Most analysts agree that companies need to be more aggressive in digitizing their marketing. But that’s easier said than done. With terabytes of data to collect and analyze and thousands of marketing tools available to help you improve your operations and customer experience capabilities, where should you begin?

During a recent webinar sponsored by HCLTech, three digital marketing experts weighed in on how to integrate new technological systems, particularly Generative AI (GenAI) and other AI tools, in a smooth and seamless way.

Creating a digital marketing strategy is not easy, according to Tarun Aggarwal, SVP and Global Business Head for HCLTech X, a one-stop digital engagement and publishing platform.

In fact, many marketers are likely to find the task complicated and overwhelming. “As of last count, there are more than 15,000 Martech tools available in the market, which leads to a lot of chaos and confusion for a marketer who traditionally has not been a technologist,” he said.

 No time to hide

Despite the challenge of adoption, sticking to the sidelines is not an option. These new tools are likely to have three major effects, in Aggarwal’s view. First, they will spur internal processes and cost optimization. “All these tools that are getting built will help humans do their jobs more efficiently and effectively,” said Aggarwal. 

Second, digitalization will improve consumer experiences dramatically, particularly with respect to personalization and the spontaneity of interactions with consumers. “The fun and joy of interactions will increase significantly over time with technologies like AI,” he added.

Third, there are likely to be new kinds of engagement we don’t even know yet. “GenAI is maybe one or two years old in the mainstream environment, so definitely, there will be some new models and new engagement areas,” continued Aggarwal. It’s a bit like mobile apps, he explained. “If you just go back 10 years, the mobile apps were very primitive…Now, we live our lives in mobile apps,” he said. 

Handling your data

One aspect of today’s digital marketing that experts do agree on is the continued importance of data.

Data is so important today that Mila D’Antonio, Principal Analyst, Customer Engagement at the marketing agency Omdia, advises building a unified, centralized data platform. 

Beyond centralizing your data, it’s also crucial to make sure it’s clean. “As data moves from one system to the other…making sure that you have good data hygiene and governance practices in your organization will be huge,” said Francisco Chamorro, Director of Marketing and Communications for BBSI, an HR payroll services and consultancy firm.  “Often,” he added, “people think that data governance is the responsibility of the analytics team, but in reality, data governance is the responsibility of the entire organization, from your point of sale all the way down to the administrator of your database.”

“Companies need to be transparent about the data they’re collecting and how it’s used. They need to provide customers with clear options for consent and data collection usage. And this really builds trust and empowers customers,” said D’Antonio.

One example of a program that handles these issues well is the Beauty Insider program at Sephora, she said. The beauty retail giant provides explicit and clear consent options for data collection, enabling the company to make a fair trade with its customers of personal data for customized experiences.

Data security and hygiene needs to be a collective preoccupation, in Chamorro’s view. “Everyone has to have a vested interest in making sure that this is correct because that is ultimately what’s going to power AI and ultimately what’s going to power your personalization,” he suggested.

“This goes a long way toward striking a balance between personalization and privacy and really building stronger relationships as a result,” added D’Antonio.

Asking the right questions

Finally, it’s important to ask the right questions. “In today’s world of data abundance, it’s very easy to get distracted by the sheer volume of data points that we can track and measure at low cost compared to 30 years back,” said Aggarwal. 

Aggarwal argues that this embarrassment of riches leads people to answer questions based not on what they really need to know but on what data points they happen to collect already. For clarity, he advised taking “a business first approach: ask the right questions and then see what data we need to track and measure to get our measurements in place.”

Chamorro also warned about the risks of too much data. “When you have too much data, it can be overwhelming. I think often people fall into this paralysis through analysis trap, where there’s both too much [information] for people to process and too much for people to act on.” 

Another way to simplify the task is to take full advantage of cloud. Using the cloud can reduce the upfront capital costs associated with hardware and infrastructure, while pay-as-you-go pricing enables organizations to pay only for the resources that they consume, making it easy to scale up or down according to the demand, according to D’Antonio. “It really minimizes unnecessary spending on unused capacity,” she said.

Aggarwal warned that it’s important to remember that technology systems are always operated by people, so the cost of their retraining needs to be considered “The cost of adoption, training and retraining is significant, and that needs to be factored in,” he said.

A positive direction

The good news is that despite the confusion, technology is already pushing marketing in a positive direction. In a recent survey conducted by Omdia, business leaders said AI is already reducing agents’ routine tasks and allowing them to resolve issues faster, according to D’Antonio. “Really, AI isn’t just shaping customer expectations, it’s also elevating them. And it’s enhancing employee productivity by building demand for personalized and immediate customer experiences,” she said