MarTech Maturity in the Lens of Digital Customer Lifecycle

There are so many XyzTechs popping up now and then. MarTech, marketing technology, has been one of the key techs for the digital age in the past couple of decades. However, MarTech solutions are also booming, making it difficult for organisations to keep track of what to do and invest to support their business and operation. My approach is examining the maturity of MarTech alongside the digital customer lifecycle to find gaps and catch up.

This article is a replicate of my presentation at the Digital Insurance APAC 2024 on the same title but generalized beyond insurance.

The MarTech landscape

We should have seen the following image in the past from martechmap.com. There are a lot of categories and even more tiny icons for different MarTech solutions. If you get an account from their website, you can access an interactive version of this image for more information on each MarTech solution. I don’t want to downplay their effort in building this, but the major message I got is there are a lot of MarTech solutions.

The trend of growth may be a little bit more interesting, which shows an exponential growth of MarTech solutions over only 10 years from around 150 to over 14000.

However, it is still too much and messy to manage. There is not any single organization will have all of them, not even at the category level. Some of those solutions may be used by media agencies, which could be vital for them as they could be their daily tools. But what about brands, how does it matter from a brand perspective on MarTech solutions?

Of course, I believe MarTech is an important and critical component in today’s digital ecosystem to support a personalized and relevant digital customer journey. Instead of chasing the number of how many MarTech solutions and adoptions, it is more important to have a maturity model and measure against it to know where we are and going.

What is MarTech?

There are so many buzzwords where they come and go quickly. Many of them were gone before developed into a matured domain with proper definitions. When searching for a definition, we could find multiple similar but different definitions from different sources. Following are a few examples.

Technology employed in the service of marketing. Martech is used to create, execute, manage, orchestrate, and measure the performance of online and offline content, campaigns and experiences.

— martech.org

Refers to the array of marketing software, tools and technologies used to optimize, execute, and measure marketing campaigns and initiatives. These technologies are designed to streamline marketing processes, enhance efficiency, leverage data-driven insights, and ultimately drive better results.

— thecmo.com

Encompasses specific software applications used to build, automate, track, and improve marketing efforts. Many different kinds of industries rely on MarTech to increase the efficiency of their marketing efforts—and to better understand what resonates (or doesn’t) with a different audiences.

— coursera.org

It is not a problem with different definitions as different organizations with different structures, objectives, and needs, could see MarTech differently. However, we are still able to see some common themes from those different definitions:

• Marketing, of course, the “Mar” stands for marketing to deliver campaign and experience.
• Technology, same as above “Tech” stands for technology.
• Ecosystem, it is important that MarTech is not a single piece of solution but a set of interconnected software and tools.
• Data-driven, MarTech heavily relies on data to deliver results and optimization.

MarTech capabilities

To measure the maturity, there are 5 key capabilities to look into, largely by how data are coming in, managing and processing data, and finally using data to deliver campaigns and experiences.

Data Collection. Tagging and tracking owned digital properties to collect user behaviour​. Integration with external platforms, such as paid media and partners, to ingest data​.

Analytics and Reporting. Reporting on online behaviour on owned digital properties with the capabilities of trending analysis, breakdown with multiple dimensions, event attribution, and segmentation​. Automated dashboards with combined data from website traffic, other online data sources such as paid media, and internal sales data for end-to-end reporting​.

Data Platform. Ingest and combine data from multiple sources to create a unified customer view​. Create real-time segments with flexible conditions​. Share segments with multiple destinations for activations, such as targeting, suppression, and personalization

Marketing Automation. Orchestrate multi-step journeys across multiple touchpoints with flexible branches and condition options​. Journeys should be automated no matter triggering from realtime event or predefined schedule​.

Testing and Personalization. Conduct ABN testing on owned digital properties to identify a winner experience towards a defined goal​. Customize and personalize the experience on owned digital properties according to online signal or segmentation information​.

All these capabilities focus on owned channels where we have full control and full access to data.

Each of those capabilities can be measured and provided a score on maturity level. It doesn’t matter if it is a quantitative numeric score such as ranging from 1 to 5, or a qualitative score such as premature, elementary, and mature. A quantitative score is a more objective but specific measurement method with a lot of detailed items and measuring criteria. That could take a longer time to align and execute. A quantitive score is more flexible but subjective, it relies more on people’s gut feeling or expert judgment to score. That may still take time to align due to the subjective manner but quicker to implement.

Following is an example of quantitative measurement with three simple levels with a few words to describe the level of maturity.

Some of those capabilities allow “no capability” as an option for premature and some are not. It depends on the overall situation of the organization itself, competitors, and the market environment.

Stages of digital customer lifecycle

To make the maturity more relevant to the business, the maturity measurement on capabilities alone is not enough. We need to add the business flavour to the model with the digital customer lifecycle.

There are also many definitions of stages of the customer lifecycle but we can simplify it into three groups with five stages, and MarTech can help at different stages.

Get them, acquisition. To acquire new customers with campaigns and organically. Sample help from MarTech, to run attributed analysis on website behaviour to lead and run A/B testing to optimize conversion.

Serve them, cross/up selling. To increase pocket share by selling additional and relevant products to existing customers. Sample help from MarTech, to personalize portal homepage with next best offer according to customer profile.

Serve them, servicing. To increase NPS and customer satisfaction via easy-to-use online self-services. Sample help from MarTech, to identify experience bottlenecks to improve straight-through-process success rate and adoption.

Keep them, engagement/advocacy. To increase NPS and customer satisfaction, and also support increased pocket share with continuous engagement and turning customers into advocates. Sample help from MarTech, to track engagement to understand more about customers and opportunities for new offers.

Keep them, retention. To automatically detect and re-engage customers who are likely to leave, or inform the servicing team to approach, to reduce churn rate. Sample help from MarTech, to segment customers looking for termination information and trigger rescue communication to customers and the relevant servicing team.

Similar to MarTech capabilities, we can measure the MarTech adoption specifically on each of the digital customer lifecycle stages. Just to be mindful that it is measuring the maturity of MarTech adoption in those stages but not the maturity of the stage itself. There may be a high level of maturity in a stage of the customer lifecycle but completely offline and no MarTech adoption at all.

Adopting the same three simple qualitative levels as capabilities, and also with a few words to simply describe the level of maturity.

MarTech maturity assessment in the lens of digital customer lifecycle

By combining the two aspects of MarTech capabilities and the digital customer lifecycle stages, we get a two-dimensional table providing an overall understanding of MarTech’s maturity.

No matter whether we use qualitative or quantitative scoring approaches, we can use the red-amber-green colour coding in the maturity model. The result is easy to understand showing the overall maturity level and areas of improvement. Improvement can be made in a single combination of capabilities for a deep-dived use case, on a customer journey over multiple capabilities, or a strategic tool implementation which can support multiple stages of the lifecycle.

The ever-changing world

As seen in the beginning of the exponential growth of MarTech solutions, the MarTech landscape changes rapidly. The maturity assessment should be a regular exercise instead of a one-time effort. It is similar to our physical or financial health review ideally conducted once a year, to see where we are and if we are moving in the right direction.

The expectation of maturity could be changed and get more demanding. The same level of capability may be assessed as matured now could become unmatured. Some capabilities allow absence as an option now could become mandatory.

The capabilities themselves could be changed as well in response to technology change in a 3-5 year cadence. New capabilities may emerge and existing capabilities may be obsolete or combined.

Even the digital customer lifecycle stages can change. It depends on customer behaviour and relationship with the organization but it will take a long time to change where maybe up to 10 years.