MarTech :

Marketing Transformation – The MarTech Effect

By: Lisa Horwich @ Pallas Research

“Marketers who follow the data map without keeping an eye out for real-world conditions – most notably the customers – are going to end up in a ditch.” – Scott Brinker, VP Hubspot, @chiefmartec

Over the past few months, we have explored the impact that MarTech is having upon how we do marketing. We have looked at the growth trends and developments in the various technologies. We explored the impact of AI, Machine Learning, Business Intelligence and Real-Time Analytics. And we have looked at emerging technologies, how they are being used now, and how we arrived at this point.

In this, the final chapter of our MarTech Effect series, we now look at the value of the human element in all of this and how that human component can make it all fit together.

The following chart illustrating the “Four Forces of MarTech” by Scott Brinker is a great reminder of the value of ‘humanizing’ your company’s marketing activities to ensure you are remaining true to the brand and maintaining authenticity.

As companies strive to be more efficient and automate their marketing activities, they run the risk of forgetting the individual customers in context. That is where the value of human insights comes in. Integrating audience, brand and sales data to predict customer behavior may tell you what you need to communicate, but not how – that’s personalization comes from really knowing your audience.

There are a variety of methods a human insights professional can help you overcome some of the MarTech limitations. They include:

• Existing data isn’t predictive enough. For example, in Seattle, we saw a dramatic increase in housing prices that could not have been solely predicted by historical data – one would have needed to more deeply understand the additional factors that contributed to the change – such as an exponential growth in workforce; changes in behavior of child rearing in an urban vs suburban environment; zoning restrictions limiting the number of multi-family homes.
• Need exponentially more content for marketing messaging. As mentioned before, optimizing AI requires significantly more marketing content which can be mitigated by understanding from the outset which types of messaging most resonate with potential customers. This allows marketers to focus on utilizing imagery and copy that will more targeted from the outset.
• Training data that is insufficient or lacks industry-specific terminology. Machines need to be ‘trained’ on data before they can run a full-scale optimization routine. In addition, much of the existing consumer data does not usually contain industry or ‘domain’ specific terminology. This is where really knowing your audience is key – an insights professional can assist in uncovering the terminology or jargon that can then be fed back into the model.
• Too many variables complicate the predictive model. The concept of ‘dimensionality’, where there are too many competing variables, can be mitigated by narrowing down the features through qualitative or quantitative methodology.

Human insights can also provide exploratory research to help companies understand barriers, relationship drivers, customer preferences that cannot be achieved through automated technologies. They help companies understand the sentiment that cannot be learned from a machine.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
 

Lisa Horwich - Pallas Research

Lisa specializes in sophisticated, strategic market research and competitive intelligence. With over 15 years of marketing experience, including communications/brand management and product marketing, Lisa uncovers the ‘why’ behind data helping companies get the information they need to make smart decisions. Lisa specializes in business-to-business research helping companies understand their customers’ point of view through data analysis, focus groups and in-depth interviews.