3 of the most powerful challenges in MarTech all go back to your MarTech Stack
In case you missed it, last week’s MarTech West offered insights on the state of marketing technology from industry experts through three days of informative sessions. What were the top 3 takeaways? Each of them is a powerful challenge that marketing and operations professionals struggle with daily:
1. Data
This isn’t a new challenge, but it’s an increasingly nuanced one. Managing marketing data is more than just leads in your marketing platform to be managed across campaigns. There are powerful sources of data that can help you zero in on your prospects’ and customers’ behavior and preferences, such as customer data platforms like Segment that track user events, and can offer powerful insights into what your customers actually want, and how and when they want it.
Yet marketers still struggle with taming and unifying all this important data. Research suggests that 46% of marketing teams don’t have a free flow of customer data, while marketers continue to take in more data from more sources, up to 15 by 2019.
Marketers continue to take in more and more data from new channels. Image courtesy Salesforce.
2. Alignment
In order to orchestrate complex multi-channel campaigns that involve ferrying data across different applications, marketers now, more than ever, need to ensure their proverbial ducks are in a row. Yet as the fabled MarTech 5000 landscape balloons to 7,000+ applications and counting, and more marketers concern themselves with execution via best-in-breed solutions, marketers are also experiencing a growing gap - between their apps.
Having the best marketing platform, the best webinar platform, the best email platform, and the best marketing metrics platform make sense. Having none of these applications actually talk to each other makes for logistical headaches that drag down execution time. This is likely why Scott Brinker suggests a coming “Second Golden Age of MarTech” - one where “ecosystems, experts, and citizen engineers” use a blended model of software and services to bridge the gap between their applications using clicks-or-code solutions, without having to rely on expensive development resources.
Is a Second Golden Age of MarTech upon us? Image courtesy ChiefMarTech.com
3. ROI
The first two challenges flow into one of the biggest MarTech challenges today: delivering ROI from your MarTech stack. Gartner reports that CMOs now spend more on technology than talent. In fact, with an average budget of 29% allocated for MarTech, CMOs spend more on MarTech than on any other single expense.
Yet marketing budgets are themselves contracting or staying flat, averaging 12.1% of a company’s revenue in 2016, then contracting to 11.3% in 2017, and 11.2% in 2018. The message for marketers is clear: While MarTech will continue to be an important expenditure for marketers, shrinking budgets mean that they’ll be increasingly expected to actually justify the spend - and get the absolute most return on investment from their current stack.
MarTech is by far the highest expenditure in a CMO’s budget. Image courtesy Gartner.
Takeaways
While these three challenges may not seem all that surprising, it turns out that savvy marketers are already tackling these challenges to take full ownership of their data, bridge the gaps in their MarTech stacks, and drive more ROI from the tools they already use.
Personal finance leader FICO took full control of its marketing data by connecting its marketing platform to its data warehouse to increase deliverability 30%, open rates 26%, and click-through rates 9%. Analytics leader New Relic closed gaps within its 100,000+ customer self-service program to double engagement rates and 6x click-through. And advertising leader AdRoll drove more ROI from its existing data enrichment and CRM tools to directly grow the bottom line with 13% more sales appointments.
Learn how you can take full control of your marketing data by connecting your MarTech stack to get the most ROI from it by joining a weekly group demo.