See What Other Brands Are Looking for in a MarTech Partner
Building a future-proof, holistic, agile marketing tech stack can easily become a competitive advantage. Follow these common “buyer demands” to make sure you’re asking the right questions when hunting for a vendor
One of the most critical tasks on business decision makers’ and marketing leaders’ agendas is choosing the right vendors. Sometimes, going with the ones that best fit your immediate needs is just not enough. You need to be able to build a holistic tech stack that also future proofs your operation.
In other words, compiling a fantastic tech stack can easily become a competitive advantage for brands.
Because you don’t want your competition to have this advantage over you, we present you with a list of smart marketers’ questions and what they look for when evaluating marketing technology vendors.
Follow these steps closely so that other brands won’t blindside you with their superior technology.
Buyer Demand #1: Accessing solutions that empower their marketing teams based on their capabilities.
As marketers adopt technologies they may not be entirely ready for, their demands for vendors will center on bridging the user-solution gap as much as possible.
For non-technical users, this might mean demand for more no-code capabilities in the worlds of segmentation and customer exploration. For more tech-savvy organizations, this might mean demand for flexible solutions with robust API offerings.
Whatever the case, buyers will increase the demand for self-service capabilities that match their own users’ professional abilities.
Buyer Demand #2: A roadmap for solution maximization.
The days where vendors would “sell and forget” are long gone. As many buyers are pressed by budget constraints and overexposed by changes in the macro-environment, they require and expect vendors to be true strategic partners.
Speaking to thousands of marketing decision-makers every year, we already see many of them requesting meetings with the Customer Success Team as part of the deal cycle!
In the years to come, the requirement of a roadmap to success will become a mainstay of the marketing technology evaluation process.
Buyer Demand #3: Marketers are more aware than ever of the uncertainty they operate in and demand platforms that allow them to be more agile.
As recent times taught all business leaders, yearly plans can change at the drop of a dime. As a result, the importance buyers such as yourself are placing on the ability of solutions to help them quickly pivot is increasing.
In the next few years, marketers will increasingly demand a greater ability to monitor, adapt and redeploy marketing campaigns and strategies on the go with the expectation this will provide them more agile responsiveness to external occurrences.
Buyer Demand #4: Buyers will continue to seek easier integrations across technology platforms.
As organizations continue to prepare for more agile responses to environmental changes, the need for open platforms that connect with ease to new solutions will grow.
More specifically, marketers have learned the importance of quickly connecting a new channel or platform to their multichannel marketing hub, making this an expected capability of vendors in the market for the near future.
Buyer Demand #5: Marketers desire greater responsiveness to customer behavior in order to deliver contextually relevant messages.
Buyers demand the ability to respond to customers based on their own rules of engagement and context – for example, by triggering campaigns and journeys based on customer interactions and profiles or deciding interaction moments based on customer time and channel preferences.
Marketers are looking to this capability as the key to improved customer experiences, under the hypothesis that, by communicating with customers through each customer’s own rules of engagement, they will feel a more meaningful connection with the brand.
Buyer Demand #6: Marketers’ interest in the true impact of their efforts reaches an all-time high.
The attribution question has been dodging marketing leaders for a long time, but now, more than ever, they are aware of the need to prove the incremental value they bring to the table.
Buyers looking for multichannel marketing hubs, for example, require the ability to demonstrate the precise impact of a campaign, channel, or strategy on immediate business outcomes such as revenues and long-term outcomes such as customer lifetime value.
It is important to note that business outcomes have begun to vary. Whereas in the past, most KPIs were occurrence-based (e.g., a purchase, a deposit), today’s companies look to measure outcomes of recurring or non-activity-based KPIs (e.g., replenishment, recurring revenue).
An example of how measuring the wrong things can cost you is evident in how many marketers are freaking out that both iOS and Android will block “email opens” tracking. When in reality, if they’d measure the right things – such as, you know, incremental impact on revenue – they could sleep tight and not worry over these privacy changes.
Rony Vexelman is Optimove’s VP of Marketing. Rony leads Optimove’s marketing strategy across regions and industries. Previously, Rony was Optimove's Director of Product Marketing leading product releases, customer marketing efforts and analyst relations. Rony holds a BA in Business Administration and Sociology from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from UCLA Anderson School of Management.
