The recent B2B Marketing survey on industry wide use of martech shows that a tactical – rather than strategic – approach to martech investment is prevalent across, leading not only to a seller’s market for software vendors, but a stormy sea of churn for marketing software users. As companies discover that prior tech investments are not suitable, money is re-invested in the same areas instead of being used for new projects.
As the one business department most accustomed to spending externally on agency services and technology, marketing has not necessarily been subject to the same financial disciplines as their colleagues. But the spending honeymoon is over. Chief financial officers have turned their attention to marketing expenditures and expect answers.
Only those marketing organisations with a clear strategic approach to their marketing technology stack will be able to ensure that their spending is providing a realistic return on investment. It’s the responsibility of the chief marketing officer or marketing director to ensure that all the marketing technology investments they’re responsible for (software, external services, training, recruitment) provide full value.
A martech strategy must include several elements of planning, guidelines and frameworks. As the title implies, it includes the technology plan itself with a description of the current status (backed up by a recent technology audit) and a list and/or calendar of technology projects for the coming period (broken down into investment areas, make or buy decisions, status of technology acquisition, and an integrations project plan).
It should also include a process re-engineering plan, discussing how it is planned to adopt the new digital marketing methods with the associated change management projects addressing migration and skills acquisition. Another component of the strategy should be a resources plan (documenting staffing, recruitment, external assistance, and training).
A clear, strategic approach to the mMartech stack ensures that spending across the whole marketing budget is optimally invested. Marketing has become primarily digital and requires technology to operate effectively – and a suitable mMartech infrastructure is needed to achieve that goal. But equally, digital marketing also requires the appropriate framework and processes to be effective in operating and leveraging that infrastructure.
The overall marketing strategy is a business plan emerging from the goals and strategies defined for the business it’ is representing. Ideally, a martech strategy could be documented onto an empty playing field, a greenfield site, where the optimal solution can be selected for each business process.
However, the reality is that It must also be informed by the current set of technologies installed, so a full technology audit is fundamental. The audit should record all installed technologies, how much they are used, the benefits that result, and what they cost to operate.
Having a martech strategy raises accountability and governance
An important benefit of formally creating and discussing a martech strategy is that you have one or several members of staff who take responsibility. The CMO or marketing director must assign this responsibility to a senior member of their staff. In larger organisations a separate group for marketing operations is created to manage the technology – the leader of that group could be the owner of the martech strategy.
The martech strategy, when completed, becomes a framework for all marketing staff (, and possibly IT staff), who are involved with the technology. Digital marketing means there many categories of marketing staff now involved: marketing application end-users, marketing operations staff and executives who need reports and dashboards. But also involved are citizen developers of digital experiences or external marketing apps; or those potential rogue buyers of marketing software (such as analytics) for individual use.
In a modern democratic business environment, there is no way to stop the individual investments, but establishing a framework will limit any potential damage that is caused to (integration, security, non-compliance or, privacy breaches.
