MarTech Interview with Gerardo Dada, Chief Marketing Officer at Catchpoint

Gerardo Dada, Chief Marketing Officer at Catchpoint chats about the need for marketers of today to focus on driving the emotional experience to develop brand value and position in competitive times:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Gerardo, tell us more about your foray into B2B marketing, how has the journey been and what’s it like for you now as Catchpoint’s new CMO?

I learned marketing was my calling after reading Positioning – The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout, when I was in middle school. I had my own business for a few years, which helped me build a business-first mindset. 20 years ago, we moved to the Silicon Hills in Austin, TX to focus on working with tech companies.

Since then, I have been lucky to be at the center of the new technologies movement, including smartphones, cloud, social commerce, and other internet technologies. I have worked in a mix of demand generation, product marketing, and audience marketing roles. It has been fascinating to see the evolution of the marketing function and how it has become more complex over time. I joined Catchpoint as CMO because I saw a perfect challenge for me: the company has amazing technology and great customers but is lacking great marketing to give it the market recognition it deserves.

As a seasoned marketing leader, what are some of the core marketing fundamentals and martech that you swear by that you’d like to talk about today?

In terms of marketing fundamentals, I believe marketing is the growth engine for any company. It should therefore be accountable for sustainable revenue growth – leads are only a leading indicator. I believe the best form of marketing is education – meaning providing useful, honest guidance for customers. Last, the value of marketers lies in their understanding of customers: their needs, how they want to consume information, what their predispositions are, what are the emotional drivers for their purchases, etc.

People buy based on emotions and then they justify their decisions via rational means. Marketers must win hearts and minds. Given this and the fact that customers are doing most of their research on their own, it means marketing attribution is becoming more and more elusive. In the end, we need enough attribution to know what is working and what is not, while at the same time we need to trust our intuitions and make bets on what we know is valuable but cannot be properly measured.

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How can CMOs today work closely with their marketing/sales teams to build better end to end digital experiences for their end users, what do you see missing from digital journeys in B2B today?

What is missing in many organizations is a true understanding of the buyer’s journey from the customer’s psychological perspective. With that, I don’t mean journey mapping, which is more about engagement steps, but understanding the drivers, motivations, challenges, and questions that exist in the mind of the prospect as they make a buying decision.

Separately, marketers must focus on providing good customer experiences. In the brick-and-mortar world, successful companies obsess over customer experience, which is judged by observing buyer behavior: how many customers stop by your store, how long did they stay, how much time until someone greeted them, how quick was the service, how long they had to wait to checkout, etc.

In today’s world where most of the engagement happens online, it is critically important to measure their digital experience. A frustrated customer will leave your digital experience for a competitor in a second. The performance and uptime of the company’s website is critical, and it is complex given all the dependencies, and all the systems outside of your control on the internet. Digital experience requires a combination of customer insights, technology, and a focus on removing friction.

What do you feel CMOs need to do more of in today’s market to drive impact, given current day dynamics?

CMOs need to focus. Marketing is always getting more complex, more difficult, more interesting. Modern marketers need to understand behavioral psychology, SEO, social media, ABM, and many other competences. There are always new technologies, new tools, new ideas, and endless opportunities to learn more about customers and try things. So, we need to focus on what really moves the needle while setting aside investment and time to experiment and test new ideas and new tools.

Marketers should acknowledge no playbook is perfect. There is no silver bullet. We need to understand the intricacies of the industry, the market, and customers, to determine what works and what makes sense. It is very risky to follow best practices because it can sometimes be like following a herd in the wrong direction.

A few thoughts on what it takes for marketers today to build brand experiences that stand out from the crowd.

Standing out requires being bold and different. This means you need to embrace your values, your uniqueness, your culture, and be immediately clear about what your product or service does that is different from the competition. I know this sounds like common sense, but then we watch ads on TV from insurance companies, all of whom claim to save you money. A few years ago, my daughter, who was seven at the time, told me “Dad, all these companies promise to offer the lowest price. It is not possible. They must be lying.”. Take one of your pieces of content or a page on your website and swap the logo for your competitors. If the content still works, then you have failed to differentiate.

Some last thoughts on the future of martech and the future of digital experience observability platforms?

The risk with MarTech is that it can lead to tactics and tools driving the marketing strategy instead of business strategy and customer experience driving tactics and processes. CMOs must be very clear on determining the overall strategy, the desired customer experience, and how it will result in the growth the company expects.

It’s easy as a marketer to be distracted by the latest shiny object. Remember how Facebook Commerce, augmented reality, and big data were supposed to be the future of marketing? Today we hear about blockchain. influencer marketing, ABM, and other tools – some of it is very useful, some not so much.

In terms of digital experience, marketers must ensure that experience management becomes a discipline. Website performance is a KPI that may be just as useful as NPS or other metrics we have been following. Marketers must understand their website performance as it impacts customer experience and SEO, but also continuously measure and optimize the experience from customers in key regions around the world to ensure their digital experiences are available, performant, and they delight customers.

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