Do you know how much you are paying for marketing tools every year?
MarTech investments account for around 25% of total marketing budgets on average. However, in the 2022 Gartner Marketing Technology survey, marketers report that they utilize only 42% of the capabilities available in their MarTech stack, down from 58% in 2020.
Challenges that lead to Martech underutilization
The last ten years have seen an explosion of interest and new applications in MarTech. Back in 2011 when Scott Brinker started tracking the MarTech landscape, there were just 150 tools. Today, the number is 9,932.
The complexity has grown exponentially, which makes it more challenging than ever to keep technology up-to-date and staff up-to-speed in acquiring the necessary MarTech knowledge.
Challenges are mounting in all aspects, but most marketers cited the below three root causes as the biggest hurdles standing in the way of effectively leveraging MarTech, according to Gartner’s survey:
- A significant amount of overlap among marketing technology solutions (30%)
- Difficulty identifying and recruiting talent to drive adoption/utilization (28%)
- Complexity/sprawl of the marketing technology ecosystem (27%)
Why should you care?
Failing to fully leverage the tools or finding more cost-effective alternatives can lead to a degradation of your marketing ROI, especially during times like 2023 when the economic outlook doesn’t look promising. The impact of such gaps will be even more detrimental in the event of recession-driven budget tightening.
Make better use of your marketing tools
It’s time to scrutinize your investment on marketing tools and squeeze out more ROI! If you are looking for ways, here are some of our suggestions:
1. Conduct a marketing technology stack audit
The very important first step is to identify the gaps and establish routine measurement. You should:
a) Start with reviewing what tools you have in place, how they work together, whether they meet the goals and requirements you set for your business and what your team has been using or not using them for.
b) Calculate the percentage of utilization and the cost of acquisition against the business value it provides to keep track of your Martech ROI.
Business goals and objectives shift over time, so learn to adapt with new marketing tools and integration. To keep up with the ever-changing business landscape, it’s observed that more marketing teams start to assess their marketing tech stack at a more frequent, regular pace.
If you don’t have a review routine in place or struggle with how to make a start, consider taking advantage of our free Martech audit. With our experience built on thousands of Martech stack reviews, we can set you off to a flying start much faster.
2. Choose best-of-breed over integrated suites
Marketers are divided between best of breed and best of suite when it comes to marketing technology investments. Both approaches have their pros and cons.
Although in Southeast Asia, we see businesses prefer an all-in-one platform for its ease of management almost by default, recent research indicates businesses that choose the best-of-breed approach have a higher chance to see the technology exceeding their expectation (2022 Gartner Marketing and Communications Technology Survey).
An integrated suite that bundles all the functionalities may seem powerful, but in reality marketers often find themselves only using a small set of features yet unable to cut the cost off from unused ones.
Rather than being locked into one inflexible, single-vendor platform, where change requires huge amounts of planning, resources, and disruption, consider using best-of-breed solutions to build a composable Martech stack that allows you to stay more agile and adaptable to economic changes.
Read more: Growth Stack Series #2 – HOW TO develop a strategy for your Growth Stack
3. Migration pain shouldn’t be a blocker
Many businesses are passive about evaluating new marketing tech alternatives, not because they are 100% satisfied with the existing solutions, but because migration and relearning of a new platform can be strenuous.
The fear of data loss, missing connectivity and level of engineering efforts required stand out as recurring concerns when it comes to replatforming, especially among companies that are short of engineer resources or stuck in monolithic legacy business systems that don’t integrate easily with other solutions.
Don’t let the friction stop your quest for more effective tools though – Migration pain is a one-off but the impact can be long-term. If migration or integration is your bottleneck, Martech agencies with tech capabilities like Ematic Solutions can serve as your augmented engineering team.
At Ematic, we’ve performed thousands of platform migrations – We can smoothen your migration/integration by providing both hands-on engineering support and strategic technology planning to step-change your way to the stack of your dreams.
4. Leverage outside experts to bridge the skill gap
However good a tool it may be in theory, tech will never provide ROI in practice if end users can’t get a grip with it. Internal talents and skills gaps are considered the biggest challenges to capitalize on the investment in marketing technology.
But let’s face it! With the proliferation of new marketing tools and updates, asking your team to always keep up the knowledge is a bit unrealistic as they also need to focus on strategy and other areas where they excel.
On the other hand, Martech consultancy agencies like Ematic Solutions have an advantage of “economies of scale” in knowledge accumulation across platforms and industries which is often impossible to match in-house. Leaning on such experts to help your team with onboarding, platform adoption and staying abreast on industry updates that are relevant to your business will make it less difficult to get your in-house team to ramp up the skills and thrive in the complex Martech world.
According to the State of Martech 2021 report, 18% of senior marketers are using an external partner or agency to upskill their employees.
Optimize your marketing technology stack for success
Marketing tool utilization is essential to your digital marketing success. We’ve built knowledge in hundreds of MarTech tools and would like our expertise to be of use to you!
