MarTech solutions have proved to be efficient and economical options for brands to communicate with consumers. At e4m MarTech India Conference 2023, leaders from across sectors converged to share their insights on the growth of MarTech and its various aspects.

The event saw a panel discussion amongst Shashank Srivastava, Senior Executive Officer, Marketing & Sales, Maruti Suzuki; Nitin Singhal, Managing Director, Sinch, and Mukund Acharya, Head of Tech, Disney+ Hotstar. The session was chaired by Ankur Gattani, Chief Growth Officer, Webengage.

MarTech is becoming increasingly essential for a brand, said Srivastava at the outset. According to him, the auto sector spends approximately 25% of its marketing budget on MarTech globally. "It's still around 15-16% in India, so there's a long way to go. Of course, MarTech enables us to engage with highly tailored solutions, and provides direct engagement with consumers in order to nudge them at the proper time," Srivastava explained.

He also revealed that Maruti Suzuki has had a Document Management Systems (DMS) system in place since 2005, with 2.5 crore users' data. "We have a lot of transactional data because customers not only buy cars but also accessories, insurance, and even renew insurance. We have a lot of transactional data and thanks to new tools and technologies we've been able to capture a lot of interactional data as well, such as website visits."

Sharing insights as a martech solutions provider, Singhal mentioned that organisations have embraced a lot of marketing technology solutions and the activation or value generation is roughly 30-35% but it comes at a high cost. “The challenge is when one is not clear about the business strategy as it's very difficult for us to go ahead and reach out to the end customer.”

Acharya of Disney+ Hotstar shared that from a MarTech perspective, they look at two key areas - how to bring in new users to the platform and how to ensure users come back to the platform to consume content.

“The first part is more about putting content on other social media or making ads outside of the Disney+ Hotstar platform and bringing them. The second is how to bring in users. The platform already has a large user base and how do I bring those users back? This is the tech that we have built. It's a homegrown but hybrid platform. The categorization management, campaign and orchestration is done in-house but it's hybrid as we deal with third-party leading industry vendors too and help them reach the last mile.”

According to Srivastava, brands need to have the right team for managing data and choose the right platform, suppliers and partners to make sure the data is protected.”

Talking about the key aspects in the journey of digital transformation, especially concerning user engagement, Singhal shared: “A happy customer is equal to revenue. Therefore, we are focused on how to engage with customers. MarTech applies to every facet of our organisation, whether it is related to content, advertising, promotion, creating experiences, ecommerce sales and service. We have understood the need to be strategic and agile.”

Asked how India behaves, what works for India and what has worked effectively for Disney+ Hotstar, Acharya shared that since the platform has a large audience base it's easier to find good insights on user behaviour. “How do I increase that unique cohort of users? How do I bring back users who are looking for language content? We don’t want to create a storm of reach-outs. A balance is crucial. We use MarTech to get users to come and engage, we measure those campaigns and fine-tune them. The level of personalisation is crucial for MarTech to be successful.”