Modern marketers kicking off the New Year face a multitude of challenges; expanding customer engagement, enabling multi-channel integration, and leveraging increasing volumes and varieties of data in real time. This is compounded by a marketing technology landscape that can often seem chaotic and overwhelming. It’s no wonder more and more marketers are emerging from technical backgrounds. 

 

The Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, courtesy of Scott Brinker’s Chief Marketing Technologist blog, is the latest in a series of noble attempts to help visualize this increasingly crowded and ever-changing space.   

Navigating this sea of marketing technology solutions, which has nearly tripled in the past 16 months and is expanding daily, need not send marketers running for the hills. Keep the following five principles in mind as you navigate the dynamic marketing technology landscape.

1. Understand your customer’s journey
   
   This is where it all begins. Everything you do should be built around the lifecycle of your customer’s unique journey. Key channels and touchpoints relevant to your business should be identified based on this journey mapping. 
2. Befriend IT
   
   Make friends with your tech team, both within and beyond marketing. With all of these marketing technologies in mind, IT involvement is essential to get the best integration and see accurate results from the tools. It’s a no-brainer to partner with your tech team due to the broad knowledge and best practices they can provide, as well as opportunities for win-win successes that will make both your CIO and CMO look good.
3. Learn to love data
   
   Data is the underpinning of marketing; it holds the keys to intimately understanding customer personas, lifecycles, interactions, as well as measuring the effectiveness of marketing activities. It’s true, data is becoming ‘bigger.’ And while data may not be sexy (yet), it must still be your friend—embrace it as quickly as you can. Data is your primary source of insights and your customers expect you to be leveraging it for improved experiences.
4. Prioritize customer engagement
   
   Customer engagement is increasingly vital for organizations. In our State of Salesforce report, 84% of people believe customer engagement will overtake productivity as the primary driver of growth. Your marketing strategy should be fully aligned around optimizing each unique customer ‘moment’ to deliver with excellence and grace.
5. Be agile
   
   There are a clearly a multitude of solutions available in all categories. Marketing technology will continue to be a space riddled with change, since the customer is changing faster than ever, becoming more mobile and social. Be willing to try new tactics and adapt quickly based on those results.

Need a trusted partner to help navigate the sea of marketing technologies? Bluewolf can help determine which solutions will enable you to capture and act upon every customer moment. We create personalized marketing roadmaps for your business success. 

See how you can leverage the best marketing technologies in our free guide, The Three Pillars of Modern, Digital Marketing.