How has your approach to customer engagement/retention/loyalty changed due to new MarTech tools and solutions?
The education industry, in my experience, has relied a lot on face-to-face experiences to drive customer engagement/retention and loyalty. I still believe there is a place for face-to-face but by simply relying on this extremely limits the longevity of the engagement.
We have now seen how MarTech tools can be used together with face-to-face events to drive engagement. We also appreciate how webinars are engaging and create valuable content.
With all the new MarTech tools and solutions now available, what is one of the key pitfalls to avoid in the procurement process?
The key learning for me has been to ensure 2 things:
- Will your new MarTech tools “talk” to your existing tech stack?
- Have you made sure that your onboarding process for these tools is robust enough so that you are maximizing their outcomes for your business?
How have you best managed to integrate legacy systems with new MarTech solutions?
From my experience this is fairly straight forward. As long as legacy systems can integrate with new tools then there is no issue.
How has your organisation / team dealt with the challenge of the marketing industry and wider digital world evolving at such a fast pace?
This is a challenge we embrace. Simply put, as a marketer, you have never “mastered” the wider digital world. It’s about always learning, being curious about what other industries are doing, and being brave about experimenting with new tools.
Currently, what are you primarily looking for in your digital marketing efforts? Awareness or engagement? Why?
All of the above! Digital tools should be able to serve both. In the industry I work in, education, the old model was just about acquisition—buy this, use it, I’ll see you again in the next sale cycle. With subscription models and next gen tools for education we now need to forage an ongoing relationship with our customers. We need to have both awareness and engagement.
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?
Make sure the outcomes of what the tool provides can report to the same metrics as your organization’s goals. How does onboarding work? Do you have the resources to onboard your team and ensure you are maximizing the MarTech stack?
What do you predict as being the top MarTech trends for 2020?
There is a lot of excellent tools out there and many will deliver similar outcomes. I predict that ease of use and speedy onboarding will be a future differentiator. With resource challenges I believe the tech that will win will be the tech that is easiest to use and not require specialist knowledge to execute.
