Why MarTech is vital to sustainable growth in a remote-working world

With the past year of largely remote-working proving more than ever that businesses are evolving and adapting to exceeding customer expectations in a digital first way, the need for Marketing Technology that enriches customer experiences has never been more crucial.

As business teams adapted to remote working and we begin see the emergence of new hybrid remote and office hub ways of working, future-proofing businesses digitally is essential.

These shifts to remote working and the lack of face to face contact have meant many B2B companies and Sales and Marketing teams have orientated towards an increasingly digitally focused customer relationship management approach. Driven both by necessity and strategy, making the right choice of MarTech is now playing an even more vital role in successful Marketing strategies than ever before.

Investing in the right marketing capabilities can be a game-changer, and presents many opportunities at every layer of a business to deliver tangible, measurable value in terms of effective and efficient growth and maximising Marketing’s commercial return.  

With the MarTech industry continuously evolving and as a sector experiencing 5,233% growth since 2011 (Source: www.chiefmartec.com 2020) there are now over 8000 vendors to choose from, spanning every part of the Marketing ecosystem from Advertising & Promotion, Content & Experiences, Social & Relationships, Commerce & Sales, Data & Management.

The rate and pace of growth and change across the myriad of MarTech providers is substantial, establishing what is genuinely useful to remote working B2B Sales and Marketing Teams is the increasing and present challenge.

With most B2B Marketers using at least one Marketing Technology tool on a regular basis, and many using tens of tools, the evidence points to a well architected and robust MarTech stack being a foundational pillar of Marketing success.

There are significant benefits to building a MarTech ecosystem when it comes to remote working and effectively managing customer relationships and business goals:

Being personalised

Creating highly personalised experiences increases the relevance of customer and prospect interactions, leading to deeper engagement throughout their lifecycles with businesses. Marketing Technology can provide the sophisticated capabilities that use rich customer insights to create truly personalised experience across all customer touchpoints, whether that’s AI driven chatbots, highly engaging mobile messaging or hyper targeted digital Ad campaigns, having the ability to design and deliver truly relevant experiences is often the competitive advantage that wins through and keeps customers coming back.  

Harnessing data, creating insights

Gaining and evolving a deep, data-driven understanding of prospects and customers is vital, and acutely so in remote working models where face-to-face contact is limited. Building a customer data ecosystem of owned, paid-for and open-sourced data that can deliver data-driven insights to solve business problems and enable actionable outputs that unpin customer relationship management is one of the biggest assets for B2B Marketing and Sales teams today. Data challenges range from simply collecting and unifying data, through to exploring relationships and building models to inform targeting and creative deployment. Whilst there is no single approach to any data and insights challenge, they can be tackled with Marketing Technology solutions that enable sophisticated, agile and richer use of data.

Orchestrating processes

Automating and orchestrating B2B Marketing and Sales team processes across the critical activities that deliver results increases motivation, unlocks productivity and maximises and optimises resources. The B2B Martech landscape has many leading platforms capable of advanced, omni-channel lead and campaign management, content management and work management automation, many of which are ‘out of the box’ and highly configurable to unique business needs. MarTech tools can reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks and enable Sales and Marketing Teams to focus effort on more impactful opportunities.

Measuring and Improving

Critical to any Marketing Technology tool is its ability to serve remote working B2B Sales and Marketing Teams with analytical capabilities that monitor and measure results, allowing ‘what if’ performance investigations and enabling data-enriched decisions that optimise and maximise ROI consistently.

Clear marketing and sales effectiveness measurements, and being able to transparently and flexibility track progress against them through easy to access dashboards and reports is central to aligning remote teams, having them pull in the same direction and prioritising efforts in the right areas.  

Being able to focus B2B Sales and Marketing Teams on creating and managing Sales and Marketing activities that can be actioned and measured will have a direct impact on the growth of any B2B organisation. It is also important to realise that not all activities will be successful, and with right measurements learnings can be gained and adjustments made for next time if things didn’t perform as expected.

Building the right ecosystem

Practically there are no one size one fits all, off the shelf Marketing Technology platforms addressing each B2B Sales and Marketing organisations unique requirements, and it is not unusual to partner with more than one vendor for a data management platform, a different one for lead management and CRM, and another one for insight automation and analytics, often selecting “best of breeds” solutions and embracing a more open and heterogeneous approach.

The key is to narrow down these solutions by identifying the MarTech that tackles each business’ unique challenges and those that remote working models face, such as synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, globally distributed digital asset management approval workflows etc.. Embedding your marketing goals and aims into the benefits you would need to see from your MarTech investment is an essential component in identifying, selecting, activating, and properly utilising your choice of MarTech.

As the last year has shown remote working B2B Sales and Marketing teams can certainly succeed when enabled by effective and practical MarTech solutions that genuinely help an organisations teams deliver on their aims and objectives.

About the Author

Jason Hard is a Senior Consultant at Team6ix Senior with over 25 years' client and agency side experience in marketing technology strategy and implementation. Jason has been trusted to architect and deliver enterprise scale marketing technology, data and customer management capabilities for clients and Agencies such as M&C Saatchi, Verizon, The Body Shop and IKEA, RBS/NatWest, Three, Telefonica O2, Santander, Barclays, Vodafone, EDF, BskyB, British Gas.

For further information, please contact Jason – jason@team6ix.com or the wider team at Team6ix – hello@team6ix.com