if you’re planning on being at Get Stacked, let me know if I can buy you a coffee and secondly, try to make time to see the brilliant speaker Dr Chris Boorman
In a few weeks time B2B Marketing’s annual Get Stacked event takes place, exploring all things marketing technology. I was lucky enough to catch up with Joel Harrison, Editor in Chief of B2B Marketing and get his perspective on the continued upheaval and fast changing pace of this particular area of marketing – take a look at the video!
By now we’re all familiar with ChiefMartec’s annual infographic detailing the ever expanding technology choices facing today’s CMO and it’s probably unsurprising that all the forecasts suggest this expansion shows no signs of slowing down. According to recent BDO research $13bn additional spend was made on MarTech in the UK and US versus the year before! I have enormous sympathy for those who are tasked with wading through this chaos and making decisions on which to invest in.
Yet, at the same time, it is the growth in marketing technology which is enabling us to do things we’ve never been able to do before, helping to personalise, tailor and deliver engaging experiences in new ways that deliver real impact.
Since we first opened our doors for business, Agent3 has provided specialist services to customers around content, data and technology – the three agents of change! That was a conscious decision as we believe that in too many instances those areas are looked at in isolation. Organisations commission an amazing piece of creative content, but haven’t considered fully how they’ll use technology to get it to the target audience. Similarly, they build a text book nurture flow in their marketing automation system, but the content strategy hasn’t been created based upon insight from customer data and consequently the campaign doesn’t deliver.
Unfortunately, the allure of buying a shiny new piece of technology based on all the amazing claims from the salesperson (and their marketing teams!) too often ends in wasted budget and under utilised tools. Humans are pre-programmed to look for an easy solution and the perceived ‘silver bullet’ of adding something else to your tech stack can be a hard temptation to resist.
So why do these things fall down? I think we can broadly bracket the reasons for this in to three areas:
1. Lack of skills: With new tech and functionality constantly being released, finding people who are genuine experts with deep knowledge is hard. Helping them keep their skills current can be even harder when they inevitably get pulled in to a whole range of other tasks and responsibilities
2. Lack of integration: Without a strategy for pulling your martech stack in to one coherent flow of information there is a huge danger of silos developing, meaning that much of the advanced functionality of these platforms is rendered redundant
3. Lack of a plan: Not having a holistic plan for rollout, maintenance and ongoing optimisation of martech investments often results in a fragmented tech stack, disjointed customer / prospect experiences and ultimately wasted budget
Does any of this sound familiar? Our marketing automation and applied technology teams have tonnes of experience supporting customers who have reached a point where despite best efforts they’re just not driving the ROI that they’d hoped for. If you’d like to discuss your situation and get support on making the most of your marketing technology investments, get in touch.
And if you’re planning on being at Get Stacked, let me know if I can buy you a coffee and secondly, try to make time to see the brilliant speaker Dr Chris Boorman, Marketing Leader, International regions EMEA & APAC, Forcepoint talking about the value of slowing down to speed up when it comes to Martech.