With more technology available, the martech landscape has become overwhelming. In this blog we’ll act as your martech advisor and let you know some tips and tricks to navigating it!
As of 2020, there are nearly 8,000 different marketing tools available to the public. The frenzy to find new tools to meet a specific challenge is universally ongoing and shows no signs of stopping. It is tempting to incorporate or ask for a new tool whenever marketing or sales challenges arise that your existing systems can’t easily address.
However, taking a one-off approach to adding marketing tools and tech into your existing arsenal can easily get in the way of marketing success.
What’s more, steep learning curves, complex features, and integration issues slow productivity, not to mention, added (and possibly unnecessary) costs reduce your return on investment (ROI).
Even so, there are many valid reasons to consider updating, replacing, or adding to existing tech systems. The right technologies can help teams produce content more efficiently, target consumers more effectively, and reveal insights that lead to more personalized, relevant content experiences.
How Would a Martech Advisor Evaluate Your Martech Strategy?
The best way to know if you need to update your current strategy or invest in new tech is a full review!
Once you complete a full systematic review of current and planned content technology needs, you can then evaluate any new tech options against those needs.
The first step is to establish a team to help you review what tech tools your business has in place today. Determining whether you’re getting the most out of each one, and what other features and functionalities you feel you need – right now, as well as in the future – is of the utmost importance. This will help you build a martech (marketing technology) strategy you can implement to govern all marketing technology purchase decisions, moving forward.
Who Should You Include On This Team?
It depends on who is responsible for martech strategy in your particular organization. In many companies, the chief marketing officer (CMO) leads the strategy, establishes KPIs, and selects the team to implement the strategy.
Of course, your content team leaders should have a seat at the table too. But strategic martech decisions need to involve more than just marketing and content team stakeholders. Including representatives from sales, customer service, IT, finance, and procurement in your process will result in a fully-integrated martech strategy that works well with the systems that are in place across all your business functions.
You can also consider inviting external partners to the decision-making team if they’ll need access to the systems you implement. But keep the number of people on the team small to avoid decision-by-committee fatigue.
Review Before You Act
Once you have the team in place, you will need to evaluate the benefits and challenges of investing in additional systems and tools. That process starts with an audit of your current marketing tools to make sure you’re getting the most out of the technology you’re already working with (and paying for) and to identify where gaps exist in your current tech capabilities.
For near-term quick wins, focus on these areas:
- Build up user adoption: Find out who owns the tech you have, who’s using it, and what they’re using it for. If you find significant gaps in adoption, you may want to invest in, and promote, training and education before you consider adding new tools.
- Pilot unexploited capabilities: Get familiar with any newer features or capabilities offered through your existing tools. Many organizations only use one or two of the core capabilities in the tech they already own because they aren’t aware of product upgrades they can take advantage of.
- Strengthen integrations: Prioritize areas that align with business goals. For example, organizations may have workflow tools that aren’t integrated with execution tools, which result in time-consuming manual data movement through copying and pasting.
- Harmonize processes: Review what is currently working and not working for your organization. Explore interim solutions that improve processes while you review new tech solutions.
- Evaluate martech needs that extend beyond marketing.
Build a Martech Advisor Proofed Strategy
By taking the insights you’ve gathered through your audit, build a strategy that can perform well across multiple functions of your enterprise:
Recognize a Need, a Challenge or a Pain Point
Review your business goals and content marketing objectives
Dig into your documented business strategies and current marketing plans to get a clear understanding of where your priority content goals and objectives lie. Asking these questions can help sharpen your focus:
- What are our plans for using content over the next 1, 5, or 10 years?
- How are we planning to grow our performance? Through acquisitions? By introducing new content products or services? By targeting new audiences and market segments?
- Will our customers change?
- Where will new customers congregate and how will they get information about the products and services you provide?
Map current and future marketing activities from your business goals
For example, if one of your business goals is to increase market share in the next five years, what content tactics will you use to meet that goal? Will you use search ads, social ads, digital content, physical or virtual events, email campaigns, account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, or another approach?
List other departments you’ll work with and the data your teams will need to share
Sales teams, social media teams, IT, and even customer success teams can frequently collaborate with marketing. So, it’s important to know what marketing data those teams might need access to, and the processes and tools they typically use to store, retrieve, update, and manage the customer data they generate from their own initiatives.
For example, if you know email campaigns will play a big role in your marketing future, consider which other teams might be involved in helping you execute and support those campaigns. Likewise, think about how your team might benefit from direct access to the customer data those other teams own – such as the products or versions they use, when they last updated, any feedback they’ve given to sales, or complaints they’ve made to customer service, and so on.
This coordination is an important step – 39% of companies in a recent survey said that their biggest challenges when it comes to digital transformation are the complexity of the current environment, an organizational structure not aligned to support transformation, and siloed mindsets and behaviours.
Develop a roadmap that shows the incremental needs across the organization
This roadmap should cover the changing needs of your organization. It is also a good idea to note overlapping needs.
Allow your organization to think and act strategically and avoid hasty and ultimately costly upgrades. You’ve got a problem. The latest and greatest content technology promises to solve it. But before you dive in, take a step back. An ad-hoc approach could cause more headaches in the long run. Our next blog post gives you a list of criteria as well as do’s and don’ts you should consider when evaluating different tools. To learn more about our full-service agency offerings or to request a free digital marketing assessment, please reach out to us.
