e4m webinar: ‘COVID-19 has accelerated MarTech’s digitization’

 "Evolution was happening but Covid-19 accelerated the process of MarTech and AdTech,” said an expert panel on an e4m webinar on ‘Building the Right MarTech Stack Post COVID-19’   

On the panel were Deepali Naair, Director Marketing, India & South Asia, IBM, Piyush Kumar, Head Data Platform Engineering, MakeMyTrip (MMT), and Gaurav Mehta, CMO, CarDekho. The session was moderated by Apoorv Durga, Founder, AltView Advisory.

Durga initiated the discussion by asking the panel how they were going to build the MarTech stack for the post Covid-19 world.

Sharing her insights, Naair said marketing teams will have to be agile to transition from physical to digital, and have to work hand in hand with the sales teams.

“Moving forward, teams have to be agile in shutting down a few things. They will have to evaluate the things that worked in pre-COVID times, and still keep working and simultaneously work on how to come out of the crisis,” she said.

According to Naair, evolution in the non face-to-face format has been happening around the world, COVID-19 just accelerated the process. "The whole world is going to be a data-led world. The ecosystem is going to be very important. It’s going to be about secure data systems," she added.

Sharing the travel industry’s perspective was Kumar, who said the changes were different in his domain. “The way we interacted with consumers was transactional, but now we are primarily focusing our efforts on engagement platforms.”

Kumar also said MMT's earlier initiative - primarily that of personalization - was helping the brand today to maintain better communication with the consumers. “Going into the future, brands will need to build safety-first products.”

Asked if consumers were still looking to buy cars, Mehta said though the searches were still there, the number was far less.

Explaining that though overall searches for cars have reduced, there has been an increase in searches for used cars.

“We have seen an increase in searches for used cars. This may be coming from consumer apprehension about sharing public transport for a foreseeable future, due to lack of hygiene and personal space,” Mehta said.

“Moving forward, big OEMs will have to take digitization seriously and work towards minimizing physical intercalation and take built a digital channel for entire transactional journey of consumers.”

Mehta agreed that Covid-19 has accelerated digitization of the automobile industry.

Talking about the key marketing technologies in the post Covid-19 world, Mehta highlighted the three things that according to him will be necessary in the future.

“There will be three MarTech interventions that’ll be a necessary in the post COVID-19 world. First will be building technology to enable contact-less transaction of cars, like online booking. Second is, people today are more aware of fake news. Instead of relying on news channels to dispel the rumors, companies will have to build direct communication channels with the consumer. The last will be to be available to the customers 24X7. Chatbots and self-help modules will see an uptick.”

Agreeing with Mehta, Kumar said, “Brands will need to utilise the whole data-driven automation. They should focus on the whole customer experience with respect to process automation.”

Adding to Mehta and Kumar, Naair said the call center ecosystem will undergo major changes and chatbots will be a prominent mode of communication between brands and customers.

She further talked about blockchains and how they’ll help in maintaining transparency. "Blockchain will provide a big transparency. It'll change the way we do business," she said.

"The whole on-premises versus off-premises shift will have a huge impact on cloud space. It’s going to be about secure cloud services. Some industries will see fast movement," she added.

Durga also observed that in the future there will probably be a lot of hybrid cloud strategies.

Addressing an audience's question about what approach Mehta would take during phase-wise relaxation of the lockdown, he said, "Rather than being pro-active, I'd be cautionary re-active, because of my industry. Consumer behavior will determine what MarTech decisions we'll need to take."

Answering the same question, Kumar told viewers that MMT will be closely working with CRM teams. “We have MarTech strategies divided in different phases. It's not going to fully blow up soon as essential travels will pick up first," he said.

"The whole part is to really match data sets and closely work with the whole team at such times. We are experimenting with lot many things now. Need to see what is working and what isn't," Kumar added.

Adding to Kumar's statement, Naair said, "As a smart marketer, your processes need to be designed in a way that they can be pivoted and changed. The way we look at content is changing as per consumer perception. A tactical approach for content may now not work as before. Consumers are looking at it from a different POV. Now everybody is doing the needful required in changing the message and providing personalization."

Deliberating on the way forward, Kumar believed experimentation is going to play an important role while going forward.

"We try to understand how the customer is now travelling from Point A to B. We have data sets which are now being utilised to see what customers did pre Covid and formulate engagement patterns," he said.

Talking about the building matrics for the post-lockdown world, Naair said, "We believe in the performance marketing side to track ROI. We also brand health monitor, traditional metrics, engagement rate and click through rates."

Customer lifetime value is a metric marketers have been looking at for a long time, Naair added. Customer experience is measured through NPS and marketers need to figure out what kind of tech stack they need to measure it, she said.

Adding to Naair, Mehta said: "We need to understand which customer is transacting and which one is re-transacting to differentiate while selling the service. That can be enabled through Single Customer View."

"We're building our own in-house data with our SCV and stitching mechanisms," he added.

Bringing the focus to abundance of data, Kumar said that there are plenty of tools and hacks, and they are making marketers ensure that communication and technology need to come face to face and understand what they have built internally and how seamless the process could be.

"Internally we've kicked off many projects which are live now. Whether it be data or AI. We cleaned lots of data which wasn't required," he said.

"You need to work with all partners in your ecosystem so that consistency is maintained. Trust is important so that they too feel secure about being associated with you."

In his concluding remarks, Kumar talked about data privacy and the need to build a central wall, instead of letting the data getting spread. “It's a tough job but will soon be coming in effect,” he said.

Elaborating further on the matter of data privacy, Mehta said legal and compliance is one aspect of data privacy. The second is the relationship between the consumer experience and company value. “We need to get consent from the consumer before using their data," he concluded.