5 tips for choosing the right marketing activation solution

It's essential to start with a clear vision of your expectations before embarking on the selection of a tool. For this reason, the first step is to identify your priority use cases.

In other words, what are the goals of your marketing activation/marketing automation project? What do you want to do:

• Automate your email campaigns?

• Personalize your customer journeys?

• Finely analyze the behaviors of your audiences?

• Easily evolve your marketing scenarios and use cases over time?

• Unify your customer data in a 360° view to better segment your audiences?

• Benefit from advanced and customizable reporting to steer your activity?

• Deliver engaging and personalized customer experiences across all your touchpoints?

You need to precisely list your business & functional needs, this will help you target the most suitable martech solutions.

It's also important to assess your level of maturity in marketing automation. Are you in a start-up phase, with processes still manual? Or do you already have a technology stack that you want to optimize? Your choice of solution should be consistent with your current maturity and your development ambitions.

Finally, take care to involve upstream the various stakeholders concerned by the project. Beyond the marketing team, think about integrating your sales teams, your customer service, your IT department and, ideally, management.

Each will bring a complementary perspective on the project's challenges and allow you to refine the framing of your needs. This 360° vision will be valuable when writing the specifications for your marketing activation solution.

Your marketing activation solution must be sufficiently flexible and modular to support the growth of your company and the evolution of your use cases.

Therefore, favor solutions that offer an open architecture and "plug and play" features so that you can easily:

• Add new data sources.

• Integrate new marketing channels.

• Evolve your customer journeys and marketing automation scenarios.

• Deploy advanced marketing use cases (marketing pressure management, dynamic segmentation, etc.).

• Increase the volume of data, contacts, emails sent, etc.

A tip within the tip: Don't hesitate to challenge publishers on their product roadmap and their ability to support your ramp-up.

Finally, make sure the solution has integration capabilities with your existing ecosystem. Your marketing automation platform must integrate seamlessly with your other applications (CRM, analytics tools, data management solutions, etc.).

So take the time to evaluate the integration capabilities of the solutions you are benchmarking: connector library, APIs, webhooks, etc.

Choosing a marketing activation solution is not just about choosing software, it's also about choosing a support team - a team that must be able to assist you in installing, discovering and using the tool.

We recommend that you find out about the quality of support offered by the publisher.

The success of your marketing activation project depends on the tool's suitability to your needs, but also on your ability to quickly get to grips with the platform and benefit from responsive support when needed.

Check the level of support offered by the pre-selected publishers. For each publisher, you need to find the answers to the following questions (don't hesitate to use these questions to build your analysis grid):

• Does the publisher offer assistance with onboarding, with dedicated training sessions led by business experts?

• Does it provide you with experienced advisors to help you configure your platform and optimize your campaigns?

• Do you have access to an Account Success Manager (ASM), who will be your privileged referent to advise and guide you throughout your use of the platform?

• What are the support access methods (phone, email, online chat)?

• Is support available in your language and during your working hours?

• What are the publisher's commitments in terms of response time and handling of your requests?

• Do you have the possibility to access a premium level of support with reinforced commitments, for example within the framework of a personalized SLA (Service Level Agreement) contract?

• Does the publisher provide you with a complete and up-to-date knowledge base, with user guides, video tutorials, practical cases, to allow you to develop your skills independently?

• Does it regularly organize webinars or training sessions to inform you about new features and help you get the most out of the platform?

Data is the fuel of your marketing activation or marketing automation strategy. To deliver personalized and engaging experiences to your customers, you need to be able to effectively collect, centralize and leverage your data. Your choice of platform must therefore be part of a resolutely data-centric approach.

First, make sure the solution is capable of centralizing your customer data. Your platform must be able to collect and make data from your various touchpoints interact: website, mobile app, social networks, physical points of sale, etc.

Unifying your data in your marketing automation solution will allow you to have a 360° view of your customers and their interactions with your brand.

Also check the possibilities offered by the tool in terms of segmentation. To what extent do the solutions you have pre-selected offer the possibility to create relevant audience segments, by crossing different criteria: demographic, behavioral, transactional, attitudinal data, etc.?

Segmentation makes it possible to target and personalize campaigns and messages. It is one of the core features of marketing activation solutions.

A marketing activation platform is used to activate data - a truism - but also to analyze it. So also pay attention to the analysis and reporting features offered by the platform.

A marketing activation solution must be able to provide you with dashboards to steer your marketing activity, your marketing automation scenarios, your campaigns.

There are three questions to ask about this:

• Are the native reports offered in the platform customizable? If so, at what level and with what depth?

• Is it possible to create 100% custom reports, via a drag & drop type editor?

• Does the marketing automation solution offer connectors with business intelligence tools?

Another point of vigilance: don't forget to audit the compliance of the solution with the regulations in force on the protection of personal data (GDPR, in particular). Your platform must integrate features for managing consents, securing data and respecting individuals' rights.

Beyond the functionalities of the platform, the choice of your marketing activation solution is also that of a partner who will support you over time. The relationship you will build with the publisher will be decisive for the success of your project and the achievement of your objectives.

So favor a trusted player, expert in its field and really listening to you.

What does this mean in concrete terms?

First, turn to a recognized and experienced player. Find out about the publisher's history and references:

• How long has it been present on the market?

• Who are its customers, especially in your industry?

• What are the achievements and success stories highlighted?

Quite logically, an established publisher, with solid experience in your industry, will be better able to understand your challenges and offer you a suitable solution.

Also check the financial soundness and sustainability of the publisher. In such a changing market, it is important to choose a partner able to maintain and evolve its solution over time. Do some upstream research to analyze the company's financial results, its growth trajectory and its ability to invest in R&D.

Finally, and this is perhaps the most important, make sure of the proximity and quality of the relationship you can build with the publisher. Once again, beyond the technical solution, it is a true partnership that you are setting up.

To avoid casting errors, take the time to meet the teams, evaluate their understanding of your business issues, their level of listening, the responsiveness of the exchanges, challenge your interlocutors on their ability to offer you concrete and innovative solutions.

The choice of a marketing activation solution is a structuring decision for your company.

The 5 tips we have reviewed should help you sort through the many options on the market and identify the platform best suited to your challenges and goals.

Don't hesitate to take the time to think, to thoroughly audit the different solutions and to meet their teams. No rush. Your marketing activation project is a strategic investment that must be part of a long-term vision of your customer relationship and the growth of your business.

At Actito, we are committed to being this trusted partner, expert and attentive to you. Our marketing activation platform has been designed to combine power, flexibility and ease of use, in order to meet the personalization and engagement challenges of ambitious companies.

Do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your project and discover how we can help you realize your marketing activation strategy!