Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time. Today, I talk about MarTech tools.
In my previous episode, I talked about the importance of keeping up with marketing technology. One of the best ways I mentioned is to talk to various vendors at marketing conferences. When I went to Martech West in the San Jose Convention Center early April, I did my rounds and talked to different vendors. I am not affiliated with any of these vendors but I want to tell you about 3 vendors that caught my eye and share with you what they offer.
Voicify
You can use their platform to create a voice-enabled application which can be downloaded to Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, and your chatbots. It allows brands to seamlessly create and manage their voice content across any number of smart speakers & devices. This is similar to Libsyn, which some of you may use to manage your podcast episodes. Libsyn lets you upload your audio files and then automatically syndicate to iTunes, iHeart radio and other podcast or radio channels.
The Voicify platform is the Libsyn version for voice and more. For Libsyn, you upload the finished audio files. For Voicify, you can manage your content and a list of questions and answers all in one platform. You can update and refresh your content on a regular basis and you can also customize and deploy your content for different voice assistants and chatbots. This is the first voice management platform I have come across. Again, it’s called Voicify.
Strala
The next one is Strala. I enjoyed talking to the co-founder, Rob Clarke. He is incredibly passionate about tracking customers’ online and offline touch points to improve customer journeys and quantify ROI, basically tracking all your marketing efforts end-to-end. He said if you really want to track each touch point, you need to standardize your touch points’ tracking mechanism with consistent marketing taxonomies across all channels, publishers, content and messaging.
I 100% agree with him. Most marketing organizations are divided by marketing functions. Marketers tend to focus on measuring the marketing they manage. But someone needs to have a holistic view and take ownership of automating the tracking beyond basic UTM parameters. They offer 3 products: Touchpoint, I just mentioned. Journey Stream that shows customers’ touchpoints throughout their journeys. And, Prism is their standard dashboard. I know many vendors offer similar tools. I just thought their approach is sound for standardizing all the tracking, not just using APIs to pull data from various sources. Again, it’s called Strala. They position themselves as “Turnkey Insights and attributions across all online and offline touchpoints.” Very cool.
Alyce
Ok, this company caught my eye because they want to help you pick the perfect gifts for your customers. Alyce bases its gift suggestions on information that is pulled from customers’ social media accounts. The company can also provide popular gift options on its platform. Apparently, they have more than 30,000 gift options. Their platform uses AI to select the gift options and is integrated with SalesForce.com to track conversions. The company will also manage your direct mail logistics.
Here is a nice caveat: You can’t go wrong with gift selection. Whatever you choose, your recipient will always be able to donate the value to a meaningful charity or exchange for another equally valued gift. I think Alyce is a great option if you plan to do one-to-one hyper-personalized account-based marketing (ABM) for strategic accounts.
I talked to over 30 vendors and got a good understanding of how each one of them wants to fit into the overall sales and marketing processes. Understanding martech and martech tools is overwhelming. The key is to understand what challenges you aim to solve and take it from there.
If you have any questions about MarTech tools, you know where to reach me. Just google Pam Didner.
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Before you leave, make sure to check out the previous podcast episodes!
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
What can Pam Didner do for you?
Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.
