Top martech insights from 2020

2020 has certainly been an interesting year. (How’s that for understatement?) But it’s safe to say that it’s taught everyone a few things as people and professionals.  We’ve had to restructure our lives around the pandemic. Many have had to change professions, jobs, or at least how we work and interact with our colleagues. Many of these changes have forced us to re-evaluate what is truly essential, what is nice to have, and what wasn’t really so necessary after all. 

And that’s also true of us as marketers and technologists. Looking back over the year, Martechcube [linkto: https://www.martechcube.com/], the marketing technology-focused media publication house, compiled their list of the top 10 thoughtful martech quotes from martech leaders in their article Top 10 Martech Thought Leaders’ Insights – 2020 Roundup. We’re proud that Lytics’ Co-founder and CEO James McDermott was included in the list for his observation that:

The legacy approach for marketing technology is to solve a specific problem in a specific channel with a specific tool.

Challenges arising from complex martech tasks

The quote, which was taken from a January interview, calls attention to the unintended consequences of that original marketing technology approach. As marketing teams find themselves faced with more channels for digital experiences and more technologies, they may individually solve some of their problems with new tools, but at the same time they are creating other challenges: 

• Increasing complex technology stacks: He continues, “Today there is a proliferation of over 7,000 marketing tools to execute one-off campaigns in a single channel.” Every marketing team operates in multiple channels, from website to email to ads, SMS, apps, and more. Each channel creates its own data stream that exists in a silo.
• Difficulty creating accurate consumer profiles: With data in multiple marketing technology sources–not to mention other data sources like purchase transaction data, customer service records, and third-party data sources–this has created challenges in aggregating customer data into a unified profile. There are technologies like Lytics customer data platform that can help marketers stitch together unified customer profiles, but many of them (fortunately not Lytics!) stop at aggregating data, rather than translating it into insight and action.

The rise of the decision gap

Data on its own does not help marketers reach consumers more effectively. To do that, they need insights that drive results, and after that, they need to implement these insights about the data through the execution tools in their martech suite, in the form of personalized website experiences, content recommendations, and next best experiences that advance the customer through. Marketers need answers to questions like:

• Where should I place ads to reach the right customers?
• Which customers are satisfied and which are at risk to churn?
• What content should I recommend to a customer who has displayed an interest in a given topic?

This challenge of translating data into action is a decision gap–which Lytics CDP fills.

Delivering optimal experiences to customers with Lytics

McDermott continues, explaining that “the next generation of marketing automation enables companies to automate the delivery of personalized experiences based on changes in people’s behaviors, interests, likelihood to purchase and more, so ultimately [it] incorporates automated triggers and personalization creating the optimal experience for each individual consumer.”

As pioneers in the CDP category, Lytics offers marketers more than a traditional customer 360. It unifies disparate data sources, but additionally its machine learning decision engine offers insights that marketers need and the ability to automate and execute personalized marketing programs across channels, at scale, based on those insights. Rather than aggregating data, it focuses on extracting valuable insights from the data in a marketer-friendly way.

To learn more about Lytics’ place in a best-of-breed marketing technology stack, check out James McDermott’s recent blog post on the New Martech stack for 2021.