How has your organisation / team dealt with the challenge of the marketing industry and wider digital world evolving at such a fast pace?

The need of doing something drastic has been realized, early. There have been efforts to connect with the Customer Insights world through Empathy and Digital Technologies to make the Marketing more relevant and digital to the ever-changing needs and demographics.

Currently, what are you primarily looking for in your digital marketing efforts? Awareness or engagement? Why?

Engagement has been a focus, because the current marketing trends have been more of an extreme personalization and contextual to the lifestyle needs. The content of marketing has become specific to the micro offerings and offerings to customize the product or services as the need may be.

Customer Loyalty has increased when the experience is focused rather than one marketing plan working for all. Emerging millennia preference have driven the digital engagement models which can work 24/7.

What is your key takeaway piece of advice that you would give when speaking to others on how to evaluate and select a MarTech stack?

Think of paradigm shift as the change happening around us and make the plans for something ahead of the curve, focusing on the imagination of possibilities rather than reacting to the trends.

How did your MarTech journey begin? Please let us know your top 3 findings and discoveries.

MarTech Journey began more from the Customer Centricity as the focus which led to the leveraging of Digital Technologies, leveraging the frameworks of understanding Customer Behaviour, better. Focus has been on Customer and Object Journeys to make the touch points as Analytics Driven Marketing effort as possible.

Top Three Discoveries:

• Emotions play a key role in Marketing than the Product of Offerings, the way it gets connected to the needs contextually
• Insights driven by Analytics (dynamic) play a key role in making Marketing more effective and connected to the business model
• Channels of Marketing have been very drastic and quick to emerge, the preparation is key to catch-up with an omni-channel based though process than being uni-dimensional in approach

For you and your team, which is currently recognised as the larger challenge – MarTech integration or MarTech strategy?

Integration has been a greater challenge to deal with, Design and Development of APIs for the emerging digital eco system, keeping the investment on Legacy relevant and nimble.

Have you mainly chosen to adopt established MarTech or have you also looked into the emerging opportunities? Which?

Emerging Opportunities have been explored like that of Chatbot, API, Omni Channel and Analytics driven AI enabled journeys.

2020 looks thrilling for marketers and I am looking forward to the new experiences and challenges ahead.

Which MarTech brands you found have / are close to best meeting your expectations when it comes to customer experience? Let us know of any brands which have exceeded expectations.

Salesforce has been one of the top preferred brands for many needs, clearly a winner hands down. But, Adobe has many options now to select like that of One Marketing and Integration with Oracle or Microsoft platforms have become seamless.

Sugar has been one of the interesting players that has been tried as a POC.

What do you predict as being the top MarTech trends for MarTech in 2020?

AI and VR will drive the MarTech to new heights and become extreme “experience” focused, in the years to come!