February 16, 2023 – During this Martechify session, three of our martech experts gave an insider view of the latest martech trends, including use cases, valuable insight, and advice.
Martech Stacks: Fitting the Pieces Together
Learn how to build and optimize your martech stack, from selecting the right tools and components to managing its evolution–and how to avoid pitfalls as you grow.
Martech Stack Evolution: Latest Trends
Explore the latest trends and innovations in the ever-evolving martech landscape, and break down the factors that are driving change.
October 2022 Recap
October 6, 2022 — During this Martechify discussion, four of our martech and content experts discussed approaches, best practices, and tools for upleveling content including using personalization.
Martechify May 2022 Recap
Session Recap
How to Build an A-Grade Martech Team
May 19, 2022 — During this Martechify discussion, three of our experts outline best practices for developing martech skills and building competencies in new hires.
In this session, Darren Atkins of Sabre Corporation, Ali Rastiello of Health Catalyst, and Sujoy Chandra of SiriusXM explain common considerations when integrating new and existing employees into an effective martech team. They outline what skills to look for in a prospective employee, as well as how to implement more efficient processes for onboarding and training.
Featured experts
Framework
Although it may seem straightforward enough, building a competent martech team requires coordination and forethought to prepare for inevitable challenges along the way. Arguably, the first hurdle when assembling a martech team is identifying which skills are needed—which is, itself, a complex thought exercise. This then determines whether company decision-makers should focus on developing capabilities of current employees or hiring new talent. Next, team leaders need to know how to turn these old and new skillsets into actionable roles. Finally, companies must properly nurture their teams and ensure their knowledge is current in a rapidly-evolving technological world.
Each of these interdependent steps is challenging enough in isolation, which is why it is crucial to have a detailed plan in place beforehand. Chandra, for example, recommends that hiring managers dedicate 10 hours per role, at the very least. Hiring managers should also have a clear idea of the company’s vision to articulate to prospective employees, as well as a clear scoring method to determine the skills that are most important for employees to implement this vision. Perhaps the most difficult planning aspect of your team-building process will be preparing for the future of marketing technology. Because the nature of marketing as a discipline continues to become more AI-centric, it is important to ensure that your team members have the right attitude toward technology and continuously up-to-date martech training for their role.
Team-building considerations and challenges
When starting to put together a martech team, there are a few initial considerations to keep in mind. Atkins notes that the complexity of your organization—i.e., your business’ size, geography, channels, products, and so on—will determine much of your thinking around martech team-building. Of these factors, size is perhaps the most consequential; Rastiello noted that a main challenge for smaller martech teams is ensuring that every discipline and task is covered. This means that good martech teams will likely be larger than many businesses anticipate, since a too-small team may not be able to handle more specialized tasks. Knowing your team’s skills, as well as those of other related and relevant members of your organization, will help make sure that every task is well-addressed by the appropriate people.
Oftentimes, however, your team may need to consider outsourcing the tasks that your team is unable to cover effectively. Rastiello suggests finding an agency that can work as an extension of your team and is familiar with your specific martech stack. If done right, this can provide an immediate boost to your team’s efficacy and your company’s growth. Nevertheless, this option may not be available to all companies due to limited resources. As an alternative, Atkins explained a situation in which outsourcing at Sabre was minimized by introducing a new training program. Ultimately, deciding whether to train or outsource to meet skill gaps will depend on your business’ specific resources and requirements.
Of course, these holes in a team’s skillset can be quickly patched by hiring the right new team member. Chandra explains that attracting the perfect fit means writing a job description that provides an optimized experience for each candidate. This means that each description should function like a good landing page—providing an informative yet memorable introduction to the company and role. Be sure to outline a list of hard and soft skills necessary for each role, which you can use in both a job description and to assess prospective employees in interviews. Creating a candidate scoring method ahead of time is especially important, in order to ensure an optimal fit and reduce bias.
After finding and beginning to integrate the candidate with the best fit, it is of course important to keep them well-trained and happy. This requires building a strong company culture, which can be somewhat tricky if your employees rarely or never see each other in person, but is very possible with the right processes. All of our experts stressed the importance of transparency and work-life balance, but these are not the only factors relevant to a company’s culture. Investing in the right processes and toolsets ahead of time goes a long way toward promoting an excellent culture, as does cultivating an attitude of lifelong learning. When these factors are taken into account, your teams will cohere and function at a much higher level.
Although putting together a dream martech team can require immense planning and forethought, the results are transformational. To refine your team-building process even further, try asking yourself these questions:
What drives your team?
Knowing how to use martech is only part of the job. The more that martech tools align with what each team member is passionate about, the more effective your team will be. Employees should feel empowered and autonomous enough to use their skills as they see fit, and should be able to clearly see the impact of their good work.
Do your team members understand and share the same vision?
Atkins explains that unity and clarity of purpose is essential for martech teams to cohere. Ensure that your team is aligned on how “success” is measured (and be sure to celebrate successes whenever you can).
How can your martech stack change with your business?
Chandra suggests that when selecting the right tools for your martech team, rather than being distracted by the Next Big Thing, try focusing on the direction your business is heading in six months or six years. Your team can then tailor its preferred martech stack to your business’ needs.
How are your martech processes being documented?
Having your team’s processes recorded in a location that is easy to find can make all the difference, says Rastiello. This will not only improve clarity within your team, but can also help smoothen onboarding immensely. These processes should ideally be repeatable and scalable for the sake of efficiency.
Discussion and takeaways: Advice from our experts
Here are some highlights from our experts’ advice:
Atkins: One of the key questions for me is, do you have absolute clarity on what marketing is here to do? The interpretation of this question changes with each organization. Without having this North Star of what it is you are trying to achieve and where your priorities lie, you can get pulled in every kind of direction.
Rastiello: I tell any startup or CEO trying to figure out how to create their marketing team to start with their ops team—they are going to lay your foundations for growth. Everyone else can be outsourced, for the most part.
Chandra: If you want to get the right people on the bus, you need to recruit like a marketer. What that means is, think about applying marketing concepts toward building your dream team.
Related resources
New to this topic? Find helpful external links below.
Watch the recording
For more insights and takeaways from the session, watch the full recording here:
Previous sessions
Watch previous session recordings and read recaps of our past Martechify events to learn about a variety of martech-related topics straight from the experts.
Upcoming Sessions
VIRTUAL SESSION
Precision Targeting: Using AI, ABM, and More
Tuesday, October 1, 2024 | 11 AM CT
Whether you’re marketing to business buyers or consumers, targeting the right person with the right message takes work. The good news is that making AI a member of your ABM team can greatly improve your chances of success.
Join our live panel discussion to hear experts discuss how to use AI with your martech for data-driven targeting and customized experiences. Learn how to create next-level account and customer journeys.
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AI + ABM: Taking Your Marketing Transformation to the Next Level
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Resources
Martech is a work in progress, constantly evolving to meet user and customer demands. We’ve put together some informative resources to help you navigate the shifting new technological landscape with confidence.
Building an A-Grade Martech Team
Darren Atkins of Sabre Corporation, Ali Rastiello of Health Catalyst, and Sujoy Chandra of SiriusXM discuss how to recruit, retain, and enrich outstanding modern marketing teams.
Martechify February 2022 Recap
Session Recap
CDPs in Action: Essentials for Implementing a Customer Data Platform
February 10, 2021 — In our Martechify discussion, two of our experts expand upon our November session by exploring ways to effectively implement Customer Data Platform (CDP) technology.
For this session, martech leaders Brian Prascak of Naratav and Rich Herbst of Ascend Marketing explain CDP implementation at each stage of the process, culminating in deep brand-customer relationships with continuous dialogue. They outline how developing quality use cases can better inform your decisions, and explain more ways that a 360-degree customer view can benefit your marketing campaigns.
Featured experts
Framework:
As we discussed in our previous session, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) are invaluable tools for consolidating and analyzing customer data in order to boost your brand and KPIs. No wonder then, that as of the start of 2022, most businesses are implementing or considering implementing a CDP—whether as a stand-alone platform, embedded tool, or custom in-house solution. Amidst this boom, those looking to upgrade their capabilities are finding a crowded market with overwhelming options. Compounding the issue is the complex task of integrating the CDP within your existing data framework.
Fortunately, these hurdles are clearable with some thoughtful planning and cross-team collaboration. Our discussion included a number of important considerations related to implementing a CDP as smoothly and effectively as possible.
Know emerging CDP best practices
A few important implementation insights from the CDP Institute were initially shared to frame the discussion:
- Ensure you have a well-defined customer data strategy and CDP implementation plan—ideally, one that follows a gradual crawl, walk, run approach. You will need to establish relevant, specific use cases and KPIs for your customer data to make the most of your CDP’s capabilities.
- Assess your customer data landscape to seamlessly integrate your CDP with your existing data architecture. This means accounting for the way your data is retrieved and resolved, as well as any dependencies and blockers. You may want to create a flowchart!
- Pay attention to customer data stakeholders and workflow. As data ownership and access change hands and become more centralized, cross-team collaboration and proper training are required to handle the shift.
Refining your CDP implementation plan
Brian Prascak offered further insights for precisely defining the direction of your CDP implementation with use cases. You can develop use cases based on your overall data objectives and strategy; for example, if your goal is to improve customer digital engagement, your strategy may be to offer personalized product recommendations and your use case will reflect this. This will, in turn, help define which CDP features to prioritize when making a selection—in the example case, you will want a solution that can serve product recommendations based on a customer’s cart contents and preferences. Developing use cases and connecting them with potential capabilities will ensure that your CDP choice is ideal and well-optimized.
Importantly, as your customer data and relationships mature, you may find your CDP use cases and capability needs to evolve in tandem. Brian Prascak outlined how professionals “flow” between different use cases at each stage of CDP integration, leading to an end goal of continuous customer dialogue. In increasing order of maturity, here are some use cases mentioned:
- Integrated information – Capture and consolidate various data from all channels to create a secure source for insights and decisions.
- Predictive insight and precision marketing – Understand customer behavior and preferences; optimize messages for targeted omnichannel marketing.
- Personalized interactions – Share recommendations that are tailored for each customer and synchronized across channels.
- Continuous dialogue – Provide optimized, continuous communications that engage customers according to their preferences.
Prascak emphasized that CDPs’ integrated structure provides an opportunity for continuous customer development—that is, engaging customers consistently with the right content at the right time. Done correctly, everyone’s profile attributes, preferences, and journey stages can affect the personalized content they receive and when. Moreover, connecting and resolving identities across channels provides a consistent, 360-degree customer view, as well as a more seamless customer experince. Continuous development ultimately fosters deeper connections and creates enthusiastic brand advocates, as it allows for more responsive campaigns that anticipate customer needs.
Discussion and takeaways: Advice from our experts
Our experts discussed how good planning and quality use cases can drive an effective CDP implementation. Here are some highlights of their advice:
Prascak: On the operational side, find out who in IT is going to support your CDP implementation when it is not working. It’s important to know what resources you need and the expertise you’ll need to do it.
You want to make sure you have a good partnership with your CDP vendor; the devil is in the details. Get to a level of the specificity of what you are going to do beforehand so you can validate with the vendors.
Herbst: There is a marketing approach that says, “let’s take everything to a fine-grained, highly-responsive personalization,” and it becomes a heavy lift to do that all at once. A better idea is to break it up into stepping-stones, because the human organization and the marketing both need to evolve with the technology.
Related resources
Watch the recording
For more insights and takeaways from the session, watch the full recording here:
Previous sessions
Watch previous session recordings and read recaps of our past Martechify events to learn about a variety of martech-related topics straight from the experts.
MarTech: Delivering Next-Level Content Marketing
Penny Hill of Khoros, Marie Martin of AxleHire, J.P. Maxwell of Tipit, and Stephanie McArthur of Demandbase discuss what they have done to change the content game.
Martechify October 2021 Recap
Session Recap
Adtech: Emerging Trends and Methods
October 7, 2021 — Experts Adam Cox of YETI and Nicolette Harper of Marriott International divulge how their highly distinct and diverse companies pivoted tactics and expanded reach during challenging times, thanks to the flexibility afforded by their respective adtech stacks. They share their innovative processes and platforms—and how they got the entire team on board.
Featured experts
Framework:
Adtech implementation begins with a thought exercise exploring these questions:
- Who am I targeting? – The audience may be anonymous, but third-party behavioral data can fill in some of the gaps.
- In what context? – Customers may have different needs based on their communities, interests, or stages of their respective customer journeys.
- With what goal in mind? – E.g. delivering the products and messages that further your business interests.
Adtech answers the question: how will I identify and manage all relevant audiences and personas?
Once these have been sorted, adtech tools allow professionals the opportunity to:
- Activate and manage campaigns
- Optimize content and offers
- Distribute these via the proper platform, tool, or delivery vehicle
Emerging trends and methods in adtech
The adtech and martech landscape is dense and still rapidly growing—from about 150 platforms in 2011 to over 8,000 in 2020.
- This includes content management platforms specialized for managing product information and sales (e.g. digital asset managers and product information managers, or DAMs and PIMS respectively).
- Separately, analytics platforms like Google Analytics provide tools for segmentation and data insights. Your taxonomy will likely include both content and data analysis platforms, so ensure they are compatible and have appropriate integrations.
- By creating a model of your data structure and journey, you can determine which platforms fit best for each step. See Adam Cox’s model of YETI’s adtech landscape in the video for an elegant example.
- Similarly, where identity solutions are necessary, more than one is usually required. As such, a primary challenge is stitching them together sensically and securely.
Adtech allows for segmentation of customers based on their specific interests and communities.
- By clustering products into catalogs based on different lifestyles, YETI can analyze how customers move through their specialized catalog and see how they click and convert.
- This allows not only for targeted introduction of new products, but also expansion into new communities of customers.
Adtech tools also provide businesses opportunities to be as programmatic—and therefore agile—as possible.
- Using AI tools to determine ad spending amounts—by incorporating a digital media planner, for instance—may save money and maximize impact.
- Responding to sudden shifts in supply and demand requires programmatic adtech tools that can automate budget and content delivery decisions precisely when needed.
- Many content delivery processes can be made programmatic, including the ad creation itself (see Nicolette Harper’s fascinating discussion on dynamic creative tools that logically splice together existing ads based on performance).
Discussion and takeaways: Advice from our experts
Both of our experts discussed the technical challenges and demands of implementing adtech, and despite their unique business needs had some similar tips. Here’s how they summed up their advice:
Harper: The biggest piece of advice is do not underestimate bringing your leaders along on your journey. Seek leadership buy-in toward building new tech and bring the rest of your team along to understand why and how change is happening. Becoming best friends with your Privacy and Legal departments will help manage necessary data agreements during the long process of building adtech.
Cox: Educating your executive team on what machine learning means for your company is rewarding but can be a challenge—be patient! Make sure your Privacy and Legal departments understand your adtech stack and how it satisfies their requirements by taking the time to build understandable system documentation throughout.
Related resources
Watch the recording
For more insights and takeaways from the session, watch the full recording here:
Previous sessions
Watch previous session recordings and read recaps of our past Martechify events to learn about a variety of martech-related topics straight from the experts.