Why marketers need ‘architecture vision’

“Architecture vision” is the third of six core competencies marketers need to develop. In previous articles, I discussed the first two of those competencies: generalized system understanding and martech tool management.

This third competency, architecture vision, might be thought of as the sum of those first two competencies. The first says that marketers should have a big picture understanding of how customer data should be collected, unified and prepared for activation via different channel (such as social, email, SMS, web push, app notification, etc.). The second says that marketers should have a strategic view of the different platforms and how they hold and use customer data. 

The architecture vision competency refers to having a strategic view of marketing technology systems, as well as an understanding of how these tools are used when it comes to collecting and activating customer data. 

Why architecture vision important for marketers

When marketers have a strategic, systemic view of the marketing platforms available to them, how they can collect and use customer data, and how this data can flow safely and securely amongst these platforms — along with an in-depth knowledge of marketing processes — they can atually help increase marketing technology utilization.

The architecture vision competency allows marketers to further understand how to use the available martech stack to improve both customer experience as well as internal marketing processes. As mentioned above, by having both a systemic view of marketing technology stack and an overall understanding of how each tool in the stack works, marketers can arrive at architecture vision.

Architecture vision:

• Allows marketers to understand how the different platforms fit together and how this affects the flow of customer data, from its collection all the way to its impact on customer facing communication. 
• Allows marketers to help define which customer data should flow from one platform (where consumer data is collected, for example), to another (where this same data is used to engaged with the consumer.
• Finally, having architect vision can greatly help marketers when collaborating with other stakeholders (such as IT, data ops, data security, data privacy, etc).  

Understand, this is not just about having technical understanding. Rather, this is about ensuring that marketers have a birds-eye view that allow them to have a better understanding of how the available martech stack can affect marketing processes (for better or worse) and customer experience.

Next steps

First, here’s are some questions to get you started: “

• Does your current martech architecture help automate operational marketing tasks, such as automatically and safely sending data from one platform to the other, ready to be used by marketing or revenue growth teams?
• Is there an overlap of features between the martech platforms you are using?
• If there is an overlap, does it hinder processes (e.g. teams going to different platforms to perform the same tasks)?
• Is customer data flowing safely and securely through the stack?

Marketers should bring the answers to these questions to the process of reviewing the martech stack architecture with other appropriate stakeholders and teams. These will help your understanding of how martech operations and marketing processes can be enhanced to improve customer experience and desired business outcomes.

Dig deeper: What the composability revolution means for the martech stack