Does Your New Martech Application Help You Resonate?

As martech applications continue to drive marketing and sales efforts forward, it’s important to understand if and how these applications help you resonate with your target audience. Do they enhance communication, making it easier for prospects to understand how your products solve their problems, or do they simply create noise, annoy your audience, and drive them farther away from purchase?

What martech applications should be generating is what I’ve come to call “Intelligent Resonance.” Intelligent resonance means that the technology you use through your marketing and sales efforts enables you to resonate more effectively with your target audience. Additionally, intelligent resonance requires a blend of technology and human skill, execution, and strategy to succeed, ultimately leading to revenue generation.

This post will be the first in an ongoing series in which I will highlight specific martech applications and provide insight into how they provide intelligent resonance. Rather than endorsements or official reviews, this series is intended to give you an idea of how you can incorporate these martech applications into your tech stack to resonate better with your target audience.

Today’s post focuses on Crayon, a competitive and market intelligence application that uses machine learning to deliver critical insights about your competition.

Having done competitive intelligence research and analysis for a software company in the early 2000s, an application like Crayon would have been immensely beneficial. With companies creating more content than ever, Crayon’s ability to scour multiple online sites to serve up consistent updates removes hours of manual efforts to accomplish the same tasks. I can’t tell you how many times my CEO would ask me a random question about one of our competitors, prompting me to start some specific research. It’s likely that with Crayon I would have already had the insight to deliver him the information he needed, which alone makes Crayon valuable.

What’s more exciting, however, is Crayon’s machine learning capabilities. The ability to uncover and deliver the information most important to each individual user is a key advantage. By learning to look for and prioritize key information based on implicit input from the user, the application becomes customized to each company’s needs. Whether researching competitive intelligence as an individual contributor contributing to a team or as a CMO delivering competitive insights to multiple stakeholders regularly, having intelligence built into the application makes marketers look smarter and more ahead of the game. As we all know, it’s rare to be able to get ahead of anything given the volume of work we are usually executing.

Lastly, Crayon quickly identifies potential traps competitors may be setting for my company’s salespeople, providing a content marketing advantage. By creating content optimized to helping salespeople engage with prospects, this enables them to understand how our company satisfies customer needs and solves problems better than the competition. Using Crayon in this way can help avoid the traps by getting out in front of them, denying competitors the chance to derail deals.

Combining a machine learning application like this with a human analyst will yield the best opportunities for marketing professionals to stay ahead of the competition and win more deals.

Overall, using an application like Crayon is a great example of intelligent resonance. Guiding the use of Crayon with sound human analysis allows marketers to create more quality content that will resonate with target buyers, enabling you to stand out from the competition and rise above the noise of the market.

If you want to chat more about intelligent resonance, please contact me: bret@kpitarget.com.