In the martech’s world, shiny objects appear every day. In B2B, they give the promise of more leads, better leads, shinier leads. In B2C more sales, better buyers, and increase in loyalty.
These new software products are presented behind customer quotes, best practices and other roughly measured benefits, and their value sounds for the most part legit. Unfortunately sometimes, they just offer small differences compared to other alternatives – when they don’t use their competitors as a white brand. For B2B buyers, navigating in this sea of dreams is a challenge, and marketers spend a lot of time trying to make sense of all the noise.
Last week I have received an email from another blogger:
Hello Charles,
Have you heard of XXXX? I know that you are interested in customer behavior, you probably know this company. They seem better than YYYY that you are currently using, and they are working with some big brands. This might be helpful for your business. Let me know what you think.
The goal of marketing technology has never been to become more difficult to use. Because of the market’s pace, we spend a lot of time in the weeds, testing similar products, and we often forget to refer to our customer’s experience.
Customer experience matters, not shiny objects.
You need to keep your customer in mind at all times and do your best to improve their experience. The next/new/better tool must only be adopted with your most probable target’s experience in mind. They are the ones who open their wallet and make the conscious decision to work with you. When you spend more time looking in the mirror, you take the risk of missing what your end users are looking for.
Tech marketers want to identify the micro moments that salespeople take instinctively when they give recommendations to prospects in store or door to door, and apply them to the digital world to sell better at scale. What used to be cold calls turned to digital marketing, with people like me crunching the scoring behaviors and improving scoring models.
Martech tools need to be used with your prospects in mind. Most of the software products are created as a response to a niche problem that companies extrapolate to other uses, to expend their market. The time you spend learning or setting up a new software, you don’t use it to improve your end users experience.
It is not because you have a shinier screwdriver that you will accomplish more in your day. To be really efficient, you need to be intimately familiar with your market, understand their needs, then look for the tools that will help your prospects go further.
Technology can help you go faster, save time, be more accurate, and help your prospects understand the value your product brings to the world.
A technology product’s value needs to be understood as it relates to your business. Just because other people use it, doesn’t mean that it is right for you. For example, the number of pages that people visit on your website might be or NOT BE relevant depending on the industry, the market, the segment of customers. If you are in B2C, the number of pages your customers visit might be significant and similar to them browsing through a clothing rack in a store, this might be different in B2B where a lot of page views per session might mean that your website doesn’t have clear calls to action and people get lost.
Get Trained On Your Existing Market Stack
In the post Tune Up Your Marketing Team, I talked about training your team. It is better to use an existing tool at 85% than using a great new platform at 15%. Again, customers are the only way to gauge if the investment makes sense.
Don’t get me wrong, it is important to have a marketing stack up to date, but when you need to change/add/improve your stack, do it fast, and get trained.
Shinier tools don’t make you better, if you suck with a silver screwdriver, you’ll suck with a gold screwdriver as well. Know the strength and weaknesses of each technical tool in your marketing stack, and map your tools against your activity.
