Five truths you need to know about martech, and what to do about them | MarTech

"The first question I asked at the roundtable was, "Who can tell me who your best customers are?" I then looked around at participants who avoided eye contact with me, perhaps embarrassed that they couldn't identify their best customers. How is this still possible? We have spent decades making enormous investments of time and resources into data, marketing technology, high-priced consultants and large teams. Yet, not one of the people working at leading brands felt comfortable saying they knew who their customers were."

"Recommendation to address Truth 1: Customer analytics is paramount. Most of our investments have been in systems that activate data. The need for the requisite data is a given, but these systems - CDPs, messaging tools and journey orchestration - have focused on the decision, not the understanding. Of course, brands must continue to collect valuable data about their customers. However, it's time for brands to invest more in their customer analytics capabilities to better understand their customers through:"

Many B2C brands cannot identify their best customers despite decades of investment in data, marketing technology, consultants, and large teams. Customer analytics must become a primary focus rather than only systems that activate data. Brands should invest in explainable predictive analytics, relevant data enrichments, ongoing segmentation re-evaluation, AI-enabled classification of content interactions and affinities, and similar capabilities. Martech vendors often promote high ROI figures, yet most brands do not rigorously measure ROI on marketing technology investments. Accurate ROI measurement and stronger analytics capabilities are necessary to understand customers, validate technology spend, and improve marketing effectiveness.

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