Why companies struggle to make MarTech a great success story in their organisations?
Recent articles show that there are more than 8000 MarTech applications in the market, signifying an incredible growth over the last ten years.
This is undoubtedly a sure sign that MarTech plays a growing and essential role in marketing. However, it can also open up a challenge for marketing departments to understand which applications are most useful, along with how to successfully integrate them to maximise demand generation results.
MarTech applications play a role in 3 key steps of the process – market analysis and planning, campaign execution, and ROI assessment – that cannot be replaced by any other resource or asset.
In step 1, MarTech enables you to size your total addressable market and segment it. You can enrich data, understand your target audience (including understanding the overall sentiment towards your offering and your competitors’), recognise key influencers by topic, and identify the best channels to drive your messages to the right audience, etc.
What’s more, you can detect ‘signals’ from companies or individual decision makers about their intent or preference in buying a category of products or a specific brand offering.
In step 2, the execution phase, MarTech delivers an even higher number of applications. These empower content management, personalised delivery (emails, videos, chatbox, etc), individualised offerings (upselling, cross-selling, renewal, win-back promotions, etc) real time reporting, media management, tracking of target-audience behavior, build scoring, and trigger actions.
In step 3, you can also assess campaign performance, utilising capabilities like multi-touch attribution models to gather intelligence and form an understanding of what worked and why, gaining insights for a better planning of future campaigns.
By bringing all this together to boost your predictive analytics capabilities, you can build the right offer (what) for the right audience (who) at the right time (when).
What is the greatest hurdle marketers face to ensure that they will fully benefit from their investment in MarTech? Ultimately, it is the acquisition and retention of talent who will get the most out of the technology, who can be very hard to find and keep, as highly demanded in the market.
First of all, the landscape is very complex and continually changing. Your tech department is not necessarily focused on marketing apps and it can be an ongoing challenge and investment for your marketing department to keep up in such a fast moving discipline. It is essential to employ skilled resources proficient in both marketing and technology, who are able to ‘live and breathe’ the MarTech world, and provide you with the right insights.
Secondly, it can be very challenging to integrate several vendors and modules in an end-to-end software stack, to include all 3 steps above. All vendors would claim ‘smooth integration’ and ‘automatic data transfer’ within their apps but the reality is that perfect systems integration and seamless data transfer simply do not exist. You need smart engineers who can continually work to minimise issues and mitigate any loss of efficiency.
Finally, faced with ever increasing volumes of data, you need data scientists who are able to understand and generate a concrete impact on your marketing operations.
Agencies need to play a key role in helping clients mitigate the above challenges and maximise the power of MarTech for their business.
If you want to know how Expandi can help you maximise your marketing results taking full advantage of the latest Martech technology contact us as contactus@expandigroup.com or visit our site expandigroup.com
