How has your approach to customer engagement/retention/loyalty changed due to new MarTech tools and solutions?

The new tools allow us to personalise our communication with users across a variety of different channels. Traditional MarTech tools are predominately focused on email and have to rely on acquiring or integrating with new partners who can provide them access to new channels. In our experience, using traditional tools are not very seamless which does not work for us. The new tools gather information in real time and provide us with easy ways to communicate with third parties via APIs to make the user experience more relevant, which in turn, has helped us with acquiring a unified view of the customer which in turn allows us to reach out to the customer on their preferred platform with the content that is of interest.

With all the new MarTech tools and solutions now available, what’s one of the key pitfalls to avoid in the procurement process?

Overpromising by vendors. Although there are many tools out there with a lot of amazing features, you have to recognise there may not be any one tool that can do everything you want. However, there may be tools available which are created specifically for your industry and provide everything you require. A common issue is that vendors often promise customers too much and tend to overexaggerate key features, including ones that are “just about to release”.

It is important to be diligent about the needs you are trying to address with these tools and focus on that. Most of the time, with these tools, what you see is what you get and when customers get swayed by the vendors’ words, it ends up being a frustrating relationship for both parties involved in the company is not able to achieve the objectives the tool was purchased for.

How have you best managed to integrate legacy systems with new MarTech solutions?

Fortunately, since we are a new company, we don’t have legacy systems that go further than 5 years. And for those, we are able to integrate via APIs.

What MarTech vendors have impressed you with their solutions and understanding of true business needs and challenges?

When it comes to marketing automation, we have been impressed with Braze and their ability to understand business closely. If there are areas in which Braze doesn’t fully understand and/or have the expertise in, they work with us to figure out how to best approach a problem and that is a spirit we appreciate.

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

We think we have been trying to keep up to date with the industry and always exploring and learning new tools.

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

Overall our digital marketing approach is to cut across our entire user journey from discovery to engagement. We are a company still in growth and as such we are always focusing on customer acquisition to grow our customer user base. Nevertheless, while the bulk of our marketing budgets are spent on customer acquisition, we recognize that customer acquisition costs will get steeper over time as we grow. As such, we need to ensure we retain the users we acquired and thus a huge effort is also invested on customer engagement through our CRM team to engage the user using predominantly free channels such as email and push notification.

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?

Have your short term and long term strategy clear before you start meeting prospects. There are a lot of products out there and if you don’t have your needs mapped out, you can get sidetracked by the flashy user cases that these players have to offer really fast. So, get your priorities in order and stick to them.

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

We are a tech enable media company. We started with MarTech. However, its an evolving space and you learn through testing. That is the wonderful gift of MarTech. you can test things out before committing huge budgets on it.

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

We are quite clear on the MarTech strategy and the larger challenge would be on the integration side as one tool doesn’t fit all the needs.

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

Actually, both are critically important as the established MarTech would give you more learnings, case examples and insights while emerging opportunities will give you innovation.

Which MarTech brands have 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.

We just started using Braze that has impressed us so far once we have more learning, we can share more best practices.

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

Customization, Personalization and AI.