How Can CMOs Maximise Marketing Stack ROI in 2021
Effectively maximise marketing stack ROI in times of uncertainty and changing consumer behaviour. Understand how to strategise in 2021.
Published April 21, 2021
Last updated November 14, 2021
In these unprecedented times of uncertainty and change, businesses are urged to navigate the necessity of digital transformation and manage emerging digital channels while keeping a pulse on changing customer behaviour.
Customers already expect a responsive and streamlined experience, however, as we advance, market changes will bring about new purchase patterns that will assume a contextualised real-time response from companies.
In the meantime, companies that don’t ride the wave of innovation will quickly become vulnerable to the rampant economic slowdown. If we have learned anything during the past year is that – agility is crucial.
Still, the question remains — how can companies apply their marketing technology stack strategically to keep up with the novelties while also ensuring the ROI is maximised? Read on to find out.
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Large scale digital transformation or optimisation of the current marketing stack?
Undertaking a large digital transformation requires companies to grant a hefty amount of resources, whether it’s finances, time or expertise. The process of marketing technology procurement involves coordinating many moving pieces, such as large buyer’s committee alignment, creating a future-ready marketing program and training the workforce on new techniques.
The downside to such an approach is the lack of agility, as when the implementation begins, it’s challenging to manoeuvre through various requirement changes. In the end, often, these transformation projects end up being more complex and time-consuming than initially imagined.
The upside is that companies might achieve a future-ready marketing approach, one that is adjusted to fluctuating market conditions. But what if you don’t have years or even months to implement solutions that adequately respond to new customer behaviours?
Elevate strategically
Employing an agile technology implementation methodology that tends to the most urgent customer requirements would benefit many large-scale organisations.
Agile technology implementation will:
- Shorten the loop between customer feedback to company response
- Cut the execution time from the company vision to a new reality
However, achieving agility will require strategic planning. The idea is to optimise the process of listening and collecting customer feedback so that the marketing roadmap reflects the exact customer needs and wastes no resources on deploying unnecessary technology solutions.
To ensure the best possible scenario, companies must take both business and customer requirements into consideration.
Want to know more about our B2B Marketing Automation Software Implementation?
Put customer experience at the centre
Customer experience improves when the customer journey is seamless and adaptable to their needs. However, it goes south the moment customers notice disintegrated and poorly personalised messaging. Putting customer experience first in 2021 and beyond means ensuring omnichannel and contextualised communication streams. To achieve this, companies must assume technology is there to empower their initiatives rather than slow them down. Regardless of your marketing objective, mapping out the cross-channel requirements and optimising every possible touchpoint is the foundational point where you begin maximising your Martech ROI.
Enable customer feedback collection
One shift that is currently unfolding is the necessity of contextualised communication with the customers. As a result of the global change caused by Covid-19, customers expect more empathy from companies, which drives personalisation to become more ‘hyper’. Now, gathering customer feedback isn’t just about discovering customer concerns — it’s about understanding customer conditions, emotions, beliefs and changing needs.
To establish the feedback loop, companies can:
- Deploy technology solutions that listen to customer sentiment
- Implement company-wide feedback collection process
- Ensure customer feedback is managed under a centralised system
- Tie customer feedback programs to business outcomes
Prioritise system integration
In 2021, healthy data management practice is unavoidable. Data is exponentially growing, and the new changes suggest — it will continue to be the case in the future. Now that the customers are used to the digital-first mentality, companies have a tremendous opportunity to leverage for their benefit – customer data. No matter how far you go in your technology evolution, if the data doesn’t flow freely, you are disadvantaged. To ensure your data management is up to the highest standard, integrate the systems within your marketing technology stack and establish a data hygiene practice across the company.
Identify system gaps and overlaps
According to the latest Martech landscape infographic, the number of marketing technology solutions has grown by 5,233% since 2011. This number means there is a high possibility that many marketing automation platforms share similar functionalities. While you may have used one tool for a specific purpose when you implemented it, the chances are that it evolved according to the market needs. To maximise your marketing technology ROI, it’s crucial to double-check your current stack and determine the most effective way of obtaining new functionalities as you move along. You may find you had them dormant all along.
Identify when new technology is needed
Based on what we outlined in this article, you can conclude when you should start thinking about replacing your old solution or adding a new one to your marketing stack.
To sum up, choose to implement a new solution when:
- The tools don’t integrate seamlessly across the business
- Your current tool doesn’t offer the functionality you need
- The marketing ROI starts to decrease
- Maintenance costs begin to add up
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Ensure ongoing training and expertise availability
No matter the quality of your marketing strategy and the technical support, if your users aren’t up to speed, the ROI will suffer.
Companies must find a way to cultivate a learning culture within their workforce to fuel creativity and growth. Many companies build employee portals to empower ongoing skills development and incentivise learning for the best effect.
Another option is to focus on deploying data-driven marketing techniques that bring proven results and can swiftly adjust to changing customer behaviour.
At Behavioural Response, we have designed a proven approach — Omnichannel Behavioural Campaigns — that leverages marketing data to contextually address customers’ needs across channels in changing conditions while maximising marketing stack ROI.
Omnichannel Behavioural Campaigns for B2B and B2C organisations merge the most impactful marketing techniques, such as Account-based Marketing, Omnichannel Marketing, Integrated Marketing, and Event-driven Marketing, into a future-ready approach.
Check our online resources to see how you can model our approach to maximise the ROI of your marketing initiatives and your marketing stack.
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