Re-Imagining the ABCDE of Marketing Technology

I am a Marketing Technologist and have been since before MarTech was a “thing.” I’ve also worn most of the hats you can wear in a marketing department. My first love was graphic design and website development. From there, motion graphics creator, content strategist, writer, social media marketer, CRM and marketing automation expert. I could add more to this list, but I won’t. My point is that I’ve been around the block a few times and have been an active participant in the many different evolutions of what is now called Digital Marketing.

I’m grateful for all this experience. It gives me the ability to understand how the rapid amount of change happening in my beloved marketing and MarTech landscape effects the CMO down to the intern running coffee orders. However, articulating these epic shifts in a way that makes sense, has not been very easy to do. I tend to get too technical.  Thanks to my fellow digital innovator, Curt Galusha, I’ve been introduced to Rishad Tobaccowala and his ABCDE of re-invented marketing, which has helped me explain my point of view in easier-to-understand language. I highly recommend you read Rishad’s article before digging into the rest of what I have to say below.

The ABCDE of Marketing to the rescue.

Rishad has done a brilliant job of breaking down the complexity of the transformation that marketing leaders are constantly challenged with into consumable, bite-sized pieces. Not an easy feat. The ABCDE of Marketing stands for: Audience, Brand, Content, Data and Enterprise, with three categories mapped underneath each letter. As a Marketing Technologist, three of these categories stood out to me the most: A (Audience), B (Brand) and D (Data). This is where I am going to focus my MarTech lens in this article.

Let start this exploration by re-thinking the phrase Marketing Technology. I think it is too limiting for the ABCDE theory to work. Instead, let’s replace "marketing" with "experience". Why? Because as consumers, we have “God-like” power (to paraphrase Rishad) sitting in our hands. As consumers, our mobile devices give us instant access to information and to make purchases magically appear on our doorsteps. Not only that, but we also expect a perfect buying experience from the moment we decide to hand over our credit cards. If we have a bad experience during any point of our purchase journey, it is very easy to move on to the competitor and complain publicly using social media. As consumers, we have a voice and are truly powerful.

If you are a business owner reading this right now, you probably have a thought cloud above your head with the words, “Ugh! The pressure!” (or perhaps something less polite) floating around in that stressed out brain of yours. So do I, to be honest. Stepping back into the shoes of a Digital Marketer, I don’t think people truly understand just how much technology is used to enable an engaging and personalized experience that meets consumer expectations. Marketing may have a huge tech budget, but the techstack needed to truly make a great online experience happen is never entirely owned by Marketing. This is why we have to remove the word “Marketing” and insert “Experience” - that experience is owned by many different parts of the business.

Sample Experience Technology Stack

There is a lot to unpack, so let’s try to keep it simple. The diagram at the top of this article represents a simplified example of an “Experience” Technology stack used to light up the path to purchase and beyond. Scroll up and take a look at it :-)

In this example, Marketing owns a large part of the tech stack needed to create a great online experience for customers. There are only 7 MarTech tools represented here (there can be many more) and each one of these platforms perform several functions. Think about that for a moment. How big does your marketing and technical team need to be to support a stack like this? How about the budget? Who owns that (hint, it’s probably the CMO and CIO)? Now, pile on implementation partners and outsourced agencies that help the marketing team feed and maintain this stack. This cost can be more than triple the yearly licensing cost.

On the operational/business side of this stack, just the ERP implementation can cost more than maintaining the MarTech stack for a year. And don't discount that pretty blue circle at the bottom. The one labeled, "Data Management Tech." You can forget being successful without proper access to your data and the ability to share it across all of this technology in the format and at the moment it is needed. I’ll let your imagination take it from there.

An Experience Technology stack is a significant investment, to put it mildly. However, there is an interesting irony here. You can dump as much money as you want into the Experience Tech stack, but building all this glorious technology is worthless unless you understand that, from the technology perspective, the customer does not come first. (Did your head just explode? Just askin'.)

Take care of yourself first, always.

As I’ve battled it out with my IT friends over the years and spent the last 5-years in a predominately sales focused role, one theme has remained very consistent. The employees in charge of executing that great experience for your customers need to come first. If the technology they are using is siloed, confusing and a barrier to doing their job effectively, they will quit and go work for the competitor who makes their daily job easier. It’s even possible that this disgruntled employee will leave a bad review about your company that will make replacing them difficult.

This is why I’ve chosen to focus on the A, B and D pillars of Rishad’s perspective. In order of importance, I have ranked the letter and my top choice for each of the 3 categories that fall under their respective letter. I believe this is the right place to start if you are in charge of, and would like to be successful, with an Experience Tech stack.

Letter B for Brand

Category: Employee Joy

Why is this number 1? Happy employees make happy customers. Giving them an easy-to-use technology platform (and the support needed to use it and perhaps enjoy it...) will make it easy for them to actually execute that seamless customer experience everyone is expecting.

Letter D for Data

Category: Meaning vs Math

After your employees, data is the most valuable resource you have. Making the investment in the time and money needed to understand the story your data is trying to tell you about your customers is table stakes. Making it secure, compliant and accessible to your employees in a format they understand and can act on is priceless.

Letter A for Audience

Category: People not consumers

Yes, now let’s focus on the customer. Empathy is the trendy term right now - and rightfully so. There is a person behind that email. Yes, they own a bank account with (hopefully) some money in it. They will be happy to part with that dollar if you can prove that you have empathy and will support them without barriers across their brand journey. But here's the thing, if you don't have 1 and 2 nailed, you cannot get to 3.

Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments below.