Why Does Marketing Technology Also Needs A-Human-Touch-Based Approach?
Pratama Agus, Head of Digital Marketing, MNC Media
Pratama Agus, Head of Digital Marketing, MNC Media
If you have not heard the MarTech buzzword at least once in the last couple of months, then you may need to change your circle in your LinkedIn connection, especially for those who are working in the marketing field. This term has become a hot keyword on Google Search and is running as a ‘marketing’ strategy more than any other marketing word, I suppose.
This is no surprise since I see that the timing is now to have the marketing and tech team on the same side pushing for the north star of business rather than fighting one another.
With this kind of approach, there have been massive improvements in how marketing is shifting into a seamless work while the tech team is showing a more effective output as the metrics are reflected in real-time. A mutually beneficial solution, isn’t it?
As far as I am concerned, this combination of the industrial revolution is very interesting and promising at the same time, before we know the downsides. We keep forgetting that we are humans trying to approach humans in the end.
We Need to Be Human to Ask Humans Out
Imagine if there is no personalization initiative in the marketing approach. Well, your campaign will look like just average promo banners. Your loyal customers will not get attached, as they feel they can get the same experience from others. Then technology will be our savior.
Even to implement those tech stacks, there will be much more effort from the marketing side, let alone the tech team. We need to make sure our data is clean and reliable, and the most important is how to make customers give their data to us, which is much more difficult.
Some people suggest having a first party data concept as we will get more quality data from customers' hands. For that, we need to act like humans so they would believe us. The first step, collecting data, is done. But then we mess up when we are no longer the same human that asks them out in the first place.
All these spam campaigns that unrelated communication, the annoying push notification sent three times in one hour at 2 AM, and many more. All might not have a direct impact, but as we see it in a real relationship, there would always be a possibility that our crush might not see us as the one they were looking for. It is supposed to get better, not worse. Are we the same human as we start the relationship?
Privacy Policy Keeps Haunting Us
Nowadays, it is too hard to mention when we will be getting privacy protection, especially for our daily activities. Using social media or ordering from a particular app both are required us to pass our behavior data. By consent or not.
So let’s just agree that it can be forgiven only if it can make us happy as they are getting more personalized, we are getting treated, and it seems like a win-win solution. However, this might be only happening not in the long run.
Again, to feel what customers feel is the most humanistic thing we can do, and it will be translated into execution with much more senses
Sometimes, we feel they’re just doing too much of utilizing our data, firing back at us. This is rather annoying, I suppose. Moreover, it will get us punished if maybe Apple decides to tighten its security related to this data privacy. And what will be the impact? Not only are we losing customers we already have, but we also may not be able to acquire new ones as easily as before as customers feel more comfortable using anonymous credentials.
Being a more responsible brand and marketer is the best preventive solution for those nightmares not to happen. Again, to feel what customers feel is the most humanistic thing we can do, and it will be translated into execution with much more senses.
The Humanic Takeaways
Most of the time, I would say technology will leave us amazed by how automatic that an idea can be executed. I agree that nowadays, the stack is getting real in involving human emotion. However, as we are created with the bank of emotion stored in our brains, we should be in control. That is why I always encourage research and customer experience fellas to collaborate and find out how we can improve and continue being humans who are targeting humans.
See, in the end, it is just a tech—a tool. We are behind the technology. How long will it take to reduce the human involvement in marketing? As far as I see, less than 5-10 years.
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