The marketing landscape is undergoing a seismic shift as customers demand better brand experiences. The need to deliver personalized, connected experiences across channels is one of the reasons many organizations continue to evaluate their current martech stack. According to Acxiom research, 99% of businesses plan to change their martech stack some time in the next year.
With the explosion of tech innovation and options, building the right modern martech stack is a challenge for many companies. Successful design and implementation demands the right expertise to build a strategy and roadmap to deliver business results.
To get a deeper understanding of the martech modernization opportunity, CMSWire recently spoke to Paul Feldmann, senior vice president of client services at Acxiom.
Exploring the Value of an Effective Modern Martech Stack
For marketers, the drive for martech modernization is a desire to improve the brand experience and engage customers on their terms. New solutions bring a number of benefits. “Martech modernization paves the way toward building and delivering a positive brand experience,” Feldmann said.
Delivering positive experiences is made possible by having a connected, accurate and permissioned data foundation. It also enables AI readiness. With this, brands can complete real-time views of their customers and engage with them across channels and devices.
Beyond improving brand experiences, new technologies can bring about internal operating efficiencies, such as reducing friction points that hinder marketing efforts, simplifying privacy-conscious data sharing across the organization and setting organizations to navigate market changes effectively. “Brands that are ahead of the curve on modernizing their stack will be better prepared to adopt AI tools with greater speed and efficiency,” Feldmann noted.
Strategic Alignment Across the Enterprise
Tech is core to martech modernization, yet modernization efforts are often hindered without alignment between departments or a unified business strategy.
Feldmann argues that the most common mistake at any stage of martech modernization is not having focus and conviction that’s grounded in a multiyear strategy. “New tech alone isn’t your only answer to martech modernization,” Feldmann said. “At the same time you add new solutions, you need a strong roadmap that aligns both the business and data strategy. If companies have that roadmap, they’re better equipped to make more informed decisions. On the other hand, the absence of a roadmap means companies can lose focus on their transformation journey.”
Put Your Data to Work
Data silos are another common challenge. According to Acxiom research, respondents identify “connecting customer data for a single view from separate silos” as a top challenge. Feldmann suggests companies should establish a data foundation to break down silos and enable better brand experiences.
AI has emerged as the transformative technology, and breaking down silos and cleaning up data is fundamental to AI readiness. AI’s output is only as good as the data that fuels it, and AI needs trusted, connected, clean data as a foundation to create meaningful personalization. When AI tools can use readied data to create a single 360-degree view of the customer, organizations can use that to enable marketing relevance at scale.
Acxiom works with brands to leverage AI responsibly and unlock the full potential of AI-driven marketing. “At Acxiom, we help our customers create precise, privacy-conscious, and AI-ready data foundations and strategies that fuel actionable insights and effective artificial intelligence models,” Feldmann said.
Maximize Tech Investment
When investing in martech stack enhancements, an external perspective can provide important guidance. Service partners can provide value through the entire journey, from evaluating needs and solutions to optimizing data flows and integrating platforms. Organizations that work with service partners are more likely to adopt AI, have a clear martech strategy and gain executive buy-in.
Modern martech success requires both internal readiness and external expertise. That’s where outside partners like Acxiom can help brands connect strategy to execution, and ambition to action, with a pragmatic, iterative approach to data management.
“The right outside partner provides several distinct advantages,” Feldmann said. “New tech often requires immediate hands-on data strategy and implementation expertise.. This can accelerate time to value, reduce overall project costs and improve ROI. In addition, pairing external with internal groups can help up-level the knowledge of in-house teams, creating deeper expertise.”
And, with strong relationships with tech platforms and service providers, outside partners can give clients access to roadmap insights, innovation pipelines and expertise that are not always available to internal teams.
Conclusion
A multiyear strategy roadmap and the right trusted partner will improve the value and return on your tech investments. Aligning the broader business objectives and leadership with the right data foundation can accelerate your martech modernization.
Learn how Acxiom’s martech services can help in modernizing your stack at acxiom.com.
