Once, B2B marketers just focussed on lead generation and passed conversion over to sales. Now, we must harness the power of marketing technology (martech) to analyse and drive the customer experience. We can push customers towards conversion through optimising their journey and the performance of our communications, platforms and campaigns.
More and more brands are set to take advantage of martech: Gartner reported CMOs’ technology spend will overtake CIOs’ by 2017. Updated each year, the Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic demonstrates the staggering wealth to choose from – reaching 3874 solutions, up from 1876 in 2015.
Deciding which technologies are worthy of space in your budget – contributing to your department’s efficiency and delivering a strong ROI – is enough to send even the tech fanatics among us into a panic. Below I’ll introduce martech and explore the foundation you must build to get the most out of the tools available.
Connect with business objectives
Martech covers how marketing departments harness technology to create more effective workflows, processes and operations, alongside gathering further user insight and benefits. Ultimately, it helps marketers achieve their goals and objectives. Technologies available include CRM systems, MA platforms, CMS, multivariate platforms, social media management tools and more.
Fortunately, not all will support B2B marketers, so you can happily rule out B2C and advertising technologies. Remember, there’s no point using tech for the sake of it. Martech’s main objective is to boost your department’s ROI through increasing sales revenue, lead generation and process efficiency. While considering each and every piece of tech, ask yourself one critical question: how will it fulfil your business objectives?
Boost analytic resources
Martech’s explosive arrival poses a tricky challenge. Not so long ago proficiency with CRM, CMS and basic analytics tools was enough to get the B2B marketer’s job done, but now they must seek the right martech resources.
A technical-focussed marketing operations function is no longer merely ‘nice to have’. Hiring, outsourcing or training current tech-lovers will depend on your company – some require data scientist/analyst talent, while others need a senior CMT (chief marketing technologist) to formulate the overall strategy.
Whichever is the case, the team’s visibility of the bigger picture is critical: create an integrated vision of the company’s marketing infrastructure, beyond buying and managing individual tools.
Build a solid foundation
Avoid the chaos with a solid foundation. Your team should become more efficient, impactful and accountable with a solid ‘marketing stack’, which is the popular term for collective marketing technologies.
Ideally, integrate core solutions at the heart of your current processes. For many B2B organisations, this would be a MA solution (e.g. Marketo or Hubspot) and CRM (e.g. Salesforce or Zoho). These solutions must be flexible and scalable, with real time and energy invested in the correct set up of data entry rules, flow and maintenance processes. Otherwise, your data will be unusable and no amount of tech could find any insights. Next, identify gaps against business goals for potential expansion. Your founding solutions will integrate with hundreds of other tools; IT teams could even create custom integrations to suit exact requirements.
After selecting the full range of tech, managers must draw up the high-level marketing architecture that will achieve key business goals. Specifying how the overall solution will achieve business goals, respective managers should define how each tech solution fits together and outline the flow of information, interaction and activity. Critically, this will avoid a ‘frankenstack’ – tools working in isolation, making management and gleaning insights too difficult.
Careful not to break it
It’s vital to guard the core of your martech stack. Breakages can cause unintended chaos such as data being passed incorrectly between systems, actions automated at the wrong time, and people prompted to take less efficient tasks. Culprits range from faulty integrations, poor setup or a lack of planning around how each solution should work as part of the whole picture.
Each time you add a tool to your martech stack, review the planning phase and define how it will integrate with the overall solution. As I’ve encountered broken stacks (and their consequences) so often, I would even advise against adding the latest tech if it doesn’t have a proven ability to work with the rest of your stack.
Manage expectations
Martech’s proliferation has made marketing more data-driven than ever. But the idea we can measure everything is sadly a misconception and it’s ultimately increasing the pressure to demonstrate ROI for every line item of budget spend.
Setting realistic expectations for Martech is important, especially in a B2B environment. B2B sales cycles are often long and complex, with decision-makers requiring multiple interactions with a company before buying. No technology can tell you the exact amount of influence a specific whitepaper or email had over a decision. At best, you’ll discover the list of online touchpoints that contributed (and possibly a few offline ones), or which correlated more strongly with conversion.
Conclusion
Choosing and managing martech solutions is no mean feat. It’s time for us to give the resources and strategic direction that this field deserves. After all, the digital age has transformed modern marketing. The best B2B marketers will dedicate sufficient time to learning and evaluating new solutions as they emerge, yet remain realistic about the power of technology.
As the omni-channel customer experience becomes more prevalent, the complete integration of your back-end systems and martech solutions is critical to business success.
