By Ed Pierce, Director of Stakeholder Relations, Inertia Marketing + Design
Last month, I took to task business and marketing consultants who pass along marketing trends and technology as panaceas to fleet marketers’ operational challenges without having a clue as to what those challenges really are.
Only if consultants’ promotion of trends and technology could address the real-world needs did they deserve consideration by busy fleet marketers facing pressure from senior management, sales, and other customer-relationship department personnel.
According to Todd Lebo, Partner and CMO of Ascend2, effective marketing technologies should extend the capabilities of the marketing team and strategy. B2B marketers are faced with the lofty challenge of determining which tools will align best with their needs while integrating technologies that ensure optimal performance.
Five Ways to Prioritize Technologies
Lebo goes on to cite five ways to prioritize technologies that can help fleet marketing operations in the real world:
- Technology that builds on an account-based approach. Account-based marketing (ABM) means taking a fit-first approach, ensuring you’re only targeting the accounts with the highest likelihood to buy.
- Develop a strategy and appropriate budget for implementing marketing technology that aligns with the needs of your business. Then, measure the results to validate success.
- Choose an easy-to-implement tool that enables your team to execute the planned marketing tactics more efficiently.
- Look to expand technology to get in front of new audiences in creative and effective ways. Business growth is aligned with the growth of the marketing budget.
- Just as real-time data drives fleet efficiency, real-time marketing and technologies like AI help marketing reach the right audience, at the right time, with the right message.
For marketers, technology alone does not help achieve marketing goals. Understand your business goals and only then invest and implement the pertinent marketing technologies to meet those goals.
This topic might evoke some reaction and even contrary points of view. I’d welcome the opportunity to include your response –supporting or disagreeing with the point of view. An abundance of different experiences and perspectives only make the article richer. Feel free to call me at 484-957-1246 or send an email to me at [email protected]
