SAS is on a marketing transformation mission. One that has targeting and personalization at the forefront. One that looks at customer journeys from a true omnichannel perspective – not through each of the channels in which we're executing. We’re bringing in brand, demand and engagement with the customer at the center – and our Marketing Sciences & Technology teams are enabling that strategy.  

The graphic below sums our marketing technology (MarTech) stack up in one picture. It illustrates our customers’ journey, and how key technologies support various aspects of the business. As you can see, we have lots of integrated (and some siloed) technologies that help us run our business.  

 

 

But, what it doesn’t show you is OUR journey.  So, let me tell you more. 

A key part of our transformation is technology. It’s the foundation, and our foundation is SAS Customer Intelligence 360. Are you surprised that we’re “drinking our own champagne”?  Probably not.   

We're positioning SAS Customer Intelligence 360 as our omnichannel marketing hub. Let me share three specific examples of how it's helping SAS Marketing transform and modernize.  

1. SAS 360 Discover is the baseline that helps us understand digital behavior to ensure we're able to personalize and track the customer experience. As we execute social, SEO and digital advertising campaigns, we're able to understand the behaviors of people that have engaged with sas.com. And (based on consent), customer behavior is tracked so that we're able to personalize the digital experience we deliver to customers.  
     
2. SAS 360 Engage is the execution hub. This is where we're working to really re-imagine the customer journey. Today, we execute email campaigns that target specific segments and audiences based on business rules and/or model scores we've generated in SAS Viya. But, an email campaign that's sent today won’t necessarily be in sync with the paid social ad that customer sees, or a promotional spot on sas.com. That’s our opportunity. SAS 360 Engage enables us to look at this all together – holistically.  Omnichannel. This is where things get interesting – this is where we can deliver phenomenal experiences, not just good ones, at scale.

3. SAS 360 Plan is the planning hub. SAS is a large, global organization, and that means there are more complexities around orchestrating marketing activities. We have an internal agency, as well as external agencies (locally and globally). Some functions are executed by our corporate marketing department globally, and some are executed at the regional level. We have budgets that are also executed at both levels. We need the ability to streamline these workflows and budgets.  And doing that in the same platform as our execution engine will make it much easier for us moving forward. It makes it easier to plan our upcoming activities, and makes it easier to track and react to marketing’s effectiveness. 

However, technology is not a panacea. People and process are what make it successful. Modernized MarTech challenges and enables us to rethink the "how" -- how we plan, design and execute customer journeys. New best of breed technologies help us streamline our teams and their processes to move a campaign from idea to launch faster. 

And it seems we’re on the right track! I was so excited and proud to learn last week that SAS was among 2020’s MarTech Stackie Award winners. This was a goal I had set for our team when I moved to Marketing earlier this year to head up our Global Marketing Sciences & Technology team and strategy.  It helped us visualize our MarTech stack, and hopefully, it can help you too.   

But it’s only the beginning. A journey is a voyage. An expedition. And I’m excited to be on this journey, transforming how we show up for our customers. I can’t wait to see what the road ahead reveals for SAS -- and more importantly, for our customers.