Editorial
The Gist
- Streamline customer journeys. Efficient back-end systems ensure consistency across customer touchpoints and improve the overall user experience.
- Accelerate market expansion. A well-organized marketing tech stack helps brands scale into new markets quickly by centralizing assets and simplifying localization efforts.
- Boost customer loyalty. Effective integration of front- and back-of-house technologies allows for personalized marketing campaigns that drive repeat business and deepen customer relationships.
In the Emmy-award winning TV series “The Bear,” one of the characters, Richie, interns at a Michelin three-star restaurant in Chicago. The 45-year-old spends a week polishing forks before he’s invited to shadow his colleagues in a scene that provides fascinating insight for digital marketers and marketing technologists.
Richie, who spent his career working in a sandwich shop, sees how the servers at the front of house discreetly exchange notes about customers. He learns about the team researcher who determines each guest’s dietary restrictions before they arrive. He watches the expeditor in the back of house direct the kitchen based on color-coded data about guests.
When Richie asks the expeditor how she can do this intense, repetitive job, she says, “Every night you make someone’s day.”
Making someone’s day is a tall order (no pun intended) for a website or digital experience. To achieve this goal, marketers need to improve their marketing tech stack and coordinate their front and back of house more like a Michelin-star restaurant. Here are some tips on how to do that.
How a Disjointed Marketing Tech Stack Hurts Your Brand
Although there are countless differences between websites and restaurants, the distinction between the front of house — hosts, servers and bussers — and the back — chef, cooks and dishwashers — is a helpful metaphor. When these two sides fail to coordinate, things go wrong. Guests wait longer than normal for food, cooks feel rushed and servers get stressed. The same is true for brands with a disconnected front and back of house.
For over 14 years, Leah has worked with digital asset management (DAM) systems. In one of her previous roles at McCormick, the spice company, she was tasked with strategizing how to collect and operationalize first-party data. This entailed moving from her comfort zone in DAM and product information management (PIM) to the user-facing tech stack in the front of the house. That’s when she noticed how the two parts of the tech stack work together to improve user experience.
Just as a kitchen is optimized for fast-moving cooks, the digital back of house prioritizes organization, efficiency and consistency. And just as the dining space is optimized for the guest experience, the front-of-house marketing tech stack prioritizes user experience. Often, that means their shared business goals — the customer journey, market expansion and customer loyalty — get overlooked.
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Hidden Gaps in Your Martech Stack
In her current role with Velir, a digital agency, Leah recently met with a company that sells engineering products. It planned to expand from a niche, domestic market to a global audience of engineering professionals in different verticals. Leah noticed unseen barriers in their back-of-house marketing tech stack.
The company stored marketing assets in a shared drive. Moreover, without a PIM system to consolidate technical product data — which is of utmost importance to engineering buyers — this company would struggle to launch new products and update existing product listings across its ecommerce channels.
Left unchanged, the back-of-house tech stack would drag down the front of house as this brand scaled up. This is common in our experience. The question is what to do about it.
Back-of-House Cleanup: How to Optimize Your Tech Stack
Let’s discuss several business priorities that marketers across the front and back of house are supposed to champion. We’ll look at how the back-of-house tech stack can derail or enable these priorities.
1. Customer Journey
In the progression from discovering a brand to buying something from it, companies underestimate the impact of brand and product inconsistencies on the customer journey, especially online. In a restaurant, if you label a meatloaf as “gluten free” even though it contains gluten, you will get complaints. You will lose customers. Online, cause and effect may not be so obvious.
Picture a company with 1,000 products and distribution on 100 global ecommerce sites. If just 5% of the product listings have incorrect images or inaccurate product data, that adds up to 5,000 listings that may confuse shoppers and disappoint paying customers. If someone has to manually upload or enter data for each listing, that not only delays time to market but also increases the likelihood of errors and missed sales.
Back-of-house systems, like DAM and PIM, are responsible both for eliminating those inaccurate listings and increasing speed to market. If you change one master record of a product in a DAM or PIM system, it automatically pushes the corrected listings to every storefront. That way, no one gets gluten in their gluten-free meatloaf.
2. Market Expansion
Brands often underestimate what it takes to sell in a new geography, vertical or role. Scaling with a shared folder drive of assets isn’t going to work well.
Let’s say you want to bring new products to a new, multilingual market. You can just use Google to translate your product descriptions, convert the serving sizes to metric and keep the rest as is, right?
Not quite. When Leah was at McCormick, she saw what it takes to bring a newly acquired brand to a new market. It required repurposing existing campaign assets and copy, translating recipes and much more. The content needed for given communities or cultures can be vastly different.
Without systems in place to differentiate the new, localized assets from the old, expanding a single product can become surprisingly complex. The folders within folders within folders with long file names become unmanageable. Moreover, the risk of language missteps and miscommunications grows, potentially leading to reputational fiascos and a loss of consumer trust.
3. Loyalty
Successful companies create customers, get those customers to spend more money more often and then motivate them to say positive things about the brand to others. With that purpose, many companies use first-party data to figure out how they can make a customer’s day — like the three-Star Michelin restaurant in “The Bear,” minus the note handoffs and online dietary restrictions stalking.
Typically, the front-of-house tech stack records user actions and links them to an individual identity in a CRM system. That first-party data flows to a data lake where someone can query it to find customers with certain attributes (i.e., those who bought a new home, became a new parent or brought home a new furry friend in the last six months). Then, a marketing automation system can present those customers with offers and experiences relevant to their tastes.
It sounds easy enough until we consider how to gather information and produce the creative assets for a wide range of campaigns targeting different consumers. The higher the volume of content required and the more personalized it is, the more important the back of house becomes. The creative teams that sift a Russian-nesting-doll set of assets cannot work as efficiently or effectively as the team that finds assets for a loyalty campaign as quickly as they can type something into search.
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Create Memorable Experiences With a Seamless Marketing Tech Stack
Behind every brand with an inconsistent, confusing image online, there is a back of house in need of attention. And behind every brand that consistently makes someone’s day, we’d bet there is a back of house that is well-maintained and tuned for that purpose. A great customer experience in the front of the house starts with technologies and processes that no one outside your team will ever see.
We’re not encouraging you to be precious like a three-Star Michelin restaurant. Rather, we want you to coordinate your front and back of house the way a digital Michelin-star restaurant would. The first step is to clean up your back-of-house tech stack.
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