As per Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey 2019, only 58% of marketers are using the full capabilities and potential of their marketing stack.
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Marketers are investing heavily in marketing technologies, but they are still unsure about how to use them to maximum capabilities. Another issue is that many vendors are over-selling the marketing technologies to firms. Gartner’s report does not entirely blame the overselling by the integrated suite vendors for the 40% of marketers not using their marketing potential to the maximum capacity. The biggest reason for the failure to optimize the martech stack is due to a lack of proper need analysis and subsequent ill-informed investments or de-investments in the correct marketing technology due.
Proper and smart martech utilization by marketers is what will translate marketing technology into business effectiveness. Marketing teams must become more agile, focusing on talent development, training, and system integration. To smoothly walk through the martech roadmap, firms should invest heavily on skill and capability development. Marketing leaders need to create a working environment for the overall growth of marketers. It should be focused on mastering the technology in the martech stack investing in training courses, workshops, and conferences for employees.
Marketers need to focus on learning, not only on execution. Research by Gartner indicates that 29% of marketing leaders admit that upskilling and training the marketing staff is a significant weakness, leading to the martech stack ineffectiveness. Business leaders have foreseen the inability to find the right people or lack of investment in training as the most significant consideration in the entire scenario. Clearly, vendors are also a part of the cycle that takes the blame.
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While in-house training matters, martech vendors also have a vital role to play. The research by Gartner found that about 27% of marketing leaders report either recruiting efficient martech resources or integration between different martech solutions as the most significant impediment to effectiveness. Large vendors try to provide out-of-the-box integration capabilities to address the reported integration challenge. They are now more open to the idea of integrating with competitors as well.
The challenges to guarantee ROI from martech strategies is never-ending. It is a struggle for marketers to optimize their software budget to optimize their tech stack budget. Marketing leaders and CMOs are under increasing pressure to prove ROI on their marketing expenditure. But, the key to end this struggle is that- firms should focus on building a tech stack based on the foundation of the highest quality tools and data for increased efficiency and better collaboration in order to create the most significant impact on the customers.
