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Marketing Tech Magnified 2019 enters the history books!  Our conference and its theme – MarTech, Data, and the Marketing Mix – was a hit. So what exactly are the MarTech Magnified key takeaways of the day?  The concepts that repeatedly came up were trust, relationship, data, and well, video, leading us to 3 main conclusions of the day.  Here they are:

3 MarTech Magnified Key Takeaways:

1. Don’t let marketing technology make you complacent
2. Get data and insights-driven for competitive advantage
3. Work to build trusted relationships

So with that, let’s dig in!

1. Don’t Let Marketing Technology Make You Complacent

Of all the MarTech Magnified key takeaways, this one is probably the most significant: time to replace “spray and pray” methods.  Ditch those purchased contact lists and replace them with some good old-fashioned marketing plans. It might be tempting to rely on your tech to devise the best campaigns from the ground up, but you’re wasting both time and money by casting a wide, careless net. Roll up your sleeves and get in there! Define your market targets and strategize solid plans to reach them, using a multi-channel approach.

Remember! Marketing Tools are Not Strategies.

Nobody is saying that marketing technology could do with less, well, technology. But we’ve got to resist the siren song of laziness of just using tools.

At the end of the day, that pesky human element is integral. You could have the coolest, most self-guided technology in the world, and it would be as useless as a log if you didn’t wield it properly. As our keynote speaker, Nick Panayi, so plainly put: there’s a tendency to assume that automation programs can do all of the thinking for us. Unfortunately, this kind of “set it and forget it” mentality can drive you right into a ditch.

A hammer just collects dust if you ask it to build a house, right? And, yes, your stack is probably a lot more intuitive than a wrench. But the point still stands. Until the robots take over the world and we live in a Philip K. Dick novel, it will probably continue to ring true. You must be attentive and strategic with your marketing first and your marketing tech second.  Don’t let convenience replace creativity.

Apply Strategies Across All Marketing.

Account-based marketing, we’re talking about you.

By now, we’re all pretty aware of how useful and awesome ABM strategies are – when applied thoughtfully. But one point that kept coming up at the conference was the importance of across-the-board consistency. If the common goal isn’t the application of ABM, then there needs to be a serious pep talk to bring sales and marketing into the fold. Otherwise, get ready for some serious confusion on steering the ship.

Whether it’s in pinpointing the most desirable targets, or churning out that sweet high-value content, internal alignment is integral. It saves time, makes communication less convoluted between teams, and increases data efficiency. When the same strategies are applied across different channels, weak areas become easier to spot. As a result, quick adjustments can happen without first having to decipher what the heck happened in the first place.

And it’s not enough to have your target accounts, target the individuals within those accounts.  As Nick Panayi of DXC pointed out, that in the spirit of pursuing permission-based marketing, marketers should take the time to know prospects and use all the tools at their disposal.  There’s social outreach, events for one, and highly targeted advertised to make the message as individual as each buyer.

2. Get Data and Insights-driven for Competitive Advantage

Yeah, we know you’ve probably heard this MarTech Magnified key takeaway before.  Using all that data generated from all corners of marketing requires investment in infrastructure, processes, third party data and people. Investing in modern data lakes or customer data platforms is a crucial foundation.  From there, it’s all about care and feeding of that marketing data.

Give a Hoot! Don’t Data Pollute.

The internet, nay, the world, is awash in data. But is what we’ve collected always useful? And if it’s useful, are we burying it under a ton of garbage?

Maybe there are more elegant ways to put it, but frankly speaking, data hygiene is as important as washing behind your ears. If you’ve collected gold nuggets and hidden them in a swamp of useless information, you may as well dump it all out and start over. Organizing thoughtfully collected, clean data opens up avenues of integration that can be transformative for your business.

Get Smarter with Third-Party Data Sources.

Once your clean marketing data is safely living in its data warehouse, lake, or customer data platform connects to external, third party sources for further insights. There are hundreds of data management platforms containing data that helps marketers understand everything from soap buying habits, light bulb preferences, movies watched and web site visited just yesterday. By investing in well-crafted identity graphs, you can know now more about consumers and businesses than you even know what to do with right now.

Use All Your Data.

Next, it’s time to put that clean first and third-party data living in its high performance marketing infrastructure to work. That means investing in building a culture of data experimentation and model building.

Fun stuff like A/B testing…real, rigorous A/B testing based on experimental design.  To the marketing data lay person, that means controlled experiments of say testing two marketing or advertising assets that exactly, completely identical except for 1 difference. Think of two ads, each with the exact same copy, against different color backgrounds.

And you might want to consider investing in marketing mix models that optimize spend on marketing channels. This kind of marketing data science identifies the point of diminishing returns to advertising.  As a general rule for big brands, an additional advertising dollar will be more productive in social media or YouTube advertising than broadcast TV.

With all this talk of data, it brings us to our last of the MarTech Magnified key takeaways…trust.

3.  Work to Build Trusted Relationships

Trust is earned. Not bestowed. And certainly, trust is never demanded. It is earned through respecting privacy, asking for permission, and exchanging value.  What are the ways to do that?

Don’t Make Privacy an Afterthought.

Every Internet behavior produces data. Whether we’re watching cat videos, emailing our contact lists, researching or making an online purchase, the fact that we put ourselves on the web means that privacy is more important than ever. Not a week goes by without Facebook or some other major platform apologizing for some data breach or another – and understandably, it’s got people on high alert.

Truth is, data privacy is a real differentiating factor these days. As Raman Tallamraju of T. Rowe Price pointed out, this is of value to your customers beyond your actual product. People want to know that their information is safe and won’t be sold, leaked, or carelessly thrown over the digital railing for any passerby to stumble upon. There are many ways to do this, from thoughtful consent management to secure tracking methods, but it all comes down to this: make sure that the collection, organization, and storage of your data are built around a core of data privacy.

Build Connections by Indulging Your Inner Filmmaker.

People are starving for a personal connection. And this is one of those MarTech Magnified key takeaways that applies to life, in general.  Sincere personal narratives make a huge impact. If you look around at the social mediaverse, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve all gotten pretty used to being up in everybody’s business, from that one acquaintance you friended on Facebook years ago to your nana.

Thing is, this trend isn’t just reserved for acquaintances posting filtered shots of their morning smoothie bowls. It all comes down to the feeling of a “face to face” relationship – and, as multiple presentations this year showed, it works. From Joe Matar of Brazen’s Skype and video discussions to the Anthony Bourdain-inspired video series put out by GE in the Genius Campaigns, video was a consistent theme.  One that made it impossible to leave off the list of MarTech Magnified key takeaways.

Whether it’s a customer’s story, a testimonial, or a PR clip meant to inspire trust and interest in your brand, a well-done video from a genuine human being sharing stores goes a long, long way. Wanna connect targets and prospects to your company’s personal narrative? You don’t need Wes Anderson’s budget. Just focus on being succinct, compelling, and above all, honest. You’ll find that the cinematic approach

Chatbots and BDRs Can be the Start of a Great Relationship.

Overall, chatbots meet prospects where they are. And just as important, chatbot meet the prospect when they’re there. Skeptics like marketers from SonaType tested them with low expectations. Turns out, they’re believers after all.  So while you might not be into chatbots, plenty of others are. So, don’t dismiss technologies like Drift.  Instead, try them out and see how they work for you.

Building Trust Grows a Relationship.

Now that we’ve got our methods behind the marketing madness established, let’s sum up our three MarTech Magnified key takeaways from this year’s conference.

– This might not be Hollywood, but videos are a big hit.

– Technology is no replacement for thoughtful strategy.

– Be smart about data hygiene and organization.

A Final Thought on MarTech Magnified Key Takeaways

These vendor-agnostic discussions enable us to answer the questions that keep our businesses thriving. And keep our strategies evolving. While managing and choosing the right tech is obviously important to getting job done, the marketing strategies and plans are even more important.

In recent years, these are things that we as marketers have not typically discussed.  It might feel good to pat ourselves on the back and rehash the same old conclusions, but that doesn’t do much to spark the creativity and presence that keeping up with the industry requires.

This year, as for the past three years, each and every presenter brought something to the table that we’ve yet to see anywhere else.

So here it is, the most important key takeaway from Marketing Tech Magnified 2019: thinking outside of the box isn’t just a cute inspirational platitude. It’s a direct challenge to us to better ourselves as marketers.

See you next year at Marketing Tech Magnified 2020!

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