Tech-Driven Marketing: Four Capabilities Marketers Need Today
There’s an adage about good marketing being both an art and a science, and this has never been truer than it is today. And, while there’s no replacement for the “art”—think a brilliant creative marketing concept, crisply written copy, and compelling visuals—it’s clear the “science” aspect is also at work and driving new and better marketing tools.
While every CMO knows that their job is becoming more and more ROI-driven, quite often the differentiating spark is a creative insight. I see dozens of companies leap with a clever insight that communicates a company’s benefits to its potential customers in a more compelling way. The secret? Most often, this differentiating spark is driven from the data collected and analyzed with the aid of the marketing tech stack.
Our growing access to staggering amounts of data, in fact, along with our evolving ability to parse and analyze that data, is enabling marketers to know more about consumer behavior, preferences, and purchasing patterns than ever before.
This is all a way of saying that we are at a very transformative place in martech. As a martech investor, I have the opportunity to regularly see new solutions that are changing what marketers do and how well they perform. While some may see the martech landscape as crowded, there is always ample room for innovation. Startups offering these capabilities are especially promising from my viewpoint:
1. Provide a Holistic View of Marketing Data
Almost all digital marketers use cross-channel marketing strategies. And, while we have greater access to data for each channel these days, such data is typically contained in “silos” in different products or platforms, making it difficult for marketers to get a holistic view of their overall marketing performance. BIP Capital portfolio company DemandJump is one company that provides a single, consolidated view of cross-channel data while also delivering actionable, AI-powered insights. It enables marketers to see the complete path to purchase for their target market so they make better decisions and greatly improve ROI.