ESCALATING
BUSINESS GROWTH
WITH MARTECH
Managing Customer Experience, Data, and Technology
for Optimal Business Growth
By Faradi Bachri
Country Director, Marketing Services,
ADA in Indonesia
OVERVIEW
OPTIMISING GROWTH WITH MARTECH AMID
ACCELERATED DIGITAL ADOPTION
With over 197 million Internet users in November 2020, Indonesia is one of the
biggest online markets worldwide that surpassed its projected eCommerce revenue
growth.
Yes, sure, the recent Covid-19 pandemic has also accelerated digital adoption across
age groups and socioeconomic backgrounds. However, Indonesia has become the
world’s fastest-growing mCommerce market since 2016; when the country’s
mCommerce market surged 155%.
As more customers going online, doing digital transactions, and interacting through
various digital touchpoints, businesses can gather plenty of customer data,
behaviours, and preferences to improve and personalise the customer experience.
The need to orchestrate and customise marketing messages and customer
communications will continue to swell.
No sent messages, ads, emails, or any other means of communications should be seen
as useless or irrelevant by the customer. Improving customer experience through
automation, personalisation, customisation, and optimisation is the key to your
business growth.
A solid MarTech strategy and the right MarTech stack help you to do exactly that.
WHAT IS MARTECH AND ITS
TECHNOLOGY STACK? IS IT
FOR YOU?
MarTech has become one of the latest buzzwords in global marketing conferences and
webinars. Many described MarTech as the hybrid between marketing and technology.
But, what is MarTech, really, and what does it mean for your business?
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
To simplify it and to make sure we’re on the same page, let’s think of your sales funnel.
The first part of your sales funnel is usually to drive traffic to whatever media/platforms you’re
active at. Now, the second part of your sales funnel is where MarTech comes into play.
MarTech takes care of everything within your ecosystem. Mostly, these refer to your owned
(instead of paid) media/platforms, like your websites or mobile apps.
MarTech’s role is to optimise your owned media/platforms so they can better contribute to
your business growth.
To do this, marketers usually work with what they call MarTech Stack or Technology Stack. MarTech
Stack is a set of MarTech tools/products to optimise your business growth by optimising your
customer’s experience.
So, here’s the catch: if you’re still solely thinking about driving more traffic to your business, this
article isn’t for you (yet). But, if you’ve started thinking about optimising your owned
media/platforms to grow your business, keep reading!
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
HOW MARTECH HELPS DELIVER
IMPROVED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
With more than 8,000 MarTech products in the market today, it’s easy to
get overwhelmed.
To streamline the plethora of MarTech tools/products out there, we
classify them into four big categories, based on their core functions and
the growth challenges they can address:
1. CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
As the name suggests, MarTech tools/products under this category help
you optimise conversions, either via your website, apps, or other owned
platforms. This usually means the hyper-personalization and customization
of the customer experience—for instance, by providing accurate product
recommendation and super-relevant promotional content at the right
stages of the customer’s buying process
Tools/product selections include Insider, AB Tasty, CleverTap, Braze.
2. DTM (Digital Touchpoint Management)
The keyword here is ‘touchpoint’. These MarTech tools/products capture
customer behaviour in various touchpoints: websites, mobile site, mobile
apps, email list, SMS messaging, and many more. The emphasis is on
understanding customer behaviour for more effective and efficient
segmenting and targeting.
Tools/product selections include Google Analytics (free), Adobe Analytics,
Google Analytics 360 Suite.
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
3. LCM (Lifecycle Management)
These MarTech tools/products help you automate the process of nurturing
customers for products/services that need longer conversion time.
Typically, the purchase or investment in these products/services is
considered quite significant.
With these tools, you can automate and personalize email messages,
conversations, and other interactions to nurture customers: from educating
them about the products/services, showing the values and benefits, or
informing customers about the various payment options available—until
the customer is convinced to make the purchase.
Tools/product selections include HubSpot, Marketo, Cognigy,
YellowMessenger.
4. CDM (Customer Data Management)
Simply think of ‘analytics’ here. These MarTech tools/products pluck data
from various third-party apps and analyze/visualize these data to provide
relevant information about your businesses or your customers.
If you are selling your products through multiple third-party apps, for
instance, you can see which apps sell more of your products, which apps
have the highest conversion rate, or which apps give you the highest profit
margin.
These tools also help to build your Single Customer View (SCV), where you
can store and consolidate customer data from multiple touchpoints. The
tools make it easy to read and record these data, as well as removing any
duplicates to avoid redundancy. Remember that 80% of your sales come
from 20% of your customers. This explains why SCV is a crucial component
of your sales growth.
Tools/product selections include Meiro, Arm, Tealium, VAL.
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
WHERE TO DESIGN YOU
MARTECH JOURNEY?
Designing your MarTech strategy starts by mapping out your high-level customer
journey. Think of how an improved customer experience in various touchpoints can
escalate your business growth.
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
To get things moving, ask yourself the following questions:
What challenges are we facing when it comes to our business growth?
What media/platforms are we using? (A website? A mobile app? A third-party site?)
How can we improve our customer experience so they can use more of our services and buy
more of our products?
At which stages in the customer journey can the experience be improved? And in which
media/platforms?
What kind of technology do we need to optimise our customer experience?
These questions will help you in defining the problems that have been hindering your business
growth.
Are your customers getting the right notification, product recommendations, or payment
options at the right time, based on their previous interactions, browsing behaviours, or saved
preferences? Are they facing issues when using your websites? Are they visiting your websites
frequently and keep checking the same product repeatedly but have yet to make a purchase?
Well-defined problems will give you well-adjusted solutions—and MarTech can automate a
huge part of it.
MarTech always has 2 layers:
1. Customer Experience as the 1st layer
2. Data as the 2nd layer
The idea is to first decide on the kind of customer experience you need to optimise. How can
you provide a seamless customer experience that drives optimal business growth?
Then, and only then, should you start identifying which data you need to collect, measure, or
activate to build a single customer view and personalise your communications.
For instance, certain MarTech tools can help you see what your customers are browsing for and
automatically recommend similar products or sending related contents and promotions. If your
customers have made previous purchases, you can automatically suggest complementary
products or services at a fraction of the price. If your customers aren’t purchasing yet but keep
browsing for the same product, you can automatically offer an option to purchase the product
in instalments for a limited time.
HOW TO SELECT YOUR
MARTECH PRODUCTS OR
VENDORS
Once you’ve decided on the kind of technology you need to optimise customer
experience, it’s time to select the tools/products for your MarTech stack. You want to
find the right-sized tool that meets your needs and your team’s capabilities at a certain
time, at a certain budget.
Remember, that MarTech is not only about software and technology. It’s also about
strategy!
ESCALATING BUSINESS GROWTH WITH MARTECH
To select the right MarTech tools/products:
Evaluate the technology based on the core features you need and its compatibility with
your current tools/platforms. Compare it with two or three similar tools/products that
offer the same features and capabilities.
Find out if they offer market support or if they have technology partners in your country
(or continent).
Calculate the pricing against your available budget and time. In how many months can
you get any results from this product/tool? This will help you decide if you’d like to go
for a yearly or a monthly subscription.
To select the right MarTech consultants or partners:
Evaluate their capabilities in mastering the technology. Do they have certifications? To
which extent have they been toying around with this technology?
Ask about their success in implementing the technology. Have they used this technology
with other clients? How were the results? What were the challenges and how did they
overcome those challenges?
Find out if you have previously worked together on other projects. Are you familiar with
them? Do you have good working relationships with them? Do you have good experience
with them and trust their credentials?
KEY INSIGHT
THINK YOU NEED A
SOLID MARTECH
STRATEGY FOR
OPTIMISED GROWTH?
Then get together with your MarTech team
or consultants, and get clear about your
high-level customer journey first.
Which part of the customer experiences
should you optimise on certain
platforms? At which stages of their
decision-making process?
Which data do you need to collect,
measure and active to enable this
optimisation?
Which right-sized technology will be the
best fit for your needs, current
software/tools, team capabilities, and
budget?
Research suggested that only 19% of
business respondents have a MarTech
strategy (a whopping 60% are still working
on it) and that marketing leaders were only
using less than two-thirds (58%) of their
MarTech stack’s potential.
Thus, even with a solid strategy, you can
still fall short if you don’t adopt or optimise
the right technology—or if you get to it too
late in the game.
With MarTech, you really don’t want to
miss out.
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