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Andrew Addison, CEO of Purple Square, explains the importance of putting people at the center of digital marketing

Martech has to be an enabler, not a driver.

Marketing automation has been driving digital marketing for decades, helping companies personalize campaigns and deliver the right messages to the right people. However, for effective marketing, it is imperative to use technology as an enabler rather than a driver.

No matter how demanding Martech gets, it’s not a silver bullet. Without the right balance of people, processes, and technology behind a marketing strategy, at best it will miss the mark, and at worst, you will lose customers to over-marketing. Keeping employees at the center of marketing helps to avoid and overcome these challenges, generate commitment and loyalty, keep things fresh and, most importantly, remind them that despite having access to all the data in the world, it is ultimately people who make purchasing decisions meet, no algorithms.

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Processes as a framework for success

It’s amazing how many people I speak to whose marketing processes are technology-driven. It often seems that their end goal is to take advantage of all of the features and functionality of a Martech package instead of stepping back and taking a more strategic approach aimed at increasing customer loyalty.

Technology should be used to improve marketing processes, not to determine them. Martech exists to optimize: to accelerate work, to automate tasks where possible and – where it is in line with the strategic vision – to open up new possibilities. For example, if martech software can accomplish the same goal as a manual process in a tenth of the time, then it makes sense to use it. It should be up to the marketing team, the employees, to design processes that allow creativity, analytics, and technology to work together; to ensure that you get the most out of your technology investment without putting it into processes and campaigns for its own sake.

With that in mind, it’s important that you have the right people and team structures who know how, when and where technology needs to be used to get the best results.

It’s all in the team

A strong marketing team consists of people with different skills – from strategists and data analysts who identify strengths and record trends and focus plans, to creatives and doers who design and deliver perfectly tailored campaigns. A good marketer needs to understand how technology can help improve these campaigns, personalize them, and deliver them through the appropriate channels – but also be able to think beyond the limits of what technology can offer.

Technology makes it easy to execute, analyze, and measure a marketing strategy with the push of a button, and while this is helpful – especially on a large scale – we see the most effective personalized marketing in teams of marketers who aren’t afraid to ask questions. You need to be able to question the “why,” “how,” and “who” behind any marketing decision – be it technology or human – to ensure it gets to the right people in the most relevant, useful, and best way possible. Good marketers know this and understand that if we want customers to continue agreeing to share their information, we must earn their trust.

For example, we’ve all received an email or seen a pop-up ad that didn’t. I recently received an email from a company I did business with in the past after purchasing men’s outdoor clothing. The email gave me a little foretaste of the new season’s skirts and dresses – a little off the mark. One or two misdirected communications may not stop us from buying from a brand that has treated us well in the past, but constant, irrelevant emails – especially those with a discounted price on an item we’ve already bought have – will eventually take their toll and encourage customers to go elsewhere.

This misalignment can be avoided in organizations where technology is used by people to make the final decisions when it comes to targeting and delivering campaigns and offers.

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Find the right balance

Developing an understanding of how martech works and how to best use it will help avoid mistakes like the ones mentioned above. By investing in experienced team members, as well as training and mentoring programs, you can help build team members’ confidence in using technology to optimize the way they work, without becoming complacent or overly dependent on it.

The point of putting people at the center of marketing is not to eliminate automated customer journeys or to downplay the importance of martech – on the contrary. It’s about creating a framework for easy decision-making and having marketers overseeing the technology to ensure customers are receiving engaging, relevant, and timely communications. AI and machine learning are brilliant and will play an increasingly important role in marketing, but we haven’t gotten to the point where we can trust machines to do everything for us. I would argue that even then we will still need people at the heart of marketing. After all, we are all more than just the sum of our data.

Written by Andrew Addison, CEO of Purple square