They would, however, quite like you to answer their email.
Marketing technology is impressive.
CRM platforms. Automation. Analytics. AI. Personalisation. Attribution software. Social scheduling. SEO tools, dashboards displaying information from other dashboards.
A modern marketing stack can resemble the control room of a small nuclear facility.
Your customers don’t care.
Nobody Has Ever Been Impressed by Your CRM
Customers don’t wake up thinking: “I really hope this company has successfully integrated its marketing automation platform with its CRM.”
They want something much simpler.
They want to understand what you do. They want answers to their questions. They want buying from you to be easy. And once they’ve bought, they’d quite like you to deliver what you promised.
As I explore in Episode 15 of The Overthinker’s Guide to Modern Marketing Podcast, technology should make these things easier. The trouble starts when managing the technology becomes the marketing strategy.
At that point, your marketing team can spend an entire Tuesday discussing integrations while the customer is still waiting for someone to reply.
Tools Should Remain Tools
Sophisticated marketing technology isn’t wrong.
A good CRM can help you understand customers. Automation can save enormous amounts of time. Analytics can improve decisions. AI can help research, analyse and create.
But none of them can rescue unclear positioning, an irrelevant message or a terrible customer experience.
Efficiency isn’t the same as effectiveness.
Automating something nobody wants lets you annoy considerably more people before lunch.
Keep the Customer in the Middle
Perhaps the best test of your marketing stack isn’t how sophisticated it is.
It’s whether it helps you understand people better, communicate more clearly, make better decisions and create a better customer experience.
Everything else is just software.
For more on how tools, platforms, dashboards and AI have made modern marketing increasingly complicated, listen to Episode 15: Why Marketing Has Become So Complicated.
Because your customers don’t care about your marketing stack.
They care whether dealing with you is any good.
