Tag: mastering-martech

So, CMOs’ budget for martech is sinking: is that bad news? I don’t think so, as there are a few good reasons behind this trend.

First, as Gartner says, budget for CX and digital commerce technology – and martech mostly falls into these categories – shifted to become a strategic priority at most companies. CTOs and CIOs looking to modernize their stack is HUGE news both from a brand and a consumer perspective as it generally means a concrete step toward a better omnichannel. In this context, the main challenge for marketing and IT departments is to join forces and present a solid business case together.

Second, companies are increasingly relying on agencies and third-party services for their marketing operations. That’s because the lack of internal resources and expertise doesn’t allow them to get the most out of the expensive tools they licensed. But filling the gap between the potential tool capabilities and what it’s actually being used inevitably leads to one thing: a better user experience.

It took over 10 years (and counting) for martech to become a thing, but it seems like brands are finally getting “serious about CX data and technology”, fulfilling Forrester’s wishes from 2020. 

This post will explore how we got here and what’s coming next.

Have you been in martech for years and are now feeling lost among a sea of acronyms? Hopefully, I will help you get in the loop for 2023.

Are you a marketer and this martech thing still feels like a buzzword? No probs, I also receive dozens of emails-I-never-asked-for presenting the latest tool. But if you are open to rethinking how your company engages with its customers, give this read a chance.

Are you an IT person? Within companies, there’s a huge need for people capable of navigating the extreme complexity of the CX tech stack. With marketing technologists now being called “business technologists” and the hype around no-code and low-code tools, you know how much technology is changing: your colleagues from business departments need your help more than ever.

2014: The rise of Martech

At this point in time, e-commerce sales accounted for less than 10% of turnover. Marketers couldn’t keep up with the fast-paced scenario and were frustrated about being at the bottom of IT’s priorities.

But martech was ready to help, and it boomed quickly, supporting a wide range of use cases with marketing automation at the top of the list and focusing more on the dream of hyper-growth (a.k.a., lead generation) than customer needs (like tailored emails and enhanced personalization).

It all sounded cool and exciting, but with marketers blinded by shiny new tools every week, the growth of the martech tech stack was chaotic and siloed, with IT people not realizing the impact the cloud was having on marketing ops —and marketers, too.

Chief Marketing Technologists were “change agents, working within the function and across the company to create competitive advantage”, said the Harvard Business Review in 2014. But, you know, easier said than done.

2018: The dawn of Customer Centricity

In 2018, martech took up to 29% of the average CMO’s budget; it was top of the list, followed by labor, paid media, and agency fees (source: Gartner). Marketers understood that growth is nothing without channel-specific and data-informed CX initiatives.

All businesses agreed that a better customer experience only comes with a proper customer data strategy. And this translated into reality. In 2018, CRM – the backbone of customer centricity – experienced “the highest growth of any application software market, becoming the largest enterprise software market, with a whopping $48.2 billion in sales” (Gartner, 2019).

2021: The dream of CDP

Data, data, data. Over the previous years, everyone craved data to enrich their cool data visualizations. But these were hiding a big underlying problem: Most of the time, data didn’t turn into action. To paraphrase the famous tweet by Dan Ariel, data-driven marketing was like teenage sex: everyone was talking about it, nobody really knew how to do it, everyone thought everyone else was doing it, so everyone claimed they were doing it. 

Not only were brands unable to extract actionable insights from the data they had, but due to a fragmented martech tech stack and the lack of internal expertise, even basic tasks such as email marketing segmentation were not accomplished.

On average, marketers use only 42% of the capabilities in their martech stack, Gartner found, based on a survey of 324 marketers in May and June. This is a marked decrease from 2020, when marketers reported that they used 58% of their tech stack. (Gartner, 2022, source)

While common sense would suggest starting with small wins to validate a personalization strategy, Customer Data Platforms became the cool new kid in town, considered by 69% of marketers “as the key to realising their organisation’s customer experience vision” (Martech Alliance).

CDP was promoted as the biggest promise to single customer view and omnichannel personalization, but hype quickly waned due to time-to-market, uncertain ROI, and a siloed approach (more on my blog post “No, customer data platforms will not be adopted by the majority of companies by the end of 2022”). 

Covid definitely accelerated digital transformation, but it also led to more pressure on CMOs to prove the impact of marketing efforts. CDP fell right in the middle: it had a huge impact on CX but involved a big effort both from a license-cost perspective and a marketing ops one. Wrong timing?

2022: Martech is now mature, but what about brands?

Not even Covid was able to bring the level of digital transformation we were excepting as customers, with ecommerce penetration back to the expected trends in a pre-covid scenario. 

Not surprising, though, as the best in-store experiences are based on very accurate rituals. Most of the time, I can’t seem to find the same level of accuracy in online experiences, as you may have noticed from this post.

However, something in the way brands operate changed. Whether it’s an increase in sales through omnichannel (for B2C) or automation (for B2B), or operational efficiency through centralization (for marketing) or tech consolidation (for IT), understanding and leveraging martech is key in most use cases.

And now, here we are. 

Circling back to the first chart of this blog post, Gartner’s prediction from a few years ago now translates into CX and digital commerce, which have become “enterprisewide strategic priorities”.

Still, as I said at the beginning, with an increasing pressure on proving the impact of expensive experience programs, the only chance for CMOs, CIOs and CTOs to succeed is 1) to partner on shared business cases and 2) to build new engagement models with external partners to deliver against shared KPIs.

What’s coming next?

With over 10k martech tools, picking the right one is still complex, and the 2015 Rjmetrics’ research that said that “companies justify their lack of public pricing based on solution complexity because there are too many factors that go into a price” is still valid.

Navigating the martech offering will remain complex, and the key differentiator will be integration capabilities, as true personalization at scale will only be possible through a composable tech stack (Yes, even if you choose to go with Adobe or Salesforce). This is already happening with CDPs (Customer Data Platforms) moving to composable CDPs, CMSs (Content Management Systems) moving to composable content architectures, and DXPs (Digital Experience Platforms) moving to composable DXPs.

If you don’t know what composable means, there are tons of articles to check out. These are a couple I would suggest if you want to know more about these topics:

• DXP, Composable DXP, and MACH Explained from the Agility CMS blog
• How Headless Commerce Will Change How and Where We Buy from the a16z Future blog
• There’s still a short-sighted vision around composable, and this Linkedin post from Sana Remekie explains why 

Projecting the ROI of a composable stack is currently quite hard, and I think it will continue to be. But when it comes to innovation, following your gut should be allowed. Hopefully, once we leave recession times behind, intuition will become the true differentiator for brands.

“Are you intentionally omitting web3?”

No, I’m not. A few ideas come to mind when I think about the intersection of martech and web3, which I hope to write about soon. If you are curious about it, sign up below (no, no newsletter; just a little email almost as short as a tweet to report updates) or keep an eye on LinkedIn.

When I took my first steps into the world of NFT I was surprised by the huge amount of work behind a successful community, so I decided to share what I’m learning along the way (more posts on specific topics will follow). Please reach out if there is anything inaccurate or if you are looking for something that has not been discussed here.

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Running an NFT project is kind of like running a business. While it may sound like an easy task, there’s a lot of work involved. It doesn’t just come down to the artwork collection – you also need to focus on other key elements and factors, such as the marketing strategy, the community, the long-term vision, and so on.

That’s why today I’m not going to focus on the artsy side of NFTs. Instead, in this article, we’ll discuss a series of elements that are vital to growing a community and ensuring the success of your project. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Project presentation
   1. Description of the project
   2. Roadmap
   3. White paper
   4. Team
   5. Miscellaneous
      1. FAQ
      2. Newsletter
2. Project data
   1. Collection stats
   2. Rarity
3. Community
   1. Scams
   2. Verification gates
   3. Channels
      1. Readme / Official links / How-to channels
      2. Language-specific channels
      3. Interest-based channels
   4. Roles
   5. Activity-based levels
   6. Moderators
   7. Management tools
4. Growth hacking
   1. Giveaways / Airdrops
   2. Whitelist

Let’s go.

1. Project presentation

Yep, a website sounds prehistoric thing nowadays, but you simply can’t avoid it. It’s still marketing 101 and your NFT project is no exception to this rule.

As a tennis fan, the first project I invested in was The Ballman Project, and even though my passion for the sport has played a major role, this happened mainly becase the website for Stan Wawrinka’s NFT project caught my attention immediately. Agreed, also the BAYC website it’s simple and to-the-point, but my wallet wasn’t ready to mint an ape.

Let’s dig deeper into the essential components of a proper website for an NFT project.

1.1 Description of the project

The description should explain what your NFT project is all about and why it’s worth the money. It should reflect the heart and soul of your project and your vision in a concise and engaging way.

It’s no place to be generic or vague. You should clearly and briefly state all the relevant details —what the NFT is, how much it costs, and where people can buy it— while capturing your readers’ short attention span.

1.2 Roadmap

Just like any regular business, NFT projects should set out key milestones, short and long-term goals, and marketing strategies to support their vision and mission. All that information is mapped out on the a roadmap which should conveys the project’s long-term value.

While it’s important to draft an ambitious roadmap, you need to make sure your goals and strategies are doable – otherwise, you might end up losing credibility.

Let’s circle back to the Ballman project. Ever since I minted my first player over a month ago, I’ve been waiting for things to happen. The first airdrop was only partially accomplished, and the community is getting anxious.

Unkept promises and frustrated users are becoming a bit of a trend now (we’ll cover this issue in an upcoming post), so don’t go too over the top. Set milestones and goals that you can actually achieve and exceed expectations instead of falling short.

1.3 White paper

Some title this section Whitepaper, others find more creative ways (as the Cool Cats – Cool Hub), but regardless of the definition, for those project which are more than a short-term speculative collection, this is the cornerstone of your project’s presentation.

It tells people all they need to know about the project: its goal, its vision, an overview of the team, logics of gamification, information about drops, traits and rarities (more on this in a next post) and so on.

It is relevant for the credibility of your project, so it is not something you can take lightly.

In fact, the white paper for the Ballman project really managed to get me hyped. And that’s what you should aim for with yours. Your project’s white paper should catch people’s attention and spark their interest in becoming part of the adventure.

Have you read any cool white papers recently? Ping me, I’d love to take a look!

1.4 Team

The team behind an NFT project is a major factor when it comes to credibility and engagement. Some people even go as far as to say that when you’re investing in an NFT project, you’re actually investing in the humans behind it.

The thing is that if you want your project to succeed, you need to convey a certain level of transparency. People need to trust you. And in most cases, they will only trust you if you share your team members’ names and experience, as well as any other critical information you feel comfortable divulging.

While it’s true that many NFT teams remain anonymous, transparency can actually make or break a project. If your team and founders have a track record and relevant experience, your project will look a lot more inviting for people looking to invest. Take the Ballman project, for example: having Stan Wawrinka (you know, that guy who won 3 Grand Slams during the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era) as the founder makes the project sound a lot more trustworthy.

1.5 Miscellaneous: other website essentials

1.5.1 FAQ

Adding a FAQ (“Frequently Asked Questions”) section to your project’s website gives you the chance to clarify some of the most common doubts your visitors and potential investors may have, especially in this early phase for NFTs and crypto.

You may answer general questions, such as:

• What’s an NFT? 
• What does “minting” mean?
• How do I get crypto to mint the NFT? 
• What’s the utility?

But you should also focus on more project-specific ones, like these: 

• Is XYZ involved in this project?
• What’s the supply?
• Where are the NFTs stored?
• Do you charge any fees for transactions?

1.5.2 Newsletter

Not everybody will join your Discord server or follow your announcements (I was quickly overwhelmed and almost feel the lack of a good old weekly-digest – feel old yet? – for the communities I follow), so a newsletter can come in handy. 

It’s a useful tool to keep your investors in the loop and let them know of any relevant news about your project and your team. So, don’t forget to add a newsletter subscription section in a visible area of your website and encourage people to join.

2. Project Data

2.1 Collection stats

Although OpenSea offers comprehensive stats to the NFT community, including the volume, the floor price, the number of items of hundreds of collections and so on, you might as well offer relevant data for your investors right on your website. This strengthens your credibility and fosters transparency, making the project a lot more inviting to potential investors.

Cryptopunks is doing an awesome job in this regard. They provide advanced stats that offer a greater overview of the health and performance of the project, such as the current lowest price available, their sales over the last 12 months, and the value of their sales over the last 24hs, among many other cool info also for those NFT passionates with limitated wallet (as me).

2.2 Rarity

One of the defining features of NFTs is that they are unique. While the value of your collection is mainly related to the hype around it, the value of each item depends on its traits (or attributes). However, as a owner you cannot browse through every single item on OpenSea to check how unique yours is; the same applies if you’re a potential buyer who want to know which item to mint.

If you don’t have the resources to build something similar to what CryptoPunks does in its website to let the users browse the collection, you might want to list it on an online platform that does the job for you. Rarity Sniper, for example, is a platform that helps people check the rarity of collections stored on Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains – all in just a couple of clicks. More than 1300 collections have been listed on this platform, so its appeal is quite obvious. 

3. Community

As I said, if you think launching a website and designing a collection is all there is to a successful NFT project, you’re way off. It’s no secret that an NFT project is as successful as the community built around it, reason why most of your daily routine will revolve around managing and engaging your community. And it starts long before the actual publication of your collection.

Your community will not just come up out of nowhere, but there are many ways to form one. You can get your NFT team to take an active role in sparking conversations about the project and the ecosystem in general. Or you can develop a gamified strategy and interacting with users with loyalty programs, treasure hunts, and trivias. But regardless of the approach you choose to start building your community, there’s one thing that should always be part of your strategy: Discord. 

All serious and committed NFT projects, communities, and influencers have a well-set Discord server where their community can interact, and yours shouldn’t be the exception.

For those who are a bit out of the loop, Discord is a community-oriented platform to talk over voice, video, and text, and it’s made up of mostly private, invite-only spaces called “servers.”

Let’s take a look at some of the main aspects of community building and growth on Discord.

3.1 Scams

Let’s start with the bad news. Despite all its benefits, Discord is not free from hackers and scammers looking to profit from your community. It’s a serious thing because sometimes, for instance, a scammer will impersonate a team member on the server, get them banned, gain administrator-level access, and deceive people into minting a fake NFT, which for your users means losing money. Sometimes a lot of money.

So, it’s very important to make sure your server is a safe space for your community. Putting the appropriate security measures in place will offer people a greater sense of trust and increase your project’s credibility.

On Discord, one of the fastest ways of securing your NFTs and preventing scams is by turning off Direct Messages, so you might want to encourage your server members to do so, among other methods to avoid scams.

3.2 Verification gates

Still about safeguarding your server, verification gates and verification levels can help prevent unwanted bots and spam, as they refer to the minimum level of security that a user must meet to be allowed to send text messages in a given channel.

On Discord, there are five different levels of verification for users, ranging from “none” to “highest,” and each level requires the user to meet certain criteria —such as having a verified email on their Discord account or being present on the server for over 10 minutes, among others.

On the other hand, you can implement verification gates. For instance, you can ask them to react to an intro message with a specific emoji. This proves they have read the rules and introductory messages and are ready to actively participate in the community.

3.3 Channels

As you can see from the video overview of The Ballman Project’s Discord server, you can create channels for the community to interact, you can create technical channels for handling support tickets or checking NFT ownership, and much more. Some of these channels will be covered in the next posts, some not, however the best suggestion I can give is to join some of these servers (no, you don’t need to own an NFT, that’s just to unlock unique benefits or experiences) and try yourself.

Here are some you can start with.

3.3.1 Readme / Official links / How-to channels

These channels may seem to duplicate the information on your site, and to some extent they do. However:

• a user may join your Discord server through an invitation and without having seen your site first, so a readme channel offering him some information about the project is important (you can always refer him to the site for detailed info)
• a user may want to interact with you on social media, access the collection on Opensea or need support, so a channel with official links will make life easier for them
• the how-to channel could be read-only (becoming a copy of the faq section on your website) but it could also be an open channel in which you encourage solidarity among peers

These channels do not require a particular effort but on the opposite they can be relevant for your users, so when in doubt, why not create them?

3.3.2 Language-specific channels

Not everyone speaks the same language. And while English might be the preferred language to run an NFT community, you can take things to the next level with language-specific channels to cater to other people’s needs.

Language-specific channels provide you with the chance to expand your community and welcome other perspectives to the conversation while internationalizing your project.

Choosing which language-specific channels to create will depend on many factors, including server insights, community demands, and the current state of the market. 

3.3.3 Interest-based channels

You can set a channel on your server for pretty much any topic you want or any topic your community shows interest in. The best approach to creating interest-based channels is basically paying attention to your community and the topics they most care about. They will be thankful if you provide them with a space to discuss that specific topic, and it will show you are listening.

3.4 Roles

One of the cornerstones of Discord servers is the possibility of creating roles and assigning permissions.

You can create administration roles such as “moderator” and assign certain permissions to them – e.g. moderating and deleting messages, banning other members, and so on.

Or you can create roles that enable your users to do something specific. Probably the most important role you can create for your users is the “holder” role, that is, a role that will be assigned to every person who holds an item of your NFT collection. And there’s a lot of room for creativity here: you can grant holders specific permissions and perks to show them how special they are.

3.5 Activity-based levels

Engagement and active participation are an absolute necessity when it comes to building a powerful community.

One of the best and most comprehensive leveling bots is MEE6, which provides customizable rank cards to your most active members and assigns them roles automatically once they reach a certain level, gamifying the whole Discord experience.

While I have not yet seen specific cases where levels are used to reward the most active users, what I have seen is that in many cases in the pre-launch phases of a collection, levels are used to allow users to access whitelists (if you don’t know what a whitelist is, I discuss this below).

3.7 Moderators

Last but not least, moderators, coordinators and all these persons behind all of this. They have a very significant role when it comes to community building. They have the power to moderate or delete messages and invite, ban, or suspend people on the server.

But with great power comes great responsibility. Mods are in charge of making your server a safe and cool space to hang out, keeping an eye on everyone, and making sure they behave according to the rules. Their work will have a major impact on how strong your NFT community is.

In fact, Discord moderation has grown so important that the platform now has a Moderation Academy. Also, major brands have begun creating specific roles for Discord mods in their companies to boost their digital efforts. Gucci, for example, was recently looking for a Discord Community Moderator. That’s a career opportunity you don’t learn about in school, isn’t it?

The best mods are reliable and active participants on the server, as well as experts in their field. As such, they can easily earn the member’s trust and respect, which is essential for a well-moderated and highly-connected community.

3.8 Management tools

Now, this all sounds pretty overwhelming, right? From engaging with your investors to protecting them from scams, there’s a lot of work involved in growing a community.

Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. I will write more on certain tools that help you manage and automate these tasks in my next posts.

4. Growth hacking

Now that your website is published and your Discord server is all set up in a safe and well-structured way, it’s time to make it grow. There are a series of steps you can take to foster your community and scale your NFT project. Let’s delve deeper into some of them.

4.1 Giveaways / Airdrops

NFT giveaways and airdrops are powerful marketing tools that can help build awareness around your project and reach a greater audience.

In an NFT giveaway or airdrop, you’re basically giving tokens to certain users for free or in exchange for something other than money – such as following the project on social media or subscribing to the project’s newsletter. The idea is to create hype around the project and spark a conversation that will bring more people on board, so it’s a kind of a win-win situation.

4.2 Whitelist

An NFT whitelist is essentially a list of people that are pre-approved to mint NFTs on a specific date and time. This means that whitelisted people get early access to the NFTs and guaranteed slots to mint them, as well as “early-bird” price. And some projects might even offer NFTs for free to whitelisted people.

Whitelisting is a common practice in the NFT world. It’s the perfect tactic to reward early supporters of your project and it can do wonders in terms of awareness and promotion.

Now what?

If you feel a bit overwhelmed by all this information, I completely get it. It’s a lot to take in but the good news is that more articles are coming your way (I guess it’s a good news, isn’t it?). In my next posts, I will delve deeper into some of these topics and more, including OpenSea, tools for managing and automating the community, and so on. 

So, if you want to stay in the loop and discover how to make sense of the NFT world, enter your email address below (will send monthly updates little longer than a tweet) or keep an eye on Linkedin and Twitter.

This post comes late, but after reading a customer data platform vendor’s fanciful press release that “over 99% of marketers will achieve the single customer view, or golden record, by the end of 2022,” I couldn’t put it off any longer.

No, customer data platforms – let’s say it loud and clear – the majority of companies will not adopt them by the end of the year, at least not in the sense in which we are accustomed to considering them (we will discover that it is a short-sighted classification).

It will not happen for these reasons:

• Organisations are not ready. Marketers don’t have the skills to implement the platform themselves. And if the project is in the hands of the digital team, they are unlikely to have access to the data needed to make it an omnichannel project. That’s why IT has a crucial role to play, but I rarely hear of companies with infighting going on.
• Technology is expensive. ROI is a huge uncertainty, with a year’s licence often spent setting up the tool and who knows how many more wasted on understanding how to get the most out of it.
• Data protection policies change and – worst of all – do so on a local basis. Even the most structured companies are trembling at the prospect of severe sanctions, sometimes leading to heated internal discussions on how to interpret the regulations.

To paraphrase a famous saying, those who strive for the single customer view must learn to love the process, because it is not a goal but a journey. This is the approach I adopted when I proposed developing a CDP at Benetton, which is operational from September 2020 and has become a case history on Google’s blog.

Faced with such complexity and with an investment of the magnitude of a CDP (a 100k eur/year licence, the same amount for consultancy services to turn on a few connectors, two years of project work) would have been a suicide (at least for me). So I chose to approach an incremental project with a hybrid architecture, instead choosing one of the many emerging single-vendor solutions.

The result? I could boast about the savings – a quarter of the investment in terms of licences and consultancy and no long-term contractual obligations – or the release time, equal to five months of the project from kick-off to activation of the display campaigns using programming. However, the greatest satisfaction was the chance to design an evolutionary roadmap calibrated on what the prototype had taught us in terms of processes and necessary skills, having discovered that the customer data platform was the last thing in order of importance to enable personalization at scale.

The rest is history. A very interesting story, but one that I cannot tell you for obvious reasons of confidentiality.

Skepticism around hybrid approach

I was convinced that the approach was the right one, but the more I read things online, the more my confidence wavered. Hybrid architectures seemed more and more like heresy. So in April 2021, I started to actively participate in a community where they were talking about customer data platforms. Participants were discussing which approach was best between single-vendor, custom and hybrid. I presented my point of view, explaining that a hybrid approach can be a competitive advantage but must be supported by an appropriate organisational model. 

I knew I was addressing a very hot topic, but I didn’t think I’d end up being quoted on CMS Wire in an article asking a question that has become a leitmotif since the martech landscape exploded, namely Do CDPs Really Make Marketers Independent of IT?

Even the most marketer-friendly CDPs require fairly advanced skills, education and training for a business person to master. Daniele Sghedoni, who led the build of an open CDP based on Google Cloud Platform for Benetton, agreed that a sound marketing ops team is the crux for marketing being able to derive value from the CDP deployment.

Even though I had detected some mistrust (even from market analysts with whom I had the opportunity to deal with) I was still convinced that a hybrid architecture was the ideal solution, although I was struggling to get a confirmation. At least until July, when the “Customer Experience Trends & Insights” report by the Martech Alliance was published, which showed, among other things, that almost 40% of companies were adopting a hybrid approach.

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing published in September was also highly suspicious, showing a decline in enthusiasm for Customer Data Platforms, although customisation and omnichannel marketing remain at the heart of companies’ attention.

Finally, in November, the final post from Lee Hammond, which we’ll explore further below:

More modular approaches to customer data management are emerging in this context, and this “unbundled” approach better aligns with existing internal processes. Better alignment means less work, less redundancy, and more adoption by the company at large.

This post of mine, as I said, comes late. I’ve been planning for at least a couple of years to propose a different point of view to companies interested in adopting real omnichannel strategies. However, I want to believe that, given the increased awareness of all-in on a single technology, it is not that late.

What’s next here

What I am committed to doing over the next few weeks is answering a few questions.

• If we really want to talk about customer data platforms, what types do the market offer today?
• How is a reference architecture structured and what is the role of a customer data platform?
• Marketing, information systems, business intelligence, retail, vendors, consultants: how can we organise ourselves to obtain significant results?
• Which technologies enable this paradigm shift?

If you are interested in following the evolution of this path, enter your email address below (no, no newsletter, just a little longer than a tweet to report updates) or keep an eye on Linkedin and Twitter.