Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here. (what inspired you to start a martech company)
As the marketing manager of Plattar, my day to day involves reaching out and speaking to people who are interested in Augmented Reality and also educating people who may have never heard of the technology. I arrived at Plattar after working in my own agency, helping people understand and make the full use of technology at their fingertips for marketing.
Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the martech market evolving over the next few years?
It really has been great to see all the tools being produced over the past few years, they have certainly made me excited about the sector and also solved my problems. I believe over the next few years, we will see martech solutions carve out their own niche. Meaning you will have a go-to tool for a particular task or the more significant players will gobble them up into their broader offering of their existing products.
In tandem, SME is still not truly harnessing the power of martech and more importantly, the data that can be generated. So I think we will find cost-effective tools being released that will analyze the data for SME and help them to action from those insights.
What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to impact us?
I might be biased, but I certainly think that Augmented Reality (AR) within the Extended Reality (XR) spectrum will change enterprise and industry, but also reach the consumer level. We are months away from one of the FAAMG release a consumer level, powerful AR wearable that will change your day to day tasks, entertainment, and retail experiences. What does that mean for marketers, you are literally going to have eyeballs of your audience, but also a dilemma on how often you should interrupt your user without having them turn off your service or device.
It is the world of Black Mirror coming to us very quickly, we already have tech giants achieving video streaming to contact lenses in labs. It is only a matter of time that XR will be part of our daily lives.
What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
They need the expertise to know how to harness it, some will go in-house and some will through partners. But having the ability to test and learn from the output will be essential and in many ways that will change how marketing departments will operate, moving towards a more test and learn mentality for a lot of activities. Adopting the Agile method and taking learnings from the Growth department of companies.
The key to all of these is the ROI, marketing technology will work only if it is measured and rightly tuned to attribute the change in revenue to a particular martech or campaign. So CMO’s need to find the right people to help them build their Marketing stack but also run the stack to create business outcomes. Look widely and broadly you may never know who you will learn from.
What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
I have a few that I think goes against the grain of conventional thought; I get in early to get work done before the team arrives; I think like a data-driven salesperson, I ask questions to learn as much about the customer, I speak to a customer or potential customer every day, I listen to the language they use and then use that in our messaging; Test and learn.
If you want to learn quickly how your campaigns are going, get out to the coal face as much as you can and listen.
Ohh, and I outsource admin tasks as quickly as I can describe them. You have domain knowledge, spend your time putting that to use.
How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
I start using it….simple, be an early adapter to know where it can help, but also the limits. I have already used an AI tool called Adext to manage PPC and even in my email inbox to help do the back and forth on locking in times for a meeting I use X.AI.
There are many tools out there, not all of them we will see in 5 years time, but the key thing is starting to learn how to use, manage and work alongside AI as we will always have our place. But the first wave of AI will empower us at our jobs and make us better marketers, freeing out time to spend more time thinking about the customer and the CX.
What is the core marketing technology capability of your firm that you bring to a marketer? Where does your product fit in vis-a-vis the customer life cycle?
Plattar is an Augmented Reality product lifecycle platform, we help brands to engage with their audience and customers from the activation, buying, set up to repeat purchases. It is a single touch point to help sell more and improve the customer experience. For a marketer, using AR THEY are able to create a more engaging customer experience, differentiate in the marketplace, gather further insight into their customers and sell more.
Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?
We actually have a significant product launch in October the whole team is working towards, it is going to change how you interact with a product you are going to be looking at buying. It is going to make it easier for brands to use AR as part of the purchase process with ease. I really encourage you to sign up at www.plattar.com, so you can be in the loop once it is announced. It will give more power to the everyday person to create their own Augmented Reality experiences.
What is your take on the massive explosion of MarTech across so many categories? Do you see competition, opportunities to partner and/or integrate?
I see MarTech as being an ecosystem, similar to how we look at cities and regions grow startup and innovation ecosystems. If we grow, we all grow together. More importantly, it provides all with more opportunities to integrate their products with one and another, ultimately benefiting everyone. So the explosion is the result of everyone working together, that is from the product creators to the marketing leader for being adventurous on how they take campaigns to the market.
Could you share for our readers, an infographic or description depicting your marketing stack (various marketing software products or platforms your team uses or subscribes to)?
As our audience is a B2B relationship, we don’t necessarily run a large stack or complex, a lot of our deeper in the funnel activity is in person as much as possible, picking up the phone and calling. For all the top of funnel work, we harness Hubspot, Facebook Ad, Google Ads, Linkedin Ads, Mailshake, Linkedin, Mailchimp, Intercom, Mixpanel. So nothing groundbreaking, but I think it is the tactics we employ with them that are unique, mixing and merging the technology together for our marketing and account-based marketing activity. Reach out if you want to actually to hear what we do.
Can you share a screenshot of the homepage of your smartphone (iOS/Android/other)? It would be interesting to see some of the apps you personally use on a daily basis to get things done and stay on top of your day.
So I keep my news sources very broad as you never know where and great tips or idea can come from, what you are looking at is my news sources, some of the blog I keep a top off and some of the tools I use when on the road. Mainly day to day, it is Clubhouse and Google Keep for day to day tasks.
