Yes, but our industry is different

How different industries are using marketing technology to solve some very different problems

In our recent blog, Hiring Martech to improve the job of Marketing, we talked about the saturation of the Martech landscape and how marketers are losing sight of the role their technology is meant to play within their business. This is largely brought about by the lack of clarity around what problems the technology is meant to be solving. It is still easier to buy new technology than it is to use it effectively, and this is still the biggest issue for most marketing leaders.

But every industry and every type of business is different, and therefore the requirements of the same technology are also different. Below we will look at some of the problems different industries face and the way in which they are leveraging the same Martech to support their business needs.

Financial Industry – The sales led one

Common problem

By nature, the financial industry is heavily sales led with a historic and ingrained reliance on relationship selling. Marketing often plays a subservient, reactive role to sales and they are given limited autonomy over commercial focus. By far the biggest blocker to modern marketing for a sales led organisation is the adoption and governance in the use of technology by sales. They are often target driven and revenue focussed and see little to no value in CRM admin. This lack of data and prospect insight hinders marketing’s ability to use the technology to the best of its ability.

Although brochures, direct mail and relationship selling still largely drives revenue within the financial sector, new entrants to the market, especially challenger brands in the passive and ETF markets, are starting to change the way in which financial businesses go to market. In the long term these will no doubt set the bar for digital expectation among future investors.

Where Martech supports

Following GDPR and the upcoming changes to ePrivacy, data protection and compliance management have been front of mind for most marketers, but none more so than those in the financial industry where regulation forms part of their DNA. Ensuring a defined compliance strategy is systemised in the CRM and Marketing automation or cloud platforms provides reassurance that any marketing activity is compliant without the need for manual intervention. In addition, MA and cloud platforms provide marketing with the ability to send operational emails that form part of a regulatory service requirement, regardless of their marketing consent. This protects marketers from both a financial and data regulatory standpoint.

In addition to compliance management, Martech in the financial industry is predominantly used to deliver intelligence on customer and prospect activity to sales. Tracking and engagement metrics provide insight on who is engaging with what content, whilst lead scoring is used as a mechanism to highlight those most engaged, or to score engagement across multiple categories such as asset classes.

Technology – The disruptive one

Common problem

In contrast to the financial industry where the brand and relationship selling underpins business operation, and where change and revolution is discouraged, the tech industry is innately disruptive and agile by nature. Although in many ways this supports modern marketing, and it is often where we see marketing playing a pivotal role in commercial decision making, it can also mean technology is bought without the significant upfront planning required. If the resourcing needs of an implementation are not accounted for ahead of deployment, the people responsible for it soon become disillusioned and lose momentum. This results in lots of disparate technologies, incorrectly implemented with little to no integrations.

Where Martech supports

Marketers in the industry are driven by lead generation which naturally lends itself to digital channels. This forms a heavy reliance on Martech to consolidate data from disparate platforms and channels in order to provide a single view of a prospects behaviour.

For sales, the CRM is seen as business critical in supporting their focus on converting marketing leads with rigour around opportunity management and data cleansing. This provides the business with the ability to accurately forecast revenue and marketing the ability to attribute their marketing activity to revenue generated.

Manufacturing – The product led one

Common problem

Unlike the financial and tech industries, manufacturing is still heavily product led. Marketing are rarely commercially focused and are still heavily reliant on product catalogues and collateral.
Often within the manufacturing industry we see marketing technology sit under the IT function where it will form part of a wider business critical tech stack such as the ERP, invoicing and payment systems. Often these incumbent platforms and technologies are not integrated with the Martech stack which inhibits marketers ability to personalise marketing activity in ways they could if the data was shared across the platforms.

Where Martech supports

Manufacturers are content rich and Martech is largely used to support content management, a way in which existing collateral can be easily tagged and managed to make it accessible to multiple teams and users.

Where the data is available, marketing automation and cloud platforms are used to promote recommended products based on purchase history, or retargeting buyers based on abandoned cart data. In addition, we are seeing more personalised portals and microsites being used to immerse partners and resellers, providing the training material, product sheets and pricing information required.

Conclusion

To ensure marketing technology is going to add value to your business, it is important to establish the strategic business reasons for buying it, with realistic expectations of the job you want it to do. Every business will have limitations to the effectiveness and success of new tech, understanding these and planning for them ahead of the implementation will save you a lot of hard work and retrospective changes down the line.

If you’d like to find out more about how to define your martech purpose, click here