As the second MarTech Conference came to an end, the only thing that was lacking was memory space to store all the inspiring, innovative, and outright brilliant concepts and conversations that were had.
One of the most talked about concepts was that of the ‘MarTech Unicorn’ – the mythical creature that is a hybrid with marketing and technical know-how. The person that can both talk in the technical jargon with the IT team and then communicate back in laymen’s terms to the marketing team – and vice versa. In his blog post, Travis Wright explains that this year we will not only see an increase in Marketing Technologist, but also in Sales Technologists.
This brings up a second important theme discussed during the conference: becoming obsessed with the customer and taking the buyer’s journey to a whole new level. Marketing teams are seeing a new wave of digital innovation that is putting an unprecedented level of focus on the customer.
During her session, Use Your Technology Prowess to Build a Customer Obsessed Enterprise, Laura Ramos, VP Principal Analyst at Forrester, said “Their [Customers] attention is more valuable than their money, in some respects.” She explains further that today’s customers are always connected and consuming more and more content. It is up to the marketing teams to create relevant content that will capture their attention so much that the customer becomes an advocate for them.
In order to make this happen, marketing and IT need to work together and share the responsibility. Marketing needs to monitor and pull customer data that is beneficial and pertinent for the IT teams to use to enhance product and services in the best possible ways for the customers. Tapping into both marketing and IT’s data captures tools allows the team to be able to build a complete customer persona that can be used to create an enhanced buyer’s journey. The collaboration between the two teams makes reaching the valued customers with new highly targeted and attainable goal.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for what we learned at the show. For more on the event, check out:
- Chief Marketer – Use Tech to Get Customer-Obsessed
- Inc. – How Marketing Technologists are Intersecting All Areas of Business
- B2BNews Network – Live from MarTech: The key elements of lean product design
- iMedia Connection – 5 more great things heard at #MarTech 2015 – Day Two
- Venture Beat – MarTech unicorns: Why true marketing technologists are so desperately rare
About the Author
Rob Munz is the founder and Chief Product Officer at inMotionNow. A serial entrepreneur, his previous businesses involved graphic design, publishing, internet and marketing. He’s worked directly with creative departments at national brands, agencies, associations, and mid-size businesses for more than 15 years to help them improve their production workflows and complete projects more efficiently.