Driving Innovation and building Marketing Technology Stacks to drive Growth

Whenever I join any organization, I always use the opportunity of coming on board with fresh eyes to question the operations of the team and generally how things are done; this can be largely attributed to my consulting background. And so when I joined a retail bank to lead their marketing strategy and operations for the Retail Division, there were a number of challenges I needed to tackle head on and pretty quickly to smoothen the efficiency of our marketing operations. 

• We constantly scored low on internal CSAT survey carried out by the CX team to track how well teams were servicing their internal clients. The product team, was our primary client and they constantly complained about the marketing team's turnaround time for campaign execution which was hampering their speed to market

• On the other hand, I had fatigued designers due to the volume of design work relative to the design team’s capacity. They also typically designed everything from scratch as there were no automated templates

• The campaign briefing process was manual as campaign creation, management and tracking were done on different applications and dashboards. This made reporting and tracking tedious and a lot of insight and learnings were slipping through the cracks.

I knew we needed streamline internal collaboration better, automate our processes and have a simplified and integrated approach to running our marketing programmes. It was also important to have a system capable of tracking attribution and ROI of our campaigns especially digital campaigns. 

So besides my daily marketing activities and operations, there was now this project I needed to embark on. I drew up a business case and justification to deploy a collection of technology tools that were going to deliver the marketing strategy and goals. I mapped out the architecture and designed the solution which was to deploy a much more refined Martech Stack. After getting the business case and justification approved from the relevant stakeholders, i drew up the BRD and solutions design.

Here's a summary of the solution architecture:

• The foundation was going to be the harmonization of our data sources (CRM and the Bank's data warehouse) consolidated into a CDP (Customer Data Platform) which was the melting point to give us a unified view of our customers as well as access to 3rd part data

• The next element of the stack, to be layered on the CDP was a Campaign Management Platform which would integrated all the digital marketing channels and allow for campaign activities to happen in one place. It would have an in-built decisioning engine which triggered campaigns based on customer behaviour enabling marketing automation, remarketing as well as multi-testing capabilities

• The final layer was to be a real-time visualization of campaign performance and attribution which was key to achieving meaningful experimentation and leveraging insights for campaign optimization and reporting

So I set out in search of a solution that would have all these capabilities, deliver on the solution and outlined deliverables at an acceptable price tag.

I went through the procurement process from RFP to bidding to finally selecting a partner. I then got the necessary budget approvals  based on the proposed commercials from the preferred vendor and proceeded to have a kick-off meeting with the project team made up of  various stakeholders from the Product team, CX team, Data team, external vendors, PMO, etc. I shared my vision and objectives for the project as well as roles and responsibilities of each team member. Throughout the project, I drove collaboration and cohesion within the team and managed the project using MS Projects and Jira to manage workload assignment and the issues backlog.

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Post implementation, i had been able to streamline the Bank's marketing workflows, centralized campaign management and delivered a holistic view of campaign activities and results. The success of this laudable project (which got commendation from the leadership team) drove down the Bank's CPL and CPC while dvering higher