MarTech Interview with Robert Pike

How has your approach to customer engagement/retention/loyalty changed due to new MarTech tools and solutions?

With MarTech tools we have become much more precise and data-driven in serving our customers (buyers, users). Our content, messages, and offers become much more contextually relevant and individualized as we understand better where people are in the user journey and what their needs are.

With all the new MarTech tools and solutions now available, what is one of the key pitfalls to avoid in the procurement process?

The procurement process can underestimate the cost of technical integration, as well as the extent to which new tools will be future proof or not. Furthermore, we need to take a hard look at the trade-offs between enhancing current solutions vs implementing completely new tools.

What MarTech vendors have impressed you with their solutions and understanding of true business needs and challenges?

Adobe:

- Customer Focus & Experience: Adobe has understood well that current and future business growth comes from a customer-focused, experience-driven perspective and thus how important it is to manage unified customer experience effectively in all its complexity. And they’ve realized that the big business challenge is how to operationalize and strategically choose technology to manage these experiences seamlessly.

- Data & Integration: Great CX relies on linking together platforms/channels/touchpoints and various data sources so we can connect with customers at the right time, with the right type of personal and relevant experiences informed by the right kinds of data and insights from those interactions. That means that MarTech vendors with linked technologies or tools with seamless integration will deliver the best CX solutions. As such, Adobe is a leading player here because they’ve bundled together so much under the same hood while keeping integrations to a wider ecosystem as well.

AdLingo:

- Focus: Unlike Adobe’s unified comprehensive solution, AdLingo is a good example of a focused “niche” innovation within the spectrum of experiences. Having expert solutions in key touchpoints or moments that matter most to customers enables us to keep ahead of the curve with meaningful customer experience innovations to plug into the MarTech ecosystem.

- Interactive: AdLingo has captured the major shift in customer behaviour becoming more conversational, which has created a challenge for brands to stay relevant and engaging … and AdLingo has applied this opportunity to advertising. Banner ads have been slow to evolve and stay interesting & engaging, yet AdLingo has found a very interesting way to add value to the ad experience by making ads engaging and interactive via 2-way way comms (with a chatbot), rather than just interrupting customers with ads.

- Discover: AdLingo has also identified the human challenge of how difficult it is to discover and find the right information online quickly, so their conversational AI solutions make discovery simpler, easier, and delightful by embedding ‘knowledgeable’ chatbots in relevant interactive online ads. This simplifies life for the customer, who doesn’t need to get lost in the data jungle that a website sometimes can be.

Read Full Interview at MarTechThoughts