MarTech Interview With Vibhor Kapoor, Chief Marketing Officer at AdRoll, a division of NextRoll

Vibhor Kapoor, Chief Marketing Officer at AdRoll, a division of NextRoll chats about a few proven marketing tactics that can help channel higher interest to attract target audiences:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Vibhor, tell us about yourself and your journey through the years…as AdRoll’s new CMO what are some of the immediate focus areas for you?

Honestly, I am not a career marketer…I spent time early in my career in sales, commercial operations, strategy and product management. My interest in marketing and its role in driving business piqued about a decade back. Marketing was evolving from being the soul of the company’s brand purpose to a much more data-driven function, and a key driver of business growth. The evolving role of marketing into a data-driven, strategic partner taking charge of growth fired my passion. A variety of experiences in product marketing, demand generation and growth in mature and early-stage products led me to my current role as the CMO of AdRoll.

At AdRoll, we are on a mission to enable direct-to-consumer brands to build customer loyalty and grow revenues; by bringing the power of digital ads and marketing automation in one streamlined platform supported with expert services, marketers can drive higher performance and take the busy work away in managing multiple tools and channels.

My biggest focus is helping our customers, who are marketers themselves, understand how we can solve their challenges, and leading my team to deliver on the platform that marketers rely on to grow their businesses.

We’d love to hear about the core processes/strategies you’ve used to enable better go-to market and product launches? Also, a dive into some of the martech that helped…

I am a big believer in “purpose” and in Simon Sinek’s language starting with the “Why?” I feel teams often get caught up in the bells and whistles of cool technology while losing the anchor on true purpose. As the CMO for AdRoll, it is central to my strategy to define our target audience and shape how our offerings solve their problems.

When the team is aligned on the objectives, the optimal go-to-market strategy becomes more clear. Strategy is about trade-offs, when you are clear which market segments you are leaning on and what you will optimize for, decisions become much easier.

This is the approach I am bringing to shape our priorities and decisions.

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How are you seeing marketing basics change in today’s B2B ecosystem, a few thoughts on what you feel marketers of today need to be paying more attention to?

We live in a very noisy world where there are many messages, tools and technologies that we are bombarded with constantly. Even if you have the best product or service, it does not set you up for success. There are two elements in marketing that require more attention than ever – clarity of brand purpose and the role of a community.

To go back to the basics, marketers need to have a simple, clear and persuasive message that connects with their audience. Brands and marketers also need to think about the community they are building to raise tides that helps all boats. It is no longer about customer and vendor – customers, partners, thought leaders and technology providers are all part of a thriving ecosystem. I think of them as participants in the biosphere of marketing. If you don’t have a clear message and you don’t have a community, you cannot thrive.

A few thoughts on the route you feel B2B marketing is taking and how this will impact use and demand of martech

It would be the biggest understatement of 2022 if I said marketing has changed so much in the last decade. The channels for customer engagement have proliferated, and the number of tools that a marketer uses has exploded. We have seen a serious fragmentation of the martech stack and performance marketers spend more time navigating the complexities of these tools and channels than focusing on the message, creative or performance optimization. It is honestly a lot of busy work. One implication of this dynamic is that we believe that marketers will gravitate to tools that simplify their work – being able to create campaigns across channels to measure and optimize them in a unified manner is what they want the most.

We see no slowing down of channels customers engage in, and marketers need to meet customers where they are. If you engage with customers channel by channel in silos, each channel sees an incomplete and slightly different view of the same customer. Omnichannel marketing on the other hand assumes that the same customer is interacting with you across multiple channels.

Research shows that omnichannel campaigns deliver 3.5x engagement rates relative to single-channel campaigns. Most martech systems and platforms are not designed with an omnichannel perspective, so doing omnichannel is hard. The implication is that brands that execute across multiple channels will succeed, and those that ignore this shift to omnichannel will more likely fail in attracting the right customers.

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A few martech platforms you feel marketers should be on the lookout for and why…

There are a few platforms and tools that jump out to me – FullStory – if you want to understand your users’ digital experience and drive growth tactics, you have to look at it. If you are going to deeply analyze every click, view, swipe and other actions, you would want to look at Heap Analytics.

I am also excited about some of the new tools like Aspire that enable marketers to engage influencers and build communities.

While not a martech solution, Slack has become a favorite collaboration and communication surface -there is more engagement synchronously and asynchronously between teams.

I cannot answer this question without mentioning AdRoll! If you are a direct-to-consumer business and are looking to drive growth and streamline marketing across channels, you of course have to come to AdRoll!

Some last thoughts, takeaways, before we wrap up!

I would like to wrap up by going to the basics – find your brand’s purpose in the simplest customer-centric terms, and power through your strategy and tactics using that purpose as your guiding light.