Main points
Streamline your customer journey. Efficient backend systems ensure consistency across customer touchpoints and improve the overall user experience. Accelerate market expansion. A well-organized marketing technology stack can help brands quickly enter new markets by centralizing assets and simplifying localization efforts. Improve customer loyalty. Effectively integrating front-of-house and back-of-house technology enables personalized marketing campaigns that drive repeat business and deepen customer relationships.
In the Emmy Award-winning television series “The Bear,” one of the characters, Richie, interns at a three-star Michelin restaurant in Chicago. The 45-year-old spends a week honing his fork until he’s invited to observe his colleagues in the field, providing interesting insights for digital marketers and marketing technologists.
Richie, who has been working at a sandwich shop, sees storefront employees secretly exchanging notes about customers. He learned about the researchers on the team who determine each guest’s dietary restrictions before arrival. He watches as an explorer at the back of the house directs the kitchen based on color-coded data about the guests.
When Ritchie asked the explorers how they were able to do this intensive, repetitive work, they said, “Every night you’re making someone else’s day.”
It’s hard for a website or digital experience to make someone’s day (no pun intended). To achieve this goal, marketers must improve their marketing technology stack and align the front and back of their stores to resemble a Michelin-starred restaurant. Here are some tips on how to do that.
How a disjointed marketing technology stack impacts brands
Although there are countless differences between a website and a restaurant, it’s a useful metaphor to distinguish between the front side (host, servers, and staff) and the back side (chefs, cooks, and dishwashers). If these two things don’t coordinate well, things won’t go well. Guests wait longer than usual for their food, cooks feel rushed, and servers feel stressed. The same is true for brands where the front and back of the company are separated.
Leah has been working on digital asset management (DAM) systems for over 14 years. In one of my previous roles at spice company McCormick, I was tasked with strategizing how to collect and operationalize our company’s data. This required moving from the comfort of DAM and Product Information Management (PIM) to a user-facing technology stack at the front of the house. That’s when she realized how the two parts of the technology stack work together to improve the user experience.
Just as the kitchen is optimized for fast-moving chefs, the digital backstage prioritizes organization, efficiency, and consistency. Just as dining spaces are optimized for guest experience, front-of-house marketing technology stacks also prioritize user experience. Often, that means common business objectives such as customer journey, market expansion, and customer loyalty are overlooked.
Related article: Solutions for your Martech stack: Tips for staying organized
Hidden gaps in the martech stack
In her current role at digital agency Velir, Leah recently met with a company that sells engineering products. The company planned to expand from a niche domestic market to a global customer base of engineering professionals from various industries. Leah discovered an invisible barrier in her internal marketing technology stack.
The company stored its marketing assets on a shared drive. Additionally, without a PIM system to integrate the technical product data that is most important to engineering buyers, this company would be unable to launch new products or update existing product listings across e-commerce channels. You will have a hard time.
At this rate, as the brand scales, the back-of-house technology stack will become a drag on the front-of-house. This is common in our experience. The question is what to do with it.
Internal cleanup: How to optimize your tech stack
Let’s discuss some business priorities that internal and external marketers should champion. We’ll look at how your in-house technology stack can derail or enable these priorities.
1. Customer journey
From discovering a brand to purchasing something from that brand, companies underestimate the impact that brand-product mismatch can have on the customer journey, especially online. Restaurants get complaints when they label their meatloaf as “gluten-free” even though it contains gluten. You will lose customers. Online, cause and effect may not be so obvious.
Imagine a company with 1,000 products and selling to 100 global e-commerce sites. If just 5% of your product listings contain incorrect images or inaccurate product data, your list count can reach up to 5,000, potentially confusing shoppers and disappointing paying customers. there is. If someone has to manually upload or enter data for each product, it not only delays time to market but also increases the potential for errors and missed sales.
Back-of-house systems like DAM and PIM are responsible for eliminating these inaccurate listings and reducing time to market. When you change one master record for a product in your DAM or PIM system, the revised list is automatically pushed to all stores. That way, no one will get gluten in their gluten-free meatloaf.
2. Market expansion
Brands often underestimate what it takes to sell in new geographies, industries, and roles. Scaling using shared folder drives for assets does not work well.
Suppose you want to launch a new product into a new multilingual market. You can use Google to translate product descriptions, convert serving sizes to metric, and leave the rest as is.
Not completely. During Leah’s time at McCormick, she understood what it took to bring newly acquired brands into new markets. This required reusing existing campaign assets and copy, translating recipes, and more. The content needs of a particular community or culture can vary widely.
Without a system in place to differentiate new localized assets from old ones, scaling a single product can become surprisingly complex. Folders within folders with long file names will no longer be manageable. Additionally, there is an increased risk of incorrect language and miscommunication, which can lead to reputational damage and loss of consumer trust.
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3. Loyalty
Successful companies create customers, motivate them to spend more often, and say positive things about their brand. To that end, many companies are thinking about how to use first-party data to enrich their customers’ days. Like “The Bear” 3 Michelin star restaurant, minus the memo passing and online stalking of dietary restrictions.
Typically, a front-of-house technology stack records user actions and associates them with an individual’s identity within a CRM system. That first-party data flows into a data lake, where someone queries the data lake to find customers with specific attributes (i.e., people who bought a new home in the past six months, people who became new parents). , who brought home a new furry friend). Marketing automation systems can then present those customers with offers and experiences related to their preferences.
This seems easy until you consider how to collect information and create creative assets for a wide range of campaigns targeting different consumers. The more content you need and the more personalized it is, the more important the back of the house becomes. A creative team that sifts through a set of assets like a Russian nesting doll cannot work as efficiently or effectively as a team that finds assets for a loyalty campaign by simply typing something into a search.
Related article: Demonstrate value to your customers: 3 steps to increase loyalty
Create memorable experiences with a seamless marketing technology stack
Behind every brand with an inconsistent and confusing online image is a flip side that requires attention. And behind every brand that consistently makes someone’s day, there must be a behind-the-scenes operation that is well-maintained and tailored for that purpose. A great in-store customer experience starts with technology and processes that no one outside of your team sees.
We are not encouraging people to be treated like a three-star Michelin restaurant. Rather, we want the front and back of your home to coordinate like a digital Michelin-starred restaurant. The first step is to clean up your internal technology stack.
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