“Martech needs to do much more than enable targeted reach
of a customer and/or reporting/analytics”
Tell us a little bit about your role and how you got here.
• My focus has always been centered on helping marketers; my customers leverage the most relevant and resourceful tools and strategies to achieve their goals and objectives.
• With the rise of a wide suite of marketing technology platforms, I always felt that nothing was truly “plug and play” – there would always be a need for professionals who had a keen understanding of how to leverage these tools in order to help the client achieve their goals and objectives.
• Fosina Marketing was born as such a company; our focus has always been on helping clients achieve their subscription/direct to consumer goals and objectives leveraging our insight and technology platforms to achieve those goals cost efficiently and effectively
• The market is filled with very strong platforms…however the challenge remains for marketers to figure out how to integrate these platforms and optimize the performance of these tools in order to achieve their bottom line objectives
Given the massive proliferation of marketing technology, how do you see the MarTech market
evolving over the next few years?
• I see the rise of “smart” marketing technology platforms
• Platforms that integrate various aspects of the marketing spectrum in order to make it easier for the platform to help the client achieve that top and bottom line goals
• I see marketing technology platforms in the future leveraging the huge data warehouses that most clients are building of their customer profile data to drive all marketing function in a most relevant and engaging manner with customers
• Martech needs to do much more than enable targeted reach of a customer and/or reporting/analytics…these platforms need to enable the “smart next step” in the marketing schema.
What do you see as the single most important technology trend or development that’s going to
impact us?
• The rise of Artificial intelligence based marketing technology platforms
• Platforms that allow the marketer to ingest as much disparate data thru the front door and then, based on smart thinking…allow decisions to be made about optimization of the full messaging and marketing funnel.
• Platforms that will provide media planning and messaging schedules that are fuel and optimized in real time based on real time performance data
• For Marketers, the rise of these “thinking” platforms will put greater emphasis on our need to understand our goals and objectives for all efforts and initiatives. We will need to have a greater understanding of the data that is required to enter into the “brain” of a platform in order to produce optimal results
What’s the biggest challenge that CMOs need to tackle to make marketing technology work?
• In the future the CMO will need to understand in a much more detailed manner the true bottom line goals and objectives of their marketing spend
• They will be commanded to be much more transparent about the net effect and contribution of the marketing spend to the bottom line of the company
• Huge shift from being solely focused on a customer brand awareness approach to one that engages with consumers, builds loyalty and creates great lifetime value in each and every customer.
• Also see a much great obsession with the competitive arena and shifts that are being made in real time that impact on the relative competitiveness of the company and its product offering.
• The market is shifting very quickly and accelerating this shift with each passing quarter. CMOs need to not only anticipate change, they must be focused on making the right moves to take advantage of these shifts
• CMO’s will also be challenged with the need to build brand loyalty, affinity and subscribership.
What’s your smartest work-related shortcut or productivity hack?
• Everything in our organization pivots on customer bottom line need
• The more time I spend understanding the client’s ultimate objective…the shorter path to servicing their need and solving for their challenge.
• Everyone can waste a lot of time talking around a challenge…and/or over analyzing an issue, I tend to get to the bottom line objective quickly.
• With that knowledge and an understanding of the competitive arena, we can bring the right resources and technology platforms to bear ….and solve things more quickly
How do you prepare for an AI-centric world as a marketing leader?
• Chronicle the specific challenges that you face each day as a marketer – those that take a tremendous amount of time and resources
• Create a hierarchy of data and input required throughout your company at various customer touchpoints in order to achieve the goals and objectives that you have
• Study, Study, Study – case studies that are in market today about how AI is being used to solve marketing problems efficiently – search for matches in these case studies that mirror your list of challenges.
• Start small and begin to implement AI based solutions and measure overall performance and efficiency in achieving your goal.
• Small projects in each area of your business….will give you the confidence to tackle bigger issues.
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?
• We have a series of marketing technology platforms that are centered on subscription/direct to consumer demand creation, order processing, order fulfillment, credit card processing, customer retention & ongoing retention.
• We have platforms that mirror the marketer’s customer life-cycle – Customer acquisition efforts cross digital and legacy channels, Order processing, management & fulfillment. Analytical platforms that focus on delivering insight for greater optimization of upcoming campaign optimization.
• With the rise of the subscription economy, our tools and insight are the right services for a generation of marketers that are now focused on retaining customers and building long term value thru subscription relationships.
Are there any new features or upcoming upgrades that you’re excited about and would like to give us a sneak peek into?
• Given the proprietary nature of our offering and the intensely competitive arena that we operate within…. we won’t’ be able to share any of the new ideas and upgrades that we have in the planning stages.
• Suffice to say we operate in the mind of our customer; understanding their needs for greater effectiveness and efficiency. Everything that we do is centered on delivering the highest quality services and platforms that achieve those goals and objectives.
What is your take on the massive explosion of MarTech across so many categories? Do you see competition, opportunities to partner and/or integrate?
• We see this massive explosion as exciting for our industry.
• No doubt there is a tremendous amount of thinking and innovating going on within our industry.
• There is definitely much more competition in the market which pushes all of us to be at our best and provide nothing but the best in terms of platforms and services to clients
• If we don’t solve a client problem, you can be sure that there are others waiting in the wings…ready to step in and solve it for them
• We don’t see merit in partnering or integrating for the sake of appearances. There are logical partnerships that make sense from the ability to create greater value to customers. We are always open to those kind of relationships where 1+1 = 4.
Could you share for our readers, an infographic or description depicting your marketing stack?
• Fosina Screening (internal, proprietary) – transaction hosting with fraud detection and screening
• CAKE – SaaS solution for tracking and managing multi-channel; marketing campaigns
• Adroll – Customer growth platform that uses display, social and email to increase client revenues
• Optizmo – Enterprise Class Solution for automating suppression list management
• Facebook Business Manager – Facebook platform used to run and track ads, manage assets, pages and ad accounts across multiple clients
• UpSellit – Email and display abandon cart remarketing tool
• Lead Forensics – B2B lead generation management tool
• Affiliate Marketing Platforms – Impact Radius & ShareASale
• HubSpot – CRM software managing both sales and inbound marketing activities
• MailChimp – marketing automation platform for email customer engagement
If you are involved in online direct response, chances are you already know Jim Fosina. He's led the building of online businesses for a number of the biggest and best-known traditional direct marketing companies (Gevalia, Tassimo, Gerber Life, Bertelsmann, Scholastic and more), generating hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Jim also helped write the book on CANSPAM compliance as prior Chairman of the DMA Ethics & Policy Committee and, prior to founding Fosina, served as SVP of Online Marketing for Scholastic, and in numerous marketing roles for Kraft's Gevalia Kaffe.
At Fosina Marketing Group, we take great pride in understanding your specific needs and goals. Our team will spend time with you to understand the specific challenges you face in the competitive arena. It is with that level of understanding that we can provide you with the insight and recommendations that will guide us on the path towards building,maintaining and/or enhancing your direct to consumer efforts. Our experts can and will provide you with incremental market insights in order to put all of these discussions in proper context.
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