APIs for Marketers: Unlocking Business Value by Meeting Customers Where They Are

By Eve Psalti and Justin Moses

CMOs have traditionally been responsible for promoting brand awareness, but thanks to the rise of connected experiences, smart devices, and ubiquitous connectivity, marketers are increasingly expected to drive revenue growth as well.

Mass market, one-to-many advertising still plays an important role, but increasingly, consumers expect companies to understand their lifestyles, know their preferences, and provide them with connected and dynamic experiences when and where they need them. A business’s marketing identity is no longer defined via TV spots or static online ads so much as through digital experiences in which the right offers surface to the right consumers in the right context.

Imagine the struggles a company that sells concert tickets might face if its marketing relied mainly on billboard ads and radio spots and if its customer interactions took place mostly at physical ticket booths. Instead, consumers expect to be drawn in by delightful experiences that are made available in the channels they prefer.

Forcing a consumer to switch on the TV at a specific time to check out a band’s new single can add friction, for example, whereas making the content accessible on demand across all devices does the opposite. Forcing consumers who liked the new single to visit a ticket booth or even a standalone mobile app to buy concert tickets can likewise add friction — but enabling consumers to purchase show passes in the same channel in which they experienced the single, such as a social media platform, can accomplish the opposite. Forcing a consumer to wade through music from bands they don’t like can add friction — but creating consumer profiles that offer personalized recommendations can do the opposite.

In short, a business’s brand identity is increasingly defined by not only the services and products the brand offers but the holistic experience of interacting with the brand. The distinction between a marketing experience and an overall brand experience has become blurred. CMOs are becoming responsible for not only advertising but also brand experiences writ large — and this expansion in responsibility means increased pressure, as digitally-empowered consumers are willing to abandon brands that offer poor experiences.

All of these evolutions mean that modern CMOs need the ability to mix and match corporate assets to create new experiences, to partner with other companies to further enrich services or take advantage of aggregated demand, and to make data-driven decisions based on customer behavior.

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, sit at the intersection of these new CMO mandates and should be seen as an important part of today’s marketing toolkit.

APIs: Building Blocks of Brand Experiences

For a business to create the omnichannel experiences that consumers demand, it needs to facilitate interactions with customers and partners across an ever-growing variety of digital channels. Experiences result from these interactions — from one piece of software asking another for a customer’s most-recently purchased item or for available seats on a flight, then integrating that information into what the end user sees.

APIs work like an army of specialized ambassadors, fielding these requests continuously. They deliver information from software in a controlled place (e.g., a product catalog, customer purchase history, tax table, etc.) to software in a place of greater variability (e.g., an e-commerce site, mobile app, partner developer portal, point of sale, etc.). In this way, APIs forge the connections that let a business and its partners repackage and recompose its digital assets for new offerings. Importantly, APIs ensure these exchanges of data and functionality can be initiated only when authorized, enabling complicated omnichannel experiences without compromising security or governance.

APIs are also essential because many of the CRM and ERP systems that house customer information are fragmented, leaving marketers unable to generate a comprehensive, 360-degree view into customer journeys. APIs abstract these systems, and the complexity that impedes their interoperability, into a consistent interface, meaning that just as APIs can create a new experience by connecting a product catalog to a database of existing inventory, they can also create more personalized experiences by connecting a given customer’s history to whatever online assets they are interacting with.

What’s more, because APIs mediate the interactions among the various systems that comprise a connected experience, API management tools can analytics to these interactions, helping businesses to understand which pieces of data and functionality customers value and to quickly iterate toward more delightful brand experiences.

Improving marketing with APIs

APIs are central to the tasks CMOs face in creating not only advertisements that drive awareness but also also brand experiences that drive revenue, including

• Connecting and recomposing data and functionality to create new experiences
• Personalizing new experiences by connecting them to customer data
• Protecting customer data and generating deeper insights into their needs by providing visibility into each connected interaction, control over who can initiate interactions, and opportunities to apply analytics to learn from interactions

Far from being a topic only for IT professionals, APIs are a critical component in how brands present themselves to customers, improve brand experiences over time, and forge more personal relationships with consumers. The role of the CMO continues to change — but with a solid understanding of APIs, CMOs are better enabled to adapt to the changing landscape and create the customer engagements their businesses need in order to grow.