By Mark Mountan
Marketing technology (martech) is often assessed on a point-solution and tactical basis rather than a strategic and holistic level. This leads to an underutilization of an organization’s marketing stack and inefficient application of the tools in which the business invests. This can be solved by changing the your approach to martech by following these three steps.
Clearly defining your marketing objectives and the strategies to enable you to achieve those objectives will directly inform you of the marketing technology your organization needs. For example, if deepening customer engagement and product use are important key results, then you will need fully integrated content management, digital asset management, offer management, a personalization engine, and access to customer transactional and behavioral data. Different objectives may require additional technology. The key is, to notdeploy technology that is not critical to enabling the outcomes you’re driving toward. Objectives and strategy first. Then technology.
In any large organization many tools will be distributed across various teams. If your organization is bringing on tools in response to a new tactical need, you risk adding overlapping or wholly duplicative functionality. It is imperative to conduct an inventory of the tools within your marketing stack and understand the holistic impact of adding a new capability. A current state assessment allows the business to reorganize and streamline the sprawl of its current martech ecosystem. In the process, you may also discover gaps or a need to rearchitect a tool that is not is not being efficiently leveraged.
Conducting a gap analysis will determine short-term and longer term priorities. You can identify immediate actions such as tool utilization that would yield ‘quick wins’ in the near term while developing a strategy of how best to invest and integrate other tools to attain a long-term goal.
One element of a long-term strategy should be an emphasis on holistic marketing that marries the marketing experience and product experience. By reevaluating technology assets and strategizing for the future, you open a door for marketing and product teams to become more joined up with a view to communicating aligned calls-to-action for consumers .
At Capco Studio, we bring together creative services and tech-enabled marketing operations to drive business impact for financial services clients. We specialize in marketing technology simplification among other offerings that can be customized to your organization’s unique needs.
Contact us to learn how we can guide you through the three steps to approach marketing technology and implement an efficient, automated stack solution that allows for accessible data and reduces risk and technical debt.