Marketers are facing a major issue: they are not taking full advantage of the capabilities of their marketing technology (martech) stack. Despite a huge increase in spending on martech, utilization of martech solutions is declining year on year. Gartner’s latest report shows that utilization is down 42% from last year and 58% from 2020. Statista reports that organisations are now spending 25.4% of their marketing budget on technology.
So why is utilization so low? Dominic Colosante, CEO of 2X, a B2B marketing-as-a-service agency, believes it’s largely down to skills, governance, stack sprawl and complexity. He points to the lack of training and resources available to marketers to learn how to use the new technology, as well as the ever-growing complexity of the tech stack which is making it harder for marketers to take full advantage of their martech investment.
The complexity is caused by a number of factors, including the short tenure of CMOs and the tendency for CMOs to add technology they are familiar with, even if a solution for that function already exists. This results in adding solutions with redundant capabilities, creating a situation where marketers are overwhelmed with too many remotes for the same devices.
Customer data challenges are also a major factor in preventing marketers from leveraging their martech stack. Collecting and unifying customer data across different systems can be a major obstacle to using it for personalization, advertising, and measurement. Gartner suggests reevaluating your approach to customer data to see if shifting the burden of data management to IT could be a solution.
The issue of governance is also key. Who is the ‘voice of the stack’? Who is responsible for knowing all the functions, interactions and presenting this to those making changes? The CMO may seem like a natural choice, but they are often not there long enough and don’t have the technological chops. The solution, according to Colosante, is for organisations to create a new role of Chief Revenue Officer. This person would be responsible for operations and technology management across the go-to-market engine, and for understanding the architecture, targeting and functionality of the martech stack.
It’s clear that organisations need to take a more strategic approach to their martech stack if they are to make the most of their technology investments. Without proper governance, skills and resources, marketers are likely to continue to underutilise their martech stack, and miss out on the potential benefits.
Originally reported by Martech: https://martech.org/marketers-are-only-using-one-third-of-their-stacks-capability/
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