In this guest post, Amperity area VP, Billy Loizou (lead image), offers this sage advice to marketers increasingly confused by their own martech abilities…

Australian brands and businesses are under immense pressure to attract and retain customers in a strained economic environment. They’re turning to technology to improve customer experience and stand out in a saturated landscape. However, ‘panic buying’ for the martech stack isn’t the answer to surviving, much less thriving, in this uncertain landscape.

MartechTribe and chiefmartech’s latest marketing technology landscape reveals the martech industry was pushing 10,000 vendor solutions in 2022, up from 8,000 in 2020. With an abundance of new solutions, each one touting benefits more remarkable than the last, it can be tempting to fall victim to the “shiny new tool syndrome.”

However, it’s vital marketers stay mindful of managing their ever-growing tech stack, ensuring simplicity and integration remain a core function. This is critical to delivering what matters most – a seamless customer experience.

At a recent Marketing Live event in Sydney, I joined a panel moderated by seasoned martech practitioner Satya Upadhyaya, Former VP Campaign Optimisation Marketing Capability and Change at Citibank, NAB, with Tim Armstrong, Director of Digital Capability and Data at Nova Entertainment.

Together, we unpacked the current martech landscape, uncovering the latest challenges associated with the ever-growing tech stack. Importantly, we also revealed best practices any organisation can leverage to tackle these difficulties, including how to unleash the power of customer data with a customer data platform (CDP).

The “black hole” of marketing complexity

With the rapid increase of new martech solutions dropping in the APAC market, complexity seems to be a natural byproduct. However, beyond all the noise, it all comes down to one thing: targeting customers with the right message in the right channel at the right time. It’s still every marketer’s job to figure out how to do that in a cost effective, yet profitable way.

Let’s take a deeper look into these core pillars below:

● the right unified view, sparking the explosion of CDP

● the right message, sparking the explosion of personalisation

● the right channel, sparking the explosion of mobile-first, WhatsApp, social media

● the right time, sparking the explosion of AI

Many companies have sold the dream. However, few actually deliver. Smaller start-ups are offering solutions to these problems in isolation. On top of that, complexity is added to different verticals at different price points. I’m certain we’re going to start seeing a spike in solutions by the end of the year focused on governance, privacy and compliance.

Armstrong agrees, saying organisations are certainly “spoilt for choice” but the ecosystem isn’t as complex as it’s made out to be. “It all comes back to how you approach looking at a solution or at a vendor to solve these problems,” he says.

“However, where it does get more complex is in the overlap. Where does each platform start and stop, and how can you ensure you’re only paying for the core pieces of functionality it provides?

“Some vendors aren’t forthcoming about that,” Armstrong continues. “As a decision-maker, you have to put the pressure on them to ask the hard-hitting questions — how does your tech fit into my business, and what’s the direct correlation to value?”

There’s a solution for that

The marketing industry is exploding, valued at more than AU$500 billion, Upadhyaya points out. “Now, there’s a solution for everything from privacy to compliance, data management and everything in between. Yet, despite this, overall utilisation has dropped. What’s the driving factor for the underutilisation of this tech?” he asks.

It can be attributed to two things: data access and resourcing. Businesses want to be able to deliver results. However, doing so requires access to consumer data. Data is the fuel to drive messaging and systems.

When it comes to resourcing, businesses aren’t really thinking about providing the right skills internally or allocating the budget to make the most out of whatever platform they’ve invested in. Armstrong adds that it’s also challenging for a vendor to sit in the buyer’s shoes. “There are so many things at play,” he says. “Realistically, it’s hard for the client or the customer to encapsulate that into a narrative to a vendor to help them understand.

“There’s always going to be that disconnect there. A platform must do more than fit into your living, breathing business, it must be used by everyone regularly. Often, companies waste a tonne of money on a platform that never gets used. They have to invest in one that allows different people with different capabilities within the organisation to use it effectively.”

While a large number of platforms are sold as ‘drag and drop’, that’s not always the case. Oftentimes, they end up being much more complex in the back end, requiring advanced technical skills for full operationality.

Metrics matter

At Amperity, everything we do maps back to three metrics in a business: net profit, customer acquisition cost and net revenue retention. A platform must have drivers and levers that influence those three metrics. As a vendor, we love being involved early on in the discussion with our customers. We’re there to help them see and experience the entire value of the technology.

When it comes to phase one, immediate implementation value is important. Let’s not overcook the implementation. No one likes being in an implementation process for 12 to 18 months without seeing time to value. Then, you must decide how to phase out the rest of the initiatives.

Regarding strategy versus implementation, as a vendor, you must have a chain of custody. You need to be responsible for the outcome, whether you’re working with a systems integrator or you have a partner implementing the technology. You can’t just wipe your hands free and walk away, saying, “Oh, you bought the software. Good luck for the next three years.”

You have to make sure that you’re there day in and day out, helping the customer understand how to use the tech and then, helping the implementation partner along the way as well. If that’s not happening, it’s a broken system. But when it does happen and that relationship is off the ground, there’s nothing better than having a brand by your side, advocating the use of your technology.

Building a data-led channel strategy

With the rise of online channels and the proliferation of customer touchpoints, marketers are inundated with zero, first, second and third-party data, Upadhyaya says. “How can they effectively build an audience-led data and channel strategy?” he asks.

It’s important to point out that first-party data is the only party now. If you’re not thinking that way yet, you should be. When it comes to building a channel and audience-based strategy, marketers should look at their KPIs. They are the guiding light that will drive the success of an audience-led channel strategy.

Every business is different. For example, you could look at the phase of the consumer lifecycle, whether it’s from awareness to acquisition, onboarding, engagement, conversion and retention. Then, you map the current state.

The first thing you’ll likely notice is gaps in your strategy. They are probably blocking you from achieving your KPIs. Once that’s identified, it becomes obvious where you should be investing

by channel and campaign to get as close as you can to those KPIs. That’s a longer approach, but it is a channel and audience-based strategy.

There are high-value customers, and you must figure out how to identify them and understand what drives them to find more of them. Then, you need to be able to predict and determine what’s driving churn. You can have a DMP (data management platform), MDM (master data management) or CDP, but knowing who your high-value customers are will help you acquire the best customers. And predicting churn will help you retain and create more customers.

Why CDPs are worth the hype

Research indicates that the CDP market was valued at AU$7 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach the value of AU$71.69 billion by 2030, at a CAGR of 33.70% during the forecast period, Upadhyaya shares. “Yet, despite this impressive growth, many are still unaware of what a CDP actually does. Why is a CDP worth the hype?” he asks.

Let’s break this down with an analogy. If you look at sports, electric cars and agriculture, at first glance, they don’t seem to have much in common. However, look a little closer and you’ll notice that they’re all reliant on fuel. Whether it’s LeBron James getting 10 hours of sleep a night, the right soil and nutrients creating the best-tasting grapes or the electric battery driving high-performance cars, fuel matters.

Data is the fuel source of modern business. However, if the data is unreliable and outdated, it’s not going to be of much use. Garbage in equals garbage out, and no amount of marketing or money will change that. That’s why a customer data platform (CDP) like Amperity is so important.

A CDP helps unify customer data. It takes data from every source inside your organisation, whether that’s point of sale, eCommerce, CRM (customer relationship management) web behaviour, etc and brings it together, so you can understand who the humans are behind the data.

That gives you the customer 360 and insights into your customers that are useful to the business like the last purchase to power the next best recommendation. This data can then be shared with other departments like IT for analytics or marketing for communications. It’s unified, unlocked data.

The last piece of the puzzle is unleashing that data with integrations into downstream systems. Remember, it doesn’t matter what tools you have or implement if you don’t have a clean foundation of data to start with. Good data powers good marketing.

Fun fact: CDPs aren’t just for marketers

While they were initially designed with marketing use cases in mind, their functionality has expanded to support a wide range of business needs. By collecting, integrating and managing customer data from multiple sources to create a unified view of the customer, CDPs provide value to many business departments.

For example, the insights gained from a CDP can be used to inform business decisions across sales, customer service and product development. In fact, we have clients that use Amperity to calculate share price. The reason is simple, a CDP should be the most trusted source of consumer data in your business.