Great ideas and clever people aren’t the only arsenal your marketing plans need. Often, technology is the missing link

DOES YOUR CMO have a tech strategy? Nope, that’s not a typo. I am talking about a technology strategy, not a marketing strategy. And before you ask, for a marketer, technology isn’t limited—and definitely should not be mistaken to be limited—to social media. Technology for marketing is a different ball game, and has significant implications on how you run the function. For example, marketing technology can mould how valuable company information is being treated. A little-pondered over corporate secret is that most sales teams and recruiters have their most-current data on public platforms like LinkedIn. Not because—as is popularly whispered— they want to hide it from the prying eyes of their bosses; not even because they are planning to scoot from the company with the data. Most simply, they do it because many companies have not provided an in-house equivalent which is as easy and intuitive to use. I’ll bet even most of you have your most updated contacts database either on Facebook or LinkedIn as well. Customer contact information is just the tip of the iceberg, although that is mission-critical information. It goes without saying that customer knowledge is the biggest marketing weapon. If your marketing team has information on them in their personal social networking accounts, they have access to the customers’ wedding dates, birthdays, food preferences, annual income, credit card number and a whole lot more. That’s a lot of data, and makes predicting milestones, like pregnancy, for example, a breeze—as one retail chain did! They used that information well to promote their baby care business, where catching them as early as possible hugely impacts sales and of course, loyalty. The retail chain began by sending expecting parents coupons for things that would be relevant to be a new parent. To reduce the big brother effect of the exercise, they made sure they added offers on other household items too. Almost every company today is drowning in data—very valuable data, very BIG data. But unless you have the right analytics system in place, it’s not data, it’s just noise. Depending on how big the data trove is and the size of your business you could consider simple, free, cloudhosted tools, or go in for a high-powered solution like Unica. For example, as a marketer, one of the most frustrating things is to go for trade shows, collect a 1,000 cards, and then have sales tell you six months later that nothing has converted. In fact, half the prospects have not even been contacted. Now, depending on which team you’re on, it’s tempting to blame the quality of the event, or the quality of the sales approach. But actually the problem is a technical one. If you had a system in place which could triage the leads, automatically map them to existing prospects or clients, remove those locations where you have no dealer network, and then send an automated message to all of them, imagine how much faster and more efficiently things would move. Imagine, further, that this was linked to the customer contact system and you actually could see and control how often and how each prospect was contacted. This isn’t sales utopia—it is simple tool usage. Sadly, it’s the bit that somehow gets left out when IT buys its sales system. There are other obvious smart tech usages possible. Many of us have tablets now, and playing games, reading and doodling on them are absolutely wonderful. But does your firm have an app that allows customers to interact with you, and learn about your products? Often, when someone begins talking about IT solutions and smart apps, many marketers switch off. They dismiss these ideas as only viable or executable for big companies. But, that’s old-tech thinking. Today, thanks to the cloud, there are solutions priced as low as `1,000 a month. For example, you can host your contacts on constantcontact.com and run your newsletter from there. Surveys can be run on surveygizmo. com and there are many such options available. Deploying apps and IT solutions suited to your needs can strongly impact your company’s ability to deal with your customers. Brands not knowing us well enough is a situation we all face. I’m actually quite fond of certain brands I use; I’m even loyal to some of them so it hurts when they treat me badly. Given a choice, I don’t go back to the brands that have done that to me. Mostly though, the person giving me the brush-off has no idea of my past history with the brand. In the rare cases that they do, they are not incentivised to treat loyal/ profitable/happy customers any differently. (Here, I’m not talking about employees who don’t care enough about their company’s reputation to deliberately ignore customers, though that is also not that uncommon!) Every company hunts for that one sharp differentiator— the usual levers are supply chain, distributor network and product uniqueness. But what about knowing your customers better than anyone else? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate differentiator? And, what if you could use that knowledge to customise their user experience to make sure that different types of customers are treated in the manner they find most welcoming. Wouldn’t that be great for business? Banks like Citibank, ICICI and HDFC do this. Once your spends are consistently high, you’ll find an automatic upgrade to a higher status card. You’ll also find yourself being offered loans and vacations. Behind the ability to do this is a lot of technology which analyses customer information. Ever wondered why you get a call from the bank when you’ve suddenly spent a lot of money on your card? That’s a fraud prediction engine at work. Here, technology makes customers happy, brings in revenue and reduces losses for the firm. What’s the equivalent of that for your firm? I recently came across an interesting story on a medical product. A reputed pharma company wanted to re-engineer their product—which sold at around $20,000—to be able to price it at $4,000 for an emerging market like India. The R&D team (that was outsourced to India) analysed the bill of materials and realised that they could reduce the cost by around 40 per cent by dropping all the customer experience bits. That was the engineering viewpoint. But the marketing viewpoint was that the 40 per cent is what made people pay the balance 60 per cent! Do you know what component of your product is customer experience? So, what should a CMO do? How can s/he use technology to enhance customer experience, and derive insights from it? Here are my three rules. First, analyse the customer experience and put down all the ways in which technology can improve it. Second, study all your stakeholders, and understand how your relationship with each of them can be improved by technology. Finally, understand current business bottlenecks and see how technology can improve those.