Are your client’s technology platforms causing you headaches?

By Ralph Vugts on Jan 31, 2019

So many systems...

Every client has their own preferences and needs. Each client has their own “system”—and even those who use common technologies don’t always use them in expected ways. Business is individual and we put a lot of our lives and our hearts into what we do. But we don’t always put all of our tech together with a specific plan (and sometimes there are legacy systems which don’t easily adapt, or individual preferences which go against the grain.)

Get them talking to each other

Your clients’ wants are simple: they want platform integration, or, more simply, they want all their tech go work together. In particular, they’d like their various tech platforms to act as one to support their objectives. When implemented properly their marketing and sales can grow enormously when various components—human and machine—work together to generate leads and close deals.

Companies hum along like clockwork when various divisions and people using various platforms can unify to make money for the business all together. But much too often, business units work on their own and don’t share much information.

That’s inefficient and can lead to a wide variety of problems and challenges. Integrating platforms so that vital data is synchronised across systems, easy to read, and easy to access both saves money and time, and helps generate more money.

When you’ve got the information in one place, you don’t have to spend half your time chasing down data or putting it together. It lets you actually do your job, and focus on the stuff that you enjoy and which makes you a talented marketer.

Understanding is key

This is one of the first problems we set out to solve. Sales and marketing connect with customers in real time, determining what marketing help support sales. So it’s not just about how much we spend or how flashy a campaign is, it’s about having a clear understanding of what objectives get met. How many customers do you end up with after spending $X on advertising? Do you generate repeat business? What messages get customers to buy, and which ones get them to opt-out?

Introducing martech

It’s always good to send people to your website, but it’s more important to use Martech and other data agglomeration to figure out if they don’t just visit, but also buy. How many potential customers become actual customers? How much are we spending to acquire these customers? How many come back? These are vital questions. If we can use Martech to answer them, we save you time, money, and stress. When we can tag the marketing spend, or analyze user response, not on one platform but on all of them, we can figure out what really works, what makes money and what is just a money sink.

There are some really major platforms out there which don’t share data easily—and they particularly don’t share data with each other. For example, if you want good ad spend tracking, you want to try to figure out all of your costs. That includes Google Adword conversion tracking, and while Google’s the gold standard in analysis with their Google Analytics, it doesn’t match this data up all the way down to your individual contact record in your CRM. So if they become a customer at a later day the attribution for this source will not match up. You’re looking for that special sauce, that ingredient which helps you know what ad spends bring the customers, what brings they buyers, what doesn’t do anything—and what brings just the lookers, who choose to go away without making purchasing.

But not just metrics

Great advertising isn’t all about the metrics, but the better and stronger your metrics, the more targeted, the smarter, the more customer-friendly you can make your marketing.  Think about it—in this day and age, people don’t just want to see a push message, “Buy this now”. They want inbound marketing something which says, “Here are some things you probably want to know before you make up your mind.”

Over time, you can learn any platform and optimise campaigns individually. But if you use Martech you will eventually optimise your campaigns to perfection and establish a base to run the bulk of your campaigns on. You will still need to experiment but this will now only take up a small percentage of your time as you will know what has worked well for you in the past.

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Ralph has been developing websites and systems for nearly 20 years. Passionate and curious, he’s an a-typical developer who understands how users interact with the systems he builds. He understands that systems need to be human-friendly. Ralph loves working in an industry that is constantly changing and disrupting itself.

Get in touch, We love to talk