What is an Experimental Marketer and Why Should I Care?
Gartner research has painted a challenging picture for most CMOs and marketing teams. Marketing budgets have decreased on average, while companies realize they don't use about 42% of is marketing-related platforms to their fullest (and this number has decreased year-over-year). And even though 89% of CEOs say digital is embedded in all growth strategies these same CEOs also report that only 35% of companies surveyed have achieved their digital transformation goals.
The underlying conclusion is that CMOs and their marketing teams have the immediate task of making the most of what they have, showing the value of the existing marketing-related platforms while ensuring they are being used to the fullest. This may come before CMOs can request budget increases or add shiny new platforms.
There can be many reasons why the current martech stack is underutilized. From problems with how these platforms were scoped, to how these investments are seen only as costs, or underfunded teams that cannot properly support the new technology added.
Another reason, at least according to my own professional experience, is that martech stack platforms are usually paired with existing processes inside a company. This in itself is a missed opportunity as many of these processes are outdated or sub-optimal (the process may have been created prior to the adoption of the martech stack platforms, for instance). The key here is reviewing the many marketing activities, completely rethinking these processes and redesigning or eliminating some steps to help marketers focus on more strategic tasks. So, instead of aligning platforms with current processes, a company should take the opportunity to greatly improve processes through different teams involved in customer activation and engagement, cutting through siloes that can increase platform usage.
The redesign of these marketing processes should follow three main criteria:
Streamline and simplify the marketer's (CRM, brand, etc) life by eliminating low-value tasks freeing time for more strategic tasks, and allowing for more experimentation.
Ensure that strategic customer data and decisions are wholly owned by the company and not by vendors. Agencies (these can help but they should never own a company's strategy). All customer data should be viewed by the company only, and be in compliance with data privacy and data security best practices and directives.
Help (or at a minimum not negatively impact) the customer experience/journey.
It is all about connecting dots throughout the many marketing activities and the different teams inside a company...
Enter the Experimental Marketer!
The Experimental Marketer sits at the intersection of marketing and technology but with a strong customer activation background. And don't worry, there are no certificates or classes needed to become an EM. It is actually a framework, a way of working that can be applied and adapted to a career to allow for more agility and flexibility.
One of the biggest enablers for the underutilization of the martech stack is a company's siloed structure, especially in large ones, where marketers may be further specialized in their area and are not exposed to many aspects of marketing technology and data operations. The same can be said for the technical person and knowing marketing activities. The Experimental Marketer bridges this gap, by having a strong foothold in both and being flexible enough to learn new concepts on the fly.
For Experimental Marketers, it is not about having 50% in marketing and 50% in technical work/concepts is being flexible enough to focus more on one versus the other throughout a career, as opportunities and challenges arise.
Because the Experimental Marketers sit in this intersection, and with a strong customer activation bias, they can bring a unique perspective to how to best use the martech stack to improve processes that can decrease time to market for customer-related activations.
That allows Experimental Marketers to have a holistic view of marketing activities and how their work can be optimized, improved, scaled, and leveraged.
Here are the main steps marketing professionals (and others, too) can take to become Experimental Marketers and help improve processes and increase marketing platform utilization:
Increase Visibility - It may sound counter-intuitive but in order to increase visibility of the martech stack capabilities you have to listen attentively first. Listen to all the different stakeholders involved in communicating with customers (involved in marketing activities). Listening helps you understand pain points throughout marketing processes and then connect to the platform's functions to see how they could help. Sometimes the fix can be only in the process and the platform can help with the process itself.
Certify Value - showing concrete examples (and benchmarks) on how these platforms can help solve the pain points. The Experimental Marketer goes beyond the basics, beyond the obvious improvements for customers to uncover the profound benefits for the teams involved in communicating with the customer via different channels. These can (and should) go hand in hand.
Orchestrate Simplification - how can these platforms help change the marketing processes in a meaningful way? Can it help create a sustainable approach that can be continued regardless of the platform itself (agnostic)? Can the martech stack help lead to the automation of such processes?
Strive for Clarity - in the end, tie the martech stack back to the overall business goals, above siloed KPIs (such as IT-based KPIs versus Marketing-only KPIs). For example, if the business's overall KPI is to get to know its customers better, then the martech stack platform utilization would all tie back to how it can help the company get to know its customers better.
The Experimental Marketer can also engage project stakeholders (VPs, etc) in order to gain support and to educate them on the benefits of adopting tech for business purposes and they are great counterparts to both marketing technologies and IT coworkers, adapting to different project structures.