I was watching a detective show on TV recently. A homicide had occurred and the detective on the scene had a small sliver of evidence he was sure would lead him to the murderer. He called someone at the home office who was an IT guru. The detective described what he had found and then took a picture of it on his phone. He sent the photo to the techy guy, who pounded away on his computer and, in mere moments, had found all the information you could ever want on the killer. I sat there and thought, we have come to believe that we can find anything with a few taps on a computer. Download the right app and you have solved any problem you will ever face! Think about it: the laughable thing is we have come to believe we can control the world from our Smartphone!

That leads me to a common problem businesses are facing with their marketing technology. They believe that all they need to do is pay a software fee and they will have the solution to all of their marketing problems. But many are finding that they are getting the fee without any return on investment. That is because the software can deliver marketing raw materials, such as lead generation information that is integrated with a customer management system, but it cannot read your customers and execute a strategy without your involvement. As one writer put it, "…what the marketing technology company actually delivers is the cement, the wood, the sheetrock, the piping, and the appliances to your empty lot. It's your job to build the mansion…¹” So for every business owner who is frustrated by the lack of results from their investment in technology, let me offer a solution that will help you get the most out of it. Marcom technology is really a wonderful thing. It can streamline and revolutionize your marketing if you use it as a tool rather than a human brain that is capable of interjecting emotion into your marketing – something the technology will never be able to do for you. And marketing has always been an emotional discipline of business. It is the human connection that makes people fall in love with our brand, not logic. Don’t get me wrong, your customers expect your products and services to work. But they also won’t be brand loyal unless there is some emotion (like happiness) attached to your brand. So leave the emotional side of marketing to the humans.

What would be left for the technology side of marketing is the execution and measurement of your marketing efforts. Here is where the technology can help you. For the technology to be helpful, you will need to interject a strategy into your marketing. That means you need to formalize a marketing plan that targets potential customers, performs specific tasks that engages that targeted group and measures your success. That includes setting goals. What exactly are you trying to accomplish as a company? Get specific with this answer. From there, build a marketing strategy that provides customer engagement that leads them to a sale. Marketing, when it is working correctly, helps you reach your goals. For most businesses, that has to do with increasing sales to two different groups of people: converting prospects (what we would call your target) into new customers and keeping your current customers (your base) buying from you. What your marketing technology can help you do is reach your target and your base, measure your success in reaching them, converting and retaining customers.

In order to effectively market to your target, there has to be key, strategic actions to attract them to you, get them interested and then entice them to buy from you for the first time. Pay careful attention to potential customers as they make their way through this process. Their experience will determine whether or not they actually buy from you. Likewise, there are four reasons your base will either stay with you or leave you:

• Your price has to be competitive compared to your competition
• The quality of your products/services has to outshine the competition
• You have to deliver on time
• The customer service experience with your people has to be pleasant

Mess up on any of these four areas and you run the risk of losing your base. If you do a stellar job on these four areas and you have opened the door to sell your base again and again. They will become your advocates. This is where the emotion enters the picture once again. Happy customers become brand loyal. This is where you want all customer relationships to end up. Marketing has a key responsibility to both promote these four key areas of the customer’s experience. This is where the technology can help you get their reaction in a short amount of time. Use this technology to log customer reaction. Fix the areas where you are failing, promote the areas where you are excelling.

Marketing technology will not solve all business problems with a few taps on a computer keyboard. However, when coupled with a good marketing plan, it can help you implement and measure your success, especially as it relates to areas of the customer’s experience that can make you or break you.

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1. How Your Company Can Prevent A Failed Marketing Technology Investment, by Douglas Karr, October 17, 2019, Forbes