Navigating the Martech Landscape: Choosing and Implementing the Right Marketing Tools
Streamlining your marketing efforts through strategic tool selection, implementation, and maintenance
We all have increasingly high standards for the products that we buy — and for the marketing that sells them to us. Marketing trends evolve as quickly as the emerging technology that powers them while customers develop increasing expectations for their digital experiences, from campaign to check-out. Today, marketing experiences are expected to be hyper-personalized.
Personalized marketing comes down to data; it must be collected, organized, leveraged, and returned to users in ways that feel bespoke. But before marketing teams can start collecting and extrapolating data, they need the right tools & teammates to get it done — and that’s possibly the most challenging part.
The stakes are high. Marketing technology (‘martech’) is expensive, requires intricate alignment with technical teams, can be challenging to implement and maintain, and is usually only as good as the data & quality of that data behind it. It’s up to marketing leadership to make sure that new tools are vetted and executed properly.
I’ve led this process end-to-end at the helm of marketing departments for organizations of all sizes and scales, and had plenty of trial and error along the way (so that you don’t have to). Over the years, I’ve developed systematic methods to find, implement, and maintain tools so that they’re cost effective, collaborative, and yields meaningful ROI. Doing so takes careful consideration, clear communication, and ongoing vigilance.
Let’s break down the steps it takes to make this happen.
Stakeholder Alignment
Whether you’re replacing an existing tool or adding one to your stack, the decision is likely a complex one that involves stakeholders across several functions — including marketing, data, and engineering — each of which is impacted by the decision. Plus, the tool may require a change in workflows as well as an investment from your team beyond the cost of new software.
That’s why it’s best to start by aligning with key stakeholders on your collective evaluation principles and determining what is most critical for the organizations. Together, you should prioritize and pinpoint requirements. A few of the criteria that needs to be examined includes:
- Build vs Buy: Can this be built in-house or would it be more cost-effective to purchase in the short term? Typically, most teams start with third-party tools and shift internally as they scale, and then have a stronger sense of their use cases to inform their technical product roadmap and any customizations that the third-party tool cannot provide.
- Usability & Efficiency: Is the UI easy for marketers to understand and use for campaign creation, audience creation, journey building, editing, and other tasks?
- Scalability: How much and how fast can a tool process data? Does it have limitations for any given number of communications that may hinder your broader needs?
- Budget & Resources: How much support will your team need post-implementation, and can you manage it in-house? Should you hire an external agency for operations?
- Customer Service SLAs: If and when a system breaks, who fixes it and how quickly can it be resolved? What does downtime look like?
- Security: In the event of a data breach, what happens and what levels of liability exist?
- Cost: What’s the price for the tool, implementation, and ongoing maintenance?
If you’re replacing a tool, before you begin, consider when you need it up and running. The best way to do this is by looking at when your active contract expires and working backwards to define what is feasible: can you complete your evaluation and implementation in that period of time? Implementations always take longer than you think and it’s always more practical to allow for some margin of error and overlap time during a migration.
Requirements Gathering
With your core group together, it’s time to start gathering requirements; each team involved will likely have its own revaluation criteria and priorities. For example, marketers may care more about experimentation or personalization capabilities, while engineering may care more about ongoing maintenance costs.
Once you have all of your requirements documented and grouped, you can clearly communicate with potential vendors to set clear expectations, which also helps them tailor their demo to be more relevant to your use case. Following the demo, your team can score capabilities against the agreed-upon requirements, making it easier to align on a decision.
Governance & Optimizing Usage
According to a recent Gartner CMO Spend Survey, martech consumed the largest proportion of marketing budgets at nearly 26% of spend and has risen steadily over the last several years. Yet marketing leaders have reported that they only utilize a little more than half of their martech stack’s full breadth of capabilities, signaling how difficult it is for teams to extract the optimum value out of a tool and maximize utilization.
At this point, it’s important to examine how you’re charged — is it by how much data is ingested and stored, actually utilized for campaigns, or both? It’s one thing to go over your contracted budget due to positive growth, but it’s another to go over budget due to poor data management.
With a grasp on the pricing structure, you can begin to scale a governance structure to ensure that every platform and feature is maximized, including establishing parameters for utilization. It’s important to build these processes internally, in partnership with your vendor, and designate someone to keep track of limits and spending. Without this, you may run into a bit of trouble (not that I’m speaking from personal experience…).
One time, my marketing team used a tool that charged per use, but no one was keeping track of it. We blew through our entire year’s worth of usage in one month. As a result, we had to quickly create and enforce processes to monitor our spending. We assigned a “budget” to each region and built processes to ensure that marketers had clear business justification for using the tool.
Another time, we didn’t realize that we were being charged for all of the data in our CRM, regardless if we used it or not in our campaigns. We received a substantial overage bill and had to audit all of the data we stored to reduce costs. Going forward, we built a process to “test” the value of new data before we ingested it. If it proved valuable, we consider how often we’d utilize a specific data point: is it a one-off instance or applicable to multiple campaigns? While this may be cumbersome to get off the ground, it’s the right way to optimize your tools for long-term ROI.
Testing New Tools & ROI
If you’re evaluating a non-core, innovation-related tool (versus a foundational tool like an email marketing or customer data platforms), such as a personalization tool, it’s helpful to establish a POC (proof of concept) where your team can understand the full ROI. According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization 2021 report, companies that drive 40%+ of their revenue from personalization are rapidly outgrowing their counterparts. To measure this, build out use cases and examine the tool’s incremental value against its cost. Ideally, the incremental value (ie: revenue * your margin) exceeds the cost of the tool. ROI evaluations shouldn’t stop at POCs for innovation-related tools; the more accurately you can examine your actual ROI on any non-core tool, the more it will help clarify priorities and rank ongoing investments.
Training & Maintenance
You can buy the best-in-class tools, but if your team doesn’t know how to use them, you won’t get far. Up-skilling and/or training your team is just as important as budgeting in ensuring you get the most value out of your investment. Most vendors have educational resources to get you started. While using the tool itself may not be difficult, understanding the data may be trickier.
Building a data dictionary is a great way to solve this: it can provide consistency in how data is used, and empower marketers to self-serve. In addition, it may help to create your own internal documentation over time to supplement these resources to ensure that the marketing team is set up for maximum success.
Marketing Operations
Each of these steps, including auditing, requirements gathering, budgeting, and optimization, require time and energy. It begs the question, who is the right person to do this work? In smaller teams, it’s likely the marketers themselves. In larger organizations, this is often a dedicated role.
Welcome to the rise of the martech operations specialist: part marketer, part technologist, part operations leader, and possibly part human AI. Martech operations specialists possess a mix of technical competency and marketing savvy and have a long list of unique, strategic, and highly-specialized set of skills. Yet, this in-demand role is still often overlooked. According to Gartner, only 49% of marketing organizations have a dedicated marketing operations leader. However, they can provide tremendous leverage for a marketing team. This chart says it all:
Importantly, this marketing unicorn understands and stays up to date on the vast landscape of marketing tools. They can translate marketing requirements into technical requirements, work with technical teams to implement and maintain tools, oversee technical operations, including building campaigns and journeys, manage vendors, and sometimes even have knowledge of the legal and compliance work surrounding marketing communications.
Getting Started on Your Next Martech Tool
Throughout the rest of 2023, we can expect to watch brands increasingly adopt omni-channel marketing strategies that help them engage seamlessly with customers across all platforms. The better a martech team can centralize their tech stack will unbridle growth marketers, free of the hindrances of siloed data, disjoined operations, and sky-high marketing costs.
Auditing your systems and developing your roadmap is time consuming and requires extensive planning, thoughtful consideration, and coordination among a breadth of stakeholders. Remember that implementation itself isn’t the finish line — maintenance, governance, training, and ongoing budgeting are all required to get the most out of any new tool. When it comes to marketing tools, the implementation may feel like a sprint, but it’s just a fast start to a marathon.
The best way to maximize this output for your team in 2023 is to promote the utilization of a tool, maintain a budget, and maximize ROI through best practices. As this space continues to evolve, embracing innovation will keep you on the cutting edge. This way, your end-result will be far more than just data-driven personalization — it will feel truly personal.
