Don't proceed with marketing technology until you have a strategy
- Summary:
- Marketing teams are knee deep in marketing tech. Rob Howard, founder of DailyStory, thinks it's time for a new perspective. Barb Mosher Zinck explores how marketing tech can get closer to the business, and how DailyStory thinks they can make a difference.
This is a common story
Companies look for marketing technology to help them do something - build brand awareness, fill the lead generation queue, reach more qualified prospects, whatever. And the technology, implemented and used right does work. But most marketers still struggle with understanding how that investment is working for them. Is it improving lead quality? Is it driving a bigger sales pipeline?
Here’s a stat that may not surprise you. In a recent study, 38% of marketing teams use between 6 and ten marketing technologies. Twenty-four percent use between 10 and 20. How many do you think can concisely tell you how those investments are performing individually and as a whole?
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post from Rob Howard about a new company and technology he was working on. I know Howard from years ago when he founded Telligent, a community software platform built on the Microsoft stack.
Howard’s new company, DailyStory, is not social software. It’s account-based marketing software. But this isn’t about DailyStory as an ABM solution, it’s about DailyStory as a way to help marketers go back to approaching marketing from a business perspective first and a technology perspective second.
It’s about getting a grasp on what you are doing, why you are doing it and how you will measure it, with the end goal of ensuring that technology spend (and other marketing spend) is effective.
Howard understands this challenge well. For the last five years, he ran Telligent (which was acquired by Verint). He found he was spending an exorbitant amount of money on marketing, but he was frustrated that he had little visibility into that investment. He knew he wasn’t alone.
He asked himself what if he looked at marketing as an investment? What if you could apply technology to the business side and improve your spend? He said, marketers are already spending the money, they just need to understand how to spend it more effectively.
All this led Howard to leave the company he created twenty years ago to start something new. His focus switched to digital marketing and account-based marketing as a way to help other marketers focus their attention on the business need and how technology helps.
The three key use cases for marketers today
When I spoke with Howard about the business challenges he’s supporting with his new venture, he listed three use cases:
- Shift from broadcasting to one-to-one marketing to accounts.
- Develop a recurring revenue business model for customer relationship management. Keep in touch with subscribers of your solution in a personalized way, across the entire customer lifecycle.
- Looking at the customer as shared among departments including customer support, giving customer support more marketing focus because it’s a much larger part of the customer relationship.
For Howard, these are three of the most important areas to focus your marketing strategy especially for the mid-sized and growing businesses that his company focuses on. Mid-sized companies have a budget, but they don’t have money to throw away (not that any company does, regardless of size). The goal of DailyStory is to help these marketers understand the ROI from their marketing spend.
The primary problem Howard wants to solve with DailyStory is not a technology problem. He said marketers have more technology than they know what to do with. The challenge is that business owners, despite all this great technology, can’t make the connection points that tell them how effective each component is.
Howard provided the example of the company that spent $2 million a year on PPC ads and expected to get back $4 million, but he didn’t know how to tell how effective each piece of that $2 million investment performed or how the new business flows through the organization. Howard is helping them figure out their advertising strategy and go to market, but also how to measure and track that strategy through their business.
Too many solutions today are technology first, not business first
Something Howard wrote in his blog post introducing DailyStory caught my attention:
In fact, there is so much great technology when it comes to marketing my first reaction was to look at building a consulting business to help organizations use all the great technology. But, the more I dug in, the more I found that while there was a lot of great technology … it was just that, technology. It wasn’t connected to the business and didn’t view marketing as an investment. If there were business narratives to the technology, they were mediocre at best.
This is an interesting comment and a perspective I share. There is a lot of great technology available, including in account-based marketing. But marketers need to step back and ignore the technology for a minute. What are the business objectives they need to map their strategy against and how will they measure how well the strategy they implement, which includes technology, supports those objectives?
And it’s not simply a matter of set the metrics upfront, implement the strategy and then measure the results. If it were only that straightforward. How do you connect those six to ten, or ten to twenty marketing applications so you can see how they are used together to achieve the expected results and how does each app contribute to the big picture?
The technology needs to help provide those insights. Unfortunately, this is where many fall short.
My take
I like Howard’s approach to DailyStory. Yes, it’s a technology company, but it’s choosing to focus on the business side first and then look at how the technology can help. I don’t know if this ABM technology will be any different from what’s already on the market, it’s still in limited beta and wasn’t ready for my eyes. I will get a look when it is. But I do know, Howard is taking a different road that could make all the difference in what is becoming an important and growing market.
Most technology vendors provide professional services, or they have partners trained in their products. These vendors can help marketers implement the technology and make it work, but how many have the expertise and resources to step back with the marketer and understand business objectives and critical KPIs?
How many will spend hours working with a client to figure out not only how their technology integrates technically with another technology, but how it works as part of a bigger picture to meet those business objectives? How does it contribute to ROI overall?
I think that there’s a puzzle that needs to be put together, one that many marketers struggle to understand, and many technology vendors don’t take the time to see. Maybe you think that’s not their job? I would disagree.