As the marketing landscape continues to get more and more complex, new companies are introducing technology to help marketers address the challenges with the increasingly fragmented consumer path to purchase. These companies—many of them startups—influence how we go to market with our product, how we engage our customers across touchpoints and how we can introduce efficiencies that weren’t otherwise possible.
Navigating which of these companies to work with isn’t always clear. And once you select a partner, how do you align your objectives and establish trust? Experimenting is all well and fine, but how can you make the most of a new relationship in unchartered territory?
Forbes contributor MaryLee Sachs offers up three different perspectives—including one from Beckon CEO Jennifer Zeszut—to help marketers navigate the cluttered, but highly valuable, martech space. Here are some of the highlights:
Beckon
From Jennifer’s perspective as CEO, she offers the following tips based how Beckon has found success working with some of the world’s best brands:
- Look for function-specific tools. The industry is moving so quickly that marketing-specific tools are much more effective. These start-ups have employees that come from marketing backgrounds so they understand the problems marketers are facing and how to best solve them.
- Have the CTO and the CIO involved in the process to make sure that vendors are vetted for things like security, controls and the other types of IT-related considerations that might become an issue once the technology is fully deployed.
- Have full data portability. Each of these new technologies carries data that should be under ownership of the brand. The data offers critical insights for you and you should have access to it—especially in the event you choose to move in a different direction in the future.
McKinsey and Its New Startup Investment Landscape Analytics (SILA) Tool
SILA was created by McKinsey to be part directory, part curation and part vetting. Senior Director Judy Wade advises marketers to pay close attention to the implementation process and how to support and grow usage across the organization. She comments:
“Once a startup is identified and a project in place, the large corporates often don’t know how to go from pilot to scale. They might get incredible results but then struggle to drive usage throughout their entire marketing department. The more the CMO or the CIO can have a streamlined decision-making process and the more that they can do to help the startup scale in the organization, either through up-selling or cross-selling, the better.”
The Unilever Foundry
The Unilever Foundry connects startups with Unilever by inviting them to solve problems experienced by Unilever brands via a challenge posted online—taking a “pitch, pilot, partner” approach. Unilever brands approach Unilever Foundry with a problem, budget and plan to execute on it, and then the Foundry provides a list of startups that can approach the problem more efficiently and effectively (which they call a pilot). If the pilot is successful, they roll it out to the larger organization.
For more details, the full article can be found here.