. In this blog post, we’ll look at how AI is transforming digital marketing and discuss the opportunities it presents for businesses in today’s world. Yes it will mature more in coming months and years but here are the areas where it is already making impact!

Processes Automation

One of the most important ways in which AI is impacting digital marketing is its ability to automate processes related to personalization, targeting, and segmentation. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, marketers can identify patterns in customer behavior data more quickly and accurately than ever before. This means that marketers can create highly customized campaigns that are tailored to each individual customer’s needs and preferences.

Customer Insights

AI also has the potential to change how marketers measure success by offering insights into customer behavior that may not have been visible before. By analyzing large amounts of data generated by customers’ interactions with a brand or product, marketers can gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work within their marketing strategy. This allows them to adjust their campaigns accordingly and optimize future efforts for maximum ROI.

Content Creation Assistance

Finally, AI technology has opened up new possibilities for content creation. For example, natural language processing (NLP) can help target a wide variety of audiences by using language models to provide personalized experiences across multiple channels and platforms such as voice assistants or chatbots. As AI continues to evolve, these applications will become even more sophisticated in the near future – offering brands the possibility of creating truly engaging experiences for their customers. Yes you are right ChatGPT is an amazing contender in the category. Have you tried it? What are your thoughts?

In case you need to understand the difference between AI, ML and Deep Learning. Here is an article you will like to read quickly.

In conclusion, AI is revolutionizing digital marketing strategies in numerous powerful ways. Through automation processes such as personalization and segmentation, improved measurement capabilities for campaigns, as well as creative opportunities for content creation- businesses are now able to access more actionable insights than ever before- enabling them to be more effective at reaching their customers on a deeper level.

Yes this article is partially written by AI!

After Covid-19, What Will Be the Future of Digital Marketing?

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The pandemic of Covid 19 has changed so many aspects of our everyday lives globally. You have probably also heard the term; we should get used to changes and adapt to the “new normal” adjustments. However, how can these transformations be implemented in the digital marketing world? How can we bring innovation in business strategy associated with any occurring change?

As the implementation of quarantine measurements was done to prevent epidemic situations, several business organizations took their marketing campaigns to the online environment, not just because they wanted to, but because it became crucial for their survival.

The realm of digital marketing changed severely due to the pandemic. Since the technology took a considerable turn and new marketing innovations kept coming up, traditional marketing methods turned even more difficult to keep up with the latest industry trends.

Pandemic forced businesses to shift their marketing operations online and brands to develop content that is most relevant to the customer needs and considerably influential in enhancing business growth online. Companies now use online marketing channels to showcase their products and services in a more effective and personal way. Marketing agencies now have to constantly innovate and develop new methodologies that can help them to enhance the quality of online marketing content. Online marketing firms are now investing in more graphic designers and taking advantage of technological innovations that aid them in improving the overall user experience through digital marketing initiatives and driving more success in the business world.

More and more customers now continue to shop online, which means businesses are now required to adapt to market online to these customers. More online users will result in more lead generation, which equals more customers.

Being online is now the necessity of the time.

Now, it’s no longer a choice to go with in-person or digital marketing. The pandemic situation has changed the way humans interact with each other. It has also changed how we operate our business with individuals and markets ourselves.

With the execution of social distancing protocols in place, it is getting more challenging to run the traditional marketing campaigns, especially for those instances where we market our business face-to-face. Customers are no longer going outside as much as they used to before. And also, the ones who do take precautions as they leave to visit any places outside.

Businesses can also expect a rise in social media jobs and creative skills. Different digital marketing approaches such as video marketing, authentic content marketing, and regular adaptability to new technologies are also incorporating revolutions in digital marketing.

Consumers and suppliers have both adapted their habits to the new changes.

It is critical to recognize that customers and suppliers have altered their behaviors and are interacting following the new standards. There may be more demand for digital marketing, but this will be counterbalanced by increased competition, and to stand out, one will need to build a strong brand and invest in business flexibility that works better with clients.

Without a doubt, digital marketing agencies have a bright future, but only if they can turn a pandemic into an opportunity and adjust accordingly.

Obstacles 

• Because most marketing is done online, there is a less personal touch with customers.

• More pressure to add a personal touch to your material to build strong relationships with customers and set yourself apart from the competition.

• The need for more interactive content, such as questionnaires, surveys, and engaging and innovative social media tales for customer interaction, as there are fewer opportunities for traditional face-to-face encounters.

Benefits

• It will be easier to contact potential clients via the internet rather than in person.

• Because of the convenience of being online, such as social media and email marketing, it is easier to reach out to people.

• Online outreach allows for more cost-effective marketing techniques.

• Physical, face-to-face events to promote your business can be time and money-consuming.

• There has been a spike in demand for video content. Look at TikTok’s massive rise in popularity since it all started. The company has grown tremendously. It got downloaded 115 million times in March of this year alone.

Conclusion

As long as firms approach the change to digital marketing carefully, there’s no reason for it to act as an emergency fill-in merely. It will continue to provide long-term benefits when even after the world will inevitably return to the perfect normal state.

In terms of communicating with business customers, digital marketing is the place where the business world is heading to. Whether we appreciate it or not, now is the moment for change. Being a business organization, it is crucial for us that we must adjust to those changes by rolling with the punches and bringing Innovation in Business Strategy.

Essential Skills for a Successful Digital Marketer

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Essential skills for a successful digital marketer helps to touches the sky in a business. It can be overwhelming for newcomer marketers to find their proper place in this enormous digital industry. The realm of digital marketing is vast. From obtaining the knowledge of the best data analytics tools to understanding the concepts of content marketing, there is always a lot to understand to attain success with your marketing initiatives.

An excellent digital marketer comes with the ability to learn quickly about the Impact of Digitalization on Business, and they efficiently adapt to new changes. When an old skill turns less demanding, they pivot their way into the latest digital prospects.

What’s better is the demand for marketers with agile digital skills is always on hype in the industry. So, how do you plan to accelerate your journey way up of the corporate ladder and set yourself apart from the competition? 

Let’s talk about some of the essential skills that will help you succeed with your digital marketing journey.

1. Video Marketing:

Video marketing has always left a significant influence on the realm of the internet, and we can rest assured that it will be nowhere to stop anytime sooner. Customers love to see video-based commercials. When it comes to social media, it is proven that 8 out of 10 customers purchase as they see a brand’s video-based advertisement. 97% of the market state that video marketing should be an essential part of the digital marketing strategy. 87% of them reported that it provided more significant returns on their investments. 

However, you need to bear in mind that these are nothing more than loose stats that will change every time based on who you are asking. But, the fact that matters is most of these stats refers to significant conversion rates, higher customer engagements, and better SEO rankings when it’s about Video Marketing.

2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) & Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the critical aspect of the entire digital marketing domain. So, any individuals willing to take on this career prospect of digital marketing must have their grasp on the subjects of SEO. Even though you may have highly skilled individuals on your team with excellent technical knowledge, lacking in the terminologies of SEO and how it works will not take you so far. Generate your understanding of the best SEO practices and content optimization. It is always crucial to run a successful digital marketing program.

SEO and SEM both play vital roles in the entire digital marketing strategy. They explain the effectiveness of these practices on the level of data and content. So, make sure your entire marketing team is aware of its concepts, as it won’t be possible to proceed further enough without understanding how these two essential digital marketing skills work.

3. Content Marketing 

What is considered to be the core of Digital Marketing? Content marketing is the most crucial part of the plat, no matter what happens. However, understanding the concepts of content marketing is not an easy task itself. It is a big job to manage. What’s essential is the creation of high-quality content which should be SEO-friendly for all marketing channels. Learn first how to create a highly-effective content strategy that converts. 

4. Data/Analytics

You can be working on any element of digital marketing; analytics will always help you create your strategy and aid you with the creation of a better data-driven approach for marketing campaigns. SEO tools such as Google Analytics can assist you with pretty straightforward reporting and monitoring. However, the trickiest part remains, which is determining how to gather and use the data to learn better about the consumer’s behavior and then apply it to the marketing solutions to ensure enhanced traffic and conversion rates.

5. Design Thinking and Planning 

Design thinking can be explained as an approach to counter challenges from the user’s perspective. The process teaches us to think more humanely when dealing with complex challenges. And it consists of five phases that are

  • Empathize 
  • Define
  • Ideate
  • Prototype 
  • Test 

The reason behind the success of this approach is that it is always catered to the customer experience, which is prime for the success of any digital marketing initiative.

6. Agile Marketing

Agile in marketing is the ability to use customer feedback, data, and analytics to quickly create, evaluate results, pivoting and rapidly iterating. It is also found in digital marketer essential skills. In large organizations that have adopted agile in marketing, you can run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously and multiple new ideas every week. Here are some good resources on this topic:

What is Agile Marketing?

With rising customer expectations, marketing methodologies get more complex. Fortunately, agile marketing arrives as a tactical approach in which marketers can inclusively identify high-value projects that should be focused on more with their collective efforts.

In 2012, a group of progressive marketers conducted inclusive research to bring up a new marketing version of the Agile Manifesto. The idea was to come up with a set of values that would be agreed upon and will guide marketers as they will try to adopt more agile marketing methods.

Frameworks for an agile approach may change, but the values will always remain the same.

The manifesto explains these are the aspects valued by every Agile Marketer:

  • Validated learning approach over individual opinions and conventions.
  • Customer-centric collaboration over hierarchy and silos.
  • Quick response to forthcoming changes over following a pre-determined plan.
  • Several mini experimentations over a few big bets.

· Customer discovery over static prediction

These are the values that can be helpful for any marketer with an Agile Approach. 

In the Summary

Digital Marketing has always been in demand, and it is even revolutionizing more in this era. To become a successful digital marketer, you will have to understand its fundamentals and the essential skills which helps to become a successful digital marketer. Ensure to adhere to all these essential skills mentioned above and remain continuously updated on the latest marketing practices. It certainly will allow you to become a successful digital marketer.

What’s the Difference between Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy?

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Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy: Marketing plan and marketing strategy play an essential part in any organization’s success.

Whether we talk about Business to Business Marketing Strategies  or business-to-customer marketing strategist. It comprises everything you identify to achieve your company’s goals. At the same time, the marketing plan will include all those steps required to realize the company’s marketing goals and support the strategies.

Business growth is achievable only when considering and including a marketing plan and market strategy for your enterprise objectives.

This topic defines what Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy. You will learn difference between them and how they benefit your organization’s sustained growth.

Marketing Plan- Explained

The marketing plan of an enterprise includes all those steps in detail that are essential to establish marketing objectives or a broad strategy. Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy will be totally differ.

Marketing plans concentrate on those tasks and tactics that are supposed to be implemented for achieving the company’s goals. The first step of marketing plans includes the development of a marketing strategy. Then you have to create a detailed plan that will explain what, when, how, and where you will implement your strategy. Also, it will describe to you the way to measure the success rate of a marketing plan in the future.

The most significant part of any marketing plan is measuring the success obtained by utilizing that plan. By deciding on key performance indicators, you get assistance to figure out how close you are to meeting your enterprise goals. These KPIs allow businesses to develop a more considerate marketing plan. These conveniently aligns with the entire strategy and tell them how they have become successful with their plan.

Here are a few of the elements you will require considering in your marketing plan.

Branding: Create a brand name for your company or your specific business marketing campaign. All the branding elements should be included in the brochures, campaign websites, social media channels, blog posts, emails, printed advertisements, etc.

Budget and Schedule: Include the details of your schedule and final budget whenever you create a marketing plan for a specific campaign. It will help you keep the time and budget under check throughout the marketing campaign.

Responsibilities: No plan can be carried out without a responsible team working behind it and supporting it. Your marketing plan is required to outline all those specific individuals. That will support and take responsibility for certain parts of the marketing plan’s execution for a campaign. For example, define who will make graphic designs, write marketing content, distribute the content using various channels, etc.

Content Strategy: The content strategy will include when and how to distribute the marketing content to the targeted audience. Also, what channels or means will you use for initiating interactions.

Channels: Channels are modes that you will use to connect with your targeted business audience. Choose those channels that are most appropriate as per your marketing plan.

Marketing Strategy 

The marketing strategy serves as a foundation connected with your business strategy. It aids you with deciding on what your company will need to connect with its audience and meet the final objectives. 

These are some of the crucial elements that you should consider to develop a successful marketing strategy

Objectives: Be enthusiastically aware of the objectives of your organization. That way, you will represent the short-term and long-term marketing goals of your marketing campaign.

Competitors: Consider recognizing your competitors while creating your marketing strategy. It will allow you to develop a marketing strategy that can have more positive impacts on your audience than your competition.

Target Audience: In-depth knowledge of the target audience for your business’s products and services is vital for creating a successful marketing strategy. Be aware of those looking for your products, their demands, and how they struggle to achieve a specific service.

Messaging: The way you convey your messages to your internal employees and external customers is an integral part of your marketing strategy. Consider the tone and jargon you wish to use to distribute your messages among them. Put your emotions into your messages and make your audience feel them as you convey them.

Unique Value Proportion: The unique value proportion you offer to the audience is what makes you stand out from the crowd. You need to understand and implement those aspects that set you apart from your competition.

Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy

You may have heard marketing experts using these two terms interchangeably. However, both these terms differ from one another. Whereas both of them are crucial for your business success, you should learn about the difference between them as well. 

Marketing strategy is always that you establish first. After that, your marketing plan comes into play and outlines the process that helps you achieve each goal you establish with your strategy.

Here are some defining points that elaborate the Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy:

Definition: Your marketing strategy is why you make all the efforts for marketing. In contrast, the marketing plan provides you with the method that helps you execute your marketing strategy.

Purpose: Marketing strategy aligns your marketing campaign goals with your entire business goals. At the same time, a marketing plan allows you specific steps that help you realize your marketing goals.

Concentration: Another critical difference is the element each term concentrates on. The marketing strategy will include your objectives, goals, targeted audience, communication means, etc. On the other hand marketing plan will focus on the method for implementation and more strategic steps. You will take to achieve enterprise goals included in your marketing strategy.

Marketing Plans & Strategies Advantages

These are a few of the benefits you should realize of having both a marketing plan and a marketing strategy:

  • When you come up with new, clear, and well-defined objectives, you get new opportunities for your business growth.
  • A well-formed marketing plan and strategy allows you to easily measure your progress towards the goals and objectives of your organization.
  • The level of cohesiveness that emerged with the implementation of marketing plans and strategies leads to a substantial foundation of teamwork. It improved creativity and productivity, and more effectiveness in completing individual tasks.

In The Summary

Both Marketing Plan Vs Marketing Strategy have own key points. An organization’s marketing plan serves as a roadmap that identifies the specific plan of action that will be implemented in marketing efforts. On the other hand, the marketing strategy will explain the broad reasoning for how your Innovative b2b Marketing strategy will help you attain your business goals. Always remember, if you wish to be successful and generate results, you have to make sure each employee is proactively executing a plan that is backing up your marketing strategy.

 

Advanced AI Optimization Research for Marketing & Advertising Campaigns

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Traditional marketing modes such as Advertisements have become quite expensive. The modern and effective content marketing channels are overcrowded, making it hard to maintain and coordinate the omnichannel presence. To get through these situations, Advanced AI for Marketing can prove useful in providing solutions to optimize marketing campaigns. Many vast enterprises are already implementing the possibilities offered by various machine learning algorithms. Also, deep neural networks help them select the right advertisement to show to the right customer at the right time.

Top technical companies like Google, Amazon, and Alibaba have been implementing superlative machine learning approaches that can demonstrate their effectiveness at optimizing marketing campaign allocation with improvising customer targeting. Here on this topic, you will find out the latest breakthroughs also, the latest and best practices from the leading enterprises that will provide you with the latest advancements introduced by Advanced AI researchers throughout the previous few years.

Field-aware Factorization Machines in a Real-world Online Advertising System

To predict a customer’s response is among the core ML tasks in AI-based marketing. Field-aware Factorization Machines or FMMs have been established recently as modernistic methods to face such situations and, in particular, to win over the competition. In this research, those results have been included that are concluded through implementing this method in a production system. It forecasts click-through and conversion rates for displaying advertisements. It also displays how this method effectively wins modern marketing challenges and is lucrative in real-world predictions.

The Summary of This Paper

FMM methods have demonstrated quite impressive results in numerous competitions. However, it is concluded that the training speed for the algorithms of this method is comparatively too low for a production system. The researchers have introduced two solutions that can help with increased training speed to deal with this situation. These techniques are named Premature Warm Start and A Distributed Learning Mechanism. After conducting experiments with the implementation of these two methods, it was suggested that it helped with an increased number of advertisement displays and increased return on investments while also being fast enough for real-world online marketing campaigns.

Deep Interest Evolution Network for Click-Through Rate Prediction

Click-through rate predictions that help us estimate the possibility of user clicks have become a necessity for marketing systems. Implementing the CTR prediction model is essential to attain the latent user interest behind the user behavior data. User interests evolve, dynamically accompanying the external environment and internal cognition changes. Even though plenty of CTR models can be used for interest modeling, most of them directly consider the representation of behavior in terms of interest. Also, these models mostly lack modeling for latent interest behind a user’s concrete behavior.

The Summary of This Paper

The research suggests that attaining a user’s interests and dynamics is major to advancing the performance of CTR prediction models. Also, it claims that a user’s explicit behavior doesn’t directly demonstrate their latent interest. Therefore, the researchers establish a Deep Interest Evolution Network that models users’ interest evolving process and accordingly improvises the accuracy of CTR predictions in online marketing campaigns. 

Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits for Causal Marketing

The Advanced AI-based model estimates and optimizes the casual effects of automated marketing. With a focus on casual effects, you ensure better ROI by only targeting the right customers who don’t prefer to take organically. The approach draws on the strengths of the casual interface, uplift modeling, and multi-armed bandits. The model optimizes on casual treatment effects instead of pure outcomes; it also incorporates counterfactual generation within the data collection. The research optimizes over the casual business metric following uplift modeling results. Contextual multi-armed bandit methods help scale to various treatments and perform off-policy policy evaluation of the collected data.

The Summary of This Paper

The marketing team of Amazon suggests a new approach to optimizing advertisement campaigns. The approach draws upon casual interface, uplift modeling, and multi-armed bandits. It allows the targeting of marketing campaigns based on casual outcomes rather than only pure outcomes. Ultimately, this presented model approach helps target only those responsive customers who don’t prefer to respond to marketing campaigns just after seeing them. The research optimization confirms that a focus on casual effects can lead to higher investment returns.

The Conclusion 

Customers expect any marketing campaign to understand their interactions with your product. This understanding works as fundamental for building effective marketing campaigns. Numerous Advance AI tools can automate marketing activities and significantly improvise marketing analytics and insights. These researches are some of the working models that bring the maximum user interactions from implementing AI for Marketing and advertising campaigns. By following this topic, you can rest assured that you are informed about the latest breakthrough in AI optimization research for marketing & advertising campaigns.

Top 5 Benefits of Implementing Marketing Technology in Your Business Strategy

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Technology is moving faster than ever before and with this customer’s expectations are getting higher too. MarTech marketing technology is becoming key for organizations to meet and exceed customer expectations. MarTech helps organizations fill the digital gap created due to the rapid advancement in technology and evolving consumer behavior. The advancement in artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation helps marketers catch up with recent market trends and speed up the organization’s changes. This blog will discuss the top five benefits of implementing MarTech in your business strategy.

Data unlocking with analytics tools

In this fast-changing digital world, data is the key to sustainable growth for a business. With access to more data than ever before, marketers now can unlock data that most well-funded organizations just a few years ago. The data has now become the resource that needs analysis and refinement to deliver the best for a business. This is why the analytics industry is estimated to grow 10-15 % by 2022.

Analytics tools have now become necessary for companies to add in their marketing technology to utilize data fully. With this, an organization can increase the ROI and effectiveness of its marketing strategy. Due to this, companies are now bringing analytics into the center of the decision-making process to remove any bias and become data-driven to serve their customers better. Change in an organizational culture where data can be utilized to improve and optimize social media marketing, SEO, PPC, and email personalization.

Marketing automation for increasing efficiency

Brands need to maintain their strong presence in consumers’ minds to influence purchasing decisions. But due to so much noise in the digital world, maintaining a strong presence now becomes a challenging task for marketers.Automating the marketing efforts has become important for brands to scale up their efforts and engage consumers in this digital world. Move forward from one size fits all marketing policy to cut through the digital noise. Customers are moving away from products and ads that they don’t find interesting or improve their lives. Automating the market processes allows marketers to connect with consumers in a more personalized way that offers real value.

Marketing automation is improving the productivity of the business by 15-20 percent. Marketing automation is a critical component that helps in increasing and scaling the scope of campaigns. The number of people doesn’t limit a marketing campaign’s success as automation allows in increasing the digital world’s brand footprint and provides better ROI. automation is enabling the organization to sustain its relationship with the existing customers and attract new ones.

Increasing engagement with management tools

Social media has become a great medium for businesses to connect with customers and increase sales. Even after this huge popularity, some businesses are failing to make an impact on these digital platforms. With the right management tools, creating fresh content, responding to customer queries, and increasing brands looks like an easy and achievable task. Marketers need a MarTech stack to fill in the customer expectation gap; automate and optimize customer interactions with brands over social media platforms.

Social media management tools help in publishing and schedule posts when there is maximum engagement. Automatic reposting of high engagement content to increase reach and monitoring competitors to find the latest trends and topics to improve business marketing strategy. Social listening becomes an important tool for brands to understand and analyze what people are saying about their brand, products, and competitors. With these valuable and unbiased insights, businesses can improve their marketing and business strategies.

Improving customer experience

Marketers are expected to focus largely or entirely on customer experience with the brand in the next two years. Today’s consumers are more inclined to buy from brands that offer better engagement, relevance, and personalized solutions as per their needs. This seamless customer experience is hard for companies to achieve without a MarTech stack. Artificial intelligence helps organizations analyze and process vast customer data to give that personalized experience to their customers. In a survey, many marketing executives have shown concerns that their organization is not mature when it comes to providing a personalized touch to customers. This is a clear indication of organizations’ slow response and how critical marketing technology is to meet customer expectations. 

Without the MarTech stack, organizations will become an impossible task to track the buyer’s journey. Marketing technologies are empowering the organization to analyze the customer data and forge connections in real-time. A streamlined ecosystem ensures that every customer gets a seamless and personalized customer experience.

Improving ROI and productivity

Organizations are looking to streamline their processes and become more efficient in managing their digital assets with the help of digital asset management. Marketers are creating digital content like images, videos, audio, and other content to target every stage of the buyer’s journey. It is vital to create an easily accessible and organized digital library to track all these digital assets. The DAMs are helping marketers avoid duplication of the content and save valuable time while searching media assets. Digital asset management technology provides a way to give highly relevant content that gives the personalized experience consumer demand.

Experts believe that DAM software is estimated to 30-35 percent growth by 2024.

In addition to providing increased efficiency, this software enables organizations and marketers to track usage and digital assets’ ROI. These valuable insights are empowering CMOs to optimize their marketing strategy to get better ROI from further media creation. 

Final words

MarTech stack becomes essential for brands to achieve rapid progress in this digital consumer landscape. It has become an essential tool for the organization to get valuable insights from the data and to optimize for a better customer experience in real-time. AI and ML enable organizations to improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns and maintain that personalization touch that today’s customer demands. With that personalized touch, MarTech helps bring the brand closer to consumers, improve the ROI on marketing initiatives, drive more sales, and delight their customers.

MarTech Adoption – How to increase Marketing ROI

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Beside your MarTech stack, MarTech adoption is a critical factor in driving success and high return on investment (ROI). Hence enabling MarTech skills and regular use of those skills is a critical first step. Skills come primarily from training and that needs resources especially investment of money.

After spending a lot of $$ on procuring MarTech, resources for training become a luxury that we cannot afford. Failure to train marketing teams on MarTech skills will create a huge barrier to MarTech adoption. If you are not planning to invest in MarTech training you are starting with a poor ROI from the beginning. I caution you against that and I hope you have both training and onboarding as part of MarTech strategy and investment plan.

“Organizations that invest in acquiring and maintaining MarTech skills are eight times more likely to also experience good or very good ROI.”

– A study I read few years ago.

Key Metrics to track MarTech Adoption

Some of the key metrics that come to my mind to measure MarTech adoption and ROI are:

  • Volume metrics: Measure things like impression, leads, form fills, product views etc.
  • Financial metrics: Measure things like opportunities created, revenue generated, revenue influenced or ROI. You need a stack that has data well connected for your insights team to calculate these.
  • NPS of Customer Zero: This is an ongoing tracking of satisfaction across your internal users. I have found this to be an important metric for MarTech adoption.
Customer Zero NPS is very helpful metric for tracking MarTech adoption
Customer Zero NPS – Leading indicator of MarTech Adoption in 2016 for MarTech
  • Productivity metrics: Measure things like time saved or requests handled, adherence to SLAs, time saved, the velocity of deals, speed to lead etc.
  • Stack Complexity/Retire Legacy assets: How many technologies that can be consolidated as we move from a disconnected MarTech stack with redundant technologies to a MarTech stack that is connected like a platform.

You may argue that first two are marketing metrics. MarTech teams should co-own these metrics as this ensures investments in solutions that enable business outcomes. This will also motivate your MarTech teams to integrate across technologies. Integration and Data are two key aspects in the evolution of MarTech maturity. I will be sharing industries’ first MarTech Maturity Model built with over 30 years of collective MarTech experience in the next few weeks. You will be able to use it as a framework to evolve your MarTech program.

Ideas to enable MarTech adoption

Here are some of the ideas that I have used or plan to use in the future to enable MarTech adoption and Marketing enablement:

  • As part of MarTech governance ensure your marketing stakeholder(s) are part of prioritization. They should also share responsibility for enabling ROI. Do this before you decide to invest in that MarTech solution.
  • Involve key marketing stakeholders in vendor selection, implementation and onboarding as a responsible party.
  • As soon as the marketing team onboards on MarTech solution, start creating monthly reports that use 2 or more metrics mentioned above to track MarTech adoption.
  • Roll out onboarding sessions followed by on-going training.
  • Track MarTech adoption with the help of the vendor and report out on a quarterly basis. Have a north star for adoption and request the vendor to come with recommendations to achieve it.
  • Roll-out a full-service digital marketing academy that works round the clock to enable. I will attribute the success of our MarTech program at McKesson to the Digital Marketing Academy. Here are some of the focus areas I recommend for a MarTech or Digital Marketing Academy:
    • On-going training on essential and emerging technologies
    • Certifications
    • Sharing of Best practices (internal and external)
    • Awards for best work in various categories
    • Opportunities to network across division if you are in a large enterprise
    • Have fun included in your program, so that various teams can bond across team silos
Marketing teams like to connect with each other
From Survey after 2016 Digital Marketing Academy at McKesson

I hope this helps and I will love to be part of your MarTech adoption and Marketing transformation journey. Feel free to share your experience on the topic of MarTech adoption and Marketing Enablement.

Feel free to reach out if you need guidance on putting together MarTech adoption strategy or establishing a Digital Marketing Academy.