Martech Heroes: Matt Preschern talks integrated opportunities
Ahead of the B2B Awards in New York, The Drum has joined forces with Stein IAS to recognise the best people in martech. The most nominated individuals will receive a special accolade at the award show to highlight their commitment to driving change within their company across the advertising and marketing sectors.
The Drum talks to Matt Preschern, CA Technologies about the future of martech and the importance of Martech Heroes
Talking Martech Heroes, we spoke with Matt Preschern, the SVP demand and performance marketing at CA Technologies, who revealed his tips for tackling and making sense of martech.
Given the very high level of investment in martech, what strategies and tactics are CA Technologies focusing on to deliver measurable business impact?
First, it’s not just about the technology. In my view, martech represents the opportunity to fully integrate all data sources through a complete B2B tech stack to deliver the best customer experience across every channel. We’re focused on moving away from thinking of marketing automation as a platform for nurture or CRM platform for sales interactions; instead, we’re keen to leverage data from all sources and across all communications to ensure the customer receives a seamless experience.
It’s our goal to track every interaction through paid, owned and earned channels and then use intent data and advanced predictive analytics to determine what’s the best next action and serve up contextually relevant content and experiences that ultimately end up in a transaction.
What are the most innovative ways you are utilising martech – and what are the outcomes?
Optimizing paid media performance by integrating customer data with paid activations in order to proactively serve relevant and contextually relevant experiences. By understanding customer interactions and behaviors, it is possible to predict the next best action to take and drive more effective social, search and display activations.
By working with media partners, we are also using intent data to monitor priority customers, surges in activity and directly engage them when relevant. This is particularly informing the ABM strategy and delivering hyper-targeted communications to accelerate the path to purchase.
How are you using martech in combination with more powerful and emotional creative and content experiences?
One of the missed opportunities in adtech is improved targeting and the ability to effectively use data to reach the right audience and determine the best creativity of the experience. With content reaching unprecedented levels and the audience experiencing advertising and content fatigue, the goal has to be to develop more targeted and relevant content based on an individual’s interests and behavior through better use of dynamic content in context. Consideration needs to be given to the environment. For example Geo location data provides insight to drive relevant mobile experiences in the moment. The goal is to always consider content with context.
There are plenty of barriers to effective use of martech (complexity, integration, skill sets, organizational support/alignment). How are you overcoming these?
Without question the biggest barriers are skill sets and the integration of legacy systems. The opportunity for advanced technology-driven marketing across every channel exists but most companies find it difficult to implement and build within existing legacy systems. Finding the right talent is essential, as is ensuring the entire corporate and all stakeholders are bought in and committed to having a single tech stack to drive the entire customer experience.
What are the most important ‘around-the-corner’ technologies?
AI. The ability to gather data and connect with customers through multiple devices will only continue to grow. AI is enabling the effective use of this data. It enables real-time analysis of customer behavior to predict next action and enable the delivery of the right content at the right time across every channel. By utilizing self-learning models, a customer’s experience will be improved through real-time analytics of customer interactions and responses avoiding any danger of over exposure and the ability to pivot activities as needed. The challenge will be to ensure all of these interactions are then powered by emotionally and contextually relevant content, creative and experiences.
What would be your words of advice and encouragement for other marketers on their martech journeys?
Think of the customer’s experience, don’t start with technology for technology sake. Don’t invest in technology stacks before investing in the skills to leverage the powerful capabilities the stack can offer. The science of marketing and the technology to run effective programs has become very sophisticated. Don’t underestimate the need for a talented team to build a strategy and extract value from the systems.
If you think you know a Martech Hero and want to get them recognition for driving business results, nominate them here before October 1st.