Buying the latest piece of martech is easy. It’s trying to make it work in conjunction with the rest of your stack that’s hard.
“In an ideal world you’d wipe the slate clean, start again with unlimited budget and everything would be perfect,” says Jane Morrin, director of digital marketing at the Irish tech business Corvil. “But even then I don’t think we’ll ever get full integration. The martech stack is exploding at too crazy a rate to ever contain that.”
But for those not in a position to start from scratch – which will be the majority of businesses out there – “it may be necessary to forgo perfect integration and go with 80% of the way there. I do believe it’s a pipe dream, but it depends on where you’re standing.”
With new tools coming onto the market every few weeks, there’s always benefits to take advantage of. But a major frustration is that many of these tech start-ups choose to partner with a single tool or vendor – and you’re out of luck if it’s not the one you use. But the inability to integrate shouldn’t necessarily mean a hard stop – unless it’s a key pillar of the stack such as CRM or marketing automation.
“I have bought a tool in the past six months that doesn’t really integrate, and I’m still making great use of it,” Morrin adds. “You can still buy tools and use them independently of the rest of your tech stack. [Integration] is one of the first questions you should ask when buying tech, but if the tech is excellent and is going to make a huge benefit to the team and your marketing efforts, I don’t think you should exclude it.”
And it works in reverse. An ABM platform Jane was considering didn’t sync up with her MA platform, and the team didn’t have the resources to maintain it as a separate platform, so it became a no-go.
She continues: “I can’t control integration, and I need to work with what I have. The main thing about working with what you have is don’t buy a piece of tech unless you can actually resource it, and have enough time to use it. Even if it does integrate brilliantly, it needs to be put to use and made to work.
Shadow IT, security and the stackMarketers rarely consider the risks adding new tech to their stack can create for their organisations in pursuit of results, according to Holly Rollo, CMO at RSA Security.Speaking at an event in February, Rollo said: “We are leveraging a lot of these amazing cloud tools. And because we like to think we’re innovative, we like to jump on the next big thing to take advantage of it.“The issue is we’re functioning based on speed – we want to get these tools and infrastructure built as soon as possible so we can show ROI or for our next budget cycle. So we’re going around IT to do it. We did a survey recently, and 75% agreed marketing builds ‘shadow IT’ to create this infrastructure. The average number of cloud-based tools for martech is 91. From a security standpoint, that’s a lot of potential IT problems.“Marketing organisations don’t understand the risks that could potentially happen because we aren’t building for security, we aren’t building for privacy, we’re building for speed and innovation, and trying to build a customer experience.”
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Any technology will only be as effective as the people in control of it. And the tech stack explosion will require more highly-skilled resources in your teams.
“We have marketing people, we have tech people, and then we’ve got these hybrid marketers, who are a mix between the two,” Morrin says. “We do need more of them, and we need more technical people to be part of marketing teams as well because they’re the ones who can understand deeply how the marketing technology works.”
As the martech landscape becomes more complex, it’s Jane’s view that more technical people will be required to complement the strategic vision provided by the marketers if the integration is trickier than a simple, out-of-the-box approach.
“There is a permanent role there, because having someone on a team that is a marketing technologist will enable you to change tech as frequently as possible, and open up more opportunities to choose better tech,” she adds. “It’s an up-and-coming role, which I think needs to be in place and have someone with a more technical background.”
The martech itself can be relatively user-friendly – according to Morrin marketers familiar with one particular provider should be able to pick up a rival’s product fairly quickly. But issues may arise with stakeholders who might not have directly been involved in the purchase but are affected by its results, for instance if a new MA system impacts on sales processes, operations or reporting. The key, says Jane, is early involvement in the conversation and talking to them from their, rather than marketing’s, perspective.
How much more could vendors contribute to alleviate these integration issues? It has to be a partnership, says Jane, where both sides are honest about the situation.
“One of the questions the vendor should ask the buyer – and I’ve never been asked this – is show me your tech stack, and let me talk you through it,” she says. “The vendor can only take it so far, and if there are major customisations – it depends on what your sales and marketing processes are – the buyer is the only one who really knows those, so how can you expect the vendor to?
“If you’re very clear with the vendor, then there shouldn’t be a problem. But there’ll always be parts that don’t integrate and conflict somewhere. On the vendor side, they can tend to sell the dream that everything will be automated and very little work will actually be needed. But there’ll always be anomalies.”
