Marketing technology (martech) and data are center stage in the marketing spotlight. While the endless martech news coverage may often seem like information overload and empty hype, there’s a reason martech and data have dominated marketing in recent years. With the right tools and the right data, brands can see a world of difference in their marketing performance. Here, we’ll go beyond the buzzwords and find how martech and data offer the best marketing experiences.

Challenges That the Right Martech Can Solve

Without martech, data, and specific integrations, marketers will find themselves with a host of unnecessary challenges that make their lives harder and their work less efficient:

Silos

Silos hinder communications between teams, they stop data from informing the entire organization, and ultimately keep teams from knowing who your customers are and what resonates with them. Data and system silos make it more difficult and less efficient to drive your audiences down the funnel, engage them, and ultimately get them to convert.

Improper Integrations

Brands often find it challenging to properly integrate tools in their martech stacks to drive efficiency. Creating symbiotic relationships between your technologies can improve campaigns beyond what they were accomplishing alone. Through proper integrations, brands can better understand their customers to deliver more engaging campaigns.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

The gold star for brands is engaging their audiences in real-time. However, it’s common that brands don’t have the right technology to connect with consumers in the moment at each stage of the customer lifecycle at scale. Without the proper tech stacks, brands are sometimes hours, days, or even weeks behind the moment when consumers are most likely to convert.

Slow Pacing

A common challenge is speed. Teams can’t seem to move fast enough and struggle to excel at cross-channel customer experiences (CX). This hampers their ability to predict the next best action for their customers.

Multiple CX Owners

There isn’t a single team that manages the CX of the brand. Marketing, customer success, sales, product, services, the executive team, and more all impact your CX. Without the proper technology, data won’t be distributed to the entire organization. What works for your CX in marketing will likely work for sales, product, and the other teams but will remain in marketing unless otherwise communicated.

Marketers have faced these challenges for years. It’s imperative that marketers connect their data and technologies into an integrated system to solve these problems.

The Benefits of Integrated Martech

There are many benefits to these connections, some of the main benefits being:

Helping You Meet the Higher Demand for Digital Experiences

Digital experiences are no longer reserved for your most tech-savvy consumers. This pandemic has accelerated this – everyone is online. Online shopping is hitting new highs. In August, online sales were up 42% compared to the same period a year earlier. Even less tech-savvy consumers are buying online more frequently, placing higher demand on the digital experience. Technologies that inform brands how consumers are interacting on their digital channels, like app and web, are more important than ever.

Personalized CX

The new benchmark for brands is creating a customer-centric approach to everything they do in their business. Marketing should be focused on communicating how products can help customers’ needs and interests. Sales shouldn’t reach out about irrelevant items or services. Customer service, well, serves the customer. Personalization can create impressive impacts on the customer experience.

A large majority of consumers demand personalization. 79% say that the more personalized tactics brands use, the more likely they will be loyal to that brand. However, a similar number of consumers (77%) say that brands aren’t doing enough to personalize. Incorporating location, age, gender, parental status, marital status, point in the customer journey, past behaviors, preferred channels, and other real-time data can help organizations identify how, when, and where to engage them. This can create a differentiating experience between your brand and your competitors.

Analytics provide consumers insights

Agility is key in the marketing world today. The pandemic has proven this – if teams can’t respond quickly to changes in behavior, large or small, they’ll risk loss of efficiency in the process. Consumer sentiment, interests, feelings, and behaviors change – pandemic or no pandemic. These things ebb and flow with time. Every region has their own situation, and every audience segment has their own interests. Analytics that uncover insights into these changes, especially when AI is used to rapidly find emerging trends, help organizations keep up.

Find a solution with Upland Software

Upland Software helps brands solve these challenges with a robust, best-in-class solution customer experience platform, one that helps you create an integrated customer experience across every channel. Through open API integrations with other martech solutions, brands have the industry-beset approach to a holistic strategy for their CX.

Upland’s Customer Experience Management (CXM) Cloud empowers organizations to deliver experiences people want and value. Our Upland CXM Cloud enables customers to capture actionable insights through outcome-driven conversations that are dynamic, personalized, and engaging. Our multichannel, real-time solutions span the entire customer journey and include email, SMS, MMS, RCS, wallet, push, and in-app.