Martech Strategies

In partnership with Oracle, Digital Doughnut released their Transforming Marketing Technology report which insists that businesses need to use marketing technology to deflect disruptive forces and stay competitive. Unfortunately, most companies aren’t using this technology very well; organizations are struggling to incorporate the most current and efficient techniques into their marketing strategies.

Martech Statistics Suggest Room for Improvement

In their research with Digital Doughnut, Oracle delivers a few statistics that clearly express the need for better investigation and implementation of martech solutions.

• Two-thirds of organizations investing in martech don’t have a clearly defined budget. When costs are split within department budgets without guidance, it’s likely that resources will be divided across a too broad range of martech solutions, resulting in the slow realisation of benefits.
• Just 8% of businesses believe martech has been implemented well; 52% considered implementation to be ‘good in parts’ while 40% didn’t believe implementation had been done well at all. This typically isn’t down to the solutions which are being employed, but rather relates to a lack of understanding of what is required and inadequate user engagement.
• 40% of people were unconvinced of the benefits of martech, once more highlighting the need for suitable user engagement.
• 50% of martech users employ the solutions almost solely for delivering and analysing emails, overlooking most other uses and benefits of the technology.
• Less than half of businesses use martech for current topics, including the highly relevant social media sphere.
• 70% of companies aren’t maximising marketing capabilities with the use of martech.
• Only 10% of organizations are using martech to improve the customer experience as a whole.

Though these statistics are grim, it’s apparent that providing a smooth and connected customer experience leads to improved sales and business success. When marketing is able to make the customer experience more personal, engagement surges, and analysing the entire customer experience suggests potential improvements to operational processes. The essential goal of marketing technology isn’t about the data or analyses. It is, instead, about building the best customer/company relationship.

Cloud-Based Technologies

Along with decreased spending on infrastructure, marketing presently benefits from cloud-based technologies, including platform, infrastructure, and software as a service (SaaS), which have the dual benefits of reducing costs and introducing innovative uses of marketing data and technologies. Many marketers are finding that employing dynamic test-and-learn facilities afford better results, and as marketing solutions move to the cloud the time and effort needed to implement the latest tech resources that best service marketing needs and customer experience are reduced.

Rapid Growth of Martech Solutions

The latest Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic shows that, yet again, the marketing technology industry is swiftly expanding.

This research suggests that in just five years, martech solutions have increased from around 150 products or services in 2011 to approximately 3,500 in 2016. In fact, this year’s estimated number of solutions is nearly twice what it was last year. Top categories of solutions include sales automation, enablement and intelligence; social media marketing and monitoring; display and programmatic advertising; marketing automation and campaign/lead management; and content marketing.

Though previous thinking was that we’d be moving towards a single platform that incorporates all of the required marketing capabilities, this hasn’t happened, and instead, organisations tend to make use of multi-platform marketing tactics. Most users have found this to be more practical because just about every vendor in the marketing sector has developed resources that make their products and platforms easy to integrate into the broader marketing technology ecosystem. Moreover, the growth of Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) products, as well as new generations of tag managements and ‘marketing middleware’ solutions, makes it easier to connect business’ marketing technology to a common data exchange backbone. Consequently, the users of martech are empowered to select the most appropriate solution without vendor lock-in limiting their opportunities. There is no lack of martech provision; now it’s up to the organization to properly implement and employ.

By Jennifer Klostermann