How to Get the Most Out of Your (Broken) Marketing Cloud

Today’s marketers live in their tools. Web and mobile analytics, CRM, ESPs, marketing automation — all provide critical business value. But there’s a growing dark side to marketing tooling: with so many ostensibly similar offerings in market, the competitive landscape has grown overwhelming. In this milieu of heightened competitive pressure, sales reps stretch the true capabilities of their companies’ platforms ever farther. Once implemented, vendors’ high-flying promises quickly give way to the reality of confusing workflows, broken integrations, and general disappointment. Here’s how to handle the aftermath…

In a survey of senior US marketers from July of this year, 78% responded that understanding marketing technology is an increasingly important skill — ranked second only to creativity. On the one hand, this is great, as it evinces the ever-increasing utility of these platforms. On the other hand, the fact that “understanding” these often-inscrutable systems is considered a critical employee skill is distressing. One doesn’t value understanding something that’s intuitive (e.g. using MS Office), as these platforms should be.

The evolution of almost every category of marketing tool has been characterized by feature bloat. Analytics, ESPs, and marketing automation platforms all feel pressure to deliver A, B, and C to their end-clients, ensuring that they’re at parity with competitive offerings. Deals are won and lost on “kill sheets” that stress comprehensive offerings.

The result? Poorly built, bloat-laden marketing tools that promise the world and barely deliver the basics.

In the trenches, the picture isn’t rosy. Marketing tooling has long been premised on saving time and making money — helping to make marketers more efficient, find insights, and drive incremental business value (i.e. more revenue). Achieving these things is impossible when marketers can’t use the tools properly.

How much time does your team waste trying to figure out basic workflows in your tools? Does their reporting make sense? What’s breaking — or do you even know? Let’s face it: a significant chunk of expertise in various marketing tools comes from playing constant defense against whatever isn’t working in a given moment.

If that sounds more like your day-to-day, you’re not alone. There are plenty of good reasons that “understanding marketing technology” has a dark side:

Most platforms’ workflows are mazes. Many of the most powerful enterprise-grade marketing solutions have outdated UIs, arbitrary internal logic, and confusing reporting — and in many cases, the more powerful the tool, the worse this gets. Mid-market tools aren’t exempt from this, either, thanks to feature creep and a lack of focus on usability. The end result: getting anything more than basic functionality out of your marketing tooling often involves becoming a dedicated platform expert.
There’s still a lot of heavy lifting for end-marketers. Even the most comprehensive stack usually has gaps: systems don’t communicate with one another, not all critical tasks can be fully automated, and of course there’s the dreaded .CSV import, bane of marketers everywhere. Consequently, end-marketers regularly find themselves doing somewhat technical work in order to keep their various platforms working.
It’s hard to cut through the hype. It seems like every piece of marketing technology promises the world without offering much clarity into how precisely they’re going to deliver — and it only gets worse when you’re trying to evaluate tools using black-box algorithms. Whether you’re in the process of making a buying decision or trying to gauge the success of tools you’ve already purchased, technical knowledge is an absolute necessity.

While you’ll never eliminate all of these problems entirely — some tools will always be a pain, and of course you’ll need to remain vigilant in your buying decisions and performance analysis — you can still take steps to limit their impact:

Play to your tools’ strengths. Figure out what each element of your stack does really well, and find ways to focus on that rather than “making it work” in a dozen different domains. You get better performance from your individual tools since they’re doing what they were initially architected to do, and you’ll be less likely to run into aggressive learning curves or outright broken features.
For example, instead of running all of your marketing through an all-powerful, all-frustrating ESP, create a best-in-class stack. Let your ESP stick to its core email deliverability and templating functions, then complement it with leading channel-specific solutions like Twilio and Urban Airship.
Identify the gaps in your tooling — then patch them. Audit everything. Go step by step through everything you have to do in order to keep your lifecycle marketing running. Start conversations between and among key players on your marketing and data teams to locate the major points of friction in your marketing systems, then invest in purpose-built tooling to close gaps and smooth the road going forward.
These exercises almost always lead to something useful. How many hours of your marketing and data teams’ time goes into that “simple” reactivation email you send every week? Are you really using all of your data for marketing? Is every step of your process automated? The answers may surprise you.
Demand transparency. If a new vendor makes a lot of vague promises, pin them down. Don’t be paranoid, but never be afraid to ask challenging questions. And when you do make buying decisions, be sure to prioritize technology that gives you more visibility into what’s going on, not less, so you can quickly diagnose any problems as they arise. Also, seeing where and how your data moves around and tracking which customers receive which offers lets you tie your marketing efforts back to ROI.
In other words, be an annoying customer. You’ll be better off, and smart vendors will thank you.

Understanding your tech will always be a core marketing competency, but that doesn’t mean you’ll forever be at war with your tools. Outdated UIs, clunky implementations, and technical failures might always be problems, but you can do something about it. Put your technical chops to good use. Focus your tooling, aggressively seek out greater efficiency and more complete automation, and demand excellence from your vendors — this is the kind of tech savviness that will help grow your business rather than just treading water.