3 Ways to Get More out of your MarTech platform

As organizations digitally transform their marketing and take advantage of advanced marketing technology (martech), they often struggle to keep up with what’s required to keep their marketing engines fueled and high performing. In fact, the Gartner Marketing Technology Survey 2019 findings reveal that marketing leaders report utilizing only 58 percent of their martech stack’s potential.

Marketing leaders know that martech is vital to the success of their business. That’s why they keep investing in it: this year it is estimated that CMOs in the U.S. will spend more than $122 billion on investments in martech and services according to Forrester. But the digital transformation of marketing has happened fast—and continues to evolve—so gaps have occurred along the way that are limiting marketing teams’ ability to make the most of their investments.

Identifying those gaps and helping organizations to address them is how we’ve helped our clients transform their businesses and increase their marketing ROI by an average of 17x. In our work with enterprise clients and tech-fueled businesses across the globe, we’ve identified three key areas to focus on in order to get more out of your martech stack and succeed in the new era of marketing: people, process, and technology.

People:
Rethink your teams. Marketing has changed and so have the skillsets you need from your internal and external teams. Identify the skills you need to not only create a programmatic approach for your martech campaigns but to also be able to continually analyze and adapt that approach for specific campaign goals and diverse audiences.

You may find you require more strategy, technology, and data analysis skills. You’ll likely also find that you need on-demand and diverse creative resources that you can scale to crank out relevant, highly engaging content at speed. Having a team that not only has the right subject matter expertise for your offerings and target industries but that’s representative of your diverse customers—who understands their challenges, interests, and values as humans—is vital to creating informed, relatable content that connects authentically with your audience.

You’ll then want to design and build your marketing teams with a synergistic combination of the right talent from your own organization and your agency partners. And to make sure those teams are hyper-collaborative and responsive in order to achieve the lowest cost to market and highest ROI for your marketing efforts.

Process:
Design efficient and agile ways to activate and execute your marketing programs on your technology platforms in a way that keeps them always on and always relevant—whether you’re running campaigns for just your brand or with other brands and partners.

Who needs to be involved—and when—from a technology execution, content strategy, and creative production standpoint? Who will be your stakeholders and what are their roles and responsibilities? What are the processes, team workflows, and data you need to ensure that everyone is informed with accurate information at the right time? Build a unified, repeatable process that incorporates all the complexities, nuances, and interdependencies to execute and optimize large-scale campaigns with as little friction as possible. Programmatize what makes sense and leave room for quick, frequent testing and adjustments.

Technology:
You don’t just need the right martech tools, you also need to make sure you have the right data and technology connections in place to support all the aspects of what you’re trying to accomplish.

What are all the tools that need to be automated and integrated? For example, you may want to use a marketing spend tracking tool to correlate your campaign investments to not only the qualified leads that come out of your marketing automation tool, but also whether those leads were converted to customers and revenue—data that would be provided by your CRM solution.

Whatever your unique landscape, build the right technology connections so you can harness your investments to their full potential and get the best results from your marketing programs.

Take your best next steps to up your martech ROI:
As leading experts in advanced marketing technologies, Knack is the partner to help you identify and address gaps in any or all of the above areas to get more out of your martech investments. In addition, we deliver campaigns, creative, and content on a global scale to help keep your marketing engines fueled and to drive your desired results.

Every organization’s marketing digital transformation journey is different. We can meet you wherever you are to help you strategize—and then execute—your best next steps.

We’d love to hear from you. And stay tuned for more upcoming blog posts with proven approaches for succeeding in the new era of marketing.