How Can Brands Navigate the New Era of Martech? 4 Steps to Success

CRM is keeping CMOs awake at night. To be precise: its unfulfilled investment potential. 

In fact, a recent AAR survey reported that lack of platform optimisation ranks as a top five concern among big challenges facing senior marketers in the twelve months ahead.  

And I’m not surprised.

Business is changing at speed – driven by changing consumer behaviour, fast-moving technology, data and third party/security regulation. With customer relevancy high on the agenda and ROI driving lifecycle programmes, CRM is increasingly front and centre of growth strategies.

As a result, brands have invested more, bringing CRM expertise and control of their martech in-house.

But not all is as it seems. For many businesses, unlocking the full potential of these systems is a challenge. Gartner Marketing Technology Survey reveals that marketers are harnessing a mere 42 percent of their martech's full potential, leading to disconnected customer experiences.

There are several reasons for this– ranging from complexity of increasingly sophisticated platforms, to lack of in-house expertise, to siloed data.

Based on our experience with big brands from Disney, Cunard to Nationwide, here are some steps to navigate this rapidly changing landscape and unlock the growth potential of CRM.

Empower in-house team execution capabilities 

In-house teams often drown in admin tasks and manual data processes, shifting focus from diving deep into and optimising the complexities of tools, early adoption of the latest martech capabilities, and continuously upskilling to stay ahead of the curve.  

As a result, marketing communications are less effective, less targeted, far less genuinely personalised – and sales aren’t singing as they should be.

We're increasingly seeing in-house teams working collaboratively with CRM specialists to successfully activate brand CRM tech more effectively.  

Tight alignment of strategy and execution

Yes, this seems obvious but as technology changes at the speed of sound, there’s often a disconnect between the strategic vision of senior stakeholders and day-to-day execution by CRM teams. 

Even when everyone is aligned on high-level strategic goals, teams with hands on keyboards still need to produce a marketing calendar’s worth of comms, build trigger journeys, and manage adhoc requests to cope with business challenges. That difference in 'heads up' and 'heads down' creates a functional disconnect that often explains a lack of momentum, even when there's a wealth of talent.

Without alignment, even the best martech strategies and tools can underperform and underdeliver on value and measurable results.

Briefs we're currently seeing are searching for independent expertise to objectively channel high-level strategy into scalable, and realistic, solutions for teams on the ground. Along with the ask to invigorate the whole culture, and remove the overwhelm standing in the way of progress.

Crack open data silos 

As channels constantly proliferate, data scatters fast and furious across the organisation. One major benefit martech and CRM bring is seamless integration, using data across platforms. 

Brands like Huel and Greene King have exciting, customer-focussed insights allowing them to plan CRM at a high level. They're building closer relationships between those insights and individual customers to activate relevance at a very micro-level - driving efficiencies and effectiveness.

Really focus on the customer

It's all too easy to put the cart before the horse by focusing on issues such as size of database, AI, platform feature usage and email centric KPIs.

While these have their place, successful CRM ensures that customers find true value in communications.  And this is where CRM comes into its own: with smart use of data, one to one connections are hyper-personalised. It drives relevance of communications and engagement, and highlights the importance of considering all channels, not just email. No one has truly cracked this yet.

Martech will innovate at pace over the next three to five years - there's no doubt of that. Its superpower is already winning recognition as brands drive sales growth through personalised communications. Let’s unlock the potential!