How to make MarTech work for your business
With our economy becoming more and more data-driven, business’ are investing more in technology than ever before, and this includes investment in the ever-growing range of marketing technology solutions out there.
The term ‘MarTech’ (Marketing Technology) includes elements such as Digital Asset and Brand Management systems, Multi-Channel Marketing tools, AI, CRM and Online Review & Approval Solutions.
However, this increase in available MarTech solutions can mean confusion for many businesses in terms of what’s deemed a good investment, and what isn’t. Just how do you know what marketing tech is right for you?
Even when you invest in the ‘right’ tech, business’ will need a team with the knowledge and skills to interpret data, analyse trends and incorporate marketing platforms in to both their short-term, and long term strategies.
With MarTech ever evolving, many businesses admit that their staff just simply don’t have these skills that make the most of their marketing technology. Having the appropriate key skills to utilise this technology in integrated data-driven workflows that stretch across many channels is a huge challenge. MarTech that is invested in must make a positive change to a business, and not just be bought for the sake of it.
In the UK and North America, brands have increased their MarTech budgets by 44% over the last 2 years[B1] , with the market set to be worth up to £40 billion by 2022*. What this reveals is not only a huge existing and exponentially growing market, but also a growth in confusion, complexity and choice of the technology available for marketing teams.
Another key trend identified in the study by WARC and Moore Stephens was brands increasing their overall spend on in-house technology. In the UK and North America, nearly two-thirds (63%) of media budgets are now spent in-house, compared to 44% 3 years ago.
When it comes to the choice of MarTech, it appears that AI (Artificial Intelligence) has the biggest skills gap, with there being almost twice as many jobs as people to fill them, with a continuing rise of 487% since 2014**. Clearly there is a greater need for more training and understanding in this area for marketeers, as a great deal of marketing technology is now led by AI and ML (Machine Learning). However, it’s not just the aforementioned areas that skill set gaps have been identified. According to an article in UK Tech News, there are data science skills gaps in 2020 attributed to lack of funding, time & support, as well as “lack of a standardised set of criteria to form a framework and description for data science roles, including learning and development for skills advancement which has the potential to make recruiting for these roles challenging ”
So how do you choose the right solution for your business?
A large number of business we deal with are often unsure where to start when it comes to streamlining their MarTech and making it work for them. To start with it’s important to understand who your customers are, or who is the target audience, what kind of content they are looking for and how are they expecting to receive it. It all comes down to building a strategy based around the current and future needs of your customers. It’s not wise to simply jump on the latest trend if it is not right for you, or even worse base a strategy on “that’s how it has always been done in the past”. Once you start to know what the end goal is you can start thinking about what is needed to achieve it.
You may find you need to re-think your whole or parts of your organisational strategy or your business strategy before embarking on major MarTech change. For example embarking on a customer-centric (also known as client-centric) strategy is a significant transformation – but one that is often required in part or whole for elements of your MarTech strategy to be truly successful, and importantly truly leveraged.
This can involve reassessing not just the classic funnel activities, but also considering the related disciplines that impact or influence future acquisition, reputation, attrition – for example alignment between your customer service centres and your marketing functions, alignment of your partners and supply-chains, removal of data or functional silos that prevent sharing of key information, ensuring the data you need is in a ready / fit for purpose state, or that you have a process and resources to get it there, defining a common view what customer or client centric actually is, defining the customer-experience you want to deliver – and how much you need to invest in the 3 core streams - meets needs, is easy, is enjoyable.
To summarise, whether you’re looking at technology to improve marketing performance, technology to improve marketing operations, or both – it’s important have a business-led strategy or set of key goals (that are measurable), and within that to be clear on the risks and obstacles that need to be hurdled to make the MarTech investment a success.
This is where it’s a good idea to get professional advice from people who properly understand the industry, and who have had experience successfully delivering MarTech programs for clients on similar journeys to yours. Then you better equipped and supported to source & select the right MarTech and make the key decisions around evolution / enhancement, integration or wholesale change. Speaking to a consultancy who are not tied to a narrow portfolio of MarTech products also allows the widest possible range of options in which more is always better and bigger isn’t always best!
MarTech can be a big all singing and all dancing system or a bespoke custom development, each of which has pros and cons, but it is more often an integration of varying technologies that are tailored to your business requirements. Since so many solutions are now available ‘off the shelf’ so to speak, it’s possible to be flexible and often easier to integrate these, rather than building a potentially expensive, complicated system that is can be more time-consuming to maintain.
In successful MarTech implementations you will always find a mix of highly skilled and focussed cross-functional teams including, business, data, technology, operations, support, process and marketing teams – these should be involved at every major step of the process and in all key decisions, engendering into successful programs all the right DNA, inputs and successful ingredients that will be the foundations for your program.
How can a business measure ROI when it comes to MarTech?
When it comes to measuring ROI with marketing technology, it’s worth noting that many benefits may not be seen for a reasonable length of time, and that a sound MarTech infrastructure is a long term investment that’s embedded within both short-term and long-term goals. ROI is one of the most important things for a marketing team to pay attention to, but it’s also one of the greatest challenges.
In order to calculate ROI, a Marketing Technology stack must include detailed reporting and if possible, define what a business is wanting to measure from the beginning of the MarTech implementation journey. Having clear definitions at the start will ultimately help make it easier for a business (and us!) to establish the necessary technology requirements.
The rate at which marketeers are able to convert leads into opportunities (and therefore opportunities into customers or clients) is a great way to measure how effective your MarTech is. Identifying which processes are helping move prospects down the funnel toward a sale is extremely important from a business perspective. The faster your MarTech can help achieve a sale, the greater the revenue for your business over a shorter period of time.
An example of a big name business really seeing ROI in their MarTech when it comes to new customers (viewers) has been Netflix and their use of Big Data. By using the right marketing tools, Netflix was able to predict that their new show ‘House of Cards’ would be a hit even with minimal promotion.
According to a case study by Clickz.com “…by analyzing its data, Netflix realized that a significant percentage of its 33 million subscribers at the time had streamed director David Fincher’s work, The Social Network, from beginning to end on its platform, and that films featuring Kevin Spacey were always successful with its audience….Within three months of introducing House of Cards, Netflix added 2 million subscribers in the US and 1 million additional subscribers internationally” A clear ROI in MarTech if ever there was one!
Another method of determining the ROI of technology, is to focus on MarTech that enables productivity gains within a content operation is a good metric to focus on. An example of company productivity gain as a measure of MarTech ROI is determining a technology’s ability to enable marketing teams to produce more content in less time and/or less people needed to create the content. By using an efficient marketing tool, a marketing team can potentially save time collating spreadsheets, searching for content and even creating it. These productivity gains equal ROI.
Here at Team6ix we talk you through your business needs and requirements, and our agnostic team ensure they help your business to reach your marketing goals and streamline your MarTech stack.
Give us a call and we can give you a free, no-obligation assessment of your marketing needs.
· *Source, MarTech Advisor https://www.martechadvisor.com/articles/martech-news/big-martech-news-2019/
· ** Source, Recruitment International